Not only do poor villagers know how much rice they should collect, and the extent of the subsidy, but when information cards are mailed out, local political leaders and other intermediaries also know that the aid recipients understand what they should be receiving.
"We were like zebras, so poor we didn't know how poor we were, and tough and independent because there wasn't any other way to be".
In the meantime, poor Americans should know how to buy their medicines online safely and should be allowed to do so.
But how is a poor parent to know how much the wee ones drank, how fresh the formula was, and how much more they should imbibe before going doon?
Almost the entire second half of the movie is the story of how these poor innocents, who know how to use a machine gun, are stunned into near-submission not unlike the metaphorical subjugation of Native Americans and the Napalming of North Vietnam and Cambodia.
Once we calmed down a little and started to think about that, however, we realized that fishing cliché was the essential insight missing in our US conversation about aid: they -- poor people -- know how to get out of poverty; they just need us to be a good partner, to help them overcome obstacles.
I offered to clean the floor or the shelf or wash the dishes in the restaurant in exchange for an old sandwich". In Latin America, he found that "people were very helpful if I went to their door and said, 'Can I sleep here?' There was this helpfulness, this hospitality, maybe because many people there are poor and they know how it feels.
The reason Tracy Byrnes thinks that $250,000 is close to the poverty line ($23,283 is the poverty line, meaning that $250,000 is about 975percentt more than poverty) is because Tracy Byrnes, like most Fox News anchors, pundits and politicians, have never been, or met poor people (or know how to do basic math).
Those who glory in its crisis as vindication of their crusade against the US-led policies that have underpinned globalisation might answer a simple question: what would they put in its place, who would they install in the driving seat, and how would they ensure continued growth for the poorer nations that know how trade can lift their people out of poverty?
