PackRat
3/4/2016 20:15 EST
ILuvCR,
OK, let me walk you through the civics lesson you appear to have missed.
The first question that needs to be addressed is what degree of economic inequality makes for a good society. There is no easy answer to this question, but since almost everyone rejects perfect equality and surely everyone rejects perfect inequality (one person has everything and everyone else has nothing), we know that the answer lies somewhere in between these two extremes.
In the western tradition, rooted in both classical Greece and the Old Testament, the answer that has historically been given is that good societies have a large middle class and not many either very poor or very rich. This is also the tradition Costa Rica embraces, at least in its historic myth of its own past as a middle-class society as well as its ongoing commitment to social democracy.
Though, the question still remains: How economically unequal can a society be and still maintain a strong middle class (the members of which presumably aren't exactly equal to each other either)?
To help answer this question, it helps to clarify what is meant by a good society in the first place. Although there are many components to a good society, the main one is probably that it coheres in a way that enables all to feel a part of the whole and all to therefore be committed to the "commonwealth."
It follows good societies have a vibrant public life anchoed in strong public institutions. It therefore also follows that when segments of the population are excluded from public life because they are poor and other segments of it withdraw from public life because they are rich, the society isn't all that good. It further follows that when public institutions decay it's not a particularly good society.
Currently, economic inequality in Costa Rica is fairly obviously too great to maintain a good society by these measures. Large swaths of the poor are sequestered in slums while large swaths of the rich are isolated in gated communities. Public institutions, such as the public shools and healthcare system, are in rough enough shape that the rich don't even use them.
To put a number on this, Costa Rica's Gini coeffecient (a standard measure of economic inequality) currently stands at about ,5, when a reasonable rule of thumb is that a Gini above .4 is an indicator that a society is veering away from the good.
But all this can be brought down to a personal level to determine whether a member of the society is either too poor or too rich.
Ignoring the question of how poor is too poor, since that isn't our concern here, the question of how rich is too rich can be answered by looking at indicators of withdraw from public life. Is the person living in a gated community? Is he or she going private for education and healthcare rather than public? Or even: Is the person using private as opposed to public transporation (a physical withdraw from public space) in a society in which 75% use public transportation? And: Does the person use public or private facilities for recreation?
Personally, I'm not a super stictler about people having to do everything public to be good members of a society, since I doubt that a little bit of excess affluence is really that harmful. However, the more a person's affluence allows them to withdraw from public life, the less desirable that person's affluence is for the society.
And if you note, the woman in the $1260 or $1058 example had not apparently withdrawn from public life by any of these measures. Hard to say exactly, but increase her income by $500 a month and you can bet that she'd start withdrawing. Increase it by $5000, and she'd be oblivious to it.
Now, just because a person has money doesn't mean that they will use it to buy social exclusion. Some will legitimately invest it in ways that improve the economic opportunities for others as well as make themselves a profit. Good for us because of them. Others may donate it to worthwhile charities, and good for us because of them. Still others may just sit on it (although usually this is an indirect way of investing it, since the financial institutions in which they keep their money will invest it).
However, the usual pattern is for the rich neither to invest their money nor to donate it to charities. Of course, many say that they do both, but they really don't. What they claim are investments are frequently just their own consumer purchases, which rarely create real economic opportunities for others and often further their withdraw from public life. (Sorry, providing jobs for security guards at a gated community is not an investment.) Charity is a bigger can of worms than we probably want to get into here, but unfortunately most of it that isn't outright crooked not only fails to help the recipients but also worsens their situations. It's too simple, but it seems that most charity increases the dependency of the recipients on the donors rather than empowers the recipients, and it's not unreasonable to conjecture that this is actually the (often subconscious) agenda of the donor.
So, being wealthy relative to others in a society is not necessarily a bad thing, but it usually is. Most people are much safer not having too much excess money to begin with, since most people can be counted on to do the wrong things with their excess money.
The second question that needs to be addressed is how affluence in the hands of an identifiable foreign minority affects both the social and their own good.
Well, there's no reason to imagine that wealthy foreigners are any less harmful to a society than wealthy natives--and every reason to expect that they are more harmful. As a minority, after all, they are already disposed to live and socialize in separate minority enclaves--that is, to withdraw--as well as prone to ethnocentrism, or the belief that their culture is superior and their host culture is inferior. When greater affluence permits their self-segregation from the society, that also prevents them from having their ethnocentrism challenged.
So affluent expats have a more difficult time fitting into Costa Rica than less affluent ones. Of course, many don't want to fit in, but to them we have to pose the question of why they're here in the first place. Are they here as postmodern colonists? Also, I'm not sure that we can believe those who say they don't want to fit in. Many of them are quite bitter about and some even hateful toward Costa Rica, which seem to me to signal frustration over their exclusion.
Meanwhile, as a fairly easily identifiable minority, expats are frequently resented by Ticos. They are resented of course for their haughty ethnocentrism, but also because they appear to "have more money than sense." Neither is there any justifying the economic discrepancies between expats and Ticos on the basis of individual merit. Sure, some expats deserve their affluence in the sense that had they been born and raised in Costa Rica they would have enjoyed similar financial success, but let's get real, most don't. Most are more affluent simply by accident of birth, not because they are individually more deserving.
We therefore end up with a situation in which an undeserving, ethnocentric, and easily identifiable foreign minority throws its weight around simply because it has more money. What could possibly go wrong here?
Well, a lot. We get excluded and resented, and become fair game for swindles and the like, since our only distinguishing feature is our money.
And this happens to all of us, even those of us who aren't affluent. The stereoype is established by the majority who are, and we're all saddled by it.
My strong desire is for any prospective expat who wants to move to Costa Rica in order to "live like a king" to please stay home. We really don't need any more self-designated foreign royalty here. By contrast, anyone who wants to move here because they genuinely want to live here as responsible members of the society rather than a foreign economic elite is welcome by me, and I think Ticos too.
Others can pick their own number, and I won't dig my heels in and insist that $1500 a month is the absolute upper limit of income for a single expat, but I'm pretty sure that anyone regularly spending more is at risk of doing harm to themselves and others.
Put differently, as the saying goes, money is only a problem when you have too little or too much. Everybody understands how having too little money is a problem, but not many understand how having too much money can be a problem too. Heck, some even believe it's "inane" to mention it as a problem.
Ken
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