this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Poor people in Britain can't just walk over to a market in Liberia to shop. They have to spend their British currency at British stores and on British rent, bills, taxes.
This topic comes up a lot on Rednote where Chinese people keep being surprised by how dirt poor normal Americans are. Because the American dollar is worth 7x more than Chinese renminbi, Chinese people think each and every American is 7x richer than them. But reality is closer to the opposite being true.
Poor people in Liberia also often can't got to a market in Liberia to shop. Like i get what yall are getting at disabled, oppressed, or just plain unlucky people in the core do sometimes live worse than average people in the periphery, i understand the feeling that yall are trying to put out that being poor in the core is brutal and its true but, its not a sensible comparison, capitalism is just as brutal and oppressive to poor people in the periphery except even more so.
Look im not saying that things arent bad in the core and especially bad in some areas and for some people, just that a little perspective is called for here, britain is rich by world standards, by any metric it is rich, in the article they weren't comparing britain to any country in Africa, or Latin America but another country in europe. Pretending it is not rich obfuscates the reality of imperialism, there are 2 categories of capitalist countries core and periphery and britain is solidly in the core.
Also while its clear cut when looking at things like food, its simply cheaper in the periphery (tho ill point out in my personal experience i have found food to almost always be cheaper in the core as percent of income), other necessities are more complicated, if u look at housing for example yes in the core it is expensive but its also higher quality than in the periphery, the poorest people in britain may be living in moldy apartments with roommates or several generations of their families, but the poorest people in the periphery are living in makeshift shacks with no utilities.
As for China they call themselves a developing country and they share some characteristics with developing countries but in many regards they are closer to developed countries, so they make for a poor comparison with the core especially because it is a much more fair an equal society, to put it simply there is a reason that "second world" was a useful category and it applies here.
I wasn't trying to make it sound like the British or the Americans are the poorest people in the world, my bad if I gave that impression. You're right that those countries benefit from imperialist plunder and that the global south is deprived because of that theft.
And not to make this a poverty competition, but the poorest people in the core aren't living under a roof at all. Capitalism is unequal so not everyone shares the spoils of their country's exploitation, which was what I was getting at. Just because a capitalist country has good stats doesn't mean its people live well.