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https://www.poetry.com/poem/273250/arithmetic-of-poverty

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  @SagarHaiderAbbasi

  good work

  LikeReply3 hours ago
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  vgmende

  “This is a beautiful poem. Don’t let the pretty compliments dilute it. The epiphany at its core is a slap in the face to the rich because they are the architects of poverty and homelessness — intentional or not. There’s no such thing as ‘pulling yourself up by the bootstraps’ when the wealthy own the bootstraps and sell them back to you on monthly payments you refinance until nothing’s left but the sidewalk.” more »

  LikeReply6 hours ago
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  karlcfolkes

  Thanks for your response. Renee.

  LikeReply6 days ago
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  Renees

  Amazing and so true! Reminds me of a sponge that eventually becomes non soluble and another of the same choosing takes its place. You are a master!

  LikeReply6 days ago
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  karlcfolkes

  Dear Camille,
  As a follow-up to this important topic and on a more personal level, the issue of former enslaved colonial people in several countries, once treated historically as less than fully human cargo, as chattels, is deeply integrally related to the subject at hand and, in some cases, their demand for reparations. As it stands today, in the former British Caribbean, the University of the West Indies at Mona in Jamaica, the West Indies, has created a Department of Reparations Studies (DRS) directed to that issue — the only Department of Reparations Studies in the world so far. And it is sending a delegation to the United Kingdom to meet with King Charles III and other representatives on the matter within the next few weeks. Quite clearly, other Caribbean nations were equally affected under French, Portuguese, and Spanish hegemonic colonial domination.
  These are relevant issues that hit to the very heart of your subject matter. more »

  LikeReply6 days ago
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  karlcfolkes

  Dear Camille,
  Your poem provides a brilliant critique and response to the nineteenth century British political economist, Thomas Robert Malthus who, by employing sophisticated mathematical equations, argued (and falsely so) that because, as he and others of his time observed, world populations grew in geometric progression, while food production increased in arithmetic progression, this would lead ( he and others of his time calculated) to what he postulated as the “Law of Diminishing Returns” (with the wealthy benefiting and the poor suffering as an unfortunate casualty); thus suggesting the need for harsh population control, and theorizing that this policy would be beneficial to many people dying from shortage of food, especially among those having large families and with paltry economic support, as is the case worldwide with minorities in every nation; implicitly blaming that sector and suggesting at the same time the need for population control among them.
  It is fair to point out that some critics of Malthus’ economic theory, have labeled this position as the “Malthusian Population Trap” blaming of the economically and politically disenfranchised in society.
  The stark reality is that population growth, particularly among the poor, the impoverished, and the minority outcasts, is not what has led to society’s gloom and doom among the poor. Rather, the fault lies elsewhere and can be more accurately identified in the maliciously calculated policies of the “Arithmetic of Poverty” implemented by hegemonic governmental regulations in human society. It is this admission that this poem brings to the fore. more »

  LikeReply 17 days ago
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    camillerosecastillo

    Good morning, Karl,
    
    Thank you for such a thoughtful and intellectually generous reading of Arithmetic of Poverty. Your connection to Malthus is particularly fascinating because it reveals a dimension of the poem that I hadn't consciously articulated when I wrote it.
    
    I was thinking primarily about the mathematics by which modern society assigns value; how wealth is multiplied, accumulated, protected, and celebrated, while human suffering is reduced, subtracted, or simply omitted from the equation. But your observation about Malthus adds an important historical dimension to that idea. What strikes me most is the inversion. Malthus's argument framed population growth and available subsistence as a mathematical problem, with poverty, famine, disease, and other checks becoming consequences of an imbalance. My poem attempts to turn that equation around and ask a different question... what if the problem isn't the number of people, but the way power, wealth, and resources are calculated and distributed?
    
    The poor are so often treated as though their poverty is evidence of some personal or demographic failure... as though they somehow violated the mathematics of a system that they had no role in designing, and that's precisely where my poem's line, “Such convenient mathematics.” is important to me.
    
    We count fortunes, profits, productivity and economic growth, but we rarely, if ever, count the exhausted hands that built the towers, the families displaced by rising costs, the psychological toll of perpetual survival, or the human beings who disappear beneath bridges while commerce continues uninterrupted. And ultimately, I think that's what I'm trying to expose...the equation itself. Who gets counted, valued and protected? And, perhaps most disturbingly, who can be subtracted without the system even noticing?
    
    Your observation about the Malthusian population argument has given me another way of understanding my own title, as “Arithmetic” isn't merely a metaphor for numbers; it becomes a metaphor for the intellectual and political mechanisms by which societies rationalize inequality.
    
    And I deeply appreciate your point that the gloom and suffering experienced by impoverished populations can't simply be attributed to population growth among the poor or marginalized. To do so risks turning victims of economic and political arrangements into the authors of their own deprivation, and that's precisely the moral inversion I want my poem to challenge.
    
    Thank you for seeing that dimension in the work and for giving me another historical lens through which to understand what I'm attempting to say.
    
    With gratitude,
    
    Camille more »

    LikeReply6 days ago