Los estilos de vida expresan la dinámica histórica de la subjetividad, en este caso referidos a los colectivos que poseen determinados modos de vida en una sociedad dada, pasados o actuales.
Un conocido antropólogo norteamericano, Oscar Lewis, escribió hacia mediados del siglo pasado dos monografías extraordinarias sobre la vida de los pobres en un barrio mexicano: Los Hijos de Sánchez y La Cultura de la Pobreza. Ambos analizan el estilo de vida, el modo de vida de la sociedad pobre que constituye el sector cuantitativamente más importante de una sociedad urbana opulenta como la de Ciudad de México. Igualmente, la antropóloga venezolana Iraida Vargas-Arenas analiza los estilos caraqueños de vida pobre en su obra Resistencia y Participación. Los estilos de vida expresan la dinámica histórica de la subjetividad, en este caso referidos a los colectivos que poseen determinados modos de vida en una sociedad dada, pasados o actuales. Un estilo de vida está constituido por los hábitos culturales y sociales que se expresan en la vida cotidiana, por la ideología que define a un sector específico de una sociedad, el cual puede llegar a conformar una subcultura que se manifiesta a su vez en formas culturales de comportamientos laborales, la alimentación, el vestido, la vivienda, la concepción del urbanismo. En el caso venezolano, los estilos de vida que definen a la sociedad burguesa actual confrontados con los de las clases populares, constituyen un ejemplo aleccionador. Por razones históricas, las migraciones campesinas que se produjeron en Venezuela a inicios del siglo pasado como secuela del impacto de la cultura y la economía petrolera, llegaron a un espacio geográfico donde las tierras planas del valle caraqueño y buena parte de la zona montañosa del Este de Caracas eran propiedad de una burguesía latifundista urbana, los llamados amos del valle. Hasta bien entrado el siglo XX persistieron en el Este y en el Sureste caraqueño extensos tablones de caña de azúcar como el caso de la hacienda Ibarra, donde se construyó posteriormente la Ciudad Universitaria, o la zona de Montalbán, donde sobrevivieron hasta tiempos muy recientes trapiches donde se molía la caña, se fabricaba el azúcar, el papelón, el ron y el aguardiente blanco. La expansión de la clase media y el enriquecimiento ostentoso de los burgueses caraqueños, determinó la expansión territorial de la ciudad hacia el Este y el Sureste del valle. Los migrantes campesinos fueron impedidos de ocupar las tierras planas que estaban dedicadas por sus dueños a servir de asiento a urbanizaciones para la clase media o media-alta en ascenso. Los pobres tuvieron que asentarse en las laderas de las serranías del Sur, para lo cual desarrollaron nuevas tecnologías constructivas, una nueva cultura y modos de organización social.
A pobreza do Estado Reconsiderando o papel do Estado na luta contra a pobreza global Alberto Cimadamore. Hartley Dean. Jorge Siqueira. [Organizadores]
Hartley Dean. Anete Brito Leal Ivo. Paulo Henrique Martins. Virgilio Álvarez Aragón. Nélson Arteaga Botello. José Graziano da Silva. Walter Belik. Maya Takagi. Tarcisio Patrício de Araújo. Roberto Alves de Lima. Mayra Paula Espina Prieto. Einar Braathen. Hulya Dagdeviren. Rowan Ireland. John Andrew McNeish. [Autores de Capítulo]
Colección CLACSO-CROP.
ISBN 987-1183-59-3
CLACSO.
Buenos Aires.
Agosto de 2006
A pobreza tem estado presente em toda a história da humanidade. Porém, na atualidade existem os recursos para erradicar a probreza extrema em um lapso razoável. Os discursos predominantes nas organizações internacionais, os governos existe para erradicar a necessidade e a vontade que aparentemente existe para erradicar a pobreza. Quais são os fatores que estão impedindo o sucesso de uma meta tão amplamente aceita? É difícil dar una resposta exaustiva e precisa a esta pregunta. Não obdtsnte, uma parte substancial da explicação pode estar en uma das estruturas mais significativas do mundo moderno. o Estado. Este livro explora, desde diversas perspectivas disciplinarias e teóricas, o debate em torno do papel central que o Estado tem na luta contra a pobreza, apesar das limitações presentes e passadas que esta estrutura política tem exibido em distintos contextos históricos e geográficos.
Resumen: En otros lugares de este centro de educación infantil en el centro de China, los jóvenes están montando caballos en balsa, trepando en un gimnasio en la selva, pulgares a través de libros ilustrados o participando en la lectura en grupo. Una vez a la semana, los cuidadores reciben entrenamiento individualizado sobre cómo leer a los niños pequeños y jugar juegos educativos. El centro forma parte de un ambicioso experimento que Rozelle está dirigiendo, que busca encontrar soluciones a lo que él ve como una crisis de proporciones gigantescas en China: el retraso intelectual de aproximadamente un tercio de la población. «Este es el mayor problema que China está enfrentando que nadie ha oído hablar nunca», dice Rozelle, profesor de la Universidad de Stanford en Palo Alto, California. Las encuestas realizadas por el equipo de Rozelle han encontrado que más de la mitad de los estudiantes de octavo grado de las zonas rurales pobres de China tienen coeficientes de inteligencia por debajo de 90, dejándolos luchando para mantenerse al día con el currículo oficial. Un tercio o más de los niños rurales, dice, no completan la secundaria. Rozelle hace un pronóstico sorprendente: Alrededor de 400 millones de chinos en edad laboral, dice, «están en peligro de convertirse en discapacitados cognitivos».
Glasses askew and gray hair tousled, Scott Rozelle jumps into a corral filled with rubber balls and starts mixing it up with several toddlers. The kids pelt the 62-year-old economist with balls and, squealing, jump onto his lap. As the battle rages, Rozelle chatters in Mandarin with mothers and grandmothers watching the action.
Elsewhere in this early childhood education center in central China, youngsters are riding rocking horses, clambering on a jungle gym, thumbing through picture books, or taking part in group reading. Once a week, caregivers get one-on-one coaching on how to read to toddlers and play educational games. The center is part of an ambitious experiment Rozelle is leading that aims to find solutions to what he sees as a crisis of gargantuan proportions in China: the intellectual stunting of roughly one-third of the population. «This is the biggest problem China is facing that nobody’s ever heard about,» says Rozelle, a professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Surveys by Rozelle’s team have found that more than half of eighth graders in poor rural areas in China have IQs below 90, leaving them struggling to keep up with the fast-paced official curriculum. A third or more of rural kids, he says, don’t complete junior high. Factoring in the 15% or so of urban kids who fall at the low end of IQ scores, Rozelle makes a stunning forecast: About 400 million future working-age Chinese, he says, «are in danger of becoming cognitively handicapped.»
Among Chinese academics, that projection «is controversial,» says Mary Young, a pediatrician and child development specialist formerly of the World Bank Institute in Washington, D.C. But although experts may debate the numbers, they are united on the enormity of the problem. «There is definitely a tremendous urban-rural gap» in educational achievement, says Young, who is leading pilot interventions for parents of young children in impoverished rural areas for the government-affiliated China Development Research Foundation in Beijing.
RURAL EDUCATION ACTION PROGRAM
While China’s dynamic urban population thrives, much of rural China is mired in poverty. More than 70 million people in the countryside live on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank, and children have it particularly hard. On a recent visit to Shaanxi province, at a group of farmsteads isolated in a remote valley, a 27-year-old mother of two says that she would like to send her kids to preschool. But she would have to rent an apartment in town to do so—a prohibitive expense.
Many parents migrate to the booming cities for work, leaving children with grandparents. (China’s household registration system requires that children enroll in schools in the district where their parents are registered.) Left-behind children tend to leave school early, eat poorly, and have little cognitive stimulation in the crucial first years of life. Grandparents, with limited education themselves, are poorly equipped to read to the next generation. They sometimes carry swaddled infants on their backs while working their fields, which delays infant motor development, Young says.
Such early deprivation, Rozelle and others say, limits kids’ potential for success in life. «There is a massive convergence of evidence» that development in the first 1000 days after a baby’s conception sets the stage for later educational achievement and adult health, says Linda Richter, a developmental psychologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who doesn’t work with Rozelle.
China’s millions of at-risk children could threaten its future. Economic modeling shows that in some low- and middle-income countries, such as India and Tanzania, «the gross domestic product lost to stunting can be more than a country’s spending on health,» explains Richter, who helped produce a series of papers on early childhood development published online in The Lancet last October. Conversely, she says, «There is a special window of opportunity» for interventions that bolster health and improve parenting.
Luo Lie, 5, does eye exercises at a rural school. Like many of his peers, he is being raised by grandparents.
KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES
That’s what Rozelle is setting out to prove—on an unprecedented scale. In 100 villages across Shaanxi, his team of Chinese and foreign collaborators is following 1200 baby-caregiver pairs; half attend the enriching early education centers and half serve as controls. If the intervention works, Rozelle says his team will seek to convince authorities to establish early education centers nationwide. «It will keep China from collapsing,» he says.
Rozelle’s earlier experiments on health interventions in China had «a real impact on the lives of poor people,» says Howard White, a developmental economist with the Oslo-based Campbell Collaboration, which reviews economic and social studies. Rozelle’s group, he says, has been «very successful testing things on a small scale, taking them up to the provincial level, and using the findings to influence national policy.» Now, Rozelle hopes to have a similar impact with parenting.
Rozelle followed an unlikely path to becoming a crusader for China’s infants. He started studying Mandarin in middle school because his father thought it would be a useful skill, and he pursued finance as an undergraduate at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. But he put his courses on hold to spend 3 years studying Chinese in Taiwan. Seeing the island’s emergence as an Asian Tiger «got me excited about Asian development,» he says.
Later, the poverty he observed backpacking through Southeast Asia and in South America, where he spent 2 years studying Spanish, instilled in him a concern about economic inequality. That led him to pursue a master’s degree in development economics at Cornell University. Development economics was «a new, wide-open field,» he says. And he had an advantage. «Not too many development economists speak Chinese.»
Returning to Cornell for his Ph.D., he began a varied academic career in which China was the one constant. At Stanford and UC Davis, he explored such topics as irrigation investment, genetically modified cotton, and microcredit programs for rural poor. These efforts netted him a national Friendship Award, the highest honor given to foreigners for contributions to China, in 2008. He is also the longtime chairperson of an advisory board to the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s (CAS’s) Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy.
Rozelle’s unorthodox path through academia is matched by his quirky sense of humor. At a recent public talk in English to a general audience in Shanghai, China, he mimed cradling an infant in his arms while he talked about rural parenting. He explained that studies show that investing in early childhood education pays off for society, whereas spending on adult education has negative returns. «You guys are done, sorry,» he told the crowd.
In the mid-2000s, Rozelle and his colleagues shifted their focus from agriculture to education. China’s economy was growing rapidly, but «children from rural areas with poor educations or in bad health didn’t have the capabilities» to take advantage of new economic opportunities, says Luo Renfu, a longtime Rozelle collaborator and economist at Peking University in Beijing.
In Anshun, China, Luo Hongni, 11 (left), and her brother Luo Gan, 10 (right), carry flowers to be used as animal feed.
KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES
The result is a widening gap between urban and rural educational achievement in China, Rozelle says. Many urbanites fit the stereotype of «tiger» parents, pushing kids to excel in school. After hours, their schedules are packed with music and English lessons and sessions at cram schools, which prepare them for notoriously competitive university entrance exams. More than 90% of urban students finish high school.
But only one-quarter of China’s children grow up in the relatively prosperous cities. Rural moms have high hopes for their children; Rozelle’s surveys have found that 75% say they want their newborns to go to college, and 17% hope their child gets a Ph.D. The statistics belie those hopes: Just 24% of China’s working population completes high school.
Rozelle believes such numbers bode ill for China’s hopes of joining the ranks of high-income countries. Over the past 70 years, he explains, only 15 countries have managed to climb from middle- to high-income status, among them South Korea and Taiwan. In all those success stories, three-quarters or more of the working population had completed high school while the country was still in the middle-income bracket. These workforces «had the skills to support a high-income economy,» Rozelle says. In contrast, in the 79 current middle-income countries, only a third or less of the workforce has finished high school. And China is at the bottom of the pack. School dropouts don’t have the skills needed to thrive in a high-income economy, Rozelle says. And, worryingly, the factory jobs that now provide a decent living for those with minimal training are moving from China to lower-wage countries.
Rozelle thinks a lack of opportunity isn’t the only factor holding back China’s rural children. Physically and mentally, they are also at an increasing disadvantage, hampering their performance in school and their prospects in life.
Childhood in the other China
Compared with peers in the cities, rural kids have higher rates of malnutrition, uncorrected vision problems, and intestinal parasites. Many rural parents leave kids in the care of grandparents. The result, according to a team of economists: the intellectual stunting of roughly one-third of China’s population.
CREDITS: (GRAPHIC) G. GRULLÓN/SCIENCE; (DATA) SCOTT ROZELLE
In 2006, Rozelle gathered many of his research collaborators into a Rural Education Action Program (REAP). Based at Stanford, it has key partner institutions in China, including top schools, such as Peking University, and CAS’s Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy in Beijing, which gives REAP credibility with national authorities. REAP also has connections with provincial universities and, through their professors, ties to local officials. (To avoid the scrutiny China gives nongovernmental organizations, Rozelle emphasizes that REAP is an academic entity conducting research.)
REAP’s initial studies focused on the quality and cost of rural education. But Rozelle became aware of health issues during a 2009 visit to a rural school with Reynaldo Martorell, a maternal and child health and nutrition specialist at Emory University in Atlanta. «After lunch, all the kids were napping; Rey said they should be running around,» Rozelle recalls. Martorell suspected malnutrition, and a preliminary survey proved him correct. Over several years, Rozelle’s team conducted 19 surveys in 10 poor provinces covering 133,000 primary school kids. They found that 27% were anemic, an indication of malnutrition; 33% had intestinal worms; and 20% had uncorrected myopia. «If you’ve got one of these three things,» Rozelle says, «you’re not going to learn because you’re sick.»
REAP followed up with trial interventions. At 200 schools, they checked each child’s vision and gave them a math test. Then, in half the schools, the kids who needed them got free glasses. A year later, the math scores of the kids with glasses had improved far more than those of peers in the other schools. Vitamin supplements and deworming yielded similar results. Luo says these and other findings helped convince the central government in 2011 to establish a school lunch program now benefiting 20 million rural students daily. «What impresses me about Scott,» says Martorell, «is that his work does not end with just publications; he is deeply committed to making sure government officials become aware of the problems and solutions.»
But Rozelle believed that he might achieve more by starting with younger children, persuaded by the work of economists showing that investment in the first 1000 days of life yields economic dividends. As he puts it: «The development economics field discovered babies in the past five or so years.» Adversity early on—malnutrition or neglect of an infant’s physical and emotional needs, for example—can leave cognitive deficits that persist for life. And in REAP, Rozelle had an organization that could do rigorous studies of interventions and their benefits.
Fluent in Mandarin, Stanford University economist Scott Rozelle enjoys interacting with the rural children in his intervention programs.
RURAL EDUCATION ACTION PROGRAM
In 2013, REAP launched a study enrolling more than 1800 babies, ages 6 to 12 months, and their caregivers from 348 villages in impoverished Shaanxi province. A team took blood samples and measured the height and weight of each infant. An evaluator gave each baby a widely used test—the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development—that measures cognitive, language, and motor skills. Each caregiver answered a questionnaire used to assess the infant’s social and emotional status. The tests were repeated three times at 6-month intervals. The team also tracked whether and when a mother had migrated away for work.
On the bright side, Rozelle says, the tests indicated rural kids «don’t need help with their motor skills.» But 49% of the babies were anemic. And 29% scored below normal on the Bayley test: nearly twice the 15% of babies that naturally fall at the low end of intelligence tests in any population.
The researchers initially focused on nutrition, providing vitamins in the trial’s intervention arm. But follow-up tests showed that the supplements had marginal impact and that mental development scores deteriorated in both intervention and control groups.
At that point, Rozelle recalls, the team began to think, «Maybe it’s a parenting problem.» In spring 2014, REAP started asking caregivers in their study about parenting practices. Only 11% had told a story to their children the previous day, fewer than 5% had read to their children, and only a third reported playing with or singing to their children.
The situation is particularly fraught for «left-behind» children. Fully one-quarter of Chinese children under age 2 are left in the care of relatives at some point, according to UNICEF statistics. Grandparents often end up as the caretakers—and many «are still in a survival mode of thinking,» without the time, energy, or education to read to their grandchildren, Young says. The test scores confirm a devastating impact: After mothers left home to work in another city, mental development scores among their children declined significantly and socio-emotional indices «fell apart,» Rozelle says. The declines were greatest when a mother left during the child’s first year.
REAP was already adapting what’s known as the Jamaican intervention. Sally Grantham-McGregor, a physician and child development specialist, devised the strategy to help developmentally stunted children she observed while at the University of the West Indies in Kingston in the 1970s and 1980s. The Jamaican intervention relied on home visits to teach mothers, one-on-one, how to interact with their toddlers using books and toys designed to raise cognitive, language, and motor skills. The REAP team enlisted child education specialists and psychologists at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, the province’s capital, to translate and adapt the teaching materials. For coaches, REAP turned to China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, which was seeking new roles for its 1.5 million workers, who had enforced the country’s now-ended one-child policy.
REAP then took 513 children-caregiver pairs from the 1800 participants and split them into intervention and control groups. For the next 6 months, the newly trained family planning workers visited intervention homes weekly for coaching using the Jamaican method. In the intervention group, when the mother was present the baby’s Bayley scores rose to normal. But when a grandmother was raising the child, the Bayley score barely budged. «We’re working hard to figure out why,» Rozelle says.
The in-home visits were expensive, trainers sometimes skipped the most isolated families, and caretakers did not always comply. The coaching also did little to relieve the isolation of kids who did not have playmates, or of their mothers. A questionnaire given to mothers who remained at home with their children—often living with in-laws far from their own families and friends—suggested that 40% of them show signs of depression and could benefit from psychiatric help.
At early childhood development centers, coaches work with caregivers to bolster such parenting skills as reading to children.
RURAL EDUCATION ACTION PROGRAM
Those findings set the stage for REAP’s most ambitious experiment yet. To deliver services more cost-effectively, ensure that coaching sessions take place, and relieve isolation for toddlers and caregivers, the team over the past year set up 50 early childhood development centers in villages in Shaanxi province. The centers cost an average of $10,000 each to furnish and equip; their annual running costs range from $60,000 to $100,000. REAP raised the money from charitable foundations and philanthropists. The Shangluo facility, opened in May, is the first of several «supercenters» that will be located in apartment complexes being built in provincial towns to encourage rural residents to move off their isolated plots.
The REAP team will chart the progress of kids who visit the centers against children in 50 villages lacking them. Typical among those children is a 26-month-old girl being raised by her paternal grandparents in the village of Wanghe. Their house sits among a cluster of ramshackle buildings at the end of a dirt track. There are no playmates her age nearby. Her father works a 2-hour drive away in Xi’an, making it home only several times a year. Her mother has deserted the family. The grandmother, the main caregiver, did not even attend primary school. No toys or books are in sight. At an age when most kids have started forming two-word phrases, the girl barely talks. Not surprisingly, she scores dismally on the development test.
Rozelle says that when he sees kids in the randomly selected control villages, «I often want to take them in my arms and move them to the treatment village.» But randomized trials are key to demonstrating the benefits of the intervention. Few countries have comparable programs providing all-around support for mothers and babies during a child’s first 1000 days. Richter says there are a lot of unanswered questions about how to scale up interventions and adapt them to different cultures, how to support mothers at risk of depression, and how early interventions dovetail with later educational programs.
REAP’s studies might provide some answers. The first assessment of the childhood education centers will be done in early 2018. «We hope to follow the kids for as long as we can find funding,» says Wang Lei, a Shaanxi Normal University economist and a REAP affiliate. And Rozelle is already trying to convince the central government to set up centers in 300,000 villages across the country. Authorities could solve China’s rural cognitive deficit problem, Rozelle says, «if they knew about it and put their minds to it.»
The caregivers taking advantage of the centers are convinced of their value. At a center in Huangchuan, a village 30 kilometers north of Shangluo, Zhang Yanli says she has learned a lot about parenting and can see how quickly her 18-month-old daughter is picking up verbal and social skills. The young mother gestures to her older daughter, who is four-and-a-half years old. «I wish there had been a center for her.»
Resumen: En muchos países, incluidos los Estados Unidos, los antecedentes económicos de los estudiantes a menudo determinan la calidad de la educación que reciben. Los estudiantes más ricos tienden a ir a las escuelas financiadas por altos impuestos a la propiedad, con instalaciones de primera categoría y personal que les ayudan a tener éxito. En los distritos donde viven los estudiantes más pobres, los estudiantes a menudo obtienen instalaciones de mala calidad, libros de texto obsoletos y menos consejeros de orientación. No en Japón. Según la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), un grupo de 35 países ricos, Japón ocupa un lugar destacado entre sus pares en proporcionar a sus estudiantes ricos y pobres con igualdad de oportunidades educativas: La OCDE estima que en Japón sólo alrededor del 9 por ciento De la variación en el rendimiento estudiantil se explica por los antecedentes socioeconómicos de los estudiantes. El promedio de la OCDE es del 14 por ciento, y en los Estados Unidos, del 17 por ciento. «En Japón, usted puede tener áreas pobres, pero usted no tiene escuelas pobres,»
In many countries, the United States included, students’ economic backgrounds often determine the quality of the education they receive. Richer students tend to go to schools funded by high property taxes, with top-notch facilities and staff that help them succeed. In districts where poorer students live, students often get shoddy facilities, out-of-date textbooks, and fewer guidance counselors.
Not in Japan. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, Japan ranks highly among its peers in providing its rich and poor students with equal educational opportunities: The OECD estimates that in Japan only about 9 percent of the variation in student performance is explained by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. The OECD average is 14 percent, and in the United States, it’s 17 percent. “In Japan, you may have poor areas, but you don’t have poor schools,”
John Mock, an anthropologist at Temple University’s Japan campus, told me.
Perhaps as a result, fewer students in Japan struggle and drop out of school—the country’s high-school graduation rate, at 96.7 percent, is much higher than the OECD average and the high-school graduation rate in the United States, which is 83 percent. Plus, poorer children in Japan are more likely to grow up to be better off in adulthood, compared to those in countries like the U.S. and Britain (though Scandinavian countries lead in this regard). “It’s one of the few [education] systems that does well for almost any student,” Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the OECD’s work on education and skills development, told me, adding, “Disadvantage is really seen as a collective responsibility.”
For instance, in the village of Iitate, which was evacuated after being contaminated by radiation after the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant disaster in March 2011, many families still have not come back. Piles of contaminated soil, covered up, still dot the landscape, and many homes are shuttered. The local primary school has just 51 students, compared to more than 200 before the accident. Yet the quality of education given to returnees is top-notch. The government built a new school for students outside the radiation zone, in a town called Kawamata, and though the classes are still very small—first grade has only two students—the school is well staffed. In a classroom I visited, all five second-graders in the school watched a teacher demonstrate flower-arranging as three other teachers surrounded them, helping them with each step. In another, a math teacher quizzed students on odd and even numbers, and as the students split into groups to discuss a problem on the board, another teacher leaned in to help. Walking around the school, it almost seemed there were as many teachers as students.
“The quality of education is better than before March 11th [2011],” Tomohiro Kawai, a parent of a sixth-grader and the president of the school’s parent-teacher association, told me, citing the low student-teacher ratio. Many of the children who returned to the area are from single-parent families, a group prone to struggling economically; some parents moved back to Iitate because they needed help from their own parents in watching their children, according to Satoko Oowada, one of the school’s teachers. But the federal government takes pains to prevent economic hardship from affecting the quality of students’ education. It gave a grant to Iitate so that all students in the school would get free lunch, school uniforms, notebooks, pencils, and gym clothes. “Equality of education is very important for children in Iitate Village,” the school’s principal, Takehiko Yoshikawa, told me. “Everywhere, students receive the same education.”
The equity in Iitate stands in stark contrast to a place like New Orleans, which was also hit by a disaster. While Japan’s national government tried to ensure that students in the affected area got more resources after the accident, officials in New Orleans disinvested in the public educational system in their city. Public-school teachers were put on leave and dismissed, many students disappearedfrom schools’ rolls, and the New Orleans system now consists almost entirely of charter schools. (To be sure, New Orleans is something of an outlier—districts in New York and New Jersey, for example, received federal money to help deal with Hurricane Sandy’s impact on education.)
There are a number of reasons why Japan excels in providing educational opportunities. One of them is how it assigns teachers to schools. Teachers in Japan are hired not by individual schools, but by prefectures, which are roughly analogous to states. Their school assignments within the prefecture change every three years or so in the beginning of their careers, and then not quite as often later on in their careers. This means that the prefectural government can make sure the strongest teachers are assigned to the students and schools that need them the most. “There’s a lot going on to redirect the better teachers, and more precious resources, towards the more disadvantaged students,” Schleicher said.
It also means that teachers can learn from different environments. Young teachers are exposed to a series of different talented peers and learn from their methods. That’s a big contrast to some place like the United States, said Akihiko Takahashi, a onetime teacher in Japan and now an associate professor of elementary math at DePaul University’s College of Education. “Here in the U.S., the good teachers go to the good schools and stay there the whole time,” he told me.
Japan’s educational equality is also a matter of how funds are distributed. Teacher salaries are paid from both the national government and from the prefectural government, and so do not vary as much based on an area’s median household earnings (or, more often, property values). The same goes for the funding of building expenses and other fees—schools get more help from the national government than they would in the U.S. According to Takahashi, the Japanese educational system aims to benefit all students. “Their system is really carefully designed to have equal opportunity nationwide,” he said. This contrasts with the U.S. education system, he said, which he judges to raise up the best students but often leave everyone else behind.
What’s more, Japan actually spends less on education than many other developed countries, investing 3.3 percent of its GDP in education, compared to the OECD average of 4.9 percent. It spends $8,748 per student at the elementary school level, compared to the $10,959 that the United States spends. But it spends the money wisely. School buildings are not much to look at. Textbooks are simple and printed in paperback, and students and teachers are responsible for keeping schools clean. Japan also has fewer administrators on campuses—there is usually just a principal and a few vice principals, and not many others in the way of staff.
Despite the country’s relatively low spending on education, Japan’s teachers are paid more than the OECD average. And the profession has high barriers to entry: Much like the bar exam for American lawyers, Japan’s teacher entrance exams, which are administered by prefectures, are very difficult. Oowada told me she took the Fukushima Prefecture teaching exam five times before she passed it. She’s now a permanent teacher, guaranteed a pension and a job in the prefecture until age 60; she said that the year she passed, 200 people took the test, and only five passed. (Her co-teacher, Yuka Iinuma, had still not passed the test, and was working as a one-year contract teacher, moving from school to school each year. Many people who think they want to become teachers eventually give up when they can’t pass the exam, Oowada and Iinuma told me.) And even after their full certification, teachers have an incentive to perform better and better, as every three years they get reviewed for a promotion.
There are of course some downsides to being a teacher in Japan. Because they feel responsible for all students in their classes, teachers often spend lots of time outside of normal hours helping students who are falling behind. Yoshikawa, the school principal, told me of a teacher from Iitate who, when there was a gasoline shortage that prevented him from driving, rode his bike 12 miles to school each day from the evacuation zone to Kawamata, which includes an impressively hilly stretch. One teacher in Tokyo I talked to, who didn’t want her name used, said it wasn’t uncommon to work from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and said some teachers stayed until 9 at night. (There are teachers’ unions in Japan, but their power has eroded somewhat in recent years.)
Still, Japanese teachers are rewarded with a great deal of autonomy on how to improve student outcomes, Takahashi said. In a process called a “lesson study,” teachers research and design a new lesson over a set time period, and then present it to other teachers, who give feedback. Teachers also join together to identify school-wide problems, and organize themselves into teams to address those problems, sometimes writing a report or publishing a book on how to solve them, he said. “It’s not about an individual star teacher, but about teamwork,” he said.
Schleicher says that teachers’ focus on pedagogy contributes to the Japanese education system’s equality. The emphasis, he says, is not as much on absorbing content as it is on teaching students how to think. “They really focus on problem-solving, which means the ability to attack problems they had never seen before,” Takahashi said. In subjects like math, Japanese teachers encourage problem-solving and critical thinking, rather than memorization. For instance, Japanese students were explicitly taught how to solve just 54 percent of the problems on the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test, but received an average score of 565, according to the Lesson Study Alliance, an education nonprofit. Students in the U.S. were explicitly taught how to solve 82 percent of the problems, yet received a lower average score, 518. Ironically, some of these Japanese teaching methods came from the United States—in particular, from an American group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which urged American teachers to change their methods throughout the 1980s. But it was Japanese teachers who listened to this advice.
Japan’s educational equality is also a matter of how funds are distributed. Teacher salaries are paid from both the national government and from the prefectural government, and so do not vary as much based on an area’s median household earnings (or, more often, property values). The same goes for the funding of building expenses and other fees—schools get more help from the national government than they would in the U.S. According to Takahashi, the Japanese educational system aims to benefit all students. “Their system is really carefully designed to have equal opportunity nationwide,” he said. This contrasts with the U.S. education system, he said, which he judges to raise up the best students but often leave everyone else behind.
What’s more, Japan actually spends less on education than many other developed countries, investing 3.3 percent of its GDP in education, compared to the OECD average of 4.9 percent. It spends $8,748 per student at the elementary school level, compared to the $10,959 that the United States spends. But it spends the money wisely. School buildings are not much to look at. Textbooks are simple and printed in paperback, and students and teachers are responsible for keeping schools clean. Japan also has fewer administrators on campuses—there is usually just a principal and a few vice principals, and not many others in the way of staff.
Despite the country’s relatively low spending on education, Japan’s teachers are paid more than the OECD average. And the profession has high barriers to entry: Much like the bar exam for American lawyers, Japan’s teacher entrance exams, which are administered by prefectures, are very difficult. Oowada told me she took the Fukushima Prefecture teaching exam five times before she passed it. She’s now a permanent teacher, guaranteed a pension and a job in the prefecture until age 60; she said that the year she passed, 200 people took the test, and only five passed. (Her co-teacher, Yuka Iinuma, had still not passed the test, and was working as a one-year contract teacher, moving from school to school each year. Many people who think they want to become teachers eventually give up when they can’t pass the exam, Oowada and Iinuma told me.) And even after their full certification, teachers have an incentive to perform better and better, as every three years they get reviewed for a promotion.
There are of course some downsides to being a teacher in Japan. Because they feel responsible for all students in their classes, teachers often spend lots of time outside of normal hours helping students who are falling behind. Yoshikawa, the school principal, told me of a teacher from Iitate who, when there was a gasoline shortage that prevented him from driving, rode his bike 12 miles to school each day from the evacuation zone to Kawamata, which includes an impressively hilly stretch. One teacher in Tokyo I talked to, who didn’t want her name used, said it wasn’t uncommon to work from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and said some teachers stayed until 9 at night. (There are teachers’ unions in Japan, but their power has eroded somewhat in recent years.)
Still, Japanese teachers are rewarded with a great deal of autonomy on how to improve student outcomes, Takahashi said. In a process called a “lesson study,” teachers research and design a new lesson over a set time period, and then present it to other teachers, who give feedback. Teachers also join together to identify school-wide problems, and organize themselves into teams to address those problems, sometimes writing a report or publishing a book on how to solve them, he said. “It’s not about an individual star teacher, but about teamwork,” he said.
Schleicher says that teachers’ focus on pedagogy contributes to the Japanese education system’s equality. The emphasis, he says, is not as much on absorbing content as it is on teaching students how to think. “They really focus on problem-solving, which means the ability to attack problems they had never seen before,” Takahashi said. In subjects like math, Japanese teachers encourage problem-solving and critical thinking, rather than memorization. For instance, Japanese students were explicitly taught how to solve just 54 percent of the problems on the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test, but received an average score of 565, according to the Lesson Study Alliance, an education nonprofit. Students in the U.S. were explicitly taught how to solve 82 percent of the problems, yet received a lower average score, 518. Ironically, some of these Japanese teaching methods came from the United States—in particular, from an American group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which urged American teachers to change their methods throughout the 1980s. But it was Japanese teachers who listened to this advice.
Japan’s schools can also be extremely stressful places for students, who are sometimes bullied if they fall behind. “As long as I performed well in school, things were okay. But once I started to deviate just a little—they [parents and teachers] went to the extreme and started treating me incredibly coldly,” one student told Anne Allison, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University who has written extensively on Japan. Japanese students are also expected to belong to after-school clubs for sports or dance, which can keep them at school until 6 p.m. “When they come home, it’s already dark and all they have left to do is eat dinner, take a bath and do their home assignment and sleep,” the Tokyo teacher told me.
Despite these flaws, Japan’s educational system still sets an example for other countries to follow. That’s partly because Japan has different goals for its schools than somewhere like the United States does. “The Japanese education system tries to minimize the gap between the good students and everyone else,” Takahashi told me. That means directing more resources and better teachers to students or schools that are struggling. It also means giving teachers the freedom to work together to improve schools. This could be difficult to transplant to the United States, where education has long been managed on a local level, and where talk of sharing resources more often leads to lawsuits than it does to change. But Japan’s success is relatively recent, according to Schleicher. About 50 years ago, Japan’s schools were middling, he said. Countries can make their schools more equitable. They just need to agree that success for all students is a top priority.
«La globalización ha terminado por dividir la sociedad entre los que tienen y los que no tienen»
Ignacio RAMONET (Redondela, Pontevedra, 1943) es doctor en Semiología y en Historia de la Cultura, catedrático de Teoría de la Comunicación Audiovisual en la Universidad parisina de Denis-Diderot y titular de la cátedra de Teoría de la Comunicación de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Discípulo de Roland Barthes, semiólogo e intelectual de referencia del siglo pasado, Ramonet se ha convertido en referente internacional a la hora de abordar temas como la globalización y el poder de la comunicación en la sociedad actual. Experto en geopolítica y estrategia internacional, dirige desde hace años Le Monde Diplomatique, publicación que ha hecho bandera de la reflexión crítica sobre los efectos del cuestionado fenómeno de la globalización. Para ello, presta gran atención a los países del Tercer Mundo, especialmente en el conflicto de la deuda externa «en muchos países el 80%, y a veces incluso el 100%, de sus presupuestos generales se destina a pagar la deuda exterior, lo que les impide dedicar dinero a construir infraestructuras imprescindibles, como escuelas, hospitales o carreteras.»
Ignacio Ramonet ha escrito libros de ensayo como La Golosina visual, Un Mundo sin rumbo, o Internet, el pavor y el éxtasis, en los que los medios de comunicación y su relación con la sociedad son protagonistas estelares. Su oficio periodístico le ha permitido conocer de primera mano la revuelta zapatista de Chiapas (México) o el Foro Social de Porto Alegre (Brasil). Ramonet atendió a CONSUMER en su despacho de París horas antes de viajar a Colombia, un destino habitual para quien ha invertido el estatu quo y ha convertido el Tercer Mundo en el Primero en términos de interés profesional y compromiso ético.
¿Qué supone la globalización para el ciudadano y quiénes son sus principales actores?
Estamos ante una dinámica que hace que cada día un mayor número de países intercambian comercialmente un mayor número de productos, servicios y actividades. Se han abierto las fronteras a productos extranjeros que se han integrado en el mercado local, lo que convierte a la globalización en un movimiento que intensifica el librecambio. Pero esto ocurre sólo en teoría, porque el motor real de la globalización es el hecho de que cada día lo que más se intensifica son los mercados financieros. Estamos más ante una globalización financiera que ante una globalización económica, en el centro se encuentran los mercados financieros, y por ende, los agentes financieros: las grandes multinacionales, la Bolsa, el Banco Mundial, el Grupo de los 7 países más poderosos, la Organización Mundial del Comercio…
¿Deja la globalización algún resquicio para el desarrollo económico y social de los países más pobres del planeta?
Teóricamente sí, pero la globalización funciona según la lógica del mercado. En términos morales esto no es ni bueno ni malo, pero el mercado funciona sólo con los interlocutores solventes mientras que los no solventes no se integran. Y al mercado esta situación le resulta indiferente. Ese es el problema. Se ha terminado por dividir la sociedad entre los que tienen y los que no tienen y, así, el mercado está pendiente de los países que se desarrollan y olvida a los que no lo hacen. Esto conduce a que, en nombre de la idea de que el gran rival del mercado es el Estado, éste cada vez tenga menos posibilidades de atender a las personas que no tienen capacidad económica. El mercado intenta que el Estado sea cada vez más diminuto, que maneje menos presupuesto y que tenga menos funcionarios. Así, cada vez se podrá ocupar menos de crear hospitales, escuelas y, en general, infraestructuras para quienes no tienen nada; en otra palabra, de los sistemas que por definición no pueden ser rentables porque se dirigen a satisfacer necesidades de quienes no están en el mercado. En los países pobres, el mercado funciona con las personas que tienen medios, que son las menos, lo que significa que cada día hay más pobres. Por eso, cabe preguntarse dónde está realmente el progreso.
¿En qué medida la deuda externa es una losa para el desarrollo de los países pobres y qué podría resolver su condonación?
El problema de la deuda externa es el siguiente. Usted, para comprar un piso, pide un crédito de 10 millones con un interés al 5%, pero a los tres meses el banco le dice que le sube el interés al 8%, y usted no puede quejarse. A los 6 meses, se lo sube al 20%, por lo que el préstamo que pidió podría haberlo pagado, pero con este ya no puede. Así se queda sin poderlo pagar durante toda su vida. Esto es lo que ha pasado con la deuda externa. Se ha hecho con tasas de crédito variables, con índices que no han dejado de aumentar por lo que más que una losa es un panteón lo que tienen encima los países pobres. Por tanto, la condonación de la deuda sería altamente beneficiosa para estos países. Ahora, están obligados a exportar para conseguir divisas con las que pagar los intereses de su deuda exterior. De esta forma, el país está volcado al comercio exterior lo que le impide ocuparse de su mercado interior. Como tiene que pagar su deuda, que es lo más urgente, el Estado, en estos países en que la deuda representa el 80% o el 100% de sus presupuestos generales, no puede consagrarse a su pueblo. En definitiva, la mitad de la humanidad vive en países endeudados, con lo que 3.000 millones de personas no saldrán de la situación de pobreza mientras no acaben de saldar su deuda exterior.
A cada generación le toca luchar por una utopía ¿Se pueden equiparar las actuales protestas de los movimientos antiglobalización con la convulsión social que supusieron el Mayo del 68, los hippies, las reivindicaciones antiracistas, la crítica a la guerra de Vietnam o la Primavera de Praga?
Son también acciones de crítica, pero sobre otras bases. Mayo del 68 fue una crítica a la sobreproducción, al exceso de trabajo y buscaba recuperar al individuo, a la sociedad, frente al poder político. Ahora, los movimientos se enfrentan al poder económico. El de antiglobalización admite las cualidades del mercado global pero recuerda que se está marginando a una gran parte de la sociedad, tanto en los países ricos que integran a los pobres con estatutos muy discriminatorios, como en los países del Sur, ya que el mercado se olvida de lo que no le interesa, léase minorías étnicas, analfabetos, campesinos, indígenas…. Y conviven estas reivindicaciones con las de carácter ecológico, porque el sistema actual se está desarrollando de tal manera que destruye el planeta sobreexplotándolo para el consumo, al tiempo que termina contaminando o envenenando a sus propios consumidores. Estas dos críticas, que son nuevas, han sido hasta hace poco puramente intelectuales y lo que está ocurriendo ahora es que las críticas se hacen sobre la base de grupos que protestan y se organizan frente a quienes tienen la responsabilidad de la política, que no son los gobiernos. Los antiglobalización no van contra los Estados sino contra las instituciones internacionales responsables de la globalización: el Banco Mundial, la Organización Mundial del Comercio…
Esas acciones y otras como el Comercio Justo, las campañas de cooperación ola actividad de las ONG de desarrollo, ¿son eficaces para activar el progreso en los países pobres?
Muchas organizaciones están llevando a cabo acciones correctoras y parten de un sentimiento de justicia indiscutible. Algunas tienen una política más egoísta que otras, pero su trabajo es real y positivo en el Tercer Mundo y también en los países desarrollados, donde subsisten todavía muchas desigualdades.
Hemos hablado de acciones colectivas, pero ¿cómo definiría al individuo medio de un país desarrollado respecto de parámetros como compromiso, libertad, consumismo o mantener opiniones propias de cada uno?
Los grupos de protesta nacen en los países desarrollados. Desde Seattle, en diciembre de 1999, no ha cesado de aumentar el número de personas que sienten en su conciencia la necesidad de que las cosas cambien. Y todo apunta a que este colectivo seguirá creciendo. Hay una toma de conciencia muy amplia en nuestra sociedad, más de lo que creemos.
Los medios de comunicación constituyen uno de los ejes preferenciales de sus tesis y estudios. ¿Cómo calificaría el poder real de los medios en nuestra sociedad?
Los medios de comunicación adquieren una importancia cada vez mayor. Primero como industria, ya que los mass media son la industria pesada de hoy. En gran parte, lo que ha facilitado la globalización es la mutación de las tecnologías de la comunicación, la informatización de la sociedad, la revolución digital que ha derivado en las autopistas de la información. De hecho, las actividades ligadas a la comunicación han sufrido una espectacular transformación. Ya no hay sectores especializados, todo lo que tiene que ver con lo escrito, con la imagen y con lo hablado se ha concentrado en grandes empresas que añaden a la imagen, el texto y el sonido, actividades más ligadas a la industria tradicional, como la telefonía, la electricidad e incluso la informática, por lo que termina integrándose todo. Esto genera la aparición de monstruos empresariales surgidos de alianzas entre el poder económico y el mediático que han incluido al poder de los medios de comunicación dentro de la escala de poderes. En el marco de la globalización, el primer poder lo ocupa el económico, en particular el financiero, pero el segundo es el mediático.
Internet es también materia habitual de sus ensayos ¿Cómo influye la Red en la conformación de la opinión pública?
Internet ocupa un lugar muy importante en el intercambio de información, de cultura y de conocimiento. Son indiscutibles las ventajas que aporta, como el hecho que las nuevas tecnologías estén al alcance de cualquiera, porque su manipulación es sencilla y porque es relativamente barato hacer uso de la Red. Además, nos permite llegar a yacimientos de información de cualquier parte del mundo, y las fuentes son inmensas. Pero esto sólo se puede aplicar a los países desarrollados. Conviene hacer dos reflexiones de ponderación. La primera es que Internet posibilita el acceso a mucha información rápidamente, pero se está dando una ralentización del equipamiento necesario para usar Internet, en particular en los países del Sur. Según la UNESCO, los usuarios de Internet no superan el 5% de los seres humanos que habitan el planeta. Esto no tiene que ver con Internet en sí, pero para aprovechar sus beneficios se requiere en primer lugar saber leer y escribir y 1.000 millones de personas todavía son analfabetas. Y para desarrollarse, Internet necesita electricidad y la tercera parte de la humanidad no la tiene; y teléfono, y la mitad de la humanidad no cuenta con línea telefónica. En definitiva, Internet sólo va a beneficiar a los países que disfrutaron de la anterior revolución, que les proporcionó las infraestructuras. La mayoría de los países no está preparados para aprovecharlo. Y hay que decirlo, porque son infraestructuras que hay que construir, y habrá que ver quién está dispuesto a poner electricidad en un país que no puede pagarse la instalación.
¿Y en lo que respecta a los países del Primer Mundo?
Están ligados a la segunda reflexión. Internet se presenta como un símbolo de la contracultura, de la liberación, y en parte lo consigue. Pero hoy comienza a entrar en una vía en la que por la necesidad de asumir las ideas dominantes ligadas a la globalización, al liberalismo y a la rentabilidad, se están distorsionando sus características iniciales. Internet proclama la cultura de la gratuidad, pero ¿cómo se paga esa gratuidad? Pues consumiendo publicidad para consultar algo que es gratuito, lo que implica el primer choque con la libertad. Aparece aquí la segunda transformación de Internet, convertido en un gran centro comercial. Internet, que es gratuito, esencialmente quiere vender toda clase de cosas: viajes, servicios, productos culturales, ropa… Y yo no sé si somos muy libres cuando lo que hacemos es entrar en un centro comercial. Una tercera consideración es percibir su transformación como medio de vigilancia, para vigilar en el sentido comercial, no forzosamente político. Cada vez que consulto un sitio web o compro algo, dejo huellas que si alguien recupera puede elaborar un retrato robot mercadotécnico de mí y mañana me va a hacer toda clase de proposiciones comerciales con una gran precisión porque sabrá muy bien quién soy yo. Entonces, esa gran pantalla que yo utilizo para ver el mundo está sirviendo para que me vean a mi. No quiero decir que esto sea lo principal, pero sí conviene que reflexionemos sobre ello.
Ante esa posibilidad de un Gran Hermano, ¿cuál es el papel que corresponde a los consumidores y las asociaciones de consumo que también se enfrentar al reto de asumir el Euro?
Un papel importantísimo, como ha quedado demostrado ante las crisis de las vacas locas o los pollos con dioxinas. El consumidor puede denunciar la sobreindustrialización de la agricultura y todas las consecuencias nefastas que ha producido. Es importante que los consumidores estén organizados, hay ejemplos de cómo consumidores unidos han reaccionado de manera sana y contundente ante ciertos abusos del mercado. Lo más significativo es la voluntad de los consumidores de intervenir como protagonistas que son de la sociedad, como actores importantes del circuito comercial. Comienzan a ser conscientes de la gran capacidad que tienen para corregir y moralizar, para crear un espíritu de ética en todo el mundo del consumo.
Movimientos sociales y sistemas políticos en América Latina
La construcción de nuevas democracias Christian Adel Mirza. [Autor]
Colección Becas de Investigación.
ISBN 987-1183-45-3
CLACSO.
Buenos Aires.
Junio de 2006
Este libro es el fruto de una investigación finalizada en setiembre de 2004 dedicada a estudiar a determinados movimientos sociales y su relación con los sistemas políticos desde una perspectiva comparada en Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela y Uruguay durante el período 1996-2003. Su autor plantea la necesidad de contar con movimientos sociales autónomos en aras de construir un edificio democrático mucho más sólido e integrador. La autonomía adquiere importancia en tanto los movimientos sociales se convierten en sujetos de las historias cotidianas y de la historia nacional y regional. Habida cuenta del cambio de las orientaciones económicas y políticas que se registraron a partir de 2004 en buena parte de los países analizados, el contexto actual de América Latina nos sigue convocando a examinar el papel de los movimientos sociales. Las democracias están consolidadas pero persisten zonas de fragilidad. La pobreza y desigualdad social siguen siendo elementos de la dura realidad. En ese contexto, ¿tendrán los movimientos sociales la capacidad y la autonomía suficientes para responder a los desafíos y dilemas de construcción de unas democracias más participativas e inclusivas? Se presentan aquí algunas de las respuestas posibles a ese interrogante, con el propósito de alimentar el debate contemporáneo acerca de la democracia, la acción social colectiva y el futuro próximo de los latinoamericanos.
Este año el INE ha organizado dos conferencias magistrales que han abordado de alguna forma el problema de la desigualdad. En abril, el profesor emérito de la UNAM, Rolando Cordera, en su disertación sobre la cuestión social, nos recordaba que la desigualdad económica y social se reproduce en el sistema económico moderno y que ni siquiera la violencia, los jóvenes al servicio de la delincuencia organizada o la pérdida de credibilidad en la política habían logrado que el Estado tomara un papel central en la recomposición de la política para el desarrollo.
Los datos respecto a la situación de nuestro país son vergonzosos, el indicador de desigualdad por excelencia, el coeficiente de Gini, según datos de la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), es el más alto entre los países integrantes de este organismo, en 2014 el coeficiente en México era de 0.459, mientras que el promedio de la OCDE era 0.318 (entre más alto sea el indicador, más desigual el país). Peor aún, la política tributaria y de subsidios a la población mejora el coeficiente de Gini un 2.8%, mientras que en promedio en la OCDE la mejoría es de 27%. Es decir, nuestra política de gasto no tiene un impacto importante en la reducción de la desigualdad.
La Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (Cepal) de la ONU, en el documento Panorama Social de América Latina 2016, nos revela un diagnóstico similar. México creció 2.6% en promedio entre 2003 y 2014, sin embargo, la riqueza lo hizo a un promedio anual de 7.9%, implicando que la riqueza se duplicó en este periodo en el país. Sin embargo, la riqueza no se reparte de forma equitativa: el porcentaje de los ingresos por el trabajo en 2002 era alrededor del 35% del PIB, mientras que en 2014 esta proporción disminuyó al 30%. No sólo la situación es desigual entre los dueños del capital y los trabajadores, el coeficiente de Gini para los activos físicos de las empresas y unidades de producción es de 0.93, esto implica que el 10% de las empresas tiene en su poder el 93% de los bienes de capital en el país.
En la segunda conferencia magistral de este año, John Keane mencionaba, como una de las tendencias que ponen en riesgo el futuro de la democracia, a la brecha que existe entre los ricos y los pobres en todas las democracias resultado del modelo capitalista. De acuerdo con Keane, la democracia se entiende como el autogobierno de la gente, donde todos son considerados iguales con los mismos derechos, entonces la desigualdad económica es un gran riesgo, ya que implica que el voto pueda perder su poder igualador. No obstante, sin elecciones libres, “entonces el acceso de los ciudadanos a los recursos fiscales, a otros poderes de gobierno, se pierden”.
Una explicación sobre el gran descontento hacia las autoridades electorales es que en el Estado de México y Coahuila no habrá cambio de gobierno y, por ende, de política. No obstante, esto no debe permear el análisis objetivo del desempeño del INE o los institutos locales en estas elecciones. Ambos han brindado de forma trasparente información sobre lo ocurrido el día de la jornada electoral y, hasta ahora, sus detractores, no han presentado pruebas de que los resultados electorales hayan sido alterados. Para aquellos que desean minar la confianza del INE ante la ciudadanía, deben recordar que la única forma pacífica para el cambio de poder, y en ese sentido, de la política social en contra de la desigualdad, siguen siendo las elecciones.
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