Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"All of this is already being done in some countries. The government of Kenya is now systematically deworming children in school. In Colombia, micronutrient packets are sprinkled on kids’ meals in preschool. In Mexico, social welfare payments come with free nutritional supplements for the family."

" In contrast, the social returns of directly investing in children and pregnant mother nutrition are tremendous. This can be done by giving away fortified foods to pregnant mothers and parents of small children, by treating children for worms in preschool or at school, by providing them with meals rich in micronutrients, or even by giving parents incentives to consume nutritional supplements."

"It also is probably not enough just to provide the poor with more money, and even rising incomes will probably not lead to better nutrition in the short run. As we saw in India, the poor do not eat any more or any better when their income goes up; there are too many other pressures and desires competing with food."

"In fact, there may well be an S—shaped relationship between their parent’s income and the eventual income of these children, caused by childhood nutrition. That is because a child who got the proper nutrients in utero or during early childhood will earn more money every year of his or her life: This adds up to large benefits over a lifetime. "

The fact that the basic mechanics of a nutrition-based poverty trap do not seem to be at work for adults does not mean that nutrition is not a problem for the poor.But the problem may be less the quantity of food than its quality & in particular the shortage of micronutrients.The benefits of good nutrition may be particularly strong for 2 sets of people who do not decide what they eat: unborn babies & young children"

"They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible, celebrating when occasion demands it."

"We are often inclined to see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and to wonder why they don’t put these purchases on hold and invest in what would really make their lives better. The poor, on the other hand, may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives."

" A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man does not. . . . When you are unemployed, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little tasty. There is always some cheap pleasant thing to tempt you."

"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have the less you are inclined to spend it on wholesome food"

"As for food, households could easily get a lot more calories and other nutrients by spending less on expensive grains (like rice and wheat), sugar, and processed foods, and more on leafy vegetables and coarse grains. "

In Kenya, when International Child Support, the NGO that was running the deworming program, asked the parents in some schools to pay a few cents for deworming their children, almost all of them refused, which deprived their children of hundreds of dollars of extra earning over their lifetime.

Most mothers could surely afford iodized salt, which is now standard in many parts of the world, or one dose of iodine every two years (at 51 cents per dose).

"The puzzle is that people do not seem to want more food, and yet more food and especially more judiciously purchased food would probably make them, and almost certainly their children, significantly more successful in life. The key investments that would achieve this are not expensive."

"This is of course different during natural or man-made disasters, or in famines that kill and weaken millions. As Amartya Sen has shown, however, most recent famines have been caused not by lack of food availability but by institutional failures that led to poor distribution of the available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere."

"So it is not that the lack of food could not be a problem or isn’t a problem from time to time, but the world we live in today is for the most part too rich for it to be a big part of the story of the persistence of poverty."

"Reminiscent of the witch hunt of the little ice age, Tanzania experiences a rash of “witch” killings whenever there is a drought—a convenient way to get rid of an unproductive mouth to feed at times where resources are very tight."

"During droughts in India in the 1960s, little girls in landless households were much more likely to die than boys, but boys’ and girls’ death rates were not very different when there was normal rainfall."

"We hope to persuade you that our patient, step-by-step approach is not only a more effective way to fight poverty, but also one that makes the world a more interesting place."

"As we will see, ideology, ignorance, and inertia—the three Is—on the part of the expert, the aid worker, or the local policy maker, often explain why policies fail and why aid does not have the effect it should. It is possible to make the world a better place—probably not tomorrow, but in some future that is within our reach—but we cannot get there with lazy thinking."

"One of the questions that we will use these data to answer is when and where we should worry about poverty traps; we will find them in some areas, but not in others."

"Answering these questions, we get to understand what, if anything, is special about the poor: Do they just live like everyone else, except with less money, or is there something fundamentally different about life under extreme poverty? And if it is something special, is it something that could keep the poor trapped in poverty? "

"If the poor appear at all, it is usually as the dramatis personae of some uplifting anecdote or tragic episode, to be admired or pitied, but not as a source of knowledge, not as people to be consulted about what they think or want or do.:

"i want to be young like i was never allowed,"

"i want to tell them this but i am too old now for text message battles
and facebook flame wars, like
maybe talking about privilege doesn’t change the fact that you have it,"

"we have all seen the darkness now give us the dawn"

"thank god for our hard-won hard femme glamour, for the charms that we grew out of bodies as lush as gardens and hardy as weeds."

"you can have anyone, anything you want, your body says. what you want is you want to talk to me, and i am surprised at first, before i remember that i am now petite asian lady with good bone structure rather than a gawky skinny effeminate chinese boy. remarkable, the effect that repackaging has on the market value of a product."

"i needed to own
the things i loved."

"i learned from this
that the best way to control somebody you love
to make them behave,
to keep them in line,
is to threaten the things they hold dearest.
to take away the things that make them free."

"i’ve always needed books,
the way some of my punk queer friends need cigarettes,
or weed, or clear packets of molly the size of a thumbnail.
without them, i get fidgety, anxious,
start to sweat. can’t have a good time,
can’t get down, can’t
see the point of paying rent or
going to work or having sex."