World Hunger and Poverty

In this post I will write my answer to the question we used for a contest we recently held, “If you were given $10,000,000 and all the money must be spent to reduce poverty and hunger, how would you spend the money?”

I think we all agree that charitable handouts of food, water and shelter would not effectively reduce world hunger and poverty alone. As I wrote in a post I made in August 2006, entitled The Method To End Hunger, “if a hungry child fails to eat today, that hungry child dies tonight. However, if the hungry child eats today, then we still have a hungry child tomorrow. We cannot end hunger without food, but food alone won’t solve the problem. Simply giving food to the hungry to solve hunger is like shoveling water out of a sinking ship.”

On the other hand, neither $10 million nor any amount of money one person could reasonably have would be enough to fix the political unfairness and non-meritocracy and the destitute economies that make it so even skilled, strong people willing to work hard cannot escape poverty. In regards to unfair non-meritocracy, even the smartest, strongest hardest-working slave can still live in poverty while his lazy master lives in wealth off the slave’s labor. In regards to destitute economies, what use is a skill that might earn great wealth in a non-poor, fair economy in an economy where resources are so scarce that a new Mercedes-Benz might sell for the prize of a few apples?

So I would spend the money on helping individuals directly, rather than on trying to fix the broken economies and political corruption. Besides, when we help enough individual people directly and thus empower those people, empowered people will be able to work together to fix their political and economic environment.

I would invest the money to create an organization that can continue to grow on its own without the need for any more donations of $10 million.

This organization would focus on providing a lot of help to each person it helps, rather than providing a little help to a lot of people. As mentioned before, we cannot end poverty by only providing the bare essentials to a lot of people through handouts. We would only be temporarily relieving the symptoms of poverty until we run out of money. So instead of just giving people food, clothes or temporary shelter, the organization would find a way to help each client become self-sufficient and thus permanently escape poverty.

Namely, the organization would help people permanently escape poverty by not only providing them with food, clothes and other necessities, but more importantly by providing the following:

1. The organization would get the poor people it helps out of ghettos and bad neighborhoods ridden with crime, violence, drugs and so forth. They would be brought to affordable housing in better neighborhoods. The organization may have to temporarily help these people pay for these new homes.

2. The organization would make sure each person it helps is mentally fit, and make sure they get treatment for mental health problems and addictions if the people have them.

3. In addition to the shelter already mentioned, the organization would make sure each person it helps has food, clothes and health care. Even though we already agreed we do not merely want to provide only free handouts of basic necessities, we must at least loan the funds to get those basic necessities while we find and implement long-term solutions. We cannot expect a person to work on the fundamental causes of their poverty if they have to worry about where they will get their next meal. A hungry schoolkid cannot get the education he needs if he is on the brink of starving to death in the classroom.

4. Each person’s specific situation and needs would be evaluated to determine whether the person needs education and skills-training, needs a business loan, or just needs a better job or business. And then those services would be provided. When completed, the person would have a job or own their own business with which they make enough money after deducting job costs to repay their loans and afford the cost of living. The cost of living must include the following costs (insofar as they are not provided by the government): food, clothes, shelter (in a safe neighborhood), education, unemployment insurance, and retirement.

Of course, this help would only be provided to the people if they are also helping themselves. For example, the organization would not spend its resources providing food and shelter to someone who could escape poverty by going back to school but who refuses to go to school even with the help. We are fighting poverty and world hunger, not laziness and anorexia.

At least upfront, providing those resources to a person or family would require a large investment. But it would be ensured that the people actually escape poverty permanently and become self-sufficient. Then ideally the people could pay the organization back, perhaps even with a little extra. Then the organization could not only continue doing the same work with other people, but hopefully also grow and help even more people at once.

What do you think? Comment on my idea and post your own idea of how to spend $10 million to reduce world hunger and poverty.

Our t-shirt contest is now over. Congratulations to LJEsposito, ScotHTH, and Macrocompassion who will each receive a free t-shirt from the Moju Project!

Nonetheless, the discussion of how a large sum of money could be spent to alleviate poverty is valuable regardless of it being a contest. So even though the contest is over, if you have not answered the question yet, please tell us how you would reduce poverty with $10 million.

Later today I will post my answer to the question.

A nice gentleman named Gerrid from the Moju Project recently contacted me to tell me about the project. It’s simple: A portion of the proceeds from anything bought off their website goes towards saving lives. Every t-shirt they sell feeds an orphan one hot meal daily for a month in Africa.

I like the t-shirts. I think they all would be great to wear, especially knowing that purchasing the shirt helped alleviate world hunger.

Gerrid sent me a free t-shirt. I picked out the African Bowl T-Shirt. Check out this picture of it from their website:

Gerrid also offered to give away three t-shirts to readers of this blog with a fun contest. It does not cost you anything to enter. All you have to do is post your answer to this question: If you were given $10,000,000 and all the money must be spent to reduce poverty and hunger, how would you spend the money?

Please post your answers to that question in this thread at the forums. I will choose my three favorite answers on Monday the 22^nd, and those three people will receive a free t-shirt.

What a great way to raise awareness about world hunger, win free stuff and have fun!

Tell your friends about this cool contest!

And remember, post your answer to the question in this thread for your chance to win!

In my last blog post, I explained the way that I think ignorance causes inaction on poverty. In this post, I have come up with a series of questions that I think we can ask ourselves to help us relate to poverty and understand how much poverty actually threatens and affects those of us not currently living in poverty.

The Questions

How may your life have been different if you were born in a much poorer family? What if you went to a much poorer public school in a much poorer community, with much more crime, with much more wayward students and with much less funding?

What if pretty much all of your family and friends were poor throughout your life? Have you ever been bailed out by family or friends who had spare money or personal connections? What if you hadn’t been?

What if your household never had a car or other automobile for your entire childhood? What if you never had internet or a computer? How may that have changed your life?

Can you think of something that could have been different in your past through no fault of your own that would have caused you to fall into poverty? Even if you had worked just as hard and exercised just as good decision-making, what may have happened to you that could have led to you being poor (or poorer) now?

Can you imagine a future scenario in which you end up poor through no fault of your own? What kind of help would you expect to get or need to get to escape poverty? If you fell into poverty in the future while still working just as hard or harder, how would you feel if people called you lazy or stupid or said you deserved to be poor?

How have you been lucky in your life? How has that luck contributed to your comfort of life and financial situation? Are there ways you could have been much more unlucky that could have caused you to fall into poverty? What sort of unlucky things could happen to you now or in the future that could severely affect your finances and make you poor or poorer?

The Answers

Post your answers to those questions, read other people’s answers and comment on this blog post as a whole in this thread at our forums.

Pass a link to this post along to other people as well. If we all start thinking about poverty, we will be inspired to do something about it and hopefully finally work together and eradicate it.

This blog and other publications like it often raise questions like, “How do we inspire people to take action against poverty?”

The world has more than enough food to feed everyone and more than enough resources to provide clean water, clothing, shelter, education and health care for all. I firmly believe we can end poverty. So the question stands there as an elephant in the room: Why the inaction? Why do we not end poverty? Why does the average person not do more to help eradicate poverty?

I think ignorance causes the inaction.

We all know poverty exists. But many of us do not realize the extent of the problem. We do not realize how many people actually fall into poverty. We do not realize how much the typical family is at risk of poverty. We do not realize just how much widespread poverty does exist in places like the United States.

With 12% to 17% of people living below the federal poverty line at any given time in the United States, maybe many Americans can mistakenly think of poverty not as affecting society as a whole but as affecting some marginal other group of people. Many of us may mistakenly think of fighting poverty as charity rather than as an organized group effort to help ourselves. And that ignorance can make it hard for us to relate to the poor.

But let’s remember that over a 10 year period, 40% of people in the United States fall below poverty.¹ And let’s remember that most Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between the ages of 25 and 75.² And let’s remember even those numbers do not show the full extent of poverty because of the fact that the poverty line is drawn way too low, so the government does not consider many people poor whose incomes do not cover the true cost of living.

When we forget to remember those facts, we may fail to realize the extent of the problem and how much it affects us and people like us. And then we may fail to recognize coming together and fighting poverty as the smart thing to do. That’s what I mean when I say ignorance causes inaction.

Of course the problem exists not only domestically in the US but also throughout the globe. If we cannot end poverty at home even in places like the United States, we will not end it globally.

In my next blog post, I will come up with a series of questions that we can ask ourselves to help us relate to people currently caught by poverty and understand how much poverty actually threatens and affects those of us not currently living in poverty.

What do you think? Do you agree that ignorance causes inaction on poverty? You can post your comments and discuss this blog post in this thread at the Philosophy Forums.

References
1. Zweig, Michael (2004) What’s Class Got to Do With It?: American Society in the Twenty-First Century. ILR Press.
2.Hacker, J. S. (2006). The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: Oxford University Press.

Check out the followup to this blog post: Questions to Ask Ourselves about Poverty

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.

There has been a lot of frustration over the massive amount of pay, bonuses and luxuries given to the executives at failing banks which together received hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. government. Indeed, it leaves us asking why rich people get bailout money to pay for private jets and unnecessarily lavish Superbowl parties when working class people need bailout money just to pay for food, clothes, shelter and health care. In response, some people including President Obama have called for capping the pay of executives at banks that receive bailout money.

But the highly paid chief executive of Netflix, Reed Hastings, has asked for the taxes of executives like himself to be raised. In his op-ed entitled Please Raise My Taxes, Hastings writes, “Instead of trying to shame companies and executives, the president should take advantage of our success by using our outsized earnings to pay for the needs of our nation.”

That idea interests me. And I like when one of the very rich suggests it. At the very least, we could raise the richest people’s taxes enough so that they are no longer paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than the rest of us.

Anyway, stopping and undoing the recent economic crisis will cost a lot, but we do need to do it. The recent economic crisis has pushed many people deeper into poverty, many people into poverty and still pushes many people closer and closer to poverty. Raising the taxes of the extremely rich can help fund the costs of reversing the recent economic crisis.

However, poverty is not a new problem. Even before the economic recession, millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide lived in poverty. Even then, working class people still worked too hard for too little pay in a society riddled with corruption and social, political and economic unfairness. Even then, a lot of people were poor who would not have been poor and a lot of people were very rich who would not have been so rich had it not been for the corruption and unfairness.

I believe we can not only reverse the recent recession but also eradicate poverty completely. Just like reversing the recession, eradicating poverty will require an investment that costs a lot upfront. But that investment can permanently solve a very costly problem. In analogy, we can spend $1,000 once to fix the hole in a boat today rather than spend $10 a day to desperately scoop water out of the sinking boat.

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. So one could say I ideally want taxes to be reduced and even eliminated if possible. But noting the difference between theoretical ideals and practical steps, increasing taxes on the richest of the rich in our current messed up society seems like an effective and appropriate way to raise funds to make the investment to push us closer to that ideal society.

What do you think? Do you support raising the taxes of the very rich? Why or why not? Join the discussion and tell us your thoughts in this thread at the Philosophy Forum.

According to recent IRS data, from 2000 to 2006 the income of the 400 richest Americans doubled, but their tax rate fell by a third to only 17.2 percent.

The drop in the tax rate for the richest Americans is due mainly to ex-President Bush’s push to lower the capital gains tax to 15 percent in 2003.

As pointed out in my post Bob Edgar Stresses Poverty, Bush also drastically increased government spending, leaving even more government debt for working class taxpayers to pay since the rich people’s tax rate was decreased. In other words, Bush increased the total amount that the taxpayers have to pay by increasing government spending, but he changed the proportions so that rich people pay less of it while the rest of us pay more of it.

I also ask you to remember that the richest people in America pay less in taxes than their secretaries in percentage of income.

I think those policies of the Bush Administration and the mostly Republican legislature contributed to the current economic crisis. Worse yet, many politicians actually continue to propose the same policies as a solution to the problem. For example, Republican politicians are actually suggesting changing the “stimulus package” to include more Bush-type tax cuts for the rich while eliminating tax credits for the working class.

Please tell us your thoughts about this topic at the Philosophy of Politics Online Forum in threads such as this one.

In the discussion Food for Some, Not for All on the Philosophy Forums, I made this post. In that post, I argued that the problem in our society causing world hunger and poverty is that control over natural resources has been unfairly distributed through the use of deception and violence.

It is generally another rendition of the same point I often make on this blog in posts such as The Nature of the Current Food Crisis, Oppression, Capital and Poverty, and many of my other favorite posts.

But I do especially like the fun analogy I made:

Let’s say I claimed to own all the air in the world and threatened to imprison or kill anyone who breathed the air without my permission. I could get you guys to all work like slaves for me for barely anything because the desperation caused by your poverty would make you the equivalent of sweatshop workers. So I would gain control not only over the air in the world but also the labor. And I’m sure many people would die from lack of oxygen. I would benefit from keeping such a system, but everybody else would benefit from changing it. In that example, I represent the ruling class (a.k.a. the upper class or just the wealthy); my desperate workers represent the working class; those who die from lack of oxygen represent the poorest of us; and the air represents natural resources, namely land, water and the machinery passed down from previous generations.

Please do check out the whole forum post and join the forum discussion.

Recent research in the UK has shown that women’s low pay has huge implications on child poverty.

I think we can apply those findings to most countries. Throughout the world, women both tend to have most of the child raising responsibilities and tend to receive lower pay. For example, many single mothers work hard at multiple jobs and still do not earn enough to support themselves and their children. That means the mothers often do not have enough time to raise their children and do not have enough money to provide their children with quality education since the mothers can neither afford private school nor afford to live in an area with quality public schools.

To break the poverty trap, I believe we must ensure that single mothers and all parents get paid enough to properly raise their children.

What do you think? How do you suggest we raise the pay of women and ensure parents can afford to raise their children? Post your responses and other ideas about the topic in the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.