A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 44). This blog is a continuation of the review of The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Life Time, by Jeffrey Sachs, published in 2005
Ascending the ladder of development
The developing world falls into four broad categories. Malawi with 84% in rural areas, where men of working age have died of AIDS and the margin of survival is extraordinarily narrow but funding for one of the best conceived strategies was a fraction of that required – a perfect storm bringing together climatic disaster, impoverishment, AIDS, malaria, and schistosomiasis.
Bangladesh, with 76% in rural areas, the international basket case, not out of the grip of extreme poverty but where the fight for survival is gradually being won, with its foot on the first rung of the development ladder.
India, with 72% in rural areas, the center of an export services revolution and where overall economic growth is 6% per year.
China with 61% in rural areas, where economic development is speeding ahead at full throttle, economic growth is above 8% pa and annual income has surpassed $4,000 per capita.
If economic development is a ladder there are roughly one billion who live as the Malawians; a few rungs up there are 1.5 billion like those in Bangladesh; 2.5 billion another few rungs up like those in India; and still higher up the ladder one billion in the high income world.
The greatest tragedy of our time is that one sixth of humanity is not even on the development ladder, trapped by extreme poverty, disease, physical isolation, climate stress, environmental degradation.
Even though life-saving solutions exist to increase their chances for survival, these families and their governments simply lack the financial means to make these crucial investments.
Our generation’s challenge
Our generation’s challenge is to help the poorest of the poor to escape the misery of extreme poverty so that they may begin their own ascent up the ladder of economic development.
When I speak of the ‘end of poverty’ I speak of two closely related objectives. The first is to end the plight of one sixth of humanity that lives in extreme poverty and struggles daily for survival. Everybody on Earth can and should enjoy basic standards of nutrition, health, water and sanitation, shelter, and other minimum needs for survival, well-being, and participation in society.
The second is to ensure that all of the world’s poor, including those in moderate poverty, have a chance to climb the ladder of development. As a global society, we should ensure that the international rules of the game in economic management do not advertently or inadvertently set snares along the lower rungs of the ladder in the form of inadequate development assistance, protectionist trade barriers, destabilizing global financial practices, poorly designed rules for intellectual property, and the like, that prevent the low-income world from climbing up the rungs of development.
These, then, are the economic possibilities of our time: To meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015; To end extreme poverty by 2025; To ensure well before 2025 that all of the world’s poor countries can make reliable progress up the ladder of economic development; To accomplish all of this with modest financial help from the rich countries, more than is now provided, but within the bounds of what they have promised.
To meet these challenges, we first have to understand how we got to where we are, for in that understanding we will also find the way forward.