While the media were busy speculating on who is going to be in the new Cabinet, there was a story in the news about a middle-aged man in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt after a long period of unemployment, who strangled his 13-year-old son before hanging himself. The next day, there was a story about an unemployed middle-aged man in Nanao Township (南澳), Ilan County, who immolated himself and and his eight-year-old daughter.
These two men killed themselves because of their economic and domestic difficulties. They could not wait for the incoming government to realize its promise to boost the economy. One man lived in a city, the other in the countryside, but nationwide there are thousands of people and families facing similar difficulties. These cases only serve to highlight the urgency and seriousness of the issue.
The existence of these “disadvantaged groups” is a reflection of an unreasonable social structure and of the uneven distribution of economic growth and of the social empowerment that comes with such economic growth. This causes two extremes in economic and social status, and the disadvantaged groups consist of the people at the lowest of the two extremes.
When looking at the changes in gross national product (GNP) over the past decades, we see that from the late 1960s until today, total wealth in Taiwan has grown almost continuously. Taiwan’s Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality — shows that in the 1960s and the 1970s, the wealth created was partly distributed to all layers of society, so that at the time income distribution was clearly moving toward equality, and the Gini coefficient kept falling.
This trend, however, was not sustained in the 1980s, when the Gini coefficient started to rise, an effect enlarged by the stock market bubble in the 1980s and speculation on the housing market.
In the 1990s, after the government promoted neoliberal policies of deregulation, marketization and privatization, the problem with unequal income distribution in society worsened. The sudden increase in the gap between rich and poor in the 21st century has become the nation’s most pressing social problem, and consequently, disadvantaged groups are increasing in size.
In addition, commodity prices have continuously gone up over the past decade, further adding to the economic difficulties of disadvantaged families.
How big is the group of disadvantaged people in Taiwan? It includes a large number of subgroups. Based on the strictest definition of poverty, there are about 90,000 low-income households, or about 200,000 people. Taiwan also has at least 1.38 million poor or near-poor people, using the newest definition of poverty by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Single parent households with a low social or economic status include 600,000 poor families, 220,000 families with a low level of education and 210,000 families that have to get by on low status jobs. Single person households include about 90,000 poor households, about 340,000 unemployed and 420,000 with a low level of education. All these households are disadvantaged groups, as are unemployed people and the working poor; there are about 400,000 people in each group. In addition, there are disabled people, poor single elderly people, homeless people, people deep in credit card debt, drug addicts and victims of occupational diseases and injuries. In short, there are many disadvantaged groups.
The weak social and economic position of people with a physical disability often creates further health problems. Generally speaking, disabled people are disadvantaged by many health-related factors, such as psychological and physical health, high disease and mortality rates, hearing and vision impairment, chronic pain and problems of functioning properly in their daily life. The health problems among disadvantaged groups are closely related to social and economic disadvantages, causing a vicious cycle that it is very difficulty to break.
The social, economic and health disadvantages of these groups are mostly a systemic social problem, not an individual or family problem. While the number of disadvantaged people has continued to rise, the country’s total wealth also kept growing, and the number of very rich and powerful people increased with surprising speed. In such a social system, wealth comes from poverty, and poverty is caused by wealth. The new government wants to boost the economy, but it also has to face this urgent, serious issue.
The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of themselves and their family. The cases of the two fathers who killed themselves and their children — and the analysis of the disadvantaged group problem — show the harsh reality that the fundamental human rights of this group are not sufficiently protected.
If Taiwan is a fair, just and caring society, then why didn’t anyone help the men in Taipei and Nanao? How did Taiwan do justice to them and the disadvantaged group they belong to?
Chen Meei-shia is a professor of public health at National Cheng Kung University, and the director of the Taiwan Association for the Promotion of Public Health.
TRANSLATED BY ANNA STIGGELBOUT
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