America needs to learn from George and Harriet, and the Men in Blue. So does the conservative movement. And you know what? So does the rest of the world. In the next chapter, we will visit a slum in India, a ghost town in Austria, and a few interesting stops in between. In the process, we will see people who inspire and bureaucracy that depresses, and in the process witness a cautionary tale for America that shows just how important it is that the conservative heart prevail.
Chapter 4
LESSONS FROM AN INDIAN SLUM AND AN AUSTRIAN GHOST TOWN:
Inspiration from a Society on the Make and a Cautionary Tale from One That Disappeared
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have encountered a mechanical problem and will be making an emergency landing.”
These are never words anyone longs to hear from a pilot. But they were especially unwelcome on the Air India flight I was taking from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Calcutta, India. I was nineteen years old. A freshly minted college dropout, I was on a concert tour around the world in November 1983 with my brass quintet.
It turned out to be a fairly undramatic landing in the southern Indian city of Chennai. But we were a thousand miles from our desired destination of Calcutta. The phone lines were down countrywide, it was the middle of the night, we knew no one, and we had no place to sleep. After a few hours we lined up a hellhole of a hotel to sleep in and settled in for what was to be two undocumented days next to an Indian slum.
My comrades, older and more sensible than I, had the good sense to stay put in our oven of a hotel. I, on the other hand, set out to explore. What I found shocked me profoundly. I saw poverty I had never encountered before: I saw lepers, malnourished children, and a constant stream of beggars, degraded and desperate.
The whole experience took me back to the National Geographic photo of my childhood, and stuck with me for thirty-one years. I’ll never forget that specter of human desolation and misery.
Thirty-one years later, I returned to India—this time not as a musician, but as the president of AEI, coming to see what Americans could learn from India’s stunning economic transformation. I had seen the data showing life for the very poor in India had improved a lot since I was there in 1983, but I wanted to see with my own eyes. If you study poverty, it is important to meet and speak with actual poor people. That teaches you more than any data point on a spreadsheet.
That is why I had visited the Doe Fund in New York—to meet the Men in Blue and learn how they had overcome homelessness. And that is why I was headed to visit an Indian slum called Dharavi—to meet the people who lived there, to learn how they were lifting themselves up from extreme want, and to witness the true progress brought about by globalization, trade, and entrepreneurship.
I DHARAVI
Dharavi is home to more than 700,000 people who live and work in an area about two-thirds the size of Central Park. That yields a density of about 1,300 people per acre.1 To put that in perspective, the average new single-family home in America is built on a little more than one-third of an acre.2 So, if you can imagine four hundred people living on your property, you’re starting to get the picture.
I have never in my life been in a more crowded place. Every inch of Dharavi is in use. The ramshackle houses are all improvised, one piled on top of the other, built without permission over many years. The buildings are so close together that they block the sun like a rain forest canopy. Even in daytime, the walkways are dark as night. You have to watch your head, but also your feet: There is something undesirable underfoot at all times, from mud to mice to open sewers.
While in Dharavi, I met a family of four who lived in a room the size of my daughter Marina’s bedroom. There was no indoor plumbing or furniture—just a single, twelve-square-foot room. By day, the family ate on the floor. At night, they slept on four bedrolls that were stored in the corner. One single electrical outlet was used to power blinking Christmas lights that framed large pictures of Hindu gods and saints. One wall was completely open with a ladder extending down to the street below. This served as their front door.
The children were two and four years old, a boy and a girl. Well-fed and cheerful, they gazed at me with that perplexed, questioning stare I remembered from my own kids when they were little. Who the heck is this weird-looking guy? they were thinking. The parents were in their mid-twenties, having migrated to Dharavi from a rural village in search of work. They were happy to welcome me. Upon leaving, I confessed to my guide that I couldn’t imagine a family of four sharing that space. After he finished laughing, he informed me that the last tenants were a group of twelve.
Dharavi is unbelievably hot. Mumbai’s famous heat and humidity are only the beginning, supplemented everywhere by open fires. There are fires for cooking, fires for pottery, fires for melting down aluminum and plastic. It feels like everything around you is burning. The morning before, I had looked at the weather forecast and thought I had to be misunderstanding what I saw. It said, literally, to expect “95 degrees and smoke.” In Dharavi, smoke is a weather forecast.
The heat is only part of the sensory overload. Dharavi is a world of unbelievable smells. It starts with the dense and acrid smoke in the air. Then there are dogs, cats, and goats all around. Roughly 1 percent of Dharavi’s residents have their own toilets. The others either use common community toilets, pay toilets (which cost three cents per use), or open-air pits in the slum’s outskirts. And the village is loud. Hammering, drilling, grinding, and yelling is the incessant soundtrack.
As anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other societies quickly defy whatever preconceptions we bring along with us. For most Americans, the phrase “inner-city poverty” probably conjures images of degradation, disrepair, and a dearth of industry and work. But I saw none of these things in Dharavi. There is a lot of poverty, to be sure—poverty way beyond anything we are used to in American cities—but little sense of deep deprivation. Everybody is busy. Children are going to school (public school is free; private school is cheap), adults are heading to work, and the whole place is absolutely abuzz.
There is also lots and lots of garbage. This sounds terrible, but it is actually far from the worst possible sign. In the world’s most destitute places, there is little garbage. Dharavi is full of garbage. Much of its economy is even built on the stuff. Scavengers from Dharavi pore over Mumbai’s municipal dumps, gathering plastic, cardboard, glass, wire hangers, cans, car batteries, computer parts—whatever can be found—and bring it all back to the slum to be sorted and recycled. Nothing goes to waste.
I visited a makeshift factory where people were sorting plastic refuse. In one corner, a worker was sorting vast buckets of used toothbrushes. In another, someone was sifting through piles and piles of plastic forks that, they told me, were used on airplanes. Beside him, someone was sorting plastic milk jugs. The next guy was organizing plastic motor oil containers.
Each type of plastic was separated and sorted. Then, I learned, a machine in the next room grinds the sorted trash into tiny pieces. Teams of workers wash the pieces and dry them in the blazing sun on the roofs of houses. The cleaned pieces are then brought back downstairs, melted in vats, and turned into long strings. Those strings are cut into pellets and sold to make new things out of plastic. I held a handful of these pellets, hot out of the machine.
Recycled plastic from Dharavi is sold across the world. You probably have Dharavi plastic in your home and don’t even know it. Perhaps some of the garbage you produce will find its way back there and restart the cycle anew.
That was just one factory. I also visited an aluminum recycler, a pottery factory, and a place where goats are slaughtered and their skins are processed (I know no words capable of describing that particular smell). Dharavi has hundreds of leather manufacturers, plus garment factories, embroidery shops, brass foundries, gold refineries, bakeries (the wares of which I sampled), kite plants, and soap and detergent factories (which recycle discarded used soap from India’s luxury hotels). There are at least 15,000 factories here,
3 and 80 percent of Dharavi’s residents work inside the slum itself.4
Some Westerners might look at Dharavi and feel sorry for all these hopeless people stuck in the drudgery of “dead-end jobs.” And of course, we all hope that the residents’ lives become easier. Personally, I was expecting to see misery like I encountered thirty-one years before in Chennai.
But I did not. There are still millions of truly poor people in India, but it is simply not the same country as it was in 1983, which was the worst point of its basket-case period. Indira Gandhi’s socialism—motivated by a deeply misguided admiration for Soviet communism—was in the process of starving millions. But while I was heading back to college in the 1990s, the winds of change were blowing across the subcontinent. In the past twenty years, poverty in India has been cut by more than half,5 as free enterprise has pulled some 200 million people out of poverty.6 Between 1965 and 1975, per capita income in India rose by just 0.3 percent annually. But from 2005 to 2013, that figure more than doubled, from $740 to $1,570.7 If India continues growing at these rates, it will cease to be a poor country in the next few decades.
As a result, Dharavians are anything but hopeless, and they emphatically do not see their work as fruitless. Despite the overcrowding and terrible sanitation, Dharavi is a magnet community. Migrants from all over India flee desperately poor villages, pouring into the slum to seize the chance to work. Here they can make money sorting, sewing, or smelting and send much of it back to their families. Everyone I talked to—everyone—told me that Dharavi was on its way up. It is a relentlessly optimistic place.
My guide through Dharavi was a young man named Krishna. He was about thirty years old, with a shaved head—kind of an Indian hipster—and was wearing a T-shirt that said, “I Dharavi.” He meant it. Krishna was born to a poor family in a village outside Bangalore. He came to Dharavi at the age of thirteen to build his own future. He started out serving tea, went to school, and eventually built a tour business. He now makes about $500 per month. That is big money in Dharavi.8
Entrepreneurs like Krishna have built what the New York Times calls a “self-created special economic zone for the poor.”9 Dharavi boasts an estimated economic output of between $600 million and $1 billion a year. According to a Harvard Business School study, that makes this unofficial cauldron of entrepreneurship more productive than many official Special Economic Zones set up by the Indian government.10
Make no mistake: Living conditions in Dharavi today are awful by American standards. In even the poorest communities in the United States, you will find better sanitation and housing than in Dharavi. While there are public and private schools for children, there is also child labor, which no one wants as a long-term solution. Everyone knows the residents deserve better than their current lot.
But Dharavi today, compared to what I saw decades ago, is still nothing less than a miracle. It has gone from a seemingly hopeless place to a vibrant, increasingly prosperous one that is helping to drive a growing country’s rapid economic transformation.
Dharavi is on the make. When I left, I had to admit that, well, I Dharavi, too.
A VILLAGE THAT IS NO MORE
Unlike Dharavi, I never managed to visit the tiny Austrian village of Marienthal. I have a good excuse, though: Marienthal no longer exists—at least not in the form it once did. And what happened to Marienthal also holds lessons for the future of America if we continue to allow work to disappear and dependence to grow.
In 1929, Marienthal was a thriving factory town twenty miles southeast of Vienna, the nation’s capital. It formed in the early nineteenth century around a flax mill, which later grew into a thriving textile factory. By the early twentieth century, the village had 478 families.
The work was hard, but the salaries were ample and community life was rich. Residents socialized with their neighbors, enjoyed the town’s manicured parks, and belonged to numerous social clubs. Weekends were dedicated to church, family outings, and evening dances.
But all that changed suddenly in 1932. The town’s sole employer went bankrupt. Almost overnight, the factory was shuttered and almost all of Marienthal’s families lost their earnings. Two years later, only one in five families in the village still had a member earning income from regular work. The village became a microcosm of idleness and economic depression.
The slow-motion tragedy that unfolded next could easily have been lost to history. Fortunately, a group of young Austrian sociologists were seeking to study how critical levels of unemployment reshaped societies. They knew an ideal case study when they saw it. The researchers descended on Marienthal to watch, listen, and learn from the people who lived there.11
So what did they find? First of all, you might imagine that widespread unemployment would lead to extreme financial hardship. It being 1929, you might even expect to see India-like conditions. But that’s not what happened. In the years between the world wars, Austria had generous unemployment insurance that covered the better part of a factory worker’s wages. But like many social democratic systems of wage replacement, the insurance payments strictly prohibited any work for pay, theoretically to prevent “double-dipping.” And it was in the resulting idleness, the researchers found, where the real nightmare started.
First, something strange started happening to the way Marienthal’s residents spent their time. With the factory closed but some income still flowing in, people should have had all day to participate in the leisure and social activities they loved. But these activities virtually disappeared. One citizen summed up the paradox: “I used to have less time to myself but do more for myself.” Now it was the opposite.
Most of us have heard the old principle that if you want something to get done, you should ask a busy person. Well, when work disappeared, Marienthalers couldn’t seem to find the time and energy to do much of anything—even enjoy their new leisure.
“[One] might think that even amid the misery of unemployment, men would still benefit from having unlimited free time,” the researchers wrote. “On examination, this leisure proves to be a tragic gift. Cut off from their work,” the workers “lost the material and moral incentives to make use of their time.” They began to “drift gradually out of an ordered existence into one that is undisciplined and empty. . . . [For] hours on end, the men stand around on the street, alone or in small groups, leaning against the wall of a house or the parapet of a bridge.”
“Nothing is urgent anymore,” the report observes. “They have forgotten how to hurry.”
“It used to be magnificent,” one woman told the researchers. “During the summer we used to go for walks, and all those dances! Now I don’t feel like going out anymore.” Another man summarized, “[T]here was life in Marienthal then. Now the whole place is dead.”
Although residents now had unlimited time to read, the town’s reading habits collapsed in the two years after the factory shut down. Before, the town library lent an average of 3.23 books to each resident; after, just 1.6. “Since I have been out of work,” one man admitted, “I hardly read at all. One doesn’t feel like it anymore.”
Public spaces began literally falling apart. “Opposite the factory lies a large park,” the researchers noted, of which “the people of Marienthal once were very proud.” It had boasted beautiful benches and manicured gardens. “Now the park is a wilderness; the paths are overgrown with weeds and the lawns are ruined. Although almost everyone in Marienthal had enough free time, no one looks after the park.”
Even Marienthalers’ sense of time seemed to warp. Men stopped wearing watches. Wives complained that their husbands were chronically late for meals, even though they were not coming from anyplace in particular. It took people longer and longer just to walk down the street. But interestingly, the researchers found that this phenomenon was different for men and women. The men walked more slowly and stopped more often. The scholars theorized it was because the women were not really unemployed; “they have a household to run which fully occupies their day.”
> People slept for hours more each night than they ever had. They could not recall how they spent their days, and spent far more time sitting at home or standing around in the street than doing anything else.
Worst of all, the people quickly turned on each other in the face of adversity and idleness. Marienthalers took it upon themselves to enforce the government dictum that nobody could supplement the insurance payments with earned income. One poor soul lost his unemployment benefits after he was turned in to officials by his neighbors for taking a little money while playing his harmonica on the street. Another man lost his benefits after he helped fell trees in return for a share of the firewood. A woman lost her benefits after she delivered milk and was given some for her own children. Any sense of solidarity had been shattered.
Unsurprisingly, for many, family life followed suit. “I often quarrel with my husband,” one woman vented, “because he does not care about a thing any longer and is never home.” A different husband, describing his wife: “What strangers we are to each other; we are getting visibly harder. Is it my fault that times are bad? Do I have to take all the blame in silence?” Still another woman had even sunk deeper into depression. “I couldn’t care less now. If I could hand the children over to the welfare people I would gladly do so.”
What decimated life in Marienthal was not the loss of wages. For most, public assistance blunted the financial blow of the layoffs. What destroyed Marienthal was the loss of meaningful work. All the other ills were downstream from this. One man confided in the researchers, “If I could get back to the factory it would be the happiest day of my life. It’s not only for the money. Stuck here between one’s own four walls, one isn’t really alive.”
The Conservative Heart Page 11