Katherine Boo has written a book called Behind the Beautiful Forevers which is an examination of the poor that dominate India still, in spite of the myths of the success of global capitalism. It could be describing parts of Mexico. Or the US or anywhere else where there is a rich upper class that has benefited from The Washington Consensus approach to life. I have not read it yet, but I have read the review in the New York Times. Here, from the review, is the ultimate condemnation of our currently dominant global sysem:
Boo describes what happens when opportunity accrues to the already privileged in the age of globalization, governments remain dysfunctional and corrupt, and, with most citizens locked into a fantasy of personal wealth and consumption, hope, too, is privatized, sundered from any notions of collective well-being.
In this sense, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is not just about India’s delusory new culture of aspiration. For as Boo writes, “what was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too” — in Nairobi and Santiago, Washington and New York. “In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament.”
“The poor,” she explains further, “blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.” Meanwhile, only “the faintest ripple” is created “in the fabric of the society at large,” for in places like Mumbai, “the gates of the rich . . . remained unbreached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.” In its own quiet way, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory. Transcending its geographical setting, the book also provides a bracing antidote to the ideological opiates of recent decades — those that made the worldwide proliferation of gray zones appear part of a “great success narrative.”
I am struck by (among other things) her statement that "the poor blame one another for the choices of government and markets..." What is it that Red American poor are also doing?