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Dear Readers,
While All Things Pakistan has remained alive and online, it has been dormant since June 11, 2011 - when, on the blog's 5th anniversary, we decided that it was time to move on. We have been heartened by your messages and the fact that a steady traffic has continued to enjoy the archived content on ATP. While the blog itself will remain dormant, we are now beginning to add occasional (but infrequent) new material by the original authors of the blog, mostly to archive what they may now publish elsewhere. We will also be updating older posts to make sure that new readers who stumble onto this site still find it useful.
We hope you will continue to find ATP a useful venue to reflect upon and express your Pakistaniat. - Editors
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Raza,
When you write about the consequences of poverty and inequality and how poverty can be reduced, it is natural to look at the experience of others for clues. As human beings, how else do we learn?
One way is to learn from your own experience the hard way after making a lot of mistakes. The other is to learn from the mistakes of others. I personally prefer the latter.
Hopefully, you can come up with better ideas when you seriously answer the following questions based on intelligent analysis:
Is there really a strong connection and correlation between poverty/inequality and rising violence in our society? If so, what is it? Has anyone seriously explored this hypothesis?
Can poverty be reduced without encouraging investors/businesses to invest? How do we encourage them?
Where will the resources come from to alleviate poverty? Even if we equally divided the nation’s entire gdp, we would end inequality but wouldn’t that make every one poor?
Will violence and militancy simply evaporate even if we reduced inequality or ended poverty?
I think it’s much easier to write a column or blog post than to come up with defensible answers to these questions. Just sticking to our ideologies and pre-conceived, untested notions will not help.
As I said in an earlier comment, I do admire your initiative to start this debate online.