MEASURING “ESCAPES FROM POVERTY.†I don’t think that the new poverty line is of much use in telling us who is poor. When I posted here on studies of how people (twenty to forty per cent of people in the world!) live on one dollar a day, Dick Weisfelder commented: “I wonder whether pundits who measure the percentage living on a dollar a day have controlled for inflation and the buying power of the dollar.†I agreed with Dick then and do now. The Economist article bears out Dick’s point. When the World Bank looked at prices and foreign exchange rates in 2005, “At a stroke, the Chinese economy shrank, in real terms, by 40%.”
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Well, I just can’t find the relevant post I wanted to comment on; so I’ll stop right here and use this gateway. (i was going to use the Harry Potter term, but, alas, I can’t think of the word.)
The books we’ve been reading about “Stumbling on Happiness” and Proust as a neuroscientist are, to me, disquieting. If Phil always believed that Enlightenment Philosophy was just pure common sense and universally held, I guess I always thought that one could rely on memory and principles learned from experience to guide one in the DIRECTION of happiness and fulfillment, if not to happiness itself. But these books seem to question our ability to remember, to project possible outcomes into the future, etc. so that life seems so much more random and chancy than I’d like to admit. The bottom line is that we seem to make choices anticipating some good outcome, and then we adhere to the choices simply because they are OUR choices. I suspect, however, there is something else going on. People need to feel that their lives have a texture, and a texture that is the result of continuous weaving. That is why community is so valuable, long marriages, commitments of all kinds. Horror comes when we’re floating free in the ocean of existence.