Being at present in South Africa, I have had the chance to visit one of the townships springing up around Cape Town and to pass the enormous areas of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcinformal settlements’ (doublespeak for shanty towns). <\/p>\n
My companion on the journey told me that surprisingly the people who live in these corrugated iron dwellings in what we would consider atrociously difficult conditions are often remarkably clean and smartly dressed, something I had myself observed in Moroccan shanty towns. Indeed, it is not unusual for such people to be better dressed and cleaner than many UK citizens who would consider the shanty town dwellers utterly impoverished and bereft. But how can that be? <\/p>\n
One thing that occurs to me is that these people although poor are not in debt; it is entirely unknown to them and they probably could not get a debt even if they wanted to, whereas most modern people are used to living in debt (interestingly, the idea of a negative number troubled Europeans for some centuries, even while they worked with it in their trade, for how can there be a number less than nothing?). <\/p>\n
So although these people have almost nothing, they have more than us who have less than nothing, who have minus wealth, who live in debt. Who’s the beggar now?
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