Gregory's ServerObviously there are many rural places where people don't have cars and also happen to be living in grinding poverty, but that's not what I was talking about. There are plenty of people in the world who lead rural lives without cars while also enjoying all the things they need and then some, because their societies are set up to facilitate that. They provide examples of how that's possible, which we in the "first world" should be trying a lot harder to learn from.
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 @chrisblake Yes, in any poor communities there'll be unrepresentative exceptions, a minority lucky enough to escape their circumstances and do well despite the odds. That isn't an argument in favour of the environment. Which central American and south Asian countries are we talking about specifically? @hughster The people I mainly had in mind are from Belize and Nepal. Note, though, that I never said the people I was referring to grew up in and had to "escape" poverty; that was an assumption you made. I just said they grew up in villages and didn't have cars. The former came from a family that would probably be considered middle-income by her home country's standards and apparently had a reasonably comfortable upbringing there, but was not affluent by "first world" standards. But that just illustrates my point, which I think you're still missing. In many parts of the world, even rural people who are reasonably well off economically typically don't own cars because regardless of where they live, it's unusual that private car ownership actually makes more economic sense than using things like buses. It's just hard for us to see that because our governments use very heavy subsidies to aggressively distort the market in favor of private cars. In other words, if my villager friend had tried to purchase, fuel, and maintain her own car, that likely would have driven her into poverty. Instead, using more convivial modes of transportation helped her to leverage what we would probably consider quite modest means to pursue experiences and opportunities she wanted. I say you're missing my point because you still seem to be conflating poverty with rural non-car-ownership, and my point is that those are two different things. Obviously a very poor villager will not have their own car, but the converse doesn't follow; living in a rural community without one's own car doesn't intrinsically drive people into poverty. If anything, when there are more efficient shared alternatives in place it can often help keep them out of it. I'll end by sharing that if anyone reading this is unfamiliar with these points and would like to learn more, a good place to start is Ivan Illich's short book "Energy and Equity", which presents some very interesting observations about the economics of different transportation modes. Illich was kind of a seminal (and pretty devastating) critic of conventional "human development" discourse along these lines, informed largely by his own experiences living in rural Central and South America.  @chrisblake It's part of the First World "saviour" complex to believe that everyone in the Third World is living in poverty. There's millions who grow up and go to school in villages and small towns, further their education in larger towns or cities, and then return to their regions. Since they haven't transplanted to the First World and been "saved" by access to cutting-edge trends, they somehow don't exist. |
You're basically presenting a false dilemma in which the only options compatible with non-urban living are a high-impact car culture vs. abject poverty with almost no modern technology at all. There's a lot of space available in between those extremes. It all just seems unthinkably exotic to many of us in the "first world" because our societies for the most part no longer *allow* us any of those other options.