Also via Kathy Shaidle, Isabel Vincent writes about a slave traffic that began with Potemkin Marriages.
Many of the women I profiled had been “married”
in their down-at-heel shtetls to elegantly dressed strangers who
promised them a better life in the New World. But once they arrived at
their destinations, they were shuttered in brothels and cut off rom their families and their coreligionists.
At the cemetery in Inhauma, you can still make out some of their
faces in the sepia-toned plaques affixed to their graves. For decades,
they have been condemned to silence, their stories still a source of
deep shame for many of their descendents.
The story unreels to a Brazilian cemetery and backwards, painstakingly, from there.
Will Wilkinson gets to the point. Growth, both its hope and its results, is a happiness-maker.
The data is plain. Wealthier in general is happier. (The relationship
is weak, sure. But a weak positive relationship isn’t no relationship,
and definitely isn’t a negative one.)
Orphans, women, the desperately courageous naive, people, are better off with prosperity. The losses to "alienation," and cultural "disenchantment," are worth discussing. But the unhappiness of scarcity is far more than cornbread-not-steak on the dinner table, and the public library rather than the bookstore.
