So much subtext about the undeserving poor. Except that it's not even wrong.
To give just one example, rates of alcoholism are higher in South India - both in TN and Kerala [1] - where endemic poverty of the Madhya Pradesh kind doesn't exist.
We can agree that addiction is widespread and there's been a world wide shift in the spending habits of people who earn less than a dollar a day. Banerjee/Duflo's Nobel Prize is based on that work [2]. Some relevant quotes:
> Yet the average person living at under $1 per day does not seem to put every available penny into buying more calories. Among our 13 countries, food typically represents from 56 to 78 percent of consumption among rural households, and 56 to 74 percent in urban areas. For the rural poor in Mexico, slightly less than half the budget (49.6 percent) is allocated to food.2
> Of course, these people could be spending the rest of their money on other commodities they greatly need. Yet among the nonfood items that the poor spend significant amounts of money on, alcohol and tobacco show up prominently. The extremely poor in rural areas spent 4.1 percent of their budget on tobacco and alcohol in Papua New Guinea; 5.0 percent in Udaipur, India; 6.0 percent in Indonesia; and 8.1 percent in Mexico.
> Perhaps more surprisingly, spending on festivals is an important part of the budget for many extremely poor households. In Udaipur, over the course of the previous year, more than 99 percent of the extremely poor households spent money on a wedding, a funeral, or a religious festival. The median household spent 10 percent of its annual budget on festivals.
5% is a lot on alcohol, but cannot be the major cause of poverty, festivals being an even bigger outlay. We also know that in India those spending habits are gendered, which is why prohibition campaigns have been very popular among women voters.
Nevertheless, the idea that the poor are poor because of their 'poor values' is one of the oldest tropes in the book. Please don't spread stereotypes that are neither grounded in data nor in actual lived experience.
To give just one example, rates of alcoholism are higher in South India - both in TN and Kerala [1] - where endemic poverty of the Madhya Pradesh kind doesn't exist.
We can agree that addiction is widespread and there's been a world wide shift in the spending habits of people who earn less than a dollar a day. Banerjee/Duflo's Nobel Prize is based on that work [2]. Some relevant quotes:
> Yet the average person living at under $1 per day does not seem to put every available penny into buying more calories. Among our 13 countries, food typically represents from 56 to 78 percent of consumption among rural households, and 56 to 74 percent in urban areas. For the rural poor in Mexico, slightly less than half the budget (49.6 percent) is allocated to food.2
> Of course, these people could be spending the rest of their money on other commodities they greatly need. Yet among the nonfood items that the poor spend significant amounts of money on, alcohol and tobacco show up prominently. The extremely poor in rural areas spent 4.1 percent of their budget on tobacco and alcohol in Papua New Guinea; 5.0 percent in Udaipur, India; 6.0 percent in Indonesia; and 8.1 percent in Mexico.
> Perhaps more surprisingly, spending on festivals is an important part of the budget for many extremely poor households. In Udaipur, over the course of the previous year, more than 99 percent of the extremely poor households spent money on a wedding, a funeral, or a religious festival. The median household spent 10 percent of its annual budget on festivals.
5% is a lot on alcohol, but cannot be the major cause of poverty, festivals being an even bigger outlay. We also know that in India those spending habits are gendered, which is why prohibition campaigns have been very popular among women voters.
Nevertheless, the idea that the poor are poor because of their 'poor values' is one of the oldest tropes in the book. Please don't spread stereotypes that are neither grounded in data nor in actual lived experience.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014857/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2638067/