mouseworks

A couple of years ago, I was looking at house prices all over Europe and in especially the UK that would be equivalent to houses in the US. It seemed that house prices in that range were close to equivalent transnationally.

I'm suspecting that house prices on the lower ends are also relatively flat, that what you got for $110 a month in NYC in 1975 is more or less the same as what you'd get for $110 in Jinotega, Nicaragua, that the prices for these things have also been affected by international travel, costs of non-locally produced plumbing parts, copper wire, and all that. I knew people in NYC who had rent controlled apartments, very tiny studios for $45 a month. A room in a house in Jinotega now goes for about that. There's been considerable inflation in house prices in the US, but I suspect that the lowest end in the more economically depressed areas in the US would be comparable to prices in Jinotega. The difference with Jinotega is that more people than not are part of the renter pool at this rate. The better off Jinotegans are not 100 times better off than the average.

Seeing someone with four times the local pay for school teacher as rich would also require me to see college tenured professors who made four times what I made as rich. I didn't. I don't think people in Jinotega who knew what I got in Social Security would think of me as rich. Rich has a certain power to it over other people's lives.

Most of the people coming to try their back to the lander schemes weren't rich, either. Rich is owning the factory.

Jinotega didnt' have the load of Gringos that Esteli had -- or necessarily the radical difference between the factory owners and the rest of the population. Esteli had the cigar factories.

My income has varied by a multiple of around three during the last decade. I've never felt that I was rich when it was high, just that I didn't have money problems then. I've never made as much as six figures, ever.

And even that's not rich, really.

The other things that make Nicaragua cheap is not having to heat and in some places, not having to run an a/c. In the places that don't require cars, there's that savings (but many Gringos buying land tend to also need cars to get to their land and a car in Nicaragua costs more to run than a car in the US from what I've read).

For better or worse, the old style hand-craft textile home textile production in Nicaragua is gone to the point of not seeing handspun and woven cloth in handicraft shops in Esteli. People still make boots and shoes by hand in both Jinotega and Esteli (I really want a pair of handmade boots).

The surplus from world cloth manufacturing ends up in the markets of Jinotega. Suzanne, the gringa who was showing us around, had a North Face jacket she'd bought for a couple of cordobas. I got a pair of light sweat pants for maybe fifty cents or a quarter.

Food is cheap enough, but growing crops for export pushes the home food production onto less useful land. I didn't see any signs of malnutrition in Jinotega (have seen it in Patrick County) but this may be because Jinotega is a market town and has the money from the various service and professional work (lawyers, doctors, government agencies, banks, etc.) to be able to afford the food. Nobody seemed particularly prosperous; nobody seemed in dire straits. The usefulness of government patronage jobs complicates the political life but that is also true of small town politics in the US.