2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

It felt horrible reading the material this week but it was full of relevant commentary. The countries who managed to care of their citizens and invest in the population managed to indirectly invest in the market as well. Those who did not managed to get high suicide rates and malnutrition. While reading about the IMF’s plans for privatization and austerity on Thailand and Indonesia I felt disgusted. They kept pushing the citizen’s further and further into despair thinking their way was the only possible alternative to recovering from a recession. I thought it was funny how the IMF had to apologize but Suckler simply wrote “Such apologies were of little use to the millions of lives destroyed by the IMF’s ‘help’”.

The Soviet Union’s decline was felt throughout all of it’s regions and my country was no different. Azerbaijan was always an outlier kept with limited goods as my parents often told me of the bread lines people could be trampled on. There was no food in the stores and oftentimes the electricity would shut off. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave my parents some hope that times would change but unfortunately, as mentioned in the book, corrupt officials took over and a policy of austerity was being implemented. It became difficult to get any form of services for the poor as bribery was the main power source and places funded by the government charged exorbitant prices. Our country, in my family’s opinion, was a country that implemented austerity. Governments should begin recognizing a pattern in the countries who thrive after a recession quickly and those who fall into deeper patterns of debt yet it seems like they choose to remain ignorant of the past.

As many of my class mates have stated, this week’s reading is disturbing. Not just because it discussed way in which those most susceptible to urban decay and diseases like HIV are taken advantage of and treated like lesser human beings, but because the way in which those things were propagated was so deliberate.  It hurts to hear that basic services like fire departments were pulled from poor neighborhoods, leading to displacement as urban decay in those neighborhoods grew. I wonder how such policies were able to be passed, and how we can change what happens in these areas, now that we are aware of this.

The connections between urban decay and the spread of HIV is something I wouldn’t have thought much about, but now that I’ve read about it, it seems that we need to make services for people with hiV more accessible, so that people don’t have to be in one specific location to get the health services they ned. As for how to stop the displacement, as we discussed last week, that is a more complicated matter which obviously required further discussion.