The point I am
making in it is simply and obvious but it has been hard to gain publication in
the academic literature.Hope you like this snappy title. It is my latest attempt to
garner some interest for the paper that you can download below. The point I am
making in it is simply and obvious but it has been hard to gain publication in
the academic literature.
I began thinking about the relative definition of poverty, which I had always found a troublesome concept, partly because there was so much cheerful liberal consensus attached to it. The paper, which you can download here (senart.pdf: 141KB), begins with a Russian joke:
How do you know that Adam and Eve were Russian?
Because they thought they were in paradise when they had no clothes and only one apple to share between them.
This joke sums up the point the paper makes, which is that how well off you are, and how much you suffer as a result of your poverty, is crucially determined by expectations. In the late capitalist society we live in, those expectations are manipulated daily by the advertising industry. This matters both because our unfulfilled desires have resulted in an epidemic of depression and other mental illness, and because our fulfilled desires are destroying the planet.