You Should Read This Tom Friedman

The audience was very small. It consisted of introductory journalism students who were promised extra credit and a few middle-agers who really were concerned about the topic of the lecture: global inequality. The small auditorium could not have been half-full though, and the speaker looked a little too fidgety to diagnose the problems with our world.

The orator was an older Indian man with strongly parted grey hair and nervously roving eyes. He wore an orange dress shirt and a black vest, and he seemed uncomfortable with the idea that all of us were on hand to see him. He reminded our American high school sensibilities of the kid who has all the answers but is too afraid to opine over the whirr of the lights.

Everyone in the audience quickly erased these thoughts when P. Sainath finally got to the podium. The rural affairs editor of one of India’s largest English-language papers did not come all this way for nothing. Sainath gripped the front of the podium tightly and passionately decried the gross injustices of globalization.

These were not the fanatical ravings of a flat-world idealist, though. Sainath made his name as a journalist by studying the plight of rural India closer than any scholar who cheers the free market from comfortable chairs in buildings with running water. He trotted out more stats than you could write down to show just how unequal liberalization makes the world. Consider:

India is 8th in the world in number of billionaires, but 127th in human development.
India’s per capita income is lower than Nicaragua’s.
India’s rural families are eating, on average, 100 kg less food per year than they did 10 years ago.

But stats are never enough, and Sainath is a captivating speaker. When he tells the continuing story of Indian farmers who would rather commit suicide than live in debt, the room is completely without noise. Yet, Sainath also has the peculiarly Indian gift of digression and wry humor, and the people in the audience nod their heads and laugh often.

Sainath summed up the purpose of his lecture right away. Talking about the fact that stock markets everywhere boomed following the Tsunami, he said, “There’s often a direct link between the misery of the many and the profits of the few.” It was a startling but simple realization, one illuminated by the history of the world. And it flies in the face of everything we hear in America about globalization. Common sense usually does.

World economics is, without a doubt, the area of world politics Americans know the least about. We live in a corporate fantasy world where the free market makes free competition because that’s the vision of capitalism that has been hammered into our heads from birth. We’ve been taught that the world is the survival of the fittest, a fiercely independant world where the best wins. And if you want to bitch and moan about unfairness, it’s probably just because you lost.

That’s what made Sainath’s speech disconcerting in a way. It was so inspiring to see this man of the people punch out global institutions with common sense arrows, but the diseases of the world seem irreversible.

In fact, most college students seem dedicated to further perpetuating this system. I’m not pulling the ol’ liberal arts pothead bitches about those damn corporate clones in training over at the b-school. I’m talking about all of us: journalism students who are ready and willing to manufacture news, engineering students who are learning to do the next ludicrously massive project, and p.r. students who will keep the powerful in power. Could we make any changes even if we wanted to?

Sainath thinks we can. He ended his speech by telling the story of a party given by the Roman emperor Nero which was lit by burning criminals at the stake. Not one of us, he said, would want to be Nero’s guest. I think we still have the choice.