The Poverty Divide

In Sicily, an espresso costs about a dollar. A loaf of artisanal bread runs well under two. Clothing can be had for under ten dollars an article, and a furnished two-bedroom apartment rents for less than five hundred dollars a month in most towns. For an American fleeing Los Angeles — where costs have become obscene while the quality of life collapses — these numbers read like deliverance. Earn a foreign salary, live on Sicilian prices, and the arithmetic promises a kind of paradise. I have spent weeks testing that arithmetic against reality, and it fails. In traveling through Sicily, I rediscovered an old truth that the cost-of-living spreadsheets never capture: A place that is inexpensive is not necessarily a place with a high quality of life. Often it is precisely the opposite, and the reason is contained in a single, uncomfortable sentence. Sicily is cheap because everyone here is poor.

The numbers behind the dollar espresso are grim. Only about a third of working-age Sicilians are employed at all — an employment rate twelve points below the Italian average, itself nothing to envy — and youth unemployment approaches fifty percent, with more than a quarter of Sicilians under twenty-nine neither working nor studying. The average Italian gross salary is about three thousand euros a month; in Sicily it is substantially less, and welfare dependence runs at nearly triple the national rate. Poverty makes bread and coffee cheap, but everything beyond the rudiments becomes scarce or absurdly dear. Electronics cost dramatically more here than in the United States — the iPhone that sells for $999 in America runs the equivalent of $1,300 or more in Europe — and automobiles, loaded with twenty-two percent value-added tax, cost half again what Americans pay, which is why the roads are full of dented decade-old Fiats. A median American household earns about $83,730 a year; it would take three or four ordinary Sicilian incomes to match it. I saw the same phenomenon in Mexico years ago. I spent almost nothing — because there was nothing to buy. How many margaritas and bowls of soup can one man consume? I missed the comforts of a functioning economy, where goods and services flow freely and men are not sitting around a table at midday, out of work, smoking and eating high-caloric snacks.

There is a second cost, and as a psychiatrist I consider it the graver one. Poverty is a wall between you and the community you live in. A foreigner with an American income in a poor place faces exactly two options. He can retreat into the expatriate bubble, socializing only with other outsiders — at which point he is not living in Sicily at all, but in a pleasant simulation of it. Or he can live among the locals, who know to the euro how much better off he is, and accept the envy, the deference, and the quiet distancing that follow. Either way he is never truly seen. Human beings need to be surrounded not merely by like-minded people but by people of roughly similar social and economic standing; that parity is what makes friendship between equals — and therefore community — possible. When everyone around you is either a fellow transient or a man who cannot afford to join you for dinner without pretending he isn't hungry, a corrosive alienation sets in — the sense of being permanently a guest, permanently a wallet, never a neighbor. That is no foundation for a healthy identity, and no amount of cheap rent compensates for it.