Poverty and Inequality in 2020
Dr. Gabriel Rubin
Intro to International Justice
GlobalRichList
We certainly dont think of ourselves as rich, but if we compare ourselves to others in the world, we might be surprised at where we stand.
Go to GlobalRichList.com
There you can enter your income (or the income you hope to have when you start your career) to see where you stand relative to the rest of the world.
While poverty is going down worldwide, there are still many people in the world who are poor
In 1990, 36% of the worlds people lived on $1.90 per day or less. Today that number is about 10% (numbers are from 2015).
The World Bank finds that we have lifted over one billion peoplemostly in Asiaout of poverty in the past few decades. Angus Deaton, a Princeton Economist, notes that the rise in wealth in India and (mostly) China has been the main driver of this reduction in poverty.
But there are still over 700,000,000 people living on less than $2 a day and many of them live on $1 a day or less!
These poorest of the poor used to be called The Bottom Billion, but now they make up less than one billion people. Surely, thats a win but its still a lot of people living in horrid conditions.
Most of the poorest people in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa (that is, Africa below the Sahara Desert or Africa without the North African Arab-dominated countries). The World Bank estimates that if current trends continue by 2030, 9 out of 10 of the worlds extreme poor will live in sub-Saharan Africa. Thats because poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, contrary to the rest of the world, is actually going up (https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview).
Who are the Poorest of the Poor?
Many of the poorest people in the world are young since they live in countries with high birth rates and few employment opportunities. So the average person suffering extreme poverty is under 18.
Further, the average person suffering extreme poverty works in the agricultural sector and lives in a rural area. Agriculture and farming have become dead end jobs for a number of reasons including: the rise of automation, the domination of the industry by a few huge corporations like Monsanto, the fact that farming is vulnerable to weather, climate change and the fact that farming provides mostly low-skill jobs.
The average extremely poor person has little formal education.
They are also likely female as many women and girls are oppressed and sidelined the world over by traditional norms that keep them from holding property or working in the formal economy (see the books Half the Sky or From Outrage to Courage).
Finally, the income of the extremely poor is sporadic. They may average making $2 a day or so but if they, for instance, sell fruit, then they may make $11 one day, $3 the next and then nothing the next day. A bad harvest, the off-season or a bad sales day could lead to having nothing or very little for many days in a row.
Dont these People live in Inexpensive Areas?
A common response to hearing about the global poor, especially from people like us who live in expensive areas, is that they must live in cheap areas.
If they make so little money, the thought goes, then their rent and food costs must be a lot less. After all, the poorest of the poor dont drive.
Yet, this thinking misses something.
The poorest of the poor are very vulnerable.
If they get sick, they dont have the money to pay a doctorand they may not even have access to a hospital.
They likely dont have money to pay for any costs that come up be they for entertainment, school costs, surprise bills, taxes or otherwise. And they certainly cant pay to fix or upgrade what they have.
Wealth protects us from crisis. Just like wealth protects us from the climate crisis, it protects us from other crises too. We know, if we have money, that we can always pay to move or buy what we will need in a crisis.
Yet the poorest of the poor dont have that luxury.
Think about the present coronavirus crisis: people with cars and houses can avoid crowds, those living in dense apartments or on the street who have to take buses to get places cant avoid crowds. People with white-collar jobs can work remotely (and collect a salary even when they dont work), those who work with their hands or in the service industry cant (and many times get paid hourly).
Poverty and Inequality
It would be one thing if we lived in a poor world, then poverty would be less of a tragedy.
But we live in a world with vast riches, where inequality keeps increasing.
In other words, even as the poor get a bit richer, the rich get much richer still. The gap between the rich and poor keeps growing as the richest people grab more and more of the total income in the world. Unfortunately, economic downturns, like we are experiencing now normally extend the gap even more as some people lose their jobs while others get richer off cheap investments and properties.
As Oxfam recently noted (and these numbers get worse every year), the 26 richest people in the world own 50% of the worlds riches (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-richest-people-own-as-much-as-poorest-50-per-cent-oxfam-report).
An unequal world means that power, property and resources are owned by a small group of people who have access to those things. For those who have such a world certainly doesnt seem so bad (and we even come up with reasons why we have and others dont, such as that theyre lazy), but to those who are have-nots in such a situation the world system seems incredibly unfair.
Video on Inequality
The birthright lottery
Ayelet Shachar provides one way to view this state of extreme inequality. She calls it the birthright lottery (and she has a book of the same name).
She argues that at birth we go through a lottery that we could call the Life Lottery. If we are born to a rich family in a rich place we win that lottery. But if we are born in a poor country or a war-torn country or to a poor family in an unequal country, we lose that lottery.
Some of us can move up from our poor start (others might not be able to), but Shachar says that misses the point.
The point is that the world and that lottery is unfair and that those that win the lottery owe some form of protection or help or insurance to those that lose that lottery.
After all, no one would willingly choose to lose that lottery, especially since it likely means a worse and much shorter life.
The birthright lottery: north vs. south
In his textbook Intro to International Studies, Brian Orend notes that differences in lifestyles between those living in the richer North of the world (which does include Australia) and the poorer South lead to staggering inequalities of health and quality of life.
The average person in the Global North is expected to live to be 80 years old; in the Global South the average is 20 years younger with some countries having life expectancies in the 50s and even high-40s.
The infant mortality rate in the Global South is 70 per 1,000 live births (179 per 1,000 live births in Angola). In the Global North that rate is just 6 per 1,000 live births. So in rich countries about half of one percent of babies die in infancy, in poor countries its 14 times that at 7 percent.
People in poor countries are also much more likely to die of infectious diseases that can be prevented by good hygiene, clean water, and antibiotics. In rich countries chronic diseasesreally diseases of old agelike cancer and heart disease kill most people. In poor countries, infectious diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS kill people. Every year one million people die from malaria (90 percent of them in Africa), 165,000 children die of measles (despite vaccinations being available in rich countries for decades), and 2 million people die of tuberculosis despite a cure being around for decades (Orend 2013).
Poverty and Quality/Quantity of Life
As weve seen, very poor people are incredibly vulnerable. Many lack access to basic needs such as clean drinking water, vaccinations and sanitary environments.
For instance, diarrhea kills over 2,000 people every day (https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html).
In 2017, according to the World Health Organization, 6.4 million children under age 15 died of preventable causes (most of these kids were under 5) (https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/18-09-2018-a-child-under-15-dies-every-5-seconds-around-the-world-).
So what can or should be done about this?
And arent these people poor because they didnt try hard enough in life?
isnt it their own fault that theyre poor?
Many argue that we owe the poor nothing because its their fault that theyre poor.
This is a convenient argument for a rich person to make. Thats like if a student comes up to me asking for a dollar and instead of helping, I say Make it yourself, you stupid kid!
There are a few factors that might lead us to perhaps owing the poor something.
The first is inequality. We live in a rich world where there are the means to help others.
The second is that we benefit from that inequality because poor people work for low wages and we buy the cheap goods they make sometimes for much less than we could get them otherwise (for instance, many workers that make iPhones get paid 35 cents an hour). The conditions the poor worker lives in doesnt get accounted forat least by us.
Third, our government supports stability in poor countries rather than the welfare of the people. We want cheap goods and cheap oil and having corrupt, stable governments can get us that more easily than messy democracies that might raise wages. Our actions in the Middle East speak most clearly to this, but we also buy quite a lot from China.
Finally, we erect barrier to trade from poor countries. We dont want our cotton farmers to go out of business so we make barriers stopping African cotton from coming to America.
The fact that the global poor dont have good livelihoods may, then, be our fault (maybe not us directly, but people like us).
Thomas Pogge in World Poverty and Human Rights says that what we owe the poor then should not be thought of charity but as protection. What money we give them, he argues, is only fair to protect them from the economic and political factors that we created to box them in. Shachars birthright lottery view aligns with this.
Do we owe these people anything? What can we do to help?
Angus Deaton in The Great Escape argues that there is no country that has gone from poor to rich through aid alone. That said, some aid (money, food, products) could certainly help the poor get through each day. Further, Im sure we each know a few cases of people who prospered after getting a little help like a loan, a scholarship, a meal or a gift.
Vaccinations, mosquito nets, malaria pills, wells with clean drinking water and other cheap health interventions could save millions of lives and dont cost much (see the book A Path Appears for more on this).
Still, just like school lunches to poor American kids, donations or aid arent a one-time solution. They need to be given for many years to help sustain lives.
Unfortunately, US foreign aid is less than 1 percent of the governments budget and a lot of it goes to countries that dont really need it (due to treaties and military deals) like Israel, Jordan and Egypt.
Good governance and a reduction in corruption would go a long way toward helping poor people, many of whom live in countries where hard work doesnt pay off (because of lack of opportunities or government just stealing from those who succeed). A good government, like a good teacher, aligns incentives in a way that merits innovation, cooperation and effort. But many poor countries do the opposite: they reward you for who you know (patronage), who you are (nepotism), staying quiet about corruption and following orders. Bad teachers who use favoritism, dole out busywork and punish creative thinking in the name of rule-following are similar.
As we see with todays plague, helping each other can build community and those who we help today could very well be helping us tomorrow.
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