How to eliminate 99% of all poverty

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I have traveled quite a bit in Mexico and Central America. Jarring poverty. Unbelievable living conditions by our standards. Yet, and yet, the vast majority of those poor folks are entirely happy if there is enough beans and maybe some rice. Life is good. They are thankful to God - not for what they lack - but for what they have!

What the heck is wrong with us in the west?
 
According to past sources, including UN HDR reports, the richest 200 people in the world have more wealth than the bottom third of the world population. If they were to give up a fraction of their wealth (maybe 10 pct?), the amount will be enough to provide for basic needs (including universal education) for everyone on earth.

How small is that amount for the 200 richest? All of them do not spend more than just a couple of million dollars a year for personal needs and entertainment, and their wealth easily goes up by the same fraction every year or so due to financial speculation.
 
Finish school, don’t have kids as a teenager and get a job has now become “claptrap”? Clearly the first rule mentioned above needs to be followed in some cases.
 
It’s common sense stuff really - yet humans, time and again, travel down the wide road. The wide road leads to destruction. And the power of faith to help one overcome their trails is essential.
 
Marriage first, then children. Stay married if you get married, especially with children. People with extended family who can help with childcare fare especially well, I think.
 
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Highlights from the article—
The “success sequence” began with Isabel V. Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, who found that meeting a few criteria greatly reduced the likelihood of a family living in poverty: finish high school, work full time, wait until age 21 to get married, and do not have children outside wedlock.
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The Fraser Institute applied these tests and concluded they hold just as true in Canada. The report “The Causes of Poverty,” which was released on Tuesday, found that less than one percent of Canadians who graduated high school, worked full time, and waited until marriage live in poverty.

Specifically, their poverty rate is 0.9 percent.

The poverty rate in a home where at least one person works full time is just 1.7 percent.

The poverty level for all Canadian families is 3.5 percent, but 12 percent of single-parent households led by females live in poverty, as do 14 percent of homes where no one works full time.
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Since its conditions are still normative, few people must deal with the consequences. Only 1.4 percent of Americans in 2007 did not meet a single one of these benchmarks. But they account for 76 percent of the poor and 17 percent of the lower middle class.
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Sarlo noted the difference marriage makes in his new study. In the U.S., more single mothers than married mothers are working outside the home. However, more than one-in-four single mothers – and nearly one-third of single mothers with children under six – are unemployed. In a single-parent home, that means zero earned income.

Single mothers earn $20,000 a year less than the U.S. median income, often because they must seek flexible work to tend to home emergencies. There is simply less time and energy to go around when all the responsibilities fall on two, rather than four, shoulders.
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angel12 said:
Like no one who finishes school, doesn’t have kids as a teenager, and gets a job lives in poverty. :roll_eyes:
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Not no one, certainly, but I’d bet they’re dramatically less likely to end up in poverty.
 
There is nothing wrong with us in the west. Our people are better educated. They realize there is more to a good life that beans and rice.
If you believe the folks in the poor countries you toured are happy, perhaps you should move there. Those folks are not happy. They just do not understand that they are missing. That is why many try to get to America.
 
YourNameHere said:
There is nothing wrong with us in the west. Our people are better educated. They realize there is more to a good life that beans and rice.
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The problem is that the “more” we seek in the West in the quest for a good life usually means either sexual novelty or more consumer garbage we don’t really need. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either sex or material goods, but too many people in the West think if they just had this or that they’d really be happy and fulfilled. Then it doesn’t happen and so they need to acquire something else and it just becomes this cycle of consumption and disappointment.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying there’s nothing wrong with having the newest iPhone, but too many people think stuff like that is actually the key to happiness and fulfillment.
 
But we do insist on having countless newest i-phones. Don’t we.
 
I was not referring to excess in the west. Yes, some people think that having the latest IPhone is the thing. What I was referring to is that people in the west want more than just a plate of beans and rice. The person I answered seem to think that the people in impoverished are happy. And that simply is not the case.
 
ralfyman said:
According to past sources, including UN HDR reports, the richest 200 people in the world have more wealth than the bottom third of the world population. If they were to give up a fraction of their wealth (maybe 10 pct?), the amount will be enough to provide for basic needs (including universal education) for everyone on earth.
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I understand where you are coming from, yet money is not static, or held in a vacuum. If billionaires stuck there money in a whole in the ground by all means what a waste. But they dont. They invest it, put it in banks, provide capital for businesses to start up or for people to buy homes. They buy a yacht and provide jobs for yacht builders… They buy fancy cars, .giving jobs to fancy car makers etc.,etc.,etc. They donate millions for hospitals, libraries, universities, public radio and television, support inventors etc.,etc…

Get the picture?..I think the world needs rich people. They are a “resource” to be managed wisely.
 
A recent book takes a more extensive view of the matter, emphasizing the role of asset building.

“He starts from the premise that the role of assets and asset-building has been vastly undervalued in the development of public policy on poverty and addressing the needs of the most vulnerable in society. His central argument, therefore, is that poverty “must be conceived more broadly in terms of both insufficient income and deficient assets.”

Here is a review:

https://acton.org/publications/tran...book-review-rethinking-poverty-james-p-bailey
 
po18guy said:
What the heck is wrong with us in the west?
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A capitalist system promotes competition. When said capitalist system is thriving, competition tends to increase and involves competing over non-essential things, to keep up with or exceed the “Jones’s.”

This is the set of living arrangements that we are born into in the west. It is ingrained into our existence. Breaking outside of the mold most likely includes ostracizing oneself from the majority of society, which is probably the majority of one’s friends and acquaintances. This rarely appears to be an intriguing proposition, unless it can be done with a group of like-minded individuals.
 
laylow said:
competition tends to increase and involves competing over non-essential things, to keep up with or exceed the “Jones’s.”
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It’s interesting that you say that. I always thought it had much more to do with greed/gluttony than envy. You’re right however that many many people buy things just to out do others.

It’s quite sad.
 
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