In 1999, a poor Colombian told me that his eighty-two years had finally dulled his fear of violence, which had tormented him because he had been robbed many times, once they’d cut his belly open — I requested his opinion of the rich — He clenched his fists and said: Oh, they don’t do nothing for the poor people!
The ones who had harmed him were poorer than he — and still he hated the rich.
That is from William Vollmann’s intermittently fascinating Poor People. Here is an earlier post on Vollmann.
Perhaps he blamed them for not preventing it, but many attribute omni potency to them.
After all, rich people in Colombia (e.g., the late Pablo Escobar) are totally lovable …
The snide remark about Escobar has no place here. The Narcos, while a noticeable minority, are in the minority, even amongst the wealthy.
I have to admit that this comment, coming from a Colombian, is odd. Whenever I have been there what I have seen has been a more American attitude. By that I mean that while it is popular to despise the rich for having more money than sense, the typical person aspires to be rich. In Colombia, of course, your typical guy on the street has less of a chance of making himself wealthy than your typical American.
The wealthy do try to isolate themselves, both for security reasons and others. Of course this will have an effect on the aspiring middle class, a reluctance to do too much close business for example. There are other reasons, other than snobery or oppresing those below them, for handling unknown people at arms length in Colombia, just a quick anecdote, my grandfather lost 2 businesses to partners. I don’t mean through legal avenues, he was hospitalized in the states for a few months on one occasion and came back to find he had been cleaned out and had little legal recourse. The upshot of this is that people try to only deal with people with whom they have extensive contacts (both as a tool to evaluate their honesty and as a means of policing their deals in the absence of meaningful legal recourse) the net effect is that if you aren’t already known in certain circles your access to financing and partnerships is restricted, effectively inhibiting your ability to move up from the middle class.
I don’t know of anyone else who is like Sailer in that they are worried about latin american leftist-populism taking hold in the united states while being rather sympathetic to it in latin america. Usually those opinions don’t go together, which Mike Huemer might describe as evidence of irrationality in other situtations.
John, that reminds me of things I read on Sailer’s site, that talk about how in most countries you can’t trust anyone, and the laws aren’t strong enough to enforce contracts so you only deal with extended family, which is correlated with how extended families are so much bigger and more important in those countries than here, and of course also correlated with being relatively poorer.
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