This is from his interview on the Coleman Hughes podcast. This section starts starts at 8:40.
Coleman Hughes: What were the most surprising and informative and worldview changing things that you learnt from spending so much time in the indigenous Mexican village?
Tyler Cowen: Well I’ve been to Mexico I think a total now of thirty-three times if I’m counting correctly, and I did fieldwork in a village called San Agustín Oapan, which has about 1500 inhabitants and is quite remote, and speaks a language called Nahuatl and Spanish as a second language. And when I did my fieldwork there I would say commonly a family of seven would have an income per year of say 1500 to 2000 dollars. Which is remarkably poor. You can’t even imagine how people live that way. Of course they do because it’s subsistence agriculture, they grow their own food and whatever else they have to spend if they have anything at all is luxury.
So just what life is like in true poverty, I learned. How some humans can still be happy. Ways in which they can still exercise some control over their free time or their environments.
But I also learnt how difficult life is there, what it’s like to live without a toilet, without any stores, without any restaurants. To live with so much noise pollution. So it’s just an infernal racket so much of the time. And you think of poverty something quiet and sedate, but it’s not, it’s disruptive. You wake up at four in the morning whether or not you want to.
You learn it’s not a communitarian paradise, commonly neighbours might hate each other, or in families there’s falling out. There’s very high levels of envy and resentment. It’s not some smooth social fabric with all these well functioning community norms. It’s really pretty essentially dysfunctional.
You learn what politics is like in a very very micro environment, how silly it is what they argue about. And then you think, “Well, what is it that we argue about?” and upon reflection that seems sillier as well. And everything is about sides, and who is your compadre, and what faction you’re in.
And it just gives you a lot of perspective on the broader world, I found, to go somewhere totally different, have to cope with very different problems. Of course, for me it was easy, knowing I could leave any time I wanted to – at least if the road was not washed out by the rain – and that’s not the situation they’re in. But I’m very very glad I did it. It was one of the handful of best learning experiences in my life, and I made many close friends and learned a lot about economic development.
Tyler Cowen and Coleman Hughes – What Tyler Cowen Thinks About (Almost) Everything
See also:
This is poverty, Jakarta edition – for how this chimes with my experience of poverty in Jakarta.
And then:
Remember the name: Persistence of wealth through China’s revolutions
Wealth and Poverty in Jakarta (at Jakarta Lives)
Three truths about global development and progress from Max Roser
Thought experiment: poverty and inequality without injustice
Cascades, tides and shifting stars in social interventions: Megan Stevenson on cause, effect and the limits of RCTs
“Empirically sufficient and empirically necessary” – Lant Pritchett on economic growth as the (only) key to poverty reduction
A slice of the pie
Will and Ariel Durant on Inequality, Redistribution, Revolution and the Nature of Society’s Wealth
Max Roser: defining global development
One type of rich…
Not long ago; or, Little by little (1): Raymond Briggs on 1940s Britain
Not long ago; or, Little by little (6): New York Tenement, 1889
Not long ago; or, Little by little (8): Singapore market, early 1970s
Not long ago; or, Little by little (10): Switzerland’s iodine revolution
Not long ago; or, Little by little (11): Hot feet on hot days
Thucydides on the prosperity that comes with peace
Riches: second-best coffee press
Hannah Arendt on labour and consumption, automation and Utopia
Technology marches towards the poorest
Resident Contrarian On the Experience of Being Poor-ish
Cause and Effect (1): J. L. Mackie on INUS conditions
Recommendation: Rachel Glennerster on Poverty, Global Development, Randomised Controlled Trials and more
Russ Roberts on inequality and poverty
Quixotic Monuments to False Prediction: Oliver Kim and Morten Jervens on GDP in developing countries
Slums, slot-machines and self-un-marginalisation
Podcast recommendation: Mark Rank and Russ Roberts on poverty in the US (Econtalk)
On Getting-Rid-of-Capital-ism
Natura non facit sultum*: Lant Pritchett on poverty lines
Brad DeLong on Proudhon, property and coercion, and the Royal Society’s cornucopia
Lant Pritchett on Poverty, Economic Growth and Charity