So is the Common Error that people think there are are causes of poverty or that people attempt causation games to blame poor people for being poor?

How’s this for the cause of poverty?  A person needs food and shelter and rather than the one who has giving it to them, they say “First you must pay.” Really, what’s it to you if you give someone food who has none or you let someone live under the roof with you?  Powerful stuff sharing is.  Don’t we learn that from our parents?

People fall into the trap of thinking that the wealth of some causes the poverty in others, as if there were a fixed amount of wealth in the world and that rich people had seized too large a share of it.

I read a study somewhere that posited that if you took all the wealth that existed and divided it equally between the entire world population, within 5 years the distribution would be right back where it was when you started.

the snarkster

GUNS, GERMS, and STEEL by Jared Diamond, as well as his more recent COLLAPSE, provide insignt from 11,000 BC forward to reasons for the way things are.  Worth the time to read - even if one might choose to qubble over the occasional point.  Poverty is a natural state, however.  That is not to say it cannot be improved or overcome, but the realities of the world are the same.  ..."the poor you have with you always” is not an excuse to do nothing, but a statement of the nature of reality, and the opportunity to intervene as we are able and should.  A duty which never shall go away in this life.

[1] Saint Dumb Ox,

With all due respect, the common error is that of believing that economic activity is a zero-sum exercise—"…the trap of thinking that the wealth of some causes the poverty in others, as if there were a fixed amount of wealth in the world….” This is an utterly false assumption which immediately leads the uncritical listener to other even more pernicious errors, one of which, for someone suffering misfortune, is to fall into hopelessness. One of the most unfortunate aspects of this error is that the message that life is, economically speaking, a zero-sum exercise, is continually reiterated, either explicitly or implicitly by the great majority in both elective politics and the media. To paraphrase a well-known German of the 20th century, commenting about the (historically demonstrable) effect of this continual reinforcement: if you tell people something often enough, they will eventually come to believe it, even if it is completely untrue.

Blessings and regards,
Martial Artist

Poverty (as well as social injustice) will be eliminated from earth when Jesus Christ returns to begin his reign.  In the meantime, we are commanded by our Lord to be generous and charitable to the poor.  See, e.g., Matthew 5:42, Matthew 25:31-46, Mark 10:21, and Luke 14:13.  This is not the same thing as engineering the redistribution of wealth through political means, which, as far as I can see, has no Scriptural warrant whatsoever.

We have wealth and a high standard of living in this country because wealth has been created here, and not because it has been taken from others and given to us instead.

Piedmont - I seriously doubt they would want me on the committee.  My recipe for a fix would begin by a return to fulfilling the Great Commission.  Making disciples of Jesus Christ.  I mean that in every sense of the word.  All too often the problem is that even orthodox churches that teach God’s Word do not follow through and shepherd the new converts.  When people are truly shown the path Christ would have them take, it is Christ that will convict their hearts and open their pocketbooks.  Remember the saying “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” And how much more filling is God’s Word than mere food.  The trick here will be to make sure they are teaching God’s Word and not man’s opinion.

The whole point of the essay is that instead of studying poor people to determine why they are poor, we ought to study the rich, to find out why they are wealthy.

This is especially true for societies. It is not great secret why Zimbabwe is poor. In 1973 the per capita GDP of Zimbabwe was $573. The per capita GDP of South Korea was $403. In 2005 the per capita GDP of Zimbabwe was @59 and falling. The per capita GDP of South Korea was $16,309.

Both countries possess well educated work forces and minimal natural resources. Why is one a slow motion tragedy and the other a success? Is the South Korean model exportable?

This will sound odd, but I’d rather there were a lot more of American style poverty worldwide and less of the Haitian variety. In the West, the poor rarely miss meals and do receive health care. They are offered educational opportunities. In the Sudan they are starved, beaten, killed or enslaved.

We need less Sudans and more Gary, Indianas.

Celebrate Easter the Episcopalian way: Grill some burgers!

You can believe that there are “causes of poverty” without believing that wealth is a zero sum game, just as you can believe that there are “causes of disease” without believing that health is a zero sum game.  And you can argue that death is the “rest state” to which we are all tending, without saying that asking “what are the causes of disease and death” is a backwords question.

Assuming that poor people are not lying on their backs watching the clouds all day, assuming that most of them are actually breaking their backs day in and day out, the question is “what are the conditions that allow some people to turn hard work into wealth and what are the conditions that prevent others from turning equally hard or harder work into anything more that subsistence suvival.” And studying “the causes of poverty” is no more a stupid way of trying to answer that question than studying the “causes of wealth.”

Yikes, the @59, should be $259! Mea culpa.

Celebrate Easter the Episcopalian way: Grill some burgers!

Assuming that poor people are not lying on their backs watching the clouds all day, assuming that most of them are actually breaking their backs day in and day out,

Mousestalker’s point is well taken here.  There is a big difference between the poor who are truly out there working day in and day out in America and in Rwanda.  What we call poor here is vastly different from what poor is in other parts of the world.  In America those that are willing to do the back breaking labor have an opportunity to get ahead.  The accounts of such success stories are countless.  Of course, not all succeed, but their poverty does not compare to that in third world countries.  Even our homeless lead better lives because there are places for them to go - and often due to the generosity of others who have had their eyes opened to Christ.

Wealth is producing more than you spend.  There are only three ways to get wealth, 1.  Given to you such as inheritance or gifts, 2.  Steal it and this can be by the state for redistribution or by thugs.  3.  Work and earn it.  We must invest either capital, sweat, or smarts to make money and not have character defects that dissapate or destroy it.  Wealth grows usually where there is justice and freedom.  Unfortunately we have to live with what we vote for.

OH and one other thing.  Nothing if free.  Someone worked for it.  IMHO

Exactly, PM!  There is a problem with people who drive new cars and have cell phones who call themselves poor or accept government assistance.

Assuming that poor people are not lying on their backs watching the clouds all day, assuming that most of them are actually breaking their backs day in and day out,

Mousestalker’s point is well taken here.

Uh...that was my point. I think Mousestalker’s point was quite different.

Martial Artist,

I was simply making a point that this essay seems a round about way of blaming the poor for being poor.  Only the mentally ill have some excuse for not knowing any better.  Yet non-mentally ill poor people exist and in large numbers.  My conclusion is that the rich either don’t know or care about the poor. 

I have a hard time thinking of some tribe in the Amazon as “poor” just because they don’t have internet access or a paved street to drive their SUV on.  The standard of living in the USA and most “developed” countries is so far gone in luxury that it makes it very difficult have a proper frame of reference. 

I just think it’s a bad idea to blame poor people for being poor.  That doesn’t help anybody.

#15, please disillusion yourself about the ‘noble savage’ and how idyllic their lives are. Hunter-gatherer cultures live rather close to the edge of survival as they have few means of food preservation. Health care is minimal so they have poor rates of infant mortality. The overall population appears healthy simply because illness or injury are so devastating as to be mostly fatal. Nutrition is typically problematic.

There are very good reasons why, when given the opportunity, people flee the rural paradises for the urban hellholes.

The emphasis in the article is on the problem of the third world poor. The developed nations poor constitute a whole other set of issues. Telling a schizophrenic to get a job is not likely to correct his underlying cause of poverty, for example.

Celebrate Easter the Episcopalian way: Grill some burgers!

Hmmm...I’ve been studying Jackie’s posts and I’ve come to the conclusion that her #11 was a comment on how she thought Mousestalker’s viewpoint would apply to my comment.  So she wasn’t confused after all.  But now I am.

I will tell you one thing however.  Though the common view is that Catholicism is rife with superstition, I was raised with far less garden variety superstition then the average totally secular person. 

Basically I have (almost) zero superstitions about anything.  I don’t believe in “jinxs” or wearing your “winning” socks or anything else. 

But I do have one very powerful superstition placed in me by my sainted mom.  Whenever any of us made an offhand remark about anybody else’s condition ("if I were a person in X situation I certainly wouldn’t be doing Y like that fool Z is doing") my mother used to tell us that if we said something like that outloud we might wake up the next day to find that God had arranged to put us in X Condition just to see what we’d actually do. 

Hence I am extremely nervous about criticizing people who survive by picking garbage out of the dump in Brazil, for example, due to a basic terror that I’m going to wake up tomorrow and find myself picking garbage out of a dump.

Naturally being a deserving entrepreneurial American I’d immediately start a small business of some sort and in no time at all I would be prosperous and have brought employment to several hundred other people as well, but just thinking of those few days I might have to spend on the garbage dump in the blazing heat makes me very nervous about commenting on this topic, even anonymously on the internet (believing as I do that God knows my email address.)

Only the mentally ill have some excuse for not knowing better.

The poorly educated also have an excuse for not knowing better. If you are forced to go to a lousy school, if you live in a community where nobody seems to have picked up job skills or other coping skills, how would you know what else to do?

A non-profit (in Texas, I think) won an award for their work in introducing poor people to savings banks.  Many of them were immigrants or came from several-generation-welfare families, and assumed that banks were only for the rich. Therefore, they took their own paychecks and entitlement checks to check cashing agencies that charged them an arm and a leg.  The non-profit gave classes on using savings banks, so that their students could not only save the 20-30% they had been paying the check cashing agencies, but also learned about interest bearing savings accounts, low-income mortgages, etc.

Take a look at the real loans that the US and others have made to African nations and tell me it’s their fault for being poor.  They make quite a bit of money but it all goes to pay back their oh-so-charitable loans.  So they work, not for the betterment of their own country, but for the betterment of ours. 

Yes, Mousetalker, the noble savage does exist.  Like so many things in this world, money is used to dominate...it doesn’t really take guns anymore.  Heck, it never really did, they’re just more expedient.

I like the US and all that and we have great ideals for helping people (we do a decent job most of the the time), but we are fixated on making money having things. The US should be making more gifts and not loans.  It’s preditory lending.

...without believing that health is a zero sum game.

Catholic Mom: I believe that it is, actually.  At least I’ve never had any 200-year-old man tell me differently.

Nothing is free.  Someone worked for it.

PROPHET MICAIAH:  Truer words have NEVER been spoken.

Have A Burger Today, So Tahiti Can Sleep Easier Tonight!

Saint Dumb Ox, I may be wrong but my sources say that by and large the loans to third world countries and even more prosperous countries by and large not paid off at all or greatly discounted.  Money sent to those countries generally does not reach the people but goes into the pockets of the corrupt leaders.  To top it off, now many foundations are scared to send money to those countries lest they undergo severe scrutinity lest they be laundring money to the terrorist.

A famous South American economist recently studied why Western Style democracies imposed on countries in South America over the last thirty years or so was not improving their standard of living.  In fact, once they enjoyed the freedoms that we have, and some even adopted the DOLLAR as their currency, their standards of living began to fall quickly.

He hit upon two keys to creating and sustaining wealth in these developing democracies:
1.  Property Laws plus enforcement--to define the nature of the human relationships to what they own, and to protect the rights of the new owners.  Most all of the countries studied either had no history of property ownership and protection as we know it, or had no enforcement mechanism for the laws on the books.

2.  Capital access based on property ownership--#1 severly constrained access to capital for these developing nations and their entrepreneurs, killing their economic growth before it had a chance to leave the ground.

So essentially, one of the things that we take completely for granted but has drastically contributed to our ability to overcome poverty and build multi-generational wealth is our system of property laws and the enforcement mechanisms that underlie them.

Turns out of all things American, this (although inheritied mostly from the English) turned out to be the hardest thing to reproduce.

KTF!....mrb

Slightly off-topic, but how many lives did The Stations of the MDG’s save? How many children were fed? How much medicine was delivered to sick people through out the world?

#19, I’m not an America basher, but neither am I blind as to what is going on.

You mention the debt burden upon the Third World. I’m afraid that is more a result of the lender’s noble intentions and the borrowers’ evil ones. Taking the Congo, formerly Zaire, as an example, very little of the loan money wound up being spent upon the projects it was designated for. Even less benefitted the nation. The great bulk of the grants, loan and other aid was diverted by Mobutu and his cronies into their bank accounts.

The money was borrowed and was spent. Now what is to be done about it? You seem to be arguing that the people of a nation have no responsibility for their government and so do not deserve to be burdened with the debt.

As far as the noble savage. Have you ever asked the people involved? Worldwide, their actions speak far louder than your ivory tower hypothesizing.

Furthermore, how does allowing the hungry to starve, the naked to freeze, the sick to die, and the imprisoned to languish square up with the Gospel? When I charge the revisionists with abandonment, I not only mean the bits that are precious to me, the articles of faith, of theory of theology, I also mean the bits that are practical and hard, the Good Works that are required of us.

Cultural relativism is a stalking horse used to disguise and justify inaction. We must always be active within this world, and part of that is bringing the Good News to those who are ignorant of it, but part and parcel of it is improving the lives of the poor and the afflicted.

Instead of waxing giddy over the lives of Amazonian rain forest dwellers, take a look at their actual lives. At the rate of infant mortality, for example, and using simple, basic common sense, ask yourself if the mothers of the children that died are happier because of the death of the same? If those people enjoy seeing the elders die whenever food runs scarce?

Say what you will about there being too many televisions or expensive sneakers, but if the price of saving childrens’ lives is having the ‘Pussycat Dolls’ on the tube, then that is a price worth paying. No one is forcing us to watch the idiot box, you see.

Wealth is a good thing. It is especially good when it comes to those who have not had it before, have not had the opportunity to earn it and are now able to earn it. Oddly enough, when that happens, most people chose to to avail themselves of that opportunity.

We must never worship mammon, but to refuse to use it wisely is to fall into sin every bit as much as to wallow in it.

/rant

Celebrate Easter the Episcopalian way: Grill some burgers!

#18, the interesting thing about western style poverty is that it can really only be understood on a case by case basis. Sweeping generalizations just are not possible. In my city the truly destitute are often drug abusers, alcoholics, too ill, old or feeble to work, mentally ill, retarded or just plain lazy. There are very few who are just unfortunate and unable to find work.

No one program will ever address even a majority of the poor’s problems. By comparison, Haiti is simple. The causes of Haiti’s problems are not simple, but since poverty is almost universal there, there are a number of approaches that could yield enormous benefits rather swiftly.

Again, with countries such as Haiti, while we need to be cognizant of the past (Edward Luttwak’s book ”Coup d’Etat” has much useful information about what has happened there), I think in deciding what is to be done, we need to focus upon the approaches taken by the nouveau-riche nations of the world.

Celebrate Easter the Episcopalian way: Grill some burgers!

One unexpected approach--Iraqi prisoners at US military prisons in Iraq are asking to be allowed to stay past the end of their sentence so that they can complete their studies.  (Our military is providing prisoners with vocational training; it is unclear whether such training is available elsewhere in Iraq). 
http://www.metimes.com/Politics/2008/03/23/iraqi_detainees_refusing_to_go_home_us_general/afp/

The basis of this article is very good and solid as a rock, however it is also very simplistic.

We are called to love mercy and do justly—sometimes a poor nation does produce something, but interests in the wealthy nations opposite—most agriculture fits here, it could be our cotton farmers or European wheat or dairy, but free trade is a issue that we will protect our own. Sometimes they produce a crop we don’t want such as like cocaine. It is a catch 22 in some cases where items produces in a poor nation also have poor labor laws and we don’t want to support sweat shops. Other times powerful nations fight proxy wars in the smaller nations which lead to instability or continue to funnel arms for resources (DR Congo the UN is finding an increasing number of Chinese made AK-47, it is known that China is seeking tin {most Chinese foreign aid seems resource based}). 

I think mercy ministry is easier than justice ministry. We’re the Church, so we have commands about this stuff so the sacrifice of our time to serve in a jobs ministry or as a mentor verses a soap kitchen makes sense to us. Hopefully republics reflect the electorate’s values, but still they basically secular. A mercy ministry is more quantifiable. Also if a child we invested in ends up not succeeding we know they were loved and it was not a waste of time. Governments can’t love people they are entities, so success is based on tangible results which often will push from justice to mercy approach that this article points out does not solve the problem.

At the core I think it’s a good piece, but I think some very errant conclusions can be made or demands on us ignored if the complexities are not considered.

#19

There’s no point in making either loans or gifts to most of the wretchedly poor African countries because it only reinforces their culture of dependence and the money goes into the pockets of the ruling kleptocrats.

[23] texex,

The answer to date appears to be a big, fat ZERO. Of course, if the goals could be achieved (and about how they might be, no one in authority seems to be talking), then they might save a lot of them. The more crucial question is “how many lives will be saved by TEC devoting its contribution to lobbying the U.S. government to make more of those wonderful (but thoroughly unproductive) development loans, in hopes that the loaned dollars will stimulate progress toward the goals?” The answer to that question will likely approximate, at least effectively, my answer to your original question.

As to comment [22] by Mike Bertaut, I believe the economist in question is Alvaro Vargas Llosa (dual citizenship in Spain and Peru, the son of the writer Mario Vargas Llosa). Llosa has very clearly demonstrated, as Mike Bertaut stated, the importance of strong property rights and access to capital, as well as the importance of a strong rule of law.

(Note to those who say we need to study what makes prosperous people and societies: it has largely already been done starting in 1776.) Although it can be argued that the above conditions taken by themselves may not be sufficient to enable prosperity for a nation, it is abundantly clear at this point that the absence of them will ensure the absence of prosperity.

Blessings and regards,
Martial Artist