Are wealthy countries in anyway responsible to lift poor countries out of poverty?

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Well I currently run a business, I have experience with it, a well managed business can take any qualified employee and plug them in after removing someone else and see no change in productivity. A poorly managed one can’t work even with the best employees.
 
If a CEO is managing hundreds of millions hundreds of thousand doesn’t seem excessive, especially if they have to live in a high income region. If they didn’t they would spend as much to travel there.

No we are not required to build the infrastruction in other countries. What rich countries had done in the past is invade and occupy and exploit countries. Steal thier diamonds and land. England being the most guilty example. The claimed 3/5 of land at one point. Some countries have been returned to the people and others haven’t.

A minimum wage less than $15 or $8 does not make a country poor. What makes a country poor is the inability to live in that minimum wage. For instance making $10 a day is fine if it costs $2 to eat and $4 on shelter and $4 for everything else. In rich countries people may not be able to live in the minimum or average wage. If you look at poor countries you will see an incredible wealth gap within that country. Look at Haiti. It really has nothing to do with the income of a person in the US as to why a Haitian is poor. It has to do with the income distraction within Haiti. They burnt all their trees and land ownership issues are the main problems. How odd they turned out so different from DR, sharing the same island.

Wealthy countries are generous. Both gov and people within them. When you give to food for the poor you are paying to distribute US grain, etc to a poor place. Which is fine if they need grain. Some helping is hurting. Sending clothes for instance might throw off some poor person trying to make and sell clothes locally. Some our helping is hurting. We need to be smarter.
 
There is really no point in arguing, because we are looking at it through two different lenses. You are an employer, and you look at business that way, from the top down. I am an employee, and I see what happens from the bottom up.

The fact is, ideally, both the employers and the employees would be contributing. I think we can agree on that.
 
Because other people may benefit from seeing a wrong idea shot down and corrected.
 
whyeyeman said:
As great as charity is, it will never increase the wealth of a nation significantly. The only way to do this is if the poor country becomes more economically developed. Hence, trade is better than aid in the long term.
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A Chinese proverb came to mind after reading that: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Should we give to the poor? Yes, but more than that, what can we actually DO that will give them more benefit. Perhaps, teaching them how to care better for themselves is a more beneficial long-term goal.

Not sure we should be leaving philanthropy to any secular nation, though. Things are usually mismanaged…
 
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Are wealthy countries in anyway responsible to lift poor countries out of poverty?

No. Of course not.

Now there may be some obligation to help them meet their basic needs in a limited way. But even that’s open to scrutiny. For example, if there is a group of starving folks living in a desert, are you really helping them by dropping off food and water? Or are you just perpetuating the cycle of “starving people living in a desert”?

Where is the line between “being your brother’s keeper” versus “throwing pearls before swine”?
 
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Reading this makes me realize what a truly “poor” country I live in (the U.S.)…cringe worthy on so many levels that counting the ways would be an exercise in Christian futility.
 
DENNYINMI said:
Reading this makes me realize what a truly “poor” country I live in (the U.S.)…cringe worthy on so many levels that counting the ways would be an exercise in Christian futility.
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It’s just the hard truth. As economists say, wants are nearly unlimited, means are very limited.

When being charitable, you have to rate the recipients of your charity on the “Brother-to-Swine” scale.

The bible teaches both. *shrug
 
CAF has a lot of well meaning people who don’t have much grounding in the realities of what it takes to truly end poverty instead of just perpetuating a cycle of comfortable poverty.

Abject poverty is mans default state. Anything above scratching a living out of the dirt is a miracle of human ingenuity.
 
Until this gets taken care of—


how can we improve this—

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That is also how it is done in many other countries. Switzerland is an example that has 1st rate health care.
 
JanSobieskiIII said:
CAF has a lot of well meaning people who don’t have much grounding in the realities of what it takes to truly end poverty instead of just perpetuating a cycle of comfortable poverty.
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I agree. Many people here have their hearts in the right place, but have no real understanding of what it takes to run a business, or the impacts of tax rates on behaviors, etc.

To the OP, unfortunately, some countries can only be lifted out of poverty by getting rid of their leaders…there is absolutely nothing a “rich” country can do. Venezuela is a good example.
 
But again, there’s a compounding difficulty when you get to populations the size we have in the US. There’s a huge difference between the 8 million people of Israel/Switzerland and the 325 million in the US.

We also have 50 different governments just at the state level, not one overarching central authority (thank God) managing social programs.
 
I think in terms of looking out for one’s neighbors, we should be concerned with how those in poorer parts of the world are getting by. How we do that is hard to say. Investing in education, fighting hunger, and dealing with major health issues seems to be a good start. If you deal with those, people can start pulling themselves out of poverty rather than basically being enslaved to the horrible conditions it creates.

Also, I’m not sure, but investing in manufacturing might help. After all, all the developed countries now had to go through an industrialization period that boosted their own economies. Unfortunately, I’m not sure companies like Apple or Ford are investing with an intent to help these countries so much as reduce their own costs, which can lead to all sorts of problems.
JanSobieskiIII said:
When you compare these two maps, the first being a measure of wealth and the second being average IQ, it’s hard not to see a correlation between the 2. People with better reasoning skills make better economic choices.
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As someone who has been in a developing country, there’s a couple things to note:
  1. A lot of people in these countries have no access to education and are completely illiterate. As such, they are less likely to develop the skills used to judge reasoning ability. (This has absolutely nothing to do with what one knows. Reasoning skills can be developed, and those of us in developed countries sort of take it for granted.)
  2. Even those with access to education may not be receiving as high quality an education as those in the U.S. or Europe. They may know a lot and could easily pass a knowledge exam in the U.S., but the actual reasoning skills aren’t as well developed.
Despite these setbacks, I’ve seen first hand that if you give them access to an environment where they can develop these skills, they’re more than capable of developing and applying them. So I’m not inclined to believe that poverty is the result of differing IQ levels so much as a cause.

Edit: Obviously not saying that those in developing countries are currently dumb, just not given the same opportunity to reach their potential as someone in a more well-developed country is.
 
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I’ve also spent a lot of time in poorer countries, and I’m not by any means saying these people are dumb. They’re at about the same place most western countries were a few hundred years ago. Their main problem is they keep putting in power people that harm themselves.

Take South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe for example. Both used to be extremely well developed countries. Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa and most of the blacks there were literate. When Mugabe took power he was handed a country that was very developed and he ran it into the ground. Same with South Africa.
 
No,sorry personally I can’t agree that there is any justification for it.
I believe there will always be disparities regarding wages with some people earning more that others according to skill level -but these sort of incomes mentioned there is no justification for.

I run my own business and I have never run a corporation (ie:how some of these certain charities are run) but even if I got a Masters in eg:public policy and applied for a job to run a charity I could never accept or be ok with such a wage (even if I considered myself as being highly skilled and of great value).
It can leave a poor impression and sense of hypocrisy for a company to state they are trying to help children in poverty whilst at the same time paying their executive board exorbitant wages.

I am afraid it just comes down to greed.
 
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And statistically, bad employees maintain their employment and are swept along in the company current because there are others that can account for their work due to having a sheer numbers advantage at a far higher number than CEOs.

I have no issue making every salary or wage performance based, but that will hurt a lot more people than it helps, I suspect, at least in the short term.

The bottom line is if a company or organizations is successful, a quality CEO is almost certainly more indispensable than even the best of the thousands of workers employed there. Again, based on sheer numbers, their skills are nearly as rare, and the company’s success and ability to employ others isn’t nearly as dependent on them as it is the CEO.

We can have a discussion about just salaries without hyperbolic nonsense being thrown around like CEOs are important to a company’s success. Ask Kodak, or any of these companies.


Schwartz’s promotion to CEO in April 2006 was followed by a long series of losses. Despite its strong position, Sun started to fall apart as it lost market share in its main server business to HP and IBM. The company’s shares fell from almost $27 to under $4 from late in 2007 to late 2008; Sun also later fired nearly 6,000 people, or about 18% of its employees.
 
The hard truth is the Catholic Church was way ahead of her time with exhortations and encyclicals on the pitfalls of “unregulated” capitalism and it’s dire pitfalls, ruthless practices of land owners and employers well over 100 years ago. IT was laid out beautifully in Rerum Novarum in 1891, and re-iterated by Saint John Paul in Centesimus Annus 100 years later, and is being regurgitated once again with Pope Frances. Ciao’
 
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