One neat trick to end extreme poverty

marojejian

archive: https://archive.is/BnBFT paper cited: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34583 >it would cost $318bn a year to reduce the global poverty rate to 1% at the $2.15-a-day line—roughly 0.3% of global GDP— with imper­fect, real-world inform­a­tion. >around 60% of rich-world respond­ents say they would be will­ing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty. While in reality I'm sure this would be much harder than the article suggests, I buy the direction of the key points: 1) it costs a feasible amount, 2) there is strong support to do it. 3) creative approaches might be effective. Note: I kept the title I found in the print Economist version, since it is more informative.

oliver236

one neat trick is to end poverty, ok, yea, that makes sense

someperson

> 1.2bn people escaped penury in those 25 years, bringing the global poverty rate down from 43% to 13% (using today’s poverty line). Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline; red-hot India and Indonesia did much of the rest. It looked as though growth miracles might consign poverty to the past. > poverty is now concentrated in places where growth is harder to achieve, and population size is rising fast. Around seven in ten of the world’s poor are in sub-Saharan Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria alone account for a quarter of the total. If current poverty rates persist, rapid population growth means that these three could be home to more than two-fifths of the world’s poorest by 2050. The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea. Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance to make the growing issues in sub-Saharan Africa more like the success stories in Asia and other parts of Africa. Harder to steal infrastructure. But obviously still possible especially before and during construction, and after during maintenance contracts.

jmyeet

The framing is wild (emphasis added): > The 189 member states of the United Nations set a target to bring the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to half its 1990 level by 2015 ... Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline That's one way to put it. Another way is that China set out to intentionally raise 800M people out of extreme poverty as a decades-long, multi-faceted priority and policy goal of the CCP. According to the World Bank [1]: > China’s approach to poverty reduction has been based on two pillars, according to the report. The first was broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support was initially provided to areas disadvantaged by geography and the lack of opportunities and later to individual households. The report points to a number of lessons for other countries from China’s experience, including the importance of a focus on education, an outward orientation, sustained public investments in infrastructure, and structural policies supportive of competition. Or, as The Economist put it, "economic growth". None of this is new. Another oft-cited example is Brazil's Bolsa Familia [2]. Back to The Economist: > None of this is insurmountable, though. As Alfred Marshall, a founding figure of modern economics, once observed, eradicating poverty is less a quandary for economics than for the “moral and political capabilities of human nature”. That's so weird. We apparently can't blame income and wealth inequality on economics. No, it's a moral and political failure. [1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... [2]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/05/27/br-bols...

amazingamazing

The answer is capitalism. Unfortunately in most of Africa corruption prevents it from actually doing its thing properly. I don’t know how anyone can honestly look at India and china and say anything else. Excellent governance is useless without money and most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution. Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.

tehjoker

crazy to see that china is doing most of the poverty reduction and not say hey developing countries, copy china (in the ways that you can, china has a unique advantage in size of domestic market)

pstuart

The one neat trick to end extreme poverty is to give women full and equal rights, most importantly, bodily autonomy.