[ben_w]

Small amount of money != small amount of work.

One of the reasons food is cheap in the west is the automation, but the machines used for that automation are big and expensive, and only make sense if you’re feeding a lot of people rather than your immediate family. That leaves you with inefficient farming, hard work even though the $€£ cost is low.

A cheap home and a part-time job to buy necessities, letting you take advantage of economies of scale and specialisation? That can work, but it’s rare to find a cheap home with access to the labour market — where the jobs exist, you compete against those willing to work longer hours as a customer in housing market, and where you rely on remote work you risk being outsourced to someone willing to do ten times the hours for a tenth the hourly rate in the labour market.