The cost of fixing things.

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

Back in the 80s, I  went to a presentation on world poverty being run by a group called The Hunger Project.

One of the arguments being discussed was that poverty was not inevitable. we had , after all, put a man on the moon - so could we not end poverty on Planet Earth?

Think of the cost of giving every child on Earth a decent home with running water, with proper sanitation, and then giving all those children a primary education and then an adequate diet. the cost would run into astronomical figures.

I was actually shown the figure on a screen - a huge number with a whole string of noughts on the end.
" And yet, " the speaker told us " this is what the UK spends every year on chocolate and sweets, its what Europeans spend every month on alcohol, and it's what the USA spends every day on armaments."

Wow!

A more recent figure put it at three trillion US dollars. A trillion = 1,000,000,000,000.  It's a thousand billions, and a billion is a thousand millions. That is a lot of money - and yet, I wonder  how much that would come to in terms of government spending? Is it an accurate estimate even? It must be added that the money needs to be spent wisely and not funnelled off by corrupt dictators - but what would the cost be of eliminating endemic poverty , and could the world actually raise that amount?

Comments

[sgiffy.livejournal.com]

I am not sure you can eliminate poverty anymore than you can eliminate shortness. Both a relative terms. There will always be people who are shorter than others and there will always be people with less money than others.

Nor really can you solve poverty solely with money. For example you can to some extent point to aid programs as having a role in African instability. Well meaning aid comes in, mostly focused on children. As a result you have substantially more kids making it to adulthood were they find there is no way to make a living or the only living they can get involves living in a crowded slum. Thats a recipe for revolution right there.

What you need to do to end poverty is not to just give people money or build them houses and water purifiers but to help them develop functioning economies so they can get those things themselves.

Thats why microcredit programs are so great. They create industry and business.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Well, here's how I see the issue: there will always be people who have less and have more, this is true. However, we can see easily how *what* constitutes less and more can easily be changed. Look at the state of say, the working poor in the U.S. compared to the working poor in say, Ethiopia.

In the U.S. our standard of living is relatively very high to the rest of the world. it's a great example that even though you'll never change the fact that there will always be people who are relatively poor, and relatively rich, you can change those baselines. That being said, even the U.S. has quite a ways to go, but we *can* make it so being very poor does not mean risk of starvation nor lack of shelter or access to at least some sort of baseline health.