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A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com.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 80). This blog is a continuation of the review of ENDING GLOBAL POVERTY: A GUIDE TO WHAT WORKS by Stephen C. Smith, published in 2005.
A HOLISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF POVERTY
The importance of assets
In developing countries, the poor rarely have a steady and reliable job in the conventional sense. In understanding and combating poverty, the first step is to focus not just on their underlying assets. Assets include any goods that enable the poor to draw a stream of income or consumption. A goat that provides milk, a cart with which to carry goods for sale, a marketplace stall, a bicycle enabling more distant commuting to find work, and arable land on which to grow crops, are all assets. In addition, a person’s assets include less tangible properties that influence the income potentially received at any point in time. Health and skills are assets: With better health or nutrition, a poor person may be able to work more productively, and so be paid more as a laborer or produce more on their land. The same is true for higher levels of skill.
Inventorying a family’s or community’s assets
Focus on assets of the poor helps us to know whether a person is temporarily poor, or stuck in a more intractable poverty trap; and it clarifies what a family would need to permanently escape from extreme poverty. Many successful strategies for helping the poor escape from poverty traps begin by inventorying a family’s or community’s assets and then finding ways to build upon them.
Extreme poverty as deprivation of capabilities
The need for a holistic approach is clear from the fact that poverty traps afflict virtually every aspect of life. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen argued that, at root, to be poor is to lack basic “capabilities to function” – that is, the ability to live the kind of life that one values. Sen reminds us that income and wealth are only instruments for other purposes. As Sen put it, “Economic growth cannot be sensibly treated as an end in itself. Development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy.”
Poverty cannot be properly measured by income
Sen argues that poverty cannot be properly measured by income; what matters is not the things a person has. What matters for well-being is what a person is, or can be, and does, or can do. Calculations of income that are not fully comparable across countries cannot suffice as a measure of well-being. Measuring individual well-being by levels of consumption makes the mistake of thinking of commodities as ends in themselves, rather than as a means to an end. In the case of nutrition, the end is health and what one can do with good health, as well as personal enjoyment and social functioning. Even malnourished people can have a happy disposition.
Growth without development
Many critical problems of developing countries, such as the greater deprivations of health, nutrition, and education experienced by girls, simply cannot be adequately addressed by a focus on income, or even on family assets. Sen concludes that the expansion of freedom is both the primary end and the principal means of economic development. This perspective helps explain why development economists place so much emphasis on health and education and refer to countries with high levels of income but poor health and education standards as cases of “growth without development.” Real income is essential, but any deeper appraisal of well-being leads to a consideration of health and education in addition to income.
COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR
The poor tend to suffer malnutrition, poor health, and low levels of education; they live in environmentally stressed areas, have poor access to technology and markets, and lack personal and political power. The poor are more likely to be rural, agricultural, and have little or no land. The poor also tend to come from large families, with few income earners. The problem of female-headed families living in poverty is growing in developing countries. Although the majority of poor households – as most households generally – are still headed by men, the share of female-headed poor families has grown steadily. In a number of countries they have already approached or exceeded 50%. The chances of being poor are far greater for a female-headed family. The chances that a person will be poor, if he or she is a member of a minority or indigenous group, is also far greater than if a person is from the majority ethnic group. In most countries, poverty is also concentrated within particular regions: In the northeast of Brazil, the northwest of Bangladesh, the southwest of Uganda, and the southeast of Ethiopia, one finds, a higher percentage of the population living in poverty than the national average. The failure to account for the characteristics of the poor in the design of poverty programs has led to tragic consequences. However, the best NGOs are increasingly successful at targeting effective programs to the poorest.