Level III
Chapter 5
Writing
IC3
IC3 | TIF | IT | TOEFL | Best Answer
Language Lessons
Assessment
Poverty Reduction/ Xoá đói giảm nghèo/فقر زدایی
Guiding Question: How is it possible for people to move out of poverty in your culture? |
Câu hỏi hướng dẫn: Có cách nào để giải thoát người dân khỏi cảnh đói nghèo? |
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سوال راهنما: چگونه در فرهنگ شما برای مردم این امکان وجود دارد که از فقر فاصله بگیرند؟
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Skills:
In this chapter you will do these things:
English Language Skills:
Vietnamese Language Skills:
Peer Groups and Collaborative Writing
Odds and Ends: Organizing ideas from general to specific; Using correct tenses; Using “in fact,” “since,” “when,” and “then”
Collaboratively writing QTCCFASRQ
Vocabulary for politically correctness and describing economic status
Collaborative Editing
IC3: Pride and Poverty: Lessons from the Poor
Appendix: Glossary of Global Inequality
Intercultural Communicative Competence
Pride and Poverty
How would you describe the economic status of your country? Is it a(n). . .
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Developing Nation, Developed World, Third World , Second World , First World , Industrialized Nation, Impoverished Nation, Civilized Nation, and/or. . . Newly Industrialized Nation? |
- What do these words mean? (Find their definitions and other vocabulary in the Appendix under the title: UC Atlas of Global Inequality)
- Are these words politically correct?
- Are they shaped by cultural perceptions?
- How would you describe the economic and social state of your country?
- Does it matter what words we use?
- How does the economic status of your country shape the perceptions you have of other countries?
- Read the article below and then explain what role pride plays in the poverty and wealth of your country. Does it call on people to act or take action in certain ways? Does guilt play a role?
Lessons from the Poor
October 18, 2006
Alvaro Vargas Llosa (from: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1834)
WASHINGTON —Nobel Peace Prizes are not supposed to go to those who believe the poor can fend for themselves.
Yet this year's worthy winner, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, is essentially a commercial operation and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, has clearly spelled out politically incorrect views regarding poverty: “Grameen believes that charity is not an answer to poverty. ... It creates dependency. ... Unleashing of energy and creativity in each human being is the answer to poverty.” The bank lends tiny amounts of money to village-dwellers so they can start small businesses. The scale can be so modest as to involve the purchase of a cow in order to sell milk. Since no collateral or credit history is required, the system works on the basis of trust and peer pressure: Lenders are placed in groups of five, with part of the group guaranteeing the loans of the rest. If a loan is not repaid, the community shuns the borrower.
More than 6 million people have borrowed money from Grameen and the bank makes millions in profit. It charges higher interest rates than most banks, but since the principal is repaid before the interest—interest, therefore, is calculated on the basis of diminishing principal—borrowers end up paying less than they would pay other banks. Thanks to these private loans that very poor and uneducated Bangladeshis have put to entrepreneurial use, many people have been able to pull themselves out of extreme poverty.
At its inception, Grameen Bank was partly owned by the government because the founders figured that was the only way to channel foreign loans from outside sources. Today, it is a totally private and profit-oriented operation in which the borrowers themselves own shares.
For half a century, wealthy nations—and rock stars—have focused on foreign aid as the way to spur development. Foreign aid started with President Harry Truman's “Point Four'' program at the end of the 1940s, partly to pre-empt the spread of communism. To judge by ever increasing budgets and last year’s call at the United Nations for a doubling of aid by 2015, it continues to be the fundamental focus of efforts to bring about prosperity in poor countries. No attention is paid to the fact that in sub-Saharan Africa, the region to which most of the foreign aid has gone in the last quarter-century, per capita income has dropped by 11 percent.
Numerous government programs involving handouts and training have also failed to do the trick in many countries. What the poor really want is an environment in which undertaking a profitable venture is not a nightmarish bureaucratic and legal process. The world is full of examples of poor and uneducated communities that have been able to create wealth thanks to entrepreneurship, rather than governmental assistance. I have been looking at cases of entrepreneurial success around the world for the past year and the conclusion is overwhelming: The best way to fight poverty is to eliminate barriers that currently hold back private enterprise among the poor.
Half a century ago, William Mangin, an American anthropologist, went to live in one of the shantytowns that had sprung up around Lima, Peru. He found out that the poor were entrepreneurial and that through voluntary cooperation, they were able to provide many of the services the government was not delivering, including the adjudication of disputes. He wrote a number of scholarly papers concluding that these urban poor were “not the problem but the solution.” A few years later, anthropologist Keith Hart reached the same conclusion in Kenya. If the world had listened to them, half a century of misguided ideas about development, of useless fund transfers that often ended up in Swiss bank accounts of dictators and their cronies, and of schemes that entrenched dependency might have been avoided.
Nobel Peace Prizes are supposed to go to those who think wealth is a zero-sum game whereby rich nations are rich because poor nations are poor. The Nobel award to Yunus and Grameen Bank is a good occasion to reflect on the colossal error of judgment the rich have made about the poor and a reminder that enterprise, not aid, is the real answer to poverty.
APPENDIX
UC Atlas of Global Inequality
Unless otherwise stated, the definitions below are from: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/glossary.html
Civilized countries: to cause to develop out of a primitive state; especially : to bring to a technically advanced and rationally ordered stage of cultural development (according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)
Developing vs. developed countries : Terms used, particularly by international and governmental agencies, to distinguish poor or non-industrialized countries (developing) from rich, industrialized countries (developed). This is one of a series of paired categories used to make sense of aspects of global inequality. Perhaps the most ubiquitous is the pair originating in Cold War conditions: First World, Third World. In this Atlas, we prefer to use the more precise terms industrialized world, meaning First World, and non-industrialized world, meaning poor countries. [See also Industrialization].
East Asian miracles : Rapid industrialization after the Second World War in East Asia. Initially, four East Asian ‘Tigers’ were identified: South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The group has since been expanded, particularly in the World Bank 1993 study The East Asian Miracle to include other East Asian countries ( Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand).
Globalization, global integration : ‘…a widening, deepening and speeding up of interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual’ (Held and McGrew 1999: 2). Several dimensions of globalization can usefully be identified. These dimensions can often be analyzed separately even though they may have powerful interconnections. Economic globalization means the greater global connectedness of economic activities, through transnational trade, capital flows and migration. Environmental globalization could include the increasingly global effects of human activity on the environment. Cultural globalization may highlight the connections among languages, ways of living, and fears of global homogeneity through the spread of North American and European languages and culture. Political globalization may include wider acceptance of global political standards such as human rights, democracy, labor standards, environmental standards, as well as the greater coordination of actions by governments and other institutions across the globe.
Impoverished country: a country made poor by depriving it of strength, richness or depleting its resources. (according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)
Industrialization : the process through which industrial capacity [see also Industry] is created. And this process is given prominence for at least two reasons. Firstly, historians use the industrial revolution as the starting point of modern history. Secondly, the increased productivity, and increased range, of goods and services arising from industrialization bring the potential for higher living standards, although who will benefit from the expansion of industry is a key question to be asked in any particular case. Industrialized countries are then those that have achieved higher productivity and higher living standards.
Industry: There are three ways of identifying industry or industrial production:
- Not agriculture, that is, not production directly from the land;
- Mining, Manufacturing and Energy sectors of production;
- A ‘way of organizing production that assumes there is a constant process of technical and social change which continually increases society’s capacity to produce a wide range of goods’ (Hewitt et al. 1992: 3-6, quoted in Kiely 1998: 3).
Inequality : State or condition of being unequal. Amartya Sen argues that virtually all political philosophies ‘want equality of something — something that has an important place in the particular theory’ (Sen 1992: ix). Libertarians want equal rights; others demand equal welfare or incomes. Inequalities are commonly used to construct images of the world. Two types of inequality are noted in this atlas: i) international inequality, that is inequality between nations, commonly measured by comparing GNP/capita; ii) national inequality, meaning differences between rich and poor within one country.
Liberalization : The removal by a government of restrictions placed upon the import of goods, the movement of capital, etc.
Nationalization: The action of bringing land, property and industries under the control of the nation.
Openness : the quality or condition of being open, or unenclosed. In international economic terms, openness is portrayed as the alternative to protectionism. Being open to the world economy means having no barriers to international trade, finance and investment. The term includes a set of international flows, some of which, notably finance and capital flows, are controversial, and omits others, notably migration.
Poverty: The Oxford English Dictionary defines poverty as: ‘The condition of having little or no wealth or material possessions; indigence, destitution, want’, and suggests its first use was in AD 1075. In recent years, research tapping the perspectives of poor people has recognized that poverty involves a wider set of deprivations, including vulnerability and exclusion from society, in addition to material destitution.
Poverty line: A level of income below which people are deemed poor. A global poverty line of $1 per person per day was suggested in 1990 (World Bank 1990). This line facilitates comparison of how many poor people there are in different countries. But, it is only a crude estimate because the line does not recognize differences in the buying power of money in different countries, and, more significantly, because it does not recognize other aspects of poverty than the material, or income poverty.
Privatization: The process of making state-owned enterprises private. Also termed denationalization.
Protectionism : Government policies fostering home industries by protecting them from the competition of foreign goods, the importation of these being checked or discouraged by the imposition of duties (tariffs) or otherwise.
Third World: Phrase used originally to distinguish those countries that were aligned neither with the capitalist West, the First World, nor with the socialist East, the Second World. It remains widely used to describe non-industrialized, ex-colonial, or developing countries despite the collapse of the Second World. [See also Developing].
World Bank : The World Bank is one of the institutions established at a meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, towards the end of World War II. The other important institution established at that meeting is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Bank provides finance for development projects and advice to governments about development questions. Both the Bank’s projects and the advice it provides have gone through distinct phases, associated with changes in global politics and in ideas about development. In the latest phase, the Bank proclaims ‘Our dream is a world free of poverty’ (World Bank 2002). The advice that the Bank has provided has usually been based on a conservative reading of mainstream economic ideas.
References
-Sen, A. (1992). Inequality Re-examined. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
-Kidron, M and Segal, R (1995). The State of the World Atlas. London: Penguin.
-Milanovic, B. (1999). True world income distribution, 1988 and 1993: First calculation based on household surveys alone, World Bank.
-Thomas, A and Crow, B (1994) Third World Atlas (2nd ed.). Open University Press.
-World Bank (various years). The World Bank Atlas. Washington, DC: World Bank.
-World Bank (2000) World Development Report 2000-1: Attacking Poverty Oxford University Press and World Bank.
-Hewitt, T., H. Johnson and D. Wield. (eds.) (1992). Industrialization and Development. Oxford, OUP.
-Kiely, R. (1998). Industrialization and development : a comparative analysis. London, Bristol, Pa., UCL Press.
-World Bank (2002). www.worldbank.org. June 20 2002.
Best Answers to Guiding Question: This section will be the same in the Listening/Speaking and Reading books chapter 5. This may be posting answers online and sharing answers cross-culturally.
Who is expert in poverty reduction?
Ai là chuyên gia trong công cuộc giảm đói nghèo?