UPDATE—LIVING ON ALMOST FIVE DOLLARS A DAY.

UPDATE—LIVING ON ALMOST FIVE DOLLARS A DAY. This article, which I found moving, is a detailed account of the lives of three young men in Mumbai who are making a step up in the world from extreme poverty (defined as living on $1 a day, as discussed here) —but not through high tech jobs. They have taken jobs at a retail store, Pantaloon. They are paid about $1600 a year and work 54 hours a week selling blue jeans. Their previous jobs included elevator operator and cloth cutter. One of them had previously had a job that paid less than $2 a day.Their parents had worked at sweeping floors and cutting thread in a local shirt factory. One family lives in a 150 square foot hut; another has three people in 100 square feet. They presumably have acquired new skills because they earn double the average salary in India. But the skills described in the article are ones we don’t think of—confidence, the ability to talk to somebody richer, knowledge of what customers want. High tech shows up in the article at the very end: two of the young men have bought computers.