Please don’t misinterpret the title; the audience that I intend to talk to comprise not just one or two groups of people.

If you are a student, this piece is for you. If you are borrowing money from a cooperative or moneylender to get through the day, this is for you, too. If you own half the world’s wealth, I am talking to you. If you are the decision- maker of the country’s development policy, this is about you. If I have forgotten to mention you, this is still addressed to you, too.

Concerns about poverty often rise when there is a sudden exposure to it by a powerful work of art that cinematically depicts what it’s like to live below the poverty line. Consider Parasite, this year’s winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The movie became the first foreign movie to take the trophy home. Some talk about how it casts the class war narrative in a whole new light or about underrepresented nations at the Oscars.

But the movie also encourages us to take a look into one specific household and how they relate to the worldwide tragedy of the poor. While many commentaries center on the narrative of the Kims and the Parks, this piece will review the life and decisions of the one kicked out of the household: Moon-gwang.

Moon-gwang, a housekeeper of the Park family before the Kim family took over the household’s various occupations, hid her husband Geun-sae in a secret room under the house because he was caught in a classical capitalist situation; debt that multiplied by a thousand times due to excessively high interest rates charged by a moneylender.

It remains puzzling as to how Moon-gwang approached the problem. She could have told the Parks about her husband’s problem and asked for their help. Clearly, she was a loyal employee that even the Parks seemed uneasy to let go. Or did she think it was almost impossible for the Parks to help her escape the debt problem? Or maybe Moon-gwang wanted to maintain her image as a respectable housekeeper with no bad record of any kind and preferred not to trouble anybody with her husband’s unpaid debt.

Regardless, her decision tells us about two things; pride and the view of wealth. Being less prosperous does not mean you have to seek pity or to pass yourself off as an imposter. There are other ways to address the problem.

Moon-gwang’s view of money and wealth is clearly different from the Kims, whose poverty goes alongside greed. There are no signs in the movie that Moon-gwang attempted to exploit the Parks’ wealth. She and her husband just wanted to live life free of burden, but not necessarily live a fully upgraded life.

It does not, however, make what Moon-gwang did acceptable. But if we were to think of ways to help people like Moon-gwang and her husband, where would we start? Where should we start? The two questions will have two different answers.

We could start by influencing policy through empirical research about the lives of the poor, praising interest-free loans that substitute for the role of loan sharks to the poor, or the recent boom in peer-to-peer lending that benefits millions of the unbankable population.

But despite doing that for decades we have only made baby steps so far. Research tries to influence poverty alleviation, but insofar as it only manages to speak to two groups of audiences at best; their own kind and policymakers. Society can barely feel suffering just by reading studies.

Financial technology and microfinance do help provide alternative access to finance, but they do not create a big effect on poverty and the sudden understanding of class discrimination that Parasite brings. Similarly, the empathy evoked by Parasite beats years of empirical work by researchers, who attempt to show the everyday lives of the poor, and draw causal interpretations from them.

The latest innovations in research, policy and strategies to alleviate poverty think of society as an outsider to the problem, that they do not need to be involved in poverty alleviation efforts. Whilst in fact, society has a crucial role to play. Not just to understand that we are not living in a completely classless society, but to actually try to find a workable solution. And that can start with something so little, like understanding the limits of wealth and the importance of sharing our excess wealth with those who need it.

One good example is the European Union Research Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialization Platform in Least Developed Countries, where a place-based policy approach is applied and interventions selected are chosen by the people living in that place. The Indonesian government can learn from this practice to help speed up alleviation of poverty.

The other half that we have yet to figure out is how policy can make people care about others to the point that they actually use their power to battle poverty, even if they are not the ones affected by it. From now on, every action and every effort in the fight against poverty should involve society in the equation.

When our efforts trigger an understanding of poverty among society, collective empathy is the greatest force to eradicate poverty.

________

Doctoral student, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

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