The 007s — Week 7

The past week was a rollercoaster — the primary highlights being that I gulped gallons of coffee, read extensively on migration across the world and religiously started listening to Naval Ravikant’s podcast daily.

Image Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

• Proletarianisation: Proletarianization refers to the original creation of and the ongoing expansion of the working class in a capitalist economy. The term stems from Marx’s theory of the relationship between economic and social structures and is useful as an analytic tool for understanding changes in today’s world. Today, the term proletarianization is used to refer to the ever-growing size of the working class, which results from the growth of a capitalist economy. In order for business owners and corporations to grow in a capitalist context, they have to accumulate more and more wealth, this requires increasing production, and thus increasing amounts of workers. This can also be considered a classic example of downward mobility, meaning that people are moving from the middle class into the less wealthy working class. The opposite of proletarianisation is embourgeoisement.

• Medical Triage: When used in medicine and healthcare, the term triage refers to the sorting of injured or sick people according to their need for emergency medical attention. It is a method of determining priority for who gets care first. Triage may be performed by emergency medical technicians, hospital emergency room gatekeepers, soldiers on a battlefield, or anyone with knowledge of the system during an emergency situation. The word triage comes from the French word trier, which means to sort or select. Its historic roots for medical purposes go back to the days of Napoleon when triaging large groups of wounded soldiers was necessary. Over the centuries, triage systems have evolved into a well-defined priority process, sometimes requiring specific training depending on the setting or organization that uses the system.

• Water Wives: In the parched village of Denganmal, in western India, there are no taps. It’s so time-consuming and inconvenient to get water in villages like Denganmal, that men have taken to marrying two or three additional women just to make the trek to and from wells — making these women ‘water wives’. These ‘water wives’ are often widows or single mothers wishing to ‘regain respect’ in their communities. These relationships are primarily made to shift the burden of labour on women: the deemed couple usually does not share the marital bed and often live in separate apartments. The women must walk through hot temperatures and sticky humidity to wells, where they then wait hours for their turn before loading up metal containers and makeshift pitchers with water and lugging them back. Despite anti-polygamy laws, this is a common practice in places like Denganmal and at least 19,000 villages that lack access to water.

• Just World Hypothesis: The just-world hypothesis refers to our belief that the world is fair, and consequently, that the morality of our actions will determine our outcomes. This viewpoint causes us to believe that those who do good will be rewarded, and those who do not will be punished. On an individual level, there are ups and downs to the just-world hypothesis. Belief in a just world can motivate us to act with morality and integrity. However, the world is not always as righteous as we would hope. It can be argued that by holding tightly to the just-world hypothesis in the face of injustice, we are susceptible to making inaccurate conclusions and judgments about the world around us. UCLA social psychologists state, “People often exert tremendous effort in order to help right social wrongs and thus help restore justice in the world. At other times, however, people’s desire to live in a just world leads not to justice but to justification”. The firm belief in a just world yields a cognitive bias and can result in us justifying a person’s suffering through painting them negatively or minimizing their suffering altogether.

• Harris-Todaro framework: The Harris–Todaro model, named after John R. Harris and Michael Todaro, is an economic model developed in 1970 and used in development economics and welfare economics to explain some of the issues concerning rural-urban migration. At the core of the Harris-Todaro model were the following features:
  - Real wages (adjusted for cost-of-living differences) are higher in urban formal-sector jobs than in rural traditional-sector jobs
  - To be hired for a formal-sector job, one has to be physically present in the urban areas where the formal-sector jobs are located
  - As a consequence of the first two features, more workers search for formal-sector jobs than are hired, employers hire some of the job seekers but not all of them, and those not hired end up unemployed
  - For equality to be maintained between the expected wage associated with an urban job and the expected wage associated with a lower-paying rural job, the equilibrium arising in such a setting is characterized by urban unemployment
  - For any temporary difference in the expected wages between one sector and another is eroded as workers migrate from the low-expected-wage labour market to the high-expected-wage labour market

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• Lee’s Push and Pull Model: Lee’s model of migration suggests there are pull factors and push factors within the origin country (where the migrant moves from) and the destination country (where the migrant moves to). Pull factors are factors that attract a person to move to a new area. Examples include higher wages, higher standards of living, higher standards of education and more job opportunities. Push factors are factors that force people to move from an area. Examples include drought, conflict, fewer job opportunities and poor standards of living. Another element of Lee’s model is intervening obstacles. These are factors that can prevent or make it more difficult for a person to migrate to another country. Examples include transport difficulties, passport and visa requirements or lack of money to migrate.

• Indentured Labour: In Europe in the 1820s, there was a new kind of liberal humanism where slavery was considered inhuman. Thus between 1830–1860, the British, French and the Portuguese during the colonisation of India, prohibited slavery that was implemented by several acts under their individual domains. It was following this ideology that the colonisers stopped slavery in India, only to replace it with another form of bonded servitude and termed it ‘indentured labour’. This practice of indentured labour resulted in the growth of a large diaspora with Indo-Caribbean, Indo-African and Indo-Malaysian heritage that continued to live in the Caribbean, Fiji, Réunion, Natal, Mauritius, Malaysia, Sri Lanka etc. Indentured migration started, post the abolition of slavery to run sugar and rubber plantations that the British had set up in the West Indies. The British attempted to disassociate indentured labour from slavery by calling it an ‘agreement’. when recruiting Indians who would be willing to migrate, to try and hide the true nature of the practice.