Poor, poor me!

While Amazon might be trying its best to deliver groceries the same say that customers place their orders, that process works like a charm in the old country.  "Give this list to the store" my mother said as I was stepping out for a walk.  The grocery store is across the street, and you can reach it before you can say Jack Robinson.  The dutiful son that I always am (!) I handed the list to the guy at the store and a few hours later the delivery happened.  Can you beat that, Amazon? ;)

Along with the groceries, which was to meet the major needs for a month, the guy also delivered the bill. After looking at the bottom-line, father did a Redd Foxx-style heart attack act, though he has never heard of Foxx, I am sure.  Perhaps it is a similar experience with most fathers anywhere on this planet--after all, we men are programmed to try to be funny;)

Later, the discussions were about the cost of living and inflation, and comparing the costs to those in the old days.  "If we feel that groceries are so expensive, I wonder how a middle-class family with two kids manage" mother remarked.

Discussions like this are juicy topics for me, and I can easily slip into an academic mode.  But, I held myself in check.  However, I remembered that a few years ago, when a great-aunt asked me about how the price of bread in the US compared with the price in India, I gave her a jargon-free explanation that was essentially about Purchasing Power Parity and she appreciated that explanation.

"My plane ticket for this India trip was sixty times that grocery bill.  In other words, if I didn't come to India, I could have used that money to buy you groceries for five years!" I said.  I had their attention.  "With inflation, it will work out to only four years" quipped my sister.

The nerdy academic found the opening.

"Suppose you were to line up all the families in the world--not the extended families but the nuclear families--from the richest to the poorest, similar to lining up based on the height, where do you think you will be in that line?" I asked them.  "Will you be towards the beginning, with the rich, or in the middle, or towards the end with the poor?"

As I get older, I find that drawing people into thinking about serious stuff is not as difficult as it was when I was younger.  I guess experience matters a lot.  Now I know a tad more about how to thread that proverbial needle.

"In the middle" my sister replied.  "Of course, the middle" affirmed my father.

"You will be in the top ten percent, way up in the line" I told them.  Though, I suspect that they will be even farther ahead, close to the top five percent.

"But, the reason you feel like you are in the middle is this--you are thinking in the context of the people you know and interact with, and compared to some you feel a lot poorer, and you end up thinking you are somewhere near the middle."

"I will be even ahead of you in that line" I added.  I am one of those global one-percenters, which is often why I wonder how rich the super-rich must be and how they feel that their stand against sharing even a tiny sliver of their incomes is morally defensible.

"It will be a tough life for the poor" my sister reflected on the data that was sinking into her.

A tough life is an understatement.

If only we realized on a daily and ongoing basis that we--including you, the reader, unless you are a student--are incredibly rich people on this planet.  But, humans that we are, we forget and cry poverty all the time.

Poor me!