How The Other Half Lives

"We Americans tend to think that our way of life is the normal thing - that everybody lives as we do. It's true that millions in the great cities of the world, and particularly in the more modern countries of Western Europe, live much as we Americans do. But all of them and all of us together represent less than half of the world's population, and our standards are not normal for the world as a whole. So let's look at how the "other half" lives. By the yardstick of the average Asian, African or South American and the rest of the two billion, three hundred million people of the world, our most commonplace standards are simply beyond imagination. Most of what we have and use in our daily life is available even in Europe only to the very rich. For example: The other half can't eat what they want to. The fact is - most of the people on earth eat what they themselves grow, and go hungry when they have no harvest."

Good Reading Rack Service, 1955