HEADLINES OF THE DAY: ANOTHER 15,000 PEOPLE DIED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO POOR TO LIVE. THE RICH INCREASED THEIR WEALTH YESTERDAY BY $0.3 BILLION. THE 21st CENTURY VERSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS ONE DAY NEARER.
“O Ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease.”
Bahá’u’lláh
A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 78). This blog is a continuation of the review of ENDING GLOBAL POVERTY: A GUIDE TO WHAT WORKS by Stephen C. Smith, published in 2005.
PART I
EXTREME POVERTY: THE CRUELEST TRAP
Chapter 1: Understanding Extreme Poverty: Poverty Traps and the Experience of the Poor
To understand how poverty can be ended, first we need a clear understanding of what poverty is, and what it means to be trapped in poverty. A poverty trap – also called “structural poverty” because it is not a temporary problem that people can eventually escape from through sustained efforts – it is much more than just the lack of income. Instead, the very conditions of poverty today make it likely that poverty will continue tomorrow.
The poor are not lazy
Impoverished people frequently suffer from malnutrition, poor health, and illiteracy; live in environmentally degraded areas; have little political voice; and attempt to earn a meager living on small and marginal farms or in dilapidated urban slums in which conditions make significant growth of incomes exceedingly difficult. Such extreme conditions mean that the children are also likely to be trapped in poverty when they grow up. The poor are not “lazy,” but caught in poverty traps. They are generally unable to take entrepreneurial risks because the consequences are so dire. Even when the poor seem to have escaped from poverty, they often remain vulnerable, falling into the snare again – knowing this affects the whole way they go about life. Both their immediate conditions and the deeper causes of their underlying vulnerability have to be addressed in successful poverty programs.
THE PREDICAMENT OF THE POOREST OF THE POOR: WHY IT’S A TRAP
Here are 16 of the major poverty traps that keep the poor enslaved to the vicious cycle of poverty – and that the best poverty programs are working to address.
1. Family labor traps
2. Illiteracy traps
3. Working capital traps
4. Uninsurable-risk traps
5. Debt bondage traps
6. Information traps
7. Undernutrition and illness traps
8. Low-skill traps
9. High fertility traps
10. Subsistence traps
11. Farm erosion traps
12. Common property mismanagement traps
13. Collective action traps
14. Criminality traps
15. Mental health traps
16. Powerlessness traps
From the study of poverty traps we get confirmation that not only is poverty not the fault of the poor, neither are the things usually blamed on the poor, such as high fertility, the underlying cause of poverty – they are a result of poverty. And we gain insights into both general principles and the specifics of what poverty programs must do to be successful.
Some poor people may show many of these symptoms
It is not a matter of making a simple diagnosis of what poverty traps impoverished families find themselves caught in. These traps are “pure types,” not an exact description that necessarily applies to any one person. In particular, some poor people may show many of these “symptoms,” and others may not appear to be affected by any. These traps are guides to general understanding, not a ready-made checklist to diagnosis and action.