New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | September 1, 2005

Robert H. Nelson takes a trip to the favela and reviews a recent book on squatter communities in the developing world.

Comments

|9.1.05 @ 1:57PM|#

Ayup. IMO, this is a fascinating topic, which should get more attention than it does. People (at least here in the US and the rest of the "developed world") often forget that most of the rest of the world is not much like the US. It's easy to urge that the government should do X, Y, and Z when the government is a rich and overall good and responsive one, as ours in the US still is compared to many. Many of the governments of the world are plainly rapacious and favoritistic, so urging them to do warm fuzzy things like nationalize health care is unlikely to have the desired effect, even if they have the economic capacity for it. I sometimes wonder if Western goo-goo types ever consider what Third World governments actually do for the poor of their nations, which is usually precious little. For all the yelling and screaming about "exposing the poor to unfettered capitalism", they miss the fact that generally speaking, the poor already largely are in a capitalistic environment; it's the rich who get their costs socialized and benefits concentrated.