Americans should learn some lessons from the "under-developed" world about living poor [View All]

Social structures as they exist in the US compared with my native India and enormously different. When my family arrived in the US, one of the things I learned was regarding family structures.

In India the extended family is the dominant system. For much of my childhood I lived in an extended family. My grandparents had an ancestral home in New Delhi, and along with them, three additional families lived in that house.

In contrast, families in the US typically disperse when the children are of age. It is expected that after school children move out and start their own family in their own home.

I am not educated enough to know why the Indian structure evolved in this way, but I can guess that it had to do with the relative wealth of the nation. Perhaps it was not economically feasible for each person in India to have their own home. While in America, the abundance of national wealth meant that everyone could afford to have their own home.

The good news is that the extended family structure is not a bad thing. It is essentially communal living with your kin. Yes, family tensions are always there, but the benefits are something we should acknowledge as we consider how we will survive in the world that will be fully realized in two to three years.

I arrived in the US when I was 10. Until then I was raised primarily by my grandmother and several aunts and uncles. Until I arrived here I had never heard of the word babysitter. I never knew about a thing called a nursing home. Everything that the family needed was provided by the community. I was never left in a strangers care. My grandmother passed away in her own bed at home. These are examples of what I consider to be social benefits of how things are done in the "old world".

We would be well advised to adopt some of these principles. We are a society that consumes more than any other. That party is over. We have to find ways to be efficient and our living arrangement are a primary driver of efficiency.