Thursday, April 3, 2014

Emergent Economics on "Poverty Porn"

Full post here

"Ogling the dispossessed misrepresents poverty, says Emily. Poverty isn’t just an individual experience that can be reduced to an image — it’s rooted in social and economic conditions. Poverty porn makes it seem like you can sort out deprivation with handouts when it’s really part of a complex set of circumstances including the behaviour of rich-world consumers and producers. Charity isn’t enough; a change to the system which creates poverty is essential."

 To its credit, the post later acknowledges that 'poverty porn' is often effective at raising money for efforts to ameliorate poverty. It is fair enough for someone to question whether or not the money raised is worth the resulting misconceptions. I think what is important, is to explore other ways of fundraising that do a better job representing the people the money is meant to help. Maybe such methods are too unprofitable, and so the misconceptions are just something we have to tolerate, but I have not really seen much experimentation with anything besides 'poverty porn', so how can we know.

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