Cellphone dealers in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, a country where poverty has obviously been eradicated.
Jamelle Bouie responds to Robert Samuelson's bizarre conclusion that owning a cellphone means you're not poor:
So in Samuelson’s column, what you have is another attempt to minimize the actual poverty of poor people by pointing to items that are actually necessary to surviving in low-wage service economy. Indeed, by the end of the piece, Samuelson is a step away from lamenting that the new poverty measures will force the government to do more to combat poverty, as if what we do now is adequate. Of course, given Samuelson’s routine Hooverism -- “deficits are more important than everything else!” -- and his disdain for Social Security and Medicare, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Just as a more basic response, someone in Samuelson's office below the age of 50 should point out that prepaid cellphones can be bought for as little as $10 and cellphones in general are ubiquitous in many parts of the developing world. Now maybe that's because every poor person on the planet is faking their poverty in order to steal Robert Samuelson's money, or it could be that globalization and other factors have reduced the cost of producing a bare-bones cellphone to the point where even someone poor can afford one.
Put simply, poor people having cellphones doesn't mean they're not poor; it means cellphones are cheap. That's the kind of obvious, commonsense conclusion you'd expect from someone with a passing familiarity with market economics, let alone a columnist who gets paid to write about such things.
(Flickr/AfghanistanMatters)
-- A. Serwer
