World Hunger and Poverty

Apparently as a result of rising food prices, the UN says that world hunger is rising, namely in countries such as Mexico, Yemen, and Indonesia.

UN figures show that food prices have rose last year by 40 percent due to increasing oil prices and rising demand from developing countries.

I read in the newspaper that the size of the middle class will increase rapidly over the next decade as people in developing countries escape poverty. Ironically, that will cause increased demand and increased prices. It will also magnify problems such as pollution.

If global oil production has not peaked, I bet it will soon. That combined with increased demand will make oil prices sky-rocket, which will increase the prices of most other commodities.

We cannot afford to not address these growing global problems.

Of course, I think we must remember: the world has more than enough food for everyone. We simply have a social problem. We do not distribute food and other resources fairly, but instead choose to let people starve. Such an unfair, brutal, and problematic social system cannot deal with worsening global problems such as limited energy resources, human-caused global warming, and war.

If we do not fix our social system soon, I fear we will doom our society. A problematic society that chooses to let so many people starve will not survive.

I just finished reading a great book a few days ago: Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre-Feminist, Anarchist, Genius. I love Voltairine de Cleyre’s writing!

She wrote about various topics, but poverty came up often. In her essay Why I Am An Anarchist, she wrote something with which I completely agree: “The problem is not how to find a way to relieve temporary distress, not to make people dependent upon the kindness of others, but to allow every one to be able to stand upon his own feet.”

People will not have freedom and will not fully escape poverty unless they have self-sufficiency. We can not rely on charity to end poverty. We need to find ways to empower people. We need to make as many individuals self-sufficient as possible. Also, we need to make families self-sufficient as a whole, which we can do by ensuring that the working members of a family can provide enough for their entire family.

I believe we need to take two general steps to empower the masses and make all families self-sufficient.

Firstly, we need to use education. Education gives people the skills and credentials to support themselves in society.

Secondly, we need to give people freedom. The working people could support themselves if they received the full fruits of their labor. But the working people cannot receive the full fruits of their labor because they have to sell it out to those who control the natural resources. They cannot just go to work on the land to grow food because a ruling class has claimed to “own” the land and other natural resources. The working people must get permission to use the natural resources from those who have unjustifiably usurped control of the natural resources of the world. As a result, the working people have to give away much of the fruits of their labor to get permission to work. This unfair system has made the working class dependent on a parasitic ruling class. And I doubt we can end poverty and other similar problems without making people as independent and self-sufficient as possible.

Voltairine de Cleyre wrote, “…any man who must wait the complicated working of a mass of unseen powers before he may engage in the productive labor necessary to get his food is the last thing but a free man.”

I agree with her! The working people are not free, and that lack of freedom causes poverty and related problems.

To end poverty and make society free, we must make it so that all people have an equal right to the natural resources. We can not let one class of people oppress another class of people by monopolizing control of natural resources such as land, water, lumber, metal or oil.

Megan McArdle recently posted about how poor people get forced into higher-priced alternatives. She credits that observation to the book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Basically, poor people do not have enough money saved up to make big purchases or investments. People from more affluent backgrounds will have money saved up or will have family from whom they can borrow the money. Without the extra money, poor people can not get the better deals that other people do.

For example, poor people cannot invest in an expensive and reliable car upfront, but will instead have to buy a cheap car and constantly pay for repairs. In another example, poor people cannot afford the deposits on apartments, and have to instead move into temporary residences with higher rent. Poor people often cannot buy products in bulk, which more affluent families do to get better value for their money.

Simply put, poor people can not make cost-saving investments because they do not have financial savings or rich family and friends.

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 want so much for our society to eliminate poverty. I believe we can, and I hope we will soon. However, I do not think increasing the minimum wage will significantly help end poverty. I have a few reasons for this.

Generally, I see governments and politicians as inherently dishonest. They pander to people with nice sounding proposals such as minimum wages. But I do not think a minimum wage will end poverty, and I doubt many politicians truly think it will. They just use it as a way to get votes, just like Bush used gay marriage and the war on terror. The minimum wage will not end poverty in the same way the war in Iraq will not reduce global terrorism.

But an increased minimum wage will increase government control over economics and society, which has almost always proved detrimental in the long run. When two adults make a consensual agreement, it almost always works better to let them do it than to interfere. That generally applies to anything from employment to sex. When the government forcefully gets involved in consensual agreements, it only causes needless problems in an otherwise voluntary deal.

I think you know the minimum wage will not work, if you really ask yourself to study it. Imagine if the government increased the minimum wage to $100 an hour; do you think that would end poverty? Obviously, it would not. Imagine if the government increased the minimum wage to $1,000 an hour; do you think that would make us all rich? Obviously, it would not. But it would cause massive economic problems resulting from the governmental intervention.

When humans live in a relatively free society, they voluntarily enter into relationships and interactions that they believe will benefit them. They make countless mutually beneficial deals with each other based on their differing needs and desires. From those interactions develops a complex social system.

Even if it did have good intentions, a government will disrupt the social system by forcefully interfering with the coercive power of law. In analogy, when humans try to make interferences with natural ecosystems, they almost always cause massive damage to the ecosystem by disrupting the natural balance.

Governmental solutions almost always cause way more problems than they solve. But let’s look at the topic at hand. I will explain some of the most apparent and major effects of an increased minimum wage.

Increasing the minimum wage will cause needless inflation. The costs of production will increase for goods and services because the cost of basic labor will be artificially increased by the government’s intervention. The increased price of products will mean money buys less. This will effectively cause a decrease in the salary of workers who earn above the minimum wage–who tend to contribute to the economy more. That will lead to many other economic disruptions and problems. Besides, the inflation will likely negate the minimum wage increase.

Increasing the minimum wage will reduce the incentive for workers to gain skills and to work hard. We may have an unfair economy already, but increasing the minimum wage will only make it more unfair. On average, people in the working class get paid based on how many skills they have, how much education and credentials they have, how hard and well they work, and how many hours they work. Someone who gets paid the minimum wage or a low amount most often provides much less than someone who gets paid a little more. For example, a hard-working doctor gets paid more than a slacking, part-time nurse. This creates an incentive for workers to get an education, to learn valuable skills, to work hard, to get promoted, and pull their weight–which we need people to do for them to gain self-sufficiency and for society to end poverty. Increasing the minimum wage gives money to the workers who least deserve it. For example, an increased minimum wage will give a raise to the guy who went to school less, who didn’t study as hard, who doesn’t work as hard, and who chose to take the easier and less important job; and that raise could have gone to the guy who worked much harder and earns a few bucks more than the minimum wage.

Increasing the minimum wage will increase unemployment. If the government disallows employers from hiring employees who will take the job for a low wage, then many employers will not hire the person for a higher pay. This means the person, who wanted the job at the low pay, may not have a job at all. Many employers cannot afford to pay their low-skilled workers more money. The employers will have to hire less people since they have to pay each person more. Besides, if the employers can pay more and think it is worth paying more, then they will hire better-skilled workers anyway, and that will still leave the low-skilled, minimum-wage worker out of a job.

Increasing the minimum wage only attempts to fix a symptom, not the root problem. The working class generally gets underpaid, and we cannot end poverty until all people can earn a living wage. But merely increasing the minimum wage is a foolish, superficial, ineffective, and possibly counter-productive way to try to ensure all people earn a living wage. We have to ask ourselves, why do some people get paid so little? We have to find the root cause of the problem.

When we search for the root problem, we can see that the fact that some workers get paid so little is part of an overarching problem, which I can best sum up in the following two sentences: Firstly, the working class gets underpaid and overworked because the ruling class leeches off the labor of the working class. Secondly, society does not enable everyone to get an education and to start a business or find a job with an income above the cost of living.

We need to find a way to ensure that children grow up in an environment conducive to success. We need to make sure they get quality education. That requires that the students have sufficient food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare while they grow up and get their education because a person cannot learn properly while hungry, naked, homeless, or sick. In the same way, we need to make sure poor people have a way to get education and job-training, so that they too can gain the skills and credentials required to earn a living wage. If we do that, then we can actually have a society in which people earn a living wage without the need for a minimum wage.

In summary, the use of the coercive force of government to artificially raise the pay for low-skilled and uneducated workers will not solve the underlying problems that cause people to earn such low-wages and will itself cause problems. Instead, society must instead raise children properly and ensure that all people have access to education and job training so that they can get the skills and credentials to naturally earn a living wage and support themselves and their families.

What do you think? Post your comments on what I have written and your own ideas about minimum wages in this thread at the World Hunger and Forums. All viewpoints are welcome.

Update (March, 2010): I do want to make it clear that I am not necessarily proposing the minimum wage be decreased or eliminated immediately. Rather, I want us to solve the underlying problems to eradicate poverty which a minimum wage increase cannot do alone. I want to create a fair, povertyless society in which a minimum wage and government intervention is not needed. For the time being, keeping the minimum wage and even increasing the minimum wage in any given state or country may be a helpful temporary band-aid fix while we fix the underlying problems. The point of this blog post has always been to advise anti-poverty advocates to not look at the minimum wage as a solution in itself but rather look at it as the painkillers with some harmful side-effects that a surgeon gives you before or while he solves the actual fundamental problem.

I just read an informative letter to the editor from a newspaper in Michigan, where about 1 in 5 children live in poverty. In the letter, Jack Kresnak points out that the cure for poverty starts with children.

I especially like that he emphasized how much of the first 5 years of a children’s lives affect their future finances. Even just when they start kindergarten, children who grew up poor have already fallen significantly behind children from more affluent families.

And those poor children will continue to grow up with severely limited resources, bad role models, and inadequate education. Many of the poor children will end up in poverty not because they make mistakes but because they never received a sufficient chance at success.

I personally think that education plays the biggest role. Many factors cause the poverty trap, but I think the denial of sufficient education holds poor children back most of all. Quality education gives people the knowledge and credentials to escape and avoid poverty. In contrast, without sufficient education, people will have neither the skills nor the credentials to support themselves financially.

Education starts at home, and poor children receive little. Then poor children go to the worst schools, and the poor children have the least resources at home to assist in their schooling. Then they have the least amount of money to spend on getting into and going to college. Many poor students have to leave school and get a job because they have family to support instead of having family to support them.

Considering the major role education plays, I think we can most effectively end poverty by ensuring that all children receive high quality education from birth until they have enough education to support themselves. With a high quality education, I fully believe the children can pay us back more than it costs us to give them education.

I just read a great op-ed by Paul Krugman about the ways that living in poverty hinders the development of children.

He reported that the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” That leads to impaired language development and memory, which in turn helps destine many of the children to a life of poverty.

Beyond the biological impairments, we all know that poor children do not get a fair shot at success. They get sent to substandard schools. They cannot afford quality education. They do not have powerful connections. They do not have families that can support them in their times of need, but instead they have families that they need to support.

Approximately 50% of children born into poverty in the United States do not escape. Most of the others struggle their entire lives. We call this the poverty trap, referring to the fact that children born into poverty have significantly limited opportunities in their life. Like seeds planted in infertile soil, poor children have potential but not fair opportunity.

This must greatly shame any societies and nations that let their children grow up in poverty.

The United States has the highest child poverty rate in the developed world. Officially, about 13 million American children live in poverty in the United States. Even worse, many more children do not have healthcare coverage or adequate education.

We have to do something about this. A society will not survive if it allows this type of horror to continue. I think the government has shown that it will not solve major problems such as child poverty, despite the trillions of dollars it spends every year on other things. So I think we the people need to work together to find non-governmental solutions to poverty. Whatever we do, we have to do something.

In a recent post, I said that the unfair economic burden put on the working class causes poverty in the United States. In this post, I want to explain how I believe the ruling class puts the unfair burden on the working class. By ruling class, I mean the government and more importantly the rich, special interest groups that control the government.

Obviously, it involves some sort of trick or illusion to oppress the working class. Otherwise, the working class would not let the ruling class oppress them.

Because of their control over politicians and the media, the ruling class tricks the general public in many ways whenever it suits them. Nonetheless, I see the overarching trick as the illusion of economic freedom and fairness. Slaves do not revolt if they think that they have freedom and think that they live in a fair society.

A while back, I made a post entitled, The Myth of Meritocracy. In that post, I explained that the false idea that wealth has been distributed fairly hinders the fight against poverty.

But even worse, I think that the working class lives in a form of slavery–”neo-slavery” if you will. The general public thinks it has freedom but it truly does not.

The working class has an illusion of choice. They can choose to work for scraps or they can starve. They have a little choice between which jobs they take at which companies, but the working people still have to work long hours for low pay while the ruling class lazily leeches off the labor of the working.

Despite the illusion of freedom, the ruling class enslaves the working class by, most of all, appropriating natural resources. Throughout almost all of recorded civilization in every society, a minority of people have controlled the majority of natural resources and thereby controlled the general public. A minority of people control the majority of land and other resources such as lumber and oil. In parts of Latin America, they have even started privatizing water and literally making it illegal for citizens to collect rain water.

It may seem free and fair enough for one person to offer to pay a second person for a service. However, when combined with the appropriation of natural resources by the first person, that same process becomes clearly authoritarian. For example, it may seem free and fair for John to ask Greg to cut John’s hair for $5.00 and for Greg to accept. However, if John first claims to own the air and says that Greg has to pay him $5.00 just to breathe, then we can see the slavery in the situation.

In our modern society, the working class has to provide an extremely excessive amount of labor to the ruling class because the ruling class claims to “own” the natural resources which the working class need to use to live. The process uses supply and demand. The ruling class has taken control of the natural resources, and the working class desperately needs those resources. That desperation causes the working people to “sell” their labor for rock-bottom prices.

So I hope you can see how the ruling class has put an unfair economic burden on the working class. And I believe that that unfair economic burden causes poverty. If the working class weren’t slaves and they were able to keep the fruits of their labor, then they would not always be at risk of poverty, and the working people could fully support themselves, their families, and their communities.

I know many people may disagree to varying degrees with how I have portrayed the political status quo. Please post your comments and your own views in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. You can join and participate in the forums completely for free, and we welcome all viewpoints.

I just read a great article by Barney Blakeney about the working poor and their health.

Basically, Barney Blakeney points out that the actual health problem for the working poor is that they cannot afford to get sick and that they have to go to work even when they are sick because they cannot afford to not earn a paycheck.

I think he makes a great point.

Regarding health and the working poor, society has a problem far more extensive and deep-rooted than the lack of healthcare insurance. The working poor need to work more than they can to earn an incomplete income, and they cannot take time off to recover from illness. They must work through illness because they have bills to pay.

A biannual poverty report from Israel’s National Insurance Institute says that 45 thousand Israelis slipped below the poverty line in 2007, including 30 thousand children. Also in 2007, the percentage of children living in poverty in Israel rose to 35.8 percent. The report also points out that poverty has risen among both Jews and Arabs.

Like so often happens in the United States, the average income in Israel has risen while poverty has increased. This happens because richest people make more money than the working class loses.

Regardless, I see war as the main problem. The people in Israel and the other nations of the world have to stop allowing their governments to waste so much money and resources on war. The United States needs to stop providing military funding for other nations.

We need to put the money and resources towards creating peace and alleviating poverty. This includes international initiatives for education and economic development. That means get children and uneducated people in school and ensure that educated adults can find jobs or start their own businesses.

We cannot afford the devastation, nationalism and corruption that war causes–let alone the financial costs of literally trillions of dollars per year.

We need to stop the vicious cycle of poverty and violence. And we cannot stop it by putting money into violence instead of into alleviating poverty. More war and more poverty will beget more nationalism, more war and more poverty, which in turn will beget hopelessness, anger, and terrorism. We, the people of the world, can stop that vicious cycle by ending poverty with the resources that we currently let our governments use for war.

I have often mentioned the inherent link between war and poverty. When I think of poverty in Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East in general, it always reminds me of the relationship.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that poverty has risen among both Jews and Arabs. Poverty and militarism will cause nationalism that will likely continue to lead to those peoples fighting each other. But we can stop the violent, nationalist conflicts by coming together to alleviate poverty for all and build a better world for all–which we can only do by funding global poverty alleviation instead of nationalistic wars.

What do you think? You can post comments on this post and on the relationship between war and poverty in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.