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Two Ideas

I read these lines in Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All one one evening right before listening to a Ted Talk about the struggles of farmers in India.

In some ways, being very rich and very poor are strangely similar. Just as having not enough money creates fear and anxiety, so can having more than you know what to do with. At both ends of the spectrum, money tinkers with our notions of self-worth, our egos, our social lives, the stability of our marriages, our relationships with children, parents, and siblings—even our mental health.

In recounting the event that triggered his foray into making the low-cost portable green-house for small-hold farmers,  Sathya Raghu Mokkapati talks about seeing a farmer eating a ball of mud because that was his only choice apart from death by starvation.

When the author of Jackpot, Michael Mechanic talks of the very rich and the very poor being akin at some level, clearly has no idea of what being very poor really means. On his best day he has some fetishized romantic notion of what it is to be truly poor. 

It would take a fantastic imagination to find a point of convergence between Mokkapati's farmer and .0001% of the wealthiest in the world that Mechanic is writing about. The juxtaposition of these two ideas in that close proximity made for a very jarring experience.



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