World Hunger and Poverty

In Louisville, Kentucky, many single mothers live in poverty. Marcus Green recently wrote about it and the need to spread affordable housing. I include an excerpt:

Experts say the importance of blending low-income residents into middle-income neighborhoods is that it offers better work and education opportunities for impoverished parents and children.

“In these high-poverty areas, there aren’t a lot of jobs, a lot of viable institutions” such as parks, said Karen Christopher, a University of Louisville sociologist. “When you’re raising a family, that’s what you need.”

Expanding affordable housing into middle-income and affluent neighborhoods won’t directly pull single-mother families out of poverty, but it could influence their aspirations and behavior, Christopher said.

The housing coalition’s analysis of U.S. Census data paints a stark portrait of households headed by women, showing that 37 percent of those led by single mothers are impoverished.

Read entire article by Marcus Green.

Unfortunately, in a world where most two-parent households struggle, a single-parent home faces overwhelming obstacles.

I agree that spreading affordable housing can help allow single-mother families to escape poverty, but we must accompany it with other forms of social change.

We can best reduce single-mother poverty through prevention. We have to teach even young children about the difficulty in raising children alone. Then, teach them how to avoid it. Too many women have children without the resources to take care of them, namely a non-deadbeat father. Too many males run away from their responsibilities, thus leaving a woman to take care of children by herself. Beyond all of that, society needs to stop breaking up families. For example, needless drug laws and needless wars lead to fathers getting thrown in jail or sent to war–often never to come back.

Of course, we cannot change the past. So, we have to take care of the poor single mothers already raising families alone. In addition to affordable housing, we need to ensure that they and their children get food, clothes, shelter, healthcare, education, and employment.

Today I want to highlight the relevancy of literacy to poverty. Obviously, illiteracy leads to poverty, because illiterate people cannot get good jobs. In fact, 43% of people with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty.

Unfortunately, illiteracy still plagues society. For example, more than 20% of adults in the United States read at or below a fifth grade level, meaning that they read far below the level needed to earn a living wage. The National Adult Literacy Survey found that over 40 million Americans age 16 and older have significant literacy needs.

Almost nobody would choose to remain illiterate and poor. We need to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to get an education, and thus get a job that pays them enough to survive comfortably. We can do this fairly through student loans.

Individually, we can each help promote literacy in our own community. For example, we can volunteer at libraries, or host youth book clubs.

Florence Graves and Hadar Sayfan recently wrote about “housing first,” a new approach to end homelessness. I include an excerpt:

In the past, society’s approach to homeless people with chronic health problems such as addiction has been governed by tough love: Stay in treatment, or you don’t get the opportunity for publicly supported housing. People who could not confront their addiction, the thinking went, could not handle an apartment.

But a new approach, called “housing first,” is gathering momentum. The idea is to target the most difficult cases — the chronically homeless who make up between 10 and 20 percent of the homeless population and spend years cycling between the streets, shelters, jail cells, and emergency rooms — and give them apartments without requiring them to get sober, in the hope that having a place to live will help them address their other problems. More than 150 cities or counties around the country already have programs of some kind or plans to initiate one, and last month the Massachusetts Senate Ways and Means Committee recommended doubling the size of a small pilot program in the state. If the pilot succeeds, proponents say it could force dramatic changes in homeless policy — and a recognition that the current shelter system, built on what they call a punitive moralism, has fundamentally failed.

Read entire article by Graves and Sayfan.

The traditional ways of fight homelessness and poverty have failed, so we do need to find new ways. However, I fear giving people unconditional housing assistance. If we give people housing regardless of whether or not they try to fix their own problems, then these people have no reason to fix their own problems.

We cannot realistically expect a person to fight off addiction and fix their problems if they live on the streets. So, it does make sense to get them housing assistance first, but we need to end the assistance if these people do not do what they can to fix their own problems. If they stop attending treatment facilities, then we need to stop giving them housing assistance. Let’s focus our resources on the people who want to help themselves.

When a man worth $30 million claims to oppose poverty, I find myself trying to balance the comedy with frustration. I want to laugh and scream at the same time.

John Edwards portrays himself as a champion of the poor, but the man spends his money on $400 haircuts. He lives in a 28,000 square-foot mansion. He has every right to overindulge as such, but that makes him selfish and materialistic, not anti-poverty.

A man who truly opposes poverty wouldn’t waste $400 on a haircut. Imagine how many children we could feed with $400!

Edward’s news-hogging organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005. While a significant amount of money to most of us, it seems trite considering that John Edwards owns $30 million, and more importantly considering that the main beneficiary of Edward’s “charity” was Edwards himself.

Like all politicians, we cannot trust John Edwards. These politicians merely use causes to gain votes. John Edwards does not care about fighting poverty any more than George Bush cares about keeping the U.S. safe. The former just uses the “war on poverty” to gain votes and to cover his true motives, and the latter uses the “war on terrorism” for the same.

These rich politicians live in powerful luxury. They don’t struggle and suffer like the rest of us. They have no interest in actually changing the system, because they like the current system; they like the status quo. They like it, because they benefit from it, at the expense of the rest of us.

Please tell me what you think about this at the Hunger & Poverty Forums, in the following topic: John Edwards’ Hypocrisy

Often when posting on this blog, I refer to the general needs of humans. I usually mention food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare. While those four general categories tend to cover the vast majority of what any given human needs, they do not cover everything. I often fail to mention the need to secure one’s retirement.

For example, if a working man earns enough income to pay for just his current food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare, we cannot truthfully call that man self-sufficiently non-poor, because that man will one day lose his ability to work. He needs to earn enough now to pay for his living expenses later, when he retires.

To accurately measure the cost of living, we must include the cost of maintaining a proper retirement fund.

These retirement costs could come in many forms, just as housing costs can come in many forms (e.g. rent vs. mortgage payments). For example, a person may own a retirement account in a bank or a 401K. In another example, a person may buy some type of retirement insurance, where the person pays a fee to a company during the person’s working life, and the company pays the person for the remainder of their life after retirement. In yet another example, some cultures make it so the younger generation of a family takes care of the older generation of that family; the costs remain essentially the same.

When calculating a general cost of living, we can of course find the basic price for the general costs of securing one’s retirement. In other words, we don’t need to worry so much about each specific way to secure one’s retirement. In analogy, we use a general cost of food to calculate the cost of living, we don’t worry about the specific store from which any given person may buy their food.

Kate Bolduan recently wrote an article about kindergartners helping fight world hunger. I include an excerpt:

Students at Raleigh’s Brier Creek Elementary scooped, weighed and bagged thousands of meals.

It was part of Operation Share House, an international effort to stop world hunger.

Once the meals are assembled and the boxes are packed, the meals will be shipped overseas. In about a month, the meals will feed 4,000 children in Nigeria.

Read entire article by Kate Bolduan.

While it remains a shame that world hunger persists, I think we can all agree on the beauty of these children helping to put an end to it.

I believe those types of programs help children learn more than their regular school activities, because the children actually get to see what it feels like to help make their own world a better place. These children actually make a difference. They will feed 4,000 other children!

I hope these young children feel very proud, because they deserve to feel proud.

The Hunger & Poverty Forums have moved to the following address:

millionsofmouths.com/forums/

Remember, you can join the forums for free, and discuss world hunger, poverty, homelessness, and other serious social issues. Please go to Hunger & Poverty Forums and discuss ways to fight world hunger and poverty.

Newsblaze.com recently published an article that says child hunger costs Central America billions of dollars annually. I include an excerpt:

Child undernutrition cost the economies of Central America and the Dominican Republic almost $7 billion – or 6.4 per cent of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) – in 2004, according to a new joint study by two United Nations agencies today.

“This study is a wake up call to the international community that widespread child hunger is not only a moral and humanitarian issue, but it has economic consequences as well,” WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran said. “Clearly, we will not be able to eradicate poverty in the region or in the world for that matter, until we take effective steps to tackle hunger and malnutrition.”

Read entire article on newsblaze.com.

Of course, hunger hurts the economy everywhere. With child hunger costing us all (the people of the world) so much, why do we fail to invest more into fighting it. It would cost less to just end hunger than accept the billions of dollars it costs. Just in Central America, child hunger has caused losses of $7 billion a year. We could end hunger worldwide for less than $6 billion more a year.

It seems that the people in power want world hunger to remain. Perhaps, they need hunger to scare the working-class into obedience. Perhaps the people in power realize that the working-class might stop letting the upper-class rob them, if only the working-class people didn’t fear going hungry. Due to their fear over hunger and poverty, the working-class obediently go to their jobs, even though they get underpaid and overworked.

The powers that be do a good job scaring the working-class. For example, in any given 10-year-period, 40% of United States citizens fall into poverty.

Carl Bialik recently wrote about the flaws in the way that the World Bank calculates poverty levels. I include an excerpt:

[T]o some economists, the World Bank’s definition of poverty is flawed, arbitrary and tends toward suppressing the numbers. Sanjay Reddy, a Columbia University economist and longtime critic of the bank’s counts, says, “If their dream is a world free of poverty, they ought to know how to measure it.”

The bank defines poverty as living each day on less than the local equivalent of what $1.08 could buy in 1993. That’s the median of national poverty lines in 10 poor countries. Incomes or expenditures are measured by individual countries’ household surveys, then converted to dollars in terms of purchasing power.

Each of these steps introduces potential pitfalls. National poverty lines are set by local governments and there isn’t any standard for defining them. “It is silly to use national poverty lines to arrive at a global poverty line,” says Nanak Kakwani, an economist and visiting scholar at University of Sydney, Australia.

Read entire article by Carl Bialik.

I know nobody who could live on a dollar a day, even in 1993.

We can only accurately measure poverty by whether or not people have access to the necessities or not. To arrive at correct numbers, we must count a person as poor if they cannot stably afford sufficient food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare.