World Hunger and Poverty

By definition, a person is poor who does not have access to basic necessities, which in capitalist societies usually means they cannot afford these basic necessities.

I believe these basic necessities include sufficient food, clothes, shelter, health care, retirement, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance. The sum of the cost of those basic necessities is the cost of living. If a person or family’s income (after deducting job-related costs such as education, uniforms and transportation) is less than the cost of living, then that person or family is poor.

Unfortunately, the poverty line in places like the United States is set too low. For instance, the poverty line in the United States for a family of four is about $22,000 per year. Many people have incomes higher than that but cannot afford the true cost of living which is the cost of all of those basic necessities. (If you think you can accurately estimate how much the true cost of living in the US is, please do so in this thread.)

On the other side of the coin, many people who receive assistance from charities or government programs may buy or own luxuries, which are goods and services beyond those basic necessities. They may not truly be poor, but qualify as poor under the government’s flawed way of measuring poverty, and take advantage of the system. Or they may be people who are poor but still choose to stupidly use their funds to buy luxuries instead of the basic necessities. In both cases, this misuse of of assistance hurts anti-poverty campaigns.

Simply put, if funding from anti-poverty charities or anti-poverty government programs is being used to fund the purchase of luxuries rather than basic necessities, it is being misused. If it is being used to let a person enjoy luxuries rather than help the person avoid or escape poverty, then it is being misused. This is a terrible fraud against the charitable people or taxpayers who provide the funding, and it is a terrible disservice to the truly poor people who are being denied the helping hand that is meant to help them get what they need.

So it is very important to understand the difference between basic necessities and luxuries. To further make the distinction, I will provide a list of luxuries:

• cable television
• jewelry
• candy, soda and other foods with no nutritional value
• cigarettes
• alcohol
• recreational drugs
• video games and video game systems
• any cellphone besides perhaps the cheapest model
• air conditioning (except where heat poses a health risk)
• high-speed internet
• automobile (when more affordable public transportation is available, or when a more stylish, more expensive automobile is purchased instead of an equally effective but less expensive alternative)
• cosmetic surgery
• fancy, expensive clothes (as opposed to basic clothes)
• music CDs and CD players (for entertainment purposes)
• DVDs (for entertainment purposes)
• decorations
• dining out

If anyone receiving help from anti-poverty charities or anti-poverty programs buys luxuries such as those, then that program is being misused, and it needs to be reformed. If they want to be effective instead of having their funds misused, anti-poverty charities and anti-poverty government programs need to make sure their clients do not have any luxuries such as those listed above because that means funding is being wasted.

You can discuss the above post in this thread at the Philosophy Forums.

My good friend sent me the following quote from an article in his local paper:

A family of four in England tips the scales at a combined 1,100 pounds. They can’t–don’t want to?–work, so they live off taxpayers, collecting the equivalent to take-home pay of $42,000, on top of the “free” universal health care for assorted ailments linked to their morbid obesity. The family, of course, is grateful for the government’s generosity with other people’s money. Not exactly. “What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table,” says the father in demanding bigger government handouts. “It’s not our fault we can’t work. We deserve more.” We wish we could say this isn’t typical of people on the dole everywhere.

The information provided leads one to condemn that family and the policies that allow them to collect the money they get without working. Of course, without more specific information I cannot comment on that specific family. For example, they could have some weird illness or injury through no fault of their own. Or, if two or three of the family members are children, I think $42,000 is too little to securely raise children and would advocate for more for the children. But they could just be lazy people who could take care of themselves but who choose to not take care of themselves and leech off the working class.

Regardless of what that specific family does, there are many people in this world who do simply leech off the working class. That includes families who could work and take care of themselves but instead choose to take advantage of charity and anti-poverty assistance. Even more, it includes rich people who leech off the working class taxpayers from government spending such as the executives and share-holders of bailed out companies and the industries who receive large subsidies, contracts and favors from governments, such as the military industry and the private-owned prison industry.

Yes, let’s condemn those people who use resources meant for the needy who do not need them. They take advantage of probably well-intentioned but poorly administered anti-poverty programs. They misdirect funds to themselves that could have helped relieve actual poverty. They are not poor but are people who could live out of poverty without the assistance they lazily choose to take. They leech off of the working class, a form of legalized stealing or sometimes outright fraud. But perhaps even worse they make the general public skeptical of anti-poverty campaigns, programs and spending.

These lazy, greedy people and what they do raises an age-old wisdom I often point out on this blog: We need to find efficient, effective ways to help people help themselves. We need to teach people to fish, not unconditionally give them fish.

There is a major poverty problem in our society that needs to be fixed and that we would all benefit from fixing. There are many honest, hard-working people who are in poverty, near poverty or at risk of falling in poverty not from laziness or their own bad decisions but because of corruption in society and other external forces that could throw you or I into poverty just as easily and unfairly.

But with the limited funds currently going to solve the problem, it seems that we can only afford to give fish to hungry people rather than teach them to fish. In yet another analogy, we are spending $10 a day to scoop water out of a sinking boat rather than investing $100 today alone to fix the hole in the boat.

Doing and spending less in the short-term to solve problems like poverty costs us more in the long-term. But it also leaves room for those lazy, greedy people to take advantage of the inefficient, ineffective and short-sighted system. And by making the general public more skeptical, people want to put even less resources towards scooping water out of the sinking boat than we do now and even more unwilling to invest the big money now to fix the hole entirely.

In other posts, I have pointed out the fundamental, inherent flaws of government spending. I also wrote in my last blog post, “Ideally speaking, I see a society in which nobody suffers from poverty, where people don’t go hungry and homeless down the street from an overstocked grocery store and a vacant house. In that ideal society, neither taxes nor government spending would be needed.”

The less poverty we have, the less anti-poverty campaigns we have for lazy people to misappropriate. The less poverty, the less anti-poverty government spending.

So we can almost all agree that we need to reduce poverty as much as possible and ideally eradicate poverty entirely. We need to invest in doing that. To do that we need to change the methods we use to be more cost effective in the long run rather than the short run. We need to make sure the resources of anti-poverty campaigns and programs help those truly in need help themselves. And we need to NOT let those other greedy, lazy people misuse, misdirect and misappropriate resources and scare the general public into reducing the funding, efficiency and effectiveness of anti-poverty campaigns.

Please discuss the above blog post in this thread at the Philosophy of Politics Forum.

Increasing prices of energy and food have worsened and will continue to worsen the problems of world hunger and poverty. Even in first world countries such as the United States, rising food prices and inflation have made poor people poorer, have put more people at greater risk of poverty, and have worsened the financial conditions of most non-poor people.

I believe the current food crisis makes it even more important that we utilize long-term solutions to prevent, alleviate and hopefully eradicate poverty.

Let me play on an old metaphor: If you give a man a fish each day, when fishing prices go up you will not be able to afford to give the charity and the man will starve. If you teach a man to fish, then afterwards he can probably fully support himself regardless of fluctuations in the price of fish. Also, in the long run, teaching a man to fish costs less than giving him a fish each day for the rest of his life.

We can protect people and society as a whole from poverty and rising food prices. I believe we need to do it by getting people in poverty or at risk of poverty into programs that will turn poor families into self-sufficient families. Namely, we need to provide people with education, skills training, and job placement services. We need to help the people start their own businesses or get jobs that pay them enough to support themselves and their families. And we need to make sure the people have access to food, shelter and healthcare while they go through the process of getting the job, including the time it takes them to get the education and skills to get the job.

Healthcare can be especially important in cases where a person has an illness or mental disorder that prevents them from doing what it takes to get a job that pays them enough to support themselves and their families.

If you know of any good programs helping families become self-sufficient as I have described above, please post about them in my World Hunger and Poverty Forums. You can also use the forums to post other comments in response to this blog post.

Throughout my unprofessional studies of history and geopolitics, I have come to the conclusion that young people tend to start, push and lead the most effective and positive social movements. For example, consider the hippies, yippies, and such in the United States, namely in the 60s and 70s.

I believe young people tend to have the most compassion and the most principled and honest sense of justice. I believe young people become the most honestly upset by the world’s constant terrors and injustices, such as war, poverty, oppression, political inequality, violence and so forth. In this harsh, corrupt world, perhaps as people get older they tend to become corrupted and institutionalized. Perhaps age breeds complacency and tolerance of the horrible.

Not only do I propose we try to get the youth involved in poverty alleviation and other progressive social movements, but also I propose we try to turn these movements into youth movements.

Like many activists in the United States, I have often asked myself how we can bring back the social awareness and progressive momentum of the counterculture of the 1960s, a time marked by its heavy involvement of young people and their relative free-spiritedness, originality, sense of individuality and lack of corruption.

If you have any good ideas for getting the youth involved or if you know of any organizations already helping the youth get involved, please post about them in my World Hunger and Poverty Forums.

The people of the world would benefit in many ways by reducing or eliminating global poverty and by increasing education levels.

I believe less poverty and more education would reduce violent crime and other forms of criminal victimization. Poor and uneducated people tend to turn to crime and anti-social behavior more often. The same happens to other people raised in poor and uneducated neighborhoods.

I believe less poverty and more education would reduce terrorism. Actual terrorists generally come from more affluent backgrounds because poor people have too many personal problems to get so actively involved in politics. However, anger and hatred over the perceived injustice of the existence of poverty and socioeconomic inequality helps create and empower terrorists. Additionally, lack of political rights does correlate with terrorism, and a less poor and better educated public often achieves more political rights and equality without as much violence. In other words, though terrorists may not be poor, I believe terrorism thrives in a world with poverty and lack of education. (Terrorism is never justified, in my opinion. Nonetheless, we need to counter the contributing factors if we wish to stop and prevent it.)

I believe less poverty and more education would lead to more wealth and happiness for all. Investing in saving children and communities from poverty helps create a more productive and wealthy society. Educated and working people living in a fair and free society not only benefit themselves but they benefit others. Well-educated and hard-working people will produce wealth in this cooperative system that we call a society. For example, how much better off would the rest of us be if poor, uneducated and homeless single mothers had received excellent education and now had a good job providing valuable services to others for great pay that kept them and their families out of poverty? How much wealthier would the entire world be if those starving Ethiopian children instead went to great schools and performed useful jobs keeping themselves out of poverty?

Breaking the poverty cycle will help us all! Do not look at poverty alleviation as charity. I doubt we will end poverty if we look at it as charity. Charity cannot end global poverty. We need to recognize that helping poor people help themselves not only helps them but it helps us too. To that end, we can find mutually beneficial social interactions and movements that alleviate poverty. Namely, I recommend investing heavily in small businesses and in education including both investing in organizations creating and running schools as well as investing in students with extensive student loans. We need to find ways to get better schools and better paying jobs into poor areas or ways to get poor children and unemployed people out of poor areas and into areas with great schools and great jobs for the educated.

Oxford University economist Professor Paul Collier’s book about poverty has won the prestigious Lionel Gelber Prize for 2008. The book’s title explains its subject rather well: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

According to the description, the book investigates and attempts to explain why traditional approaches to alleviating poverty have failed in the poorest countries of the world. Namely, the book explains how corrupt governments have made these countries dependent on the extraction and export of natural resources.

I want to read the book. I just requested 3 other books from the library a few days ago, so it will take a little while before I get to this one. But I will read it soon.

UN officials named the biggest challenges to meeting poverty reduction goals as the rising prices of food and energy as well as global warming.

The demand for oil will continue to increase as countries all over the world continue to industrialize and develop. Of course, we continue to use up more and more of our limited supply of oil. As supply goes down and demand goes up, the costs of anything involving the use of energy increases, namely food and imports.

Poor regions suffer as poorer people can no longer afford as much goods and services as prices rise. Also, charity becomes hindered since charitable funds buy less and less.

Even in the United States and the developed world, rising prices will obviously throw even more people into poverty and worsen the conditions of people already in poverty.

Of course, even with rising prices, the world will continue to have enough resources to provide food, clean water, shelter, healthcare and education to everyone. But we need to change our society structure so that people have more access to the world’s abundant natural resources.

Additionally, we can not leave people dependent on charity or welfare. We need to make as many people self-sufficient as possible, as many families self-sufficient as possible, and all local communities self-sufficient.

As Lao Tzu famously pointed out, it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish. Unfortunately, charitable organizations can barely afford to buy the proverbial fish for the hungry, let alone afford to teach them to fish.

Before matters get even worse, we need to invest a lot more in helping people help themselves. It will cost a lot more upfront, but it will cost us less in the long run, and it will save much more people overall. Namely, we need to invest heavily in education to give people the skills to support themselves and their families. Also, we need to focus on finding ways to empower local economies to make them independent of the need for charity. In fact, large amounts of charitable funds or food have often undermined local economies by putting local businesses out of business and leaving the economy and its people worse off.

What do you think? How do you suggest anti-poverty organizations help people and economies become more self-sufficient? Post your answers in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.

I often stress the importance of education and raising children in the fight against poverty. Education empowers people, and people empowered with education will have the skills to take care of themselves, to take care of their families, and to help uplift society as a whole.

We do need to find large-scale ways to provide education to the masses. But more importantly we have to start prioritizing these issues in our personal lives.

We can only end poverty and build a more socially responsible world if most people choose to do it. We can do it once we choose to do it.

When as individuals we make it a priority in our personal lives, then we can hopefully spark a cultural shift, in which other people follow our lead and join us.

But we have to do it ourselves first.

Instead of buying iPods and other expensive toys, we need to fund our own education or the education of our children. Instead of wasting time watching TV, we need to help teach children or even self-educate ourselves. Even those of us who do not have our own children can donate money to scholarship funds or private schools, or donate time into mentoring or other volunteering. Instead of playing video games or partying, we can volunteer. The money spent on perfume alone could provide food and housing for everyone in the world who lacks it.

We cannot end poverty simply by voting for a single politician or feeling slightly bad when we see a picture of a starving child. We have to prioritize our lives. Maybe strong commercialism has done it; maybe a general feeling of hopelessness has done it; maybe something else did it; but, for whatever reason, almost all of us have routinely spent our money and time on short-sighted and impulsive indulgences instead of investing it in building a better world for all. Our stupid priorities have allowed our world to go to hell.

We have to make wiser priorities as individuals to have wiser priorities as a society. We need to prioritize education, personal development, and raising all children well. We need to forget about impulsive wastes of time and money such as fancy cars, over-priced clothes, drugs, television, and so on and so forth.

We all seem to make stupid, wasteful decisions–myself included. We have to starting trying a lot harder to make wiser and more responsible decisions.

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes which seems relevant:

“The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty. Nine hundred and ninety nine women out of a thousand are more interested in the cut of a dress than in the independence of their sex; nine hundred and ninety nine men out of a thousand are more interested in drinking a glass of beer than in questioning the tax that is laid on it; how many children are not willing to trade the liberty to play for the promise of a new cap or a new dress? That it is which begets the complicated mechanism of society; that it is which, by multiplying the concerns of government, multiplies the strength of government and the corresponding weakness of the people; this it is which begets indifference to public concern, thus making the corruption of government easy.”
~ Voltairine de Cleyre

I think those of us who work for poverty alleviation would benefit from trying harder to define poverty.

Common misconceptions about poverty hinder the social movement to eradicate poverty. I think we can often trace the misconceptions to a misunderstanding of what the word poverty means in the socioeconomic context.

I think finding a accurate and complete definition of poverty requires a group of people. So I hope you help us try to define poverty in the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.

Let me try to offer my own definition of poverty. I define poverty as a lack of access to a basic standard of living which includes basic “needs” such as food, clothes, shelter and healthcare.

Additionally, I want to point out that a person needs to make enough money to pay not only their current living expenses, but also past and future expenses. On average, people probably can only work about half their life–generally from their mid-20s to retirement. So we cannot measure a person’s yearly salary against the cost-of-living for a year to measure poverty. In a year, a person needs to earn about double a year’s worth of living expenses.

Also, we need to make subtractions from a person’s salary to come up with a “net salary” which we can use to judge their true economic standing. We need to subtract unemployment insurance, education costs, transportation, and any other job-related expenses. In other words, a person must accept certain costs in order to do a job and earn an income, so we must subtract the costs from the income to find the person’s net salary. And we must use the net salary to find out if the person can truly afford the cost-of-living.

The United States government admits that nearly 40 million of its citizens live in poverty. But I think we would find an even higher number if we used a more accurate measure of poverty based on a more accurate definition of poverty.

How can we fix a problem without understanding it correctly?

At the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates said that we need to revise capitalism so that it also serves poor people, which he calls creative capitalism.

I usually avoid suggesting “capitalism” as a way to alleviate poverty, because so many people have such different interpretations of what the word means, and because “capitalism” usually seems to include a monopolization of natural resources which contributes to poverty and limits freedom. Nonetheless, I generally agree with Bill Gates’ sentiment.

At one point, Bill Gates said, “If we’re going to find a sustainable way to help those who can’t pay, we have to use self-interest and caring – capitalism and philanthropy – to direct attention to people who have been left behind.”

I agree.

Practically speaking, we cannot realistically expect people to do anything that harms themselves, even if for the so-called greater good. We have to find ways to alleviate poverty through mutually beneficial arrangements. We need not only try to help certain people or just the poorest among us. Instead, we need to find ways to build a better world for as many people as possible. People will agree to mutually beneficial arrangements, but they will oppose proposals that would cause them harm.

For example, consider micro-credit. It has helped millions of women escape poverty with loans of only $50 or so, and the bankers and lenders have profited from it. It works because it benefits everyone involved.

Simply put, we need to find win-win solutions for the problem of poverty. Bill gates can call it creative capitalism; you can call it whatever you want, but we need to do it no matter what we call it.

What do you think of what Bill Gates calls creative capitalism? Post your answers to that question and your comments on this post in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. The forums are completely free to use, and all viewpoints are welcome.