Why The Poor Stay Poor
This is not an easy article for me to write. I now see this as an important counter to the other extreme I covered – life of a 1%er. It brings back unpleasant memories from my time in Asia, during my corporate stint there. Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time but the unpleasantness was for a different reason. Asia is home to over 70% of the world’s poor people. As is common practice there among all middle and upper middle class working households, the TFR household hired a part-time maid during our stay there. It was initially awkward to have a stranger spend couple of hours each day doing our chores but we slowly got used to it.
Raman Venkatesh is the founder of Ten Factorial Rocks. Raman is a ‘Gen X’ corporate executive in his mid 40’s. In addition to having a Ph.D. in engineering, he has worked in almost all continents of the world. Ten Factorial Rocks (TFR) was created to chronicle his journey towards retirement while sharing his views on the absurdities and pitfalls along the way. The name was taken from the mathematical function 10! (ten factorial) which is equal to 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800.