A poor country that feels rich

Back in Florida I lived in a small county seat city where my monthly water bill could bring a grown man to the brink of despair. One hundred and fifty dollars for the privilege of washing dishes and clothing, taking a shower, and flushing a toilet. I often wondered if the water was being hand carried from the Rocky Mountains by trained alpacas.

When I came to Cuenca and my first water bill arrived at nine dollars, I thought the clerk had forgotten to add a zero. I even went to ETAPA to ask. The young woman behind the counter gave me a polite smile that said, without a single word, that foreigners often need reassurance. The bill was correct. Nine dollars. Not per day. Per month.

People often tell me that the United States is the richest country in the world. Perhaps it is by some measures. But after living there for years, my own experience was that the United States is rich the way a luxury dessert in a restaurant is rich. Beautiful to look at, but unless you have very deep pockets, many of the riches remain out of reach, because you must buy your expensive water every month before you think of eating blueberry cheesecake with a silver fork.

On paper the salaries do look very impressive. Those people you find in every community on earth like teachers, nurses, cops, and bus drivers probably earn more than their peers anywhere on earth, but that is where it stops, because in reality the paypacket melts very quickly. Health insurance premiums, the infamous deductibles and co-pays, property taxes. And then car insurance. Homeowner’s association bills (an oddity in a country where people hate being told what to do with their private property). Then cell phone bills that cost at least three times what I pay in Ecuador and Internet bills like a mini-mortgage. And just when you think you are still flush with cash, in come the water bills that appear to have been calculated by someone determined to make the general public think twice before they flush away the liquid gold.

A middle class American salary has a fleeting quality. It slides through the fingers like dry sand. You begin the month feeling prosperous and end it studying your bank statement with the intensity of a Cold War codebreaker.

This is why I often say that for ordinary people the United States feels like a middle-income country. Of course it is a comfortable country in many ways, with big highways, lots of bridges, and efficient supermarkets with well-polished fruit and shapely vegetables, but not a place where the average worker can relax financially. There is no margin or point where you sit back and feel you are ahead. You have to keep pedaling, because the moment you stop, the bicycle topples over.

Perhaps I see this clearly because I grew up in England during the 1970s. That decade is remembered as a time of national gloom and hardship, and yet in retrospect my own situation was surprisingly decent. I had my own studio apartment by the age of twenty five and I drove around in a respectable older car, if you can call a Ford respectable. I drank plenty of beer without shame. I took ten day holidays to Greece or Spain each summer. All of this on a training allowance in a large public service organization, less than even an entry level salary.

Four years later I moved to Bermuda at a moment of remarkable prosperity. I earned twelve and a half thousand dollars a year, tax free, and after a couple of years of Ronald Reagan, the dollar was almost equal to the once mighty pound sterling. I bought myself a shiny new Japanese car and paid off the bank loan in just six months. After that I could never return to a salary of half that amount, because once you experience dry land you do not volunteer to return to the swamp.

The interesting part is this. Britain in 1976 talked endlessly about austerity and oil shock, yet I was living a life that many young workers today in the United States or Ecuador would consider out of reach. Modern young Americans often share small apartments, postpone dental work, and pray their cars start each morning. Many Ecuadorians do the same, but their expenses are stable and predictable. Life here does not spring too many financial traps from behind the bushes.

Ecuador is not considered a wealthy country and Cuenca is definitely not Dubai or Singapore, yet here the basic costs of living make sense. Utilities are reasonable and public transport is affordable. Health care is within reach and I can go to the dentist without consulting a financial advisor. And here is a small observation: My cleaning lady has dental braces. In a country where salaries are modest, many workers can still afford orthodontic treatment. In the United States I knew many people with far higher incomes who could not even afford a routine cleaning without planning for it months in advance and where free dental check-ups paid for by insurance were really disguised sales visits. Here in Ecuador people make monthly payments of about $25 for dental braces.

Perhaps real wealth is not the size of a nation’s economy, but how many ordinary people can meet their basic needs without fear. If that is true, then Ecuador may not be wealthy in the conventional sense, but it provides a steady kind of security to a large percentage of its population that even the richest countries cannot offer their essential personnel. At least that seems to be the case in Cuenca, where at least one third of the population wears corrective glasses.

Back in Florida more than five years ago water cost me one hundred and fifty dollars a month and yet there was plenty of rain in Florida last time I looked out of the window. Here it costs nine dollars a month, even though I have the luxury of a washing machine that both washes and spins. The distance between those numbers tells a story about real living standards that official statistics never quite capture.