And the ground shook

While the house of cards that global finance built over the past decade continues to whither and fall, there are also communities around the world who recently saw their actual houses crumble to the ground. The May 12 Sichuan earthquake wasn’t meant to be a foreshadow for the global economy, but maybe it could be – and in so doing provides some light at the end of the tunnel, based on this May 21st story from NPR’s All Things Considered:

A month before the massive temblor, one woman and her family who live in the countryside a couple hours southwest of Chengdu in the region of Ya’an were hard at work building a new house.

Yao Suhui, 33, and her husband are peasant farmers. The new house is a symbol of upward mobility in the Chinese countryside….

“What bad luck,” she recalls thinking. “We’ve put everything we have into building this new house, and if it collapses, we have nothing.”

Luckily, just one wall fell down. Yao reports that they were back at work laying bricks the very next day.

Yao is hoping her children’s lives will be easier than hers. She had to leave school after sixth grade.

“I’ll encourage them to stay in school longer, to try their best to avoid our current situation,” she says. “The way things are now, you can only find a good job if you’re educated. People like us — we’re going to be left behind. So we’ll try our best to keep them in school so that they can have a better future. Then, our hard work will have paid off.”

Given an incentives structure like Yao describes rewarding hard work, creativity, education, and other aspects of human development, institutions can be strong enough to weather an earthquake and come out stronger in the end.  If Yao and her family can remain optimistic given her circumstances, maybe the global community can too.

Published Date: October 14, 2008