Today I want to start my talk
with a story of my own bubble.
When I say ‘bubble’, you might wonder what is this and what I’m talking about.
Almost more than 20 years ago, when I was eight years old,
I went to a local food market with my mum and dad.
It was a very cold winter day.
We were driving our green Hyundai Accent car, which was in trend at the time.
My parents went into the market to shop for groceries while I stayed in the car.
I was sitting in the car and listening to music, relaxing,
not even paying attention to the cold.
But there was a girl outside, the same age as me.
She had no hat or gloves in that freezing cold weather
and was holding a younger sibling in those little hands.
At first, I didn’t pay much attention.
I thought: “Okay, it’s just a poor girl standing there”,
and kept enjoying the music in the car.
But 20 minutes, 30 minutes passed.
She wasn’t simply standing there, doing nothing.
She was begging for money from those who were passing by.
Most of the people who were passing seemed to be annoyed by her
and walked faster to avoid interaction.
Looking at this, I suddenly felt uncomfortable.
What has she done wrong
to be standing outside in the cold,
holding such heavy load on her tiny back.
What have I done to deserve sitting in a warm car,
waiting for my parents to bring bags full of food while listening to music.
What is the difference between us?
Why and how has this difference emerged?
I felt so bad at the time.
Looking back now, I think that
perhaps, my choice of becoming a social researcher
was dedicated to understanding this difference.
Even today, the story of the bubble still continues.
Last year, I was standing in a bank to transfer money
when I noticed this poster on the wall.
[Dear citizens, beware of theft!!!]
Looking at that poster,
I thought the bubble hasn’t burst.
The poster said:
“Dear citizens, beware of theft!”
What this poster shows is that
we see this boy selling magazines or gums
as though he was a criminal.
And people like us with jobs and a decent life
who can afford to go to a cafe for a cup of tea
should beware of these kids and protect ourselves from them.
This poster wasn’t only put up in this bank,
but also in cafes, restaurants, department stores and everywhere.
How many of you have passed by these posters?
How many of us haven’t noticed them?
So the first question arising from this is
why are we living in the kind of society where a small boy is working at night,
doing hard labour and being called a thief?
Second, why are we living in a society
where we have to be cautious of children?
I’ve tried this.
Most people answer these questions in similar ways.
Because these kids’ parents
weren’t able to succeed in their lives,
so it’s these kids’ parents’ fault.
Let’s imagine one of these parents’ name is Turuu.
What we say about Turuu is that he’s lazy,
he likes to live on social welfare, he drinks a lot,
he doesn’t work hard enough, also may be when he moved
from the countryside to the city
he didn’t think through and so on.
People may think in different ways.
So by making these kinds of statements we conclude that this person
is living in his own bubble, not depending on other socio-economic conditions.
And because the individual is not trying hard enough,
we conclude that it’s his own personal problem.
However, there are thousands, millions and even billions of people in the world
who live in similar conditions as Turuu.
It would be wrong to assume that this poverty exists
because individuals like Turuu are not trying hard enough,
as if they wanted to live in sub-standard conditions.
On the contrary, let’s imagine that Turuu is a very successful man,
and most of the members of our society are doing well and
succeeding in their lives.
Here we conclude that it’s not just because Turuu is
a hard-worker and an achiever that he’s doing well.
Instead, our society is conducive and has the right socio-economic
conditions to make people successful.
What this tells us is that we can’t just sit comfortably inside our own bubbles
and judge another person as isolated from the society.
We shouldn’t conclude that the problem is just his own.
Since this phenomenon [poverty] is too common in our society,
there should be something wrong beyond what we can see.
Now, what is the current situation of poverty and people like Turuu in Mongolia?
Is it similar to what we have imagined?
Today there are 634,000 people living in poverty in Mongolia.
Poverty means not being able
to afford their basic needs including food.
These are people who spend less than
140,000 MNT [60 USD] per month, as of 2014.
Today, 20 percent of Mongolian population is living in poverty.
In fact, it’s more than 20 percent.
If we hypothetically increase the existing poverty line
by 50,000 MNT [26 USD] from 146,000 to 196,000 MNT,
then 40 percent of the population would be classified as living in poverty.
That means on top of the 20 percent who are currently classified as poor,
another 20 percent is living in vulnerable conditions
where they might fall into poverty easily.
As such in total 40 percent of us live under vulnerable conditions today.
Moreover, nearly 80 percent
of Mongolian population spend
less than 400 thousand tugrugs [212 USD] per month.
Only 20 percent spend more than 400 thousand.
Those who spend more than 400 thousand per month are less vulnerable to shocks
such as price increase and they have more or less secure lives.
The remaining 80 percent are people who might be affected
by various financial and personal crises.
Let’s look at another statistics.
Today we say that our society is free and equal,
everyone can work hard and achieve what they deserve.
If we imagine our society as evenly distributing income and expenses,
wealth distribution should look like this.
What do you think the current situation is in Mongolia?
The top two ladders of the society altogether
occupy 70 percent of the total expenditure in Mongolia.
The remaining three ladders combined occupy only 30 percent.
More importantly, the lowest ladder occupies only seven percent.
We can see from this
to what extent has income inequality increased.
So it shows that when we say that Turuu is the one at fault,
he is the one who has problems,
we are thinking inside our bubble.
Now, we should ask why so many people are poor,
why so much inequality has been created in our society,
and whether our explanations to these questions are done
inside or outside the bubble.
I want to tell you three most common answers.
The first answer is that people are unequal anyways
which is human nature.
But in contrast to this belief, many studies worldwide and in Mongolia
show that people almost naturally desire equality.
Nobody says I’m living in better or worse
conditions than that person.
Yet there is one condition where we accept inequality.
This is when the notion about fairness is considered.
Fairness.
In other words, today Turuu worked less than me,
so he should earn less than me.
I worked harder than him, so I should earn more than him.
It would be unfair if Turuu earns the same as me even though he worked less than me.
That’s unfair.
Unfortunately, our understanding and interpretation about fairness
is not always fair itself.
Let me take a simple example.
In India, the caste system
allows most people to think that it’s fair that some people
should be wealthy just because they are deemed to be born
from the head of the divinity,
whilst others should be poor because they were born from the foot of divinity.
Is this fair? Not at all.
The second commonly used explanation
is that our country is poor,
we are barely surviving.
This is a wrong assumption.
Our country is now a middle-income country.
Our economy has been growing steadily
for more than a decade.
Accordingly, the social welfare spending has also been increasing.
Yet Turuu or those poor 40 percent of population
can’t still benefit from this growth.
So despite economic growth we are left with a significant portion of our society
living in or very close to poverty.
Let’s see the next example.
Are poorer people indeed lazy
and not trying hard enough in their lives?
To see whether it’s true I want to take an example of successful young people.
Not long ago, I’ve been reading some articles.
Including those that were also viral on Facebook.
We are all very proud of the young people who graduated or studying
at Harvard or MIT, and share these posts.
They are all outstanding.
So quite a few of them were interviewed.
I’ve read all of them.
They were asked to share the ingredients of their success.
The common ingredients were
“to dedicate yourself and work harder”
or “good knowledge of English”.
We should be proud of these kids?
(Applause)
And now let’s look at the drivers of their success
from a broader societal perspective.
What we see here is that
there are many factors behind their success.
At least these kids are healthy,
they are studying in private schools,
they don’t need to look after a sick father or mother,
they can afford to pay the tuition fee and so on.
In other words, these kids are already very close to success,
and with a little hard work they can climb to seemingly high points on our ladder.
In contrast, those people mentioned earlier
who make up around 60 – 70 percent of the population at the bottom of the ladder
are not able to get to the same level of the ladder if they work equally hard.
Because their social barriers are very high
like the one we see here.
So one might be asking, what are these barriers?
Why can’t one work harder and climb up the ladder?
There are so many factors.
For example, quality education and health services.
Because these people don’t have sufficient education, don’t have necessary skills.
Because they don’t have skills, they can’t find job.
They don’t have work then they don’t have salaries.
No salaries, no savings.
No savings, no investment in their own life.
As such that person is trapped into poverty.
But today we, the ones standing at the top of the ladder
and inside our bubbles, are pointing down
to the people who are at the bottom and telling them to work harder
as if we have ever worked ourselves out of the situations they find themselves in.
The main reason poverty and other social issues persist is
the big gap in society and structural differences
and I’m trying to show this situation through this picture.
Again, the story is not finished.
We’ve just criticised people from inside our bubbles.
Our imagination about society is
created only within our limited social boundary.
Looking at the results from this study,
our own trust and cooperation with others
is limited by our parents, friends and relatives.
In other words, we are still operating inside a bubble.
So what can we do to burst this bubble?
Rather than just sitting here and complaining,
we should look for solutions.
There are two things that need to be done.
First, we need to remove social barriers or, in other words,
narrow the gaps in this ladder,
so that those people at the bottom can move up the ladder.
We need to make social reform.
But what is constraining this social reform from happening is that we –
the young people who are the future of Mongolia-
still remain in our bubbles, if we don’t burst them, this change will never happen.
Let’s reduce the height of the ladder with the two arrows pointing
and provide equal opportunity.
Next, let’s burst our bubbles.
(Applause)
This is a picture of a bubble
where we blame or praise the individual
and imagine the individual as isolated from the rest of the society.
We should become the young professionals who don’t blame the individual
but rather who try to see the underlying reasons and conditions for problems
in a much broader way based on evidence, research and using our intelligence.
Then why should we burst our bubble and what change can this bring?
Like this picture I’m showing you right here,
we want a society where everyone has an equal opportunity to move up there
and reach success and a society with adequate structure.
The basis of creating this kind of society is that we ourselves leave our bubble.
All of us, to burst this bubble, like I was trying to convince you earlier,
rather than seeing Turuu or someone else’s success
or failure through the matter purely of personal effort,
we should learn to ask ourselves
do we have skills to see the society as a whole?
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
Be First to Comment