First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

For years we have been told that a billion or so people in the world have to live on “less than a dollar a day.” That originally meant that poverty was defined as a money income of $1.08 a day in terms of the US dollar at its 1993 level.
 
The value of the dollar was set at so-called purchasing-power parity, meaning what it would have cost an American to buy a defined selection of goods. (PPP, as it is known, is used in making international comparisons to avoid the distortions caused by fluctuations in exchange rates).
 
But the “dollar a day” standard has always seemed an unrealistic way of defining poverty, mainly because the poor countries of the world are not primarily money-based economies. Much of daily life, particularly in rural areas, is based on exchanges that do not involve money changing hands. Housing, food and sometimes clothing may be offered in return for labour, and food is also grown for direct consumption instead of having to be bought.
 
The World Bank has published two papers on which it is consulting with proposals to change the yardstick - partly to reflect some progress in reducing relative poverty levels since 1993, particularly in China.
 
But the prospective outcome is odd. $1.08 at 1993 prices would become $1.45 at 2005 PPP rates. But the new standard looks like being set at only $1.25 - a drop of 14 per cent in real terms. This, of course, has the effect of reducing the numbers of people below the threshold, and the World Bank has in fact decided to do just this. Having collected information from 75 of the poorer countries, it restricted its analysis to the 15 poorest among these – including 13 in sub-Saharan Africa.
 
So the new poverty standard is, in effect, $0.93 a day in the original 1993 dollars, and reflects almost entirely conditions in the worst-off parts of Africa.
 
While living conditions and levels of poverty remain appallingly low in much more of the world than covered by the new calculations, at the same time it would be quite wrong to assume that “living on a dollar a day,” or close to it, can be compared in any realistic way with the daily expenditure of advanced countries. Look at all the things the real poor do not need to bother with – not least all our “defensive” or negative expenditure: from insurance to gambling and from the disposal of refuse to countering pollution.
 
The Economist and Financial Times have been pondering the new poverty guideline. Two comments. First, what would a purchasing-power parity collection of goods worth $1.25 a day look like in London or New York? Secondly, the poverty line for a family of three could be just over $26 a week. Just enough to buy the Financial Times and the Economist for a week – and nothing else.

The cream of America’s black population has never done so well as in the last ten years—two secretaries of state, a national security adviser, chief of the armed forces, heads of major companies from American Express to Time Warner, congressmen and women, rectors of major universities, bishops, newspaper editorial writers. The list goes on and on, and perhaps later this year it will be capped by the election of a black president. What a difference from the 1960s, when only sport, the arts and preaching were open to ambitious blacks. Even in the 1970s, as I long ago documented in Encounter magazine, middle-class professional blacks were beginning to roar ahead in sizable numbers, closing the gap with their white peers. Thank you Martin Luther King.

But like America’s infrastructure, neglect has meant that the cracks beneath are once again coming to the surface. Not, as in the past, in the form of civil rights agitation or riots, but in the shearing of family ties, educational failure and the appalling state of health and morbidity among American blacks. The “benign neglect” of Patrick Moynihan, social affairs adviser to President Nixon, has moved to malign neglect. Not that recent presidents have ignored the issue, but their various plans pale before the ambitions of Lyndon Johnson’s far-sighted “war on poverty,” which was sabotaged by the Vietnam war. Another such war is now needed.

The basic statistics have been thrown into relief by a new report, “The Measure of America,” published by the American Human Development Report, which is modelled on the UN annual report of the same name. The UN report was the brainchild of the late Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, and based on the work of the Indian Nobel economics laureate Amartya Sen.

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Edward Luttwak’s last cover story for us, a provocative essay arguing that the middle east was of small and declining strategic significance, proved so irritating to so many that it remains one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published, to judge by our website traffic. (It’s also being turned into a book. The film rights may still be available.)

Now Luttwak is back with another dose of far-out contrarianism: George W Bush’s presidency, he argues, far from being the foreign-policy catastrophe almost everyone, left and right, takes it to be, has actually been a stunning success. With the admittedly rather glaring exception of Iraq, Bush’s aggressive foreign policy has successfully rolled back the global tide of jihadism and brought recalcitrant governments in the Muslim world on side. “You’re either with us or against us”—the Bushism most commonly invoked to stand for what is supposed to be the president’s dunderheaded black-and-white view of the world was and remains, says Luttwak, exactly the right slogan and the right attitude.

Please vent your spleen below.

Andrew Keen told me that the one glaring omission from our list of public intellectuals was Arianna Huffington, the Greek-born socialite who is turning the US political media upside-down with her blog-cum-aggregator-cum-celebrity-gabfest the Huffington Post.

I didn’t get it. After all, while the HuffPost may have a readership extending into the millions, and while it may even represent a serious threat to the future of the newspaper industry, how does this make its proprietor—who seems to change her mind more often than John Gray—worthy of the tag intellectual?

But in his portrait of Huffington in the new issue of Prospect, Keen suggests that we may be witnessing the emergence of a new kind of intellectual, one whose influence is measured not in terms of his or her ideas, but by the quality and extent of his or her personal network. And no one has a more powerful network than Arianna. Click here to read his piece in full, and let us know your thoughts below.

The migrations of the 20th century have long provided rich pickings for literature—including around half of the winners of the Booker prize since its inception. Yet, argues Kamran Nazeer in our lead review this month, social and technological change are ushering in a new era that art has only tentatively begun to explore: a world of shared, instant information, greater mobility and awareness on the part of most immigrants, and with few of the seemingly irreversible dislocations of 50 years ago.

Comparing Eva Hoffman’s 1989 memoir of her 1959 departure from Poland for Canada, Lost in Translation, with her recent novel of a 21st century migrant in Europe, Illuminations, Nazeer explores this transition and its consequences for writers—the new challenge they face; the loss of the binary oppositions so central to older works; and the newer, subtler traumas to be explored today.

As ever, share your own thoughts and experiences below.

It’s that warm, apathetic time of year again. There’s nothing in the papers, and precious little going on elsewhere—so we troop onto boats, planes, cars and trains headed for relaxation and pleasure; and we search for a book or four to see us through the workless days and balmy nights. But what to pack? Aside from the compulsory paperback bestseller or two, what could and should we be reading this Summer?

To probe this vital matter properly, we invited an expert panel of readers, writers and thinkers to tell us what they’ll be taking on holiday with them—and what they will, at all costs, be leaving untouched. Respondents included Ian Rankin, Chris Cleave, Gideon Rachman, Nicci Gerrard, Julian Gough and Dominic Sandbrook, and you can read their responses here, among others.

My own vacation preferences are for one absurdly heavy tome—the kind of historical, philosophical work you can only satisfactorily chew through given the run-up of a vacant week and plenty of sleep—mixed with some novels of the science-fiction/thriller variety that I’ve spirited away from the office shelves when no-one was looking. But I digress. What will you be reading; and what would you like to see left safely on the shelf?

One of Richard Reeves’s first acts as the new director of Demos was to write a thoughtful essay for Prospect on the question of character, and in particular the new thinking on the left that seeks to link character to traditional left-wing concerns of poverty, inequality and life chances. Reeves argues that some on the left are beginning to come to the conclusion that good character matters; that progressive goals can only be realised by a new focus on the old-fashioned character attributes of self-restraint and an acceptance of responsibility.

Mugabe stole the Zimbabwean election with violence and intimidation. But Morgan Tsvangirai unwittingly helped him. How did this hitherto brave leader lose his bearings so badly, and what will the consequences be—both for Zimbabwe, whose warring factions are now in fragile talks, and for the MDC, which is also riven with deep faultlines? Stephen Chan, who reported from inside Zimbabwe between the first presidential poll and the run-offs, looks ahead.

With the biggest and most expensive Olympic games in history set to unfurl across Beijing in just over a week’s time, our latest issue contains a special guide to the political and cultural landscape of the games by David Goldblatt, Prospect’s resident expert on all things sporting, no matter how obscure (underwater swimming competitions and pigeon shooting, anyone?).

For our online edition, we’ve also included David’s special supplementary guide to Olympics past, from Athens 1896 to Athens 2004; as well as a feature on China’s critics, in which author Christian Tyler interviews China’s most famous democratic activist, Wei Jingsheng; and Hong Kong-based entrepreneur Jimmy Lai writes of his hopes and fears for the future of his nation.

There is, it seems, a yawning chasm between what US voters think their presidential candidates know about the world, and what they actually know.

In a July poll asking which candidate had better knowledge of world affairs, McCain came out with a 63-26 advantage.

This is in spite of the fact that Obama one of the few senators to vote against the Iraq war, on the basis that it would spark a long and bloody Shia-Sunni struggle, and now proposes a troop withdrawal timetable which the Iraqi government is in complete agreement with (neither of which his opponent can claim). Obama also took the initiative on Zimbabwe over a year ago: in June 2007, he sponsored a senate resolution condemning Mugabe’s disregard for democratic processes and calling for action to prevent further violence before the election.

Meanwhile, McCain has consistently failed to show he knows the difference between Shias and Sunnis, still thinks there is a country called Czechoslovakia, and is worried about problems on the “Iraq/Pakistan border.” (No such border exists.) One wonders if wilful ignorance is the only criteria needed for a “strong foreign policy rating.”