ABOUT |
| Chris Barrett is a professor of applied economics and management at Cornell University. His focus is on rural communities, primarily in Africa, concentrating on the dynamics of poverty, food security, and hunger. |
| In his research, Dr. Barrett is working on improving agricultural production technologies, improving markets for the poor, provision of public infrastructure, and interactions between natural resources management and poverty. One of his current studies is exploring the phenomenon of “poverty traps”, particularly in Kenya and Madagascar. |
| Dr. Barrett is the editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, an associate editor of Environment and Development Economics and the Journal of African Economies and World Development, co-director of the Cornell African Food Security and Natural Resources Management Program, and a former president of the Association of Christian Economists. Dr. Barrett co-authored a book
Food Aid After Fifty Years. More details about this book can be found in the Recommended Books section of this website. |
| INTERVIEW |
| I am currently working with a variety of colleagues in Kenya, Ethiopia and Madagascar on a couple of interrelated projects. One in Kenya and Ethiopia concerns pastoralists--semi-nomadic, livestock producers in dry lands. We are looking, in particular, at their vulnerability and how they might better manage the risks that they face--the risks that originate in climate variability such as occasional drought or, quite rare, but occasional flooding; risks that come from violence; risks that come from highly volatile market prices; risks from human and animal disease. |
| We have a related project in Kenya and Madagascar that looks at a phenomenon we call poverty traps--the idea that people will either become poor and stay poor for a very long time, or they are born into poverty and have a very hard time ever getting out of it.
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| “Median time in poverty is not four and a half months, as it is in the United States, but it is a lifetime.” |
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| In the United States today 11.7 percent of the population is, according to the Census Bureau, poor. But perhaps what is a more telling statistic in the U.S. is that anyone who is poor today, only twenty-five percent of them will still be poor twelve months from now, and only about twelve percent of them will still be poor two years from now. So if you take this twelve percent figure of who is poor today, only about 1.5 percent will be persistently poor for two years. |
| There is a small proportion of hardcore, long-term poor in this country but, largely, poverty is a very transitory phenomenon in the United States: People fall into it and come out of it with some regularity. We don't worry about people who are poor for very short periods of time or people who choose it, as when they drop out of the workforce to return to school.
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| The people we worry about are people who are poor and who will stay poor for very long periods of time. This is what defines the really important classes of poverty in the developing world, where, for all intents and purposes, median time in poverty is not four and a half months, as it is in the United States, but it is a lifetime. You have children who are born poor and basically know that they will die poor. This is where food becomes terribly important.
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| "The vast majority of adult performance is determined very early in life." |
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| The single biggest reason that they stay poor is that they do not have the capacity to earn a good living because there are not the complimentary inputs. There is not good industry. There is not good infrastructure around to make their labor valuable. But, more importantly, they never have the strength, the physical strength, or the cognitive capacity to be able to command a decent salary to get themselves out of poverty. And that originates in the first thirty-six months of life. |
| We know from the nutritionists that the vast majority of adult performance is determined very early in life, during those crucial growth stages when children receive, or fail to receive, the array of macro and micro nutrients they need. |
| It is sort of a hidden fact that these kinds of micronutrient supply problems often wind up doing as much damage as not having enough food to eat to generate energy. Homogeneous diets provide a good deal of calories but are missing essential micronutrients, vitamins and minerals. Children who do not get enough iodine suffer irreversible brain damage. Children who do not get enough vitamin A go blind, again it is irreversible. Children without vitamin D suffer rickets.
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| "These are simple solutions that deserve a little more attention than they presently get." |
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| As a consequence they are poor for the rest of their lives. They cannot concentrate in school. They do not have the energy to work hard. And you essentially condemn them to a life which they cannot ever really make ends meet. They can benefit for a short period of time from handouts but it is kind of hard to lift them up. |
| And we do not do a good job of figuring out how many people are at risk of this. Or of thinking of what does it take to insure satisfactory dietary diversity to make sure that people are healthy. |
| We need, for instance, for people who live far from the coast to be able to get enough iodine. So iodizing salt is a very low cost simple solution, and yet it is not done everywhere. And you have huge populations that do not get the thimble full of iodine necessary to insure that they do not get brain damage from iodine deficiency. These are simple solutions that deserve a little more attention than they presently get. |
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| "That is what gets people out of poverty." |
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| If there is a single important investment to make, it is in the health and nutrition of children because that naturally propagates itself into children going to school, performing well in school, being innovative and coming up with new ideas and new technologies as adults, and being able to work well. That is what gets people out of poverty. |
| The key difference between chronic and acute hunger could be understood in terms of why people are at risk of being in these poverty traps. People who are already very poor, suffer from chronic hunger because they simply don't have the income enough to regularly procure sufficient food to meet their daily needs, to reproduce their basic energy levels and have enough energy to work. |
| Acute hunger emerges when people who typically have enough purchasing power to be able to command a basket of food that can sustain them and help them to work suddenly, for any of a variety of reasons, cannot do that. Then they suffer an acute short term fall in purchasing power and fall in food consumption that has the potential to permanently damage them, so that they can fall into the poverty trap. They might not be in it already, but they might fall into it and not be able to recover. |
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| "We get the wrong stuff to the wrong people at the wrong time." |
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| The chronically hungry need things other than just a short term safety net. They need long term investment. Food is not a long term investment other than for the very young. The primary disadvantages of food aid come in two different forms. One is that food aid is very poorly targeted. This is, in part, because it is often serving the donors' interest, rather than the recipients' interests. |
| Food aid is often intended to benefit farmers, especially the large farmers in the donor countries. So, when you are trying to mop up surpluses coming out of Nebraska, Illinois and South Dakota farms, you are not purchasing the form of food or the volume of food needed for places suffering from acute vulnerability. |
| Moreover, there are very long lags when you buy up grain and non-fat dry milk in the United States. The median shipment time is four and a half months between the time when the U.S. procures the food from U.S. farmers and the time it arrives in port of the recipient country, not including the time it takes to get it from the port up to the communities. By the time you identify the need, procure the food, often in the wrong mix of commodities, and then get it to the place that needs it, the temporary emergency has largely past. We get the wrong stuff to the wrong people at the wrong time. Even though we know how to do it right, we too frequently do it wrong. |
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| "We can learn a lot from that." |
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| Now, there are modalities to address this, and there are donors who use better modalities than we typically do in the United States. We can learn a lot from that. The United Nations' World Food Programme has a much larger program for purchasing grain in regions of the countries they are trying to serve--"local purchases"--because it is often true that one region will have a good harvest while in another region food is scarce. They have similarly developed what they call "triangular transactions", a program of buying grain in one country with funds provided by a second country for distribution in a third country. |
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| "You are undermining the self-sufficiency of these communities." |
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| When you dump food in places where it is not needed, the law of supply and demand takes over. You are expanding supply, which brings prices down. By bringing prices down, you discourage local producers from cultivating, so local supply goes down. You are undermining the self-sufficiency of these communities because you are dumping food aid into markets that absorb it and push prices down. In the short term, this benefits consumers. But in the long run, it hurts them as it undermines local production. |
| The other incentive problem that arises is that you wind up getting agencies which are very dependent on food aid flows. Today, many non-governmental agencies, many charities around the world, get a very disproportionate share of their budget out of food aid that they receive and monetize, as we call it. |
| They take food aid and dump it on the market to sell to get cash to use for other things. This is a very large share of budgets of many NGO's operating in the developing world. It is not really so much that individual recipient families depend on food aid. The claim of dependency of individuals is true for a few rare individuals but generally not true, because food aid is generally a very small share of people's income. |
| There are a number of different key forms of aid. Arguably the most important one is to promote voice and power of marginalized communities.
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| "What we see today is that most countries suffering acute food shortages, as in Southern Africa, have political systems that largely leave out those that are most vulnerable." |
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| What we see today is that most countries suffering acute food shortages, as in Southern Africa, have political systems that largely leave out those that are most vulnerable. For instance, just this week the president of Zambia announced that Zambia was not going to accept genetically modified food even though there are thousands of tons of genetically modified food aid already in the country, ready for distribution.
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| This is a country that has almost three million people at risk of starvation this year, due to an acute drought and very poor infrastructure. Why is he sending back grain? The Zambians are concerned that if they let in genetically modified foods, some of it will be planted and will then contaminate the foods that they grow, and then they cannot export to Europe.
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| So it is the politics of GM foods in Europe that is driving, ultimately, the rejection of GM foods as aid for starving Africans. The pressure groups in Europe can effectively keep Zambian exports out of Europe if the Zambians take food today to help hungry people. That is pure politics. The Zambian government is not terribly accountable to its own people and is more concerned about the Europeans than it is about the Zambians.
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| "Investing in the promotion of authentic democracy and the development and promotion of a truly free press in low income countries is one of the best investments we can make." |
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| Investing in the promotion of authentic democracy and the development and promotion of a truly free press in low income countries is one of the best investments we can make. Another crucial investment is in agricultural production technologies. Commercial trade is important but commercial trade also is a very small share of food availability in most countries.
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| Most countries have something on the order of seventy to eighty percent, on average, of total food availability domestically produced. In Sub-Saharan Africa today, the average daily calorie availability is only on the order of 2,200 calories, which is less than what the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says is the minimum requirement. On average, Africa does not have enough food to feed its population and this is due to low food productivity. To raise agricultural productivity, you have to invest in technologies that work for these environments.
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| "The relationship between poverty and hunger is fairly obvious at its most basic level." |
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| The relationship between poverty and hunger is fairly obvious at its most basic level. If people do not have enough money to buy food, they cannot feed themselves. If you are poor because you do not produce much food or you do not get much cash income, you go hungry. This is fairly simple.
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| The crucial questions come in when you ask, how do people earn their money, how do people produce food and if people earn money, how do they procure their food? So the key problems here are three fold.
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| The first is that, in order to produce food, people need reasonably productive agricultural technologies. In most of the developing world, because population densities are increasing, people are cultivating ever-smaller parcels of land. Unless we are prepared for people to start taking down all of the forests and expanding all the fragile environmental margins, they have to increase agricultural productivity, which takes acceptable technologies, and we have stopped investing in those, unfortunately.
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| The second key thing is labor power. People have to have education to be able to get a half-decent job and decent salary. But education in most developing countries has been priced out of the reach of many poor people.
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| In Western Kenya for example, you find that right now secondary school costs something on the order of thirty to forty thousand Kenyan shillings a year, which is roughly two and a half times the median annual income of the poorest quarter of the population. There is no way they can afford to educate their children at the secondary level.
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| "They are basically condemned to poverty and hunger unless they can get educated." |
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| Without the secondary education, the children haven't a prayer of getting a decent salaried job. The best they can do is go pick tea leaves for somebody or go help weed or harvest their maize fields at wages that, at best, help them buy enough maize to reproduce their labor power the next day. They are basically condemned to poverty and hunger unless they can get educated.
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| The third key thing is making markets work. Now, when there is food available at the markets, the markup makes the price too high for poor people to get food. The added price is often two times the price the food producer got for the same commodity. We have to make food affordable.
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| "The United States ranks dead last in international development contributions." |
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| Hunger is a perpetual state until you give people the means to take care of themselves. Very simple.
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| The United States is uniquely miserly. Of twenty-two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks dead last in international development contributions.
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| We contribute now less than one tenth of one percent of Gross Domestic Product to foreign development relief combined. To put that in perspective, the internationally agreed target, signed by the United States, is more than seven times what we provide. It's only 0.7 percent of the GDP, it's less than one penny on the dollar that we earn.
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| We rank below countries that we think of as much poorer than we are. Almost the entirety of Western Europe and much of East Asia, where we used to send aid, provide a far larger share of aid then we do. Korea, Japan, and very soon China, provide more than we provide as a percentage of their own incomes.
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| "We have also been very short sighted because this isn't just a humanitarian concern. We have a huge self-interest in investing in reducing poverty." |
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| The U.S. has largely failed to meet both our moral obligation to attend to the needs of poverty, but we have also been very short sighted because this isn't just a humanitarian concern. We have a huge self-interest in investing in reducing poverty.
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| The way we make money today is we sell things to people who want the sorts of things that American firms make. Well, people cannot buy any of the things that American firms make if they do not have cash in their pocket. They cannot get cash into their pocket unless they have decent agricultural technologies. They have to have good health and education to keep them employable and they have to have the basic infrastructure for these markets to work, for these American goods to reach them in the villages.
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| Without investing in these things, we do not create our markets for the future, for our children and our grandchildren when they are working in corporations, when they are entrepreneurs coming up with clever ideas for new products to sell. There is only so much stuff that Americans can buy. We have incentive to invest in this as an insurance policy, as a way to advance our political objectives, as a way to create markets for us to sell into.
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| "Perpetual poverty winds up breeding a hopelessness that causes a detachment between the political leaders and the masses of the population in a country."
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| There are also political ramifications. People in perpetual poverty become hopeless. When they become hopeless, they stop caring about what's going on in the broader world and even in their own countries, creating a vicious circle. Perpetual poverty winds up breeding a hopelessness that causes a detachment between the political leaders and the masses of the population in a country.
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| And these political leaders stop paying attention to the needs of their subjects, which basically means that they are free to do whatever they like. When governments are not accountable to voters, they can easily be dominated and diverted by well-entrenched, well-funded interests that do not want to see a level playing field. Political accountability and giving the poor a voice are crucial in combating hunger.
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| The Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has a wonderful observation: You would be hard pressed to find examples in human history of famines occurring in countries where there is democracy and a free press. He uses the example of India. In 1943, British controlled India suffered a massive famine in Bengal, two or three million people died. A terrible famine, even though this was not a time of acute food shortage, this was a distribution problem. Very shortly thereafter, India achieved independence, and independent India has never experienced a famine. It is hard to imagine that much changed in four years between the Bengal famine and India's independence, other than the very dramatic change in the politics.
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| "There are big political gains when we invest in poverty reduction."
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| We find that once we invest in people's income growth, they become concerned; they look into the future; they care about whether there are opportunities down the road; they care about their children's opportunities; they start to exercise a voice and become politically active.
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| That balance is very good for the United States and other wealthy countries. We start to have more stable regimes, more trustworthy regimes, regimes which understand the value of a country like the United States, which is innovative and stands for very important principles, even if we don't always act on them. There are big political gains when we invest in poverty reduction.
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| "The environment is a common heritage for all man kind. We have to invest in poor people using it well."
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| There are environmental concerns. Poverty and environmental degradation are closely related. It's a very complex relationship. If people care about elephants existing on the African savannah, or they care about rainforests in the Amazon, or they care about the Himalayan steppe not eroding off into the ocean, then they need to attend to creating opportunities for people in these areas so that they do not have to deplete their natural capital. The environment is a common heritage for all mankind. We have to invest in poor people so they will use it well.
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| "There's simply no historical evidence or logical reason to think that growth in incomes around the world will hurt American agriculture."
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| Global trade in agriculture has doubled in something like twelve to fifteen years. We are the single biggest agricultural exporter in the world. There is simply no historical evidence or logical reason to think that growth in incomes around the world will hurt American agriculture.
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| We have benefited from this tremendously. This is where the market has been for us. Americans are not going to consume a great deal more food than we already consume. And today, our problem nutritionally is more obesity than hunger. There are hungry people, but generally we consume more than we should. Farmers in America are not going to be selling a great deal more food to Americans.
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| American farmers have to sell food to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is not going to buy food unless they have the money to buy it. So promoting markets is crucial for American farmers, but you cannot promote markets until you provide the means for people to earn good incomes in the developing world.
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| "This is a win-win opportunity that we are largely losing."
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| Now, how do they earn those incomes? They earn part of it by exporting. It is true that developing countries have an advantage, what in economics we call a comparative advantage, in producing labor-intensive things. If most of the cost of producing a good is in the form of labor, then it is cheaper to produce it in places where wages are fairly low.
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| But agriculture is only one of several labor-intensive industries. Moreover, agricultural production depends not just on labor but also inherently on agro-ecological conditions. You have to have the right soils, the right temperature, the right period of sunlight for growing season, the right water availability to grow particular types of crops.
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| Most of the crops in which developing countries have comparative advantage are not the crops in which the United States and other temperate countries have comparative advantage. The issue isn't putting American wheat farmers out of business, the issue is really how do we provide a more reliable low cost supply of strawberries, papaya, guava, and passion fruit for American consumers while creating new markets for American wheat. This is a win-win opportunity that we are largely losing.
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| "The other big misconception is that most income growth in the developing world will come from exporting. "
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| The other big misconception is that most income growth in the developing world will come from exporting. It is true that there is a strong correlation between export growth and income growth at an aggregate level in developing countries, but most exports represent a very small percentage of the GDP. Most growth, especially in agriculture, is for domestic consumption. For example, you see the very rapid rise of supermarkets throughout the developing world right now.
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| First, people have to organize because much of the problem of poverty is what economists think of as coordination failures--that people are not able to organize themselves in a way that they can help one another when particular households suffer crisis. They are not organized in a way to enforce contracts so that people are able to invest in market transactions. They are not able to coordinate technology adoption to help one another.
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| So, part of it is organizational and a big part of the organizational side is to be able to put pressure on government to provide the basic infrastructure needed to induce private investment. It is not that the government is supposed to come and pay for everything, but there is such a thing as "crowding in" investment.
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| "Silicon Valley would not have emerged if that area of California suffered large scale hunger."
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| We often think of the government as crowding out private investment by bidding up the cost of capital. But it is also true that government crowds in private investment by providing the basic infrastructure, like police services to insure that your goods don't get stolen out of a truck, roads to make sure you can get from place to place, telephone services, water that's clean, etc. These sorts of things induce private investors to build factories and start stores, and communities have to agitate for this, just like they do in the United States and East Asia.
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| So the first thing is organization. The second thing is safety nets. People do not take risks unless they have some assurance that taking a risk cannot be absolutely disastrous and, again, this is partially a matter of agitating to make sure the government provides a safety net.
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| The third thing is that people have to have opportunities, which is largely a matter of having the cognitive capacity--well-trained, innovative people who have ideas and can make them happen. Silicon Valley would not have emerged if that area of California suffered large scale hunger. It took a lot of people who were well-fed, well-trained, and imaginative to create miracles, and that can happen, and on a small scale it does happen, in the developing world.
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| "Terrible things going on elsewhere in the world tend to have a funny and scary way of affecting us on a daily basis."
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| There are multiple reasons that Americans should care. The first reason why Americans should care is that it is in our nature. We are inherently a generous and concerned people. The second reason is that it is in our material interest. We cannot have increased incomes unless we have markets in which we can sell the things we make and the services we provide, and nobody can buy from us if they don't have the income with which to buy. So it is very much in our self interest. It is also in our interest because we need a politically stable world. We are closely connected now, and terrible things going on elsewhere in the world tend to have a funny and scary way of affecting us on a daily basis.
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| "The most important thing Americans can do is to be politically involved. Most Americans do not believe that their vote matters. People overseas are flabbergasted that Americans do not value their right to vote."
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| Everyday Americans do and ought to care. The problem is that the political translation of everyday Americans' desire to help is lost somewhere in Washington.
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| The most important thing Americans can do is to be politically involved. Most Americans do not believe that their vote matters. People overseas are flabbergasted that Americans do not value their right to vote. We've become complacent, we take it for granted. The United States has for better than two hundred years enjoyed some sort of democratic operation. Now, it is a much more recent phenomenon that all citizens, regardless of race or gender have had the right to vote, but basically everyone in the United States takes this for a given.
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| "We do not value the right to vote very much and therefore a lot of Americans do not bother to vote, which is a tragedy because it means that a very vocal and often very agitated minority winds up running the show. It is usually not to our benefit."
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| We do not appreciate how scarce of an opportunity this is and how valuable of an opportunity this is. As basic economics teaches us, if you do not value something much, you do not spend much on it. We do not value the right to vote very much and therefore a lot of Americans do not bother to vote, which is a tragedy because it means that a very vocal and often very agitated minority winds up running the show. It is usually not to our benefit.
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| Chris Barrett can be reached at cbb2@cornell.edu.
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