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

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

The key distinction is that responsibility carries no moral judgment. The circumstances that land you in poverty may or may not be the result of your own actions and choices however they always influence your current state and more importantly, regardless of how you got to where you are today no one else besides you (either as an individual or an aggregate nation) can choose what actions you choose from here and you can choose actions which perpetuate your current state or actions which change them, and while your choices are always limited by the reality of the situation you are in there are always choices available which can move you in the direction you wish to go.

Again, you talk from a position of structural privilege, and when structural privilege doesn't even exist for a certain amount of people, historical/political change makes it much harder to instigate, and it will be at the cost of many lives, as well as possible failure.

In other words a free market
There is no proof that a free market negates poverty, no matter how you imply the interpretation of this term.

Absolutely not. Structures which relieve poverty are wonderful. The problem is what you are advocating has never in the history of man been shown to relieve poverty.

Some of the countries in the world with the least poverty have had such structures in place for decades.

Gee, you must really be a racist. I mean your attitude boils down to "Those poor dumb (insert nationality here), they could never make a stable wealthy culture without our help"

This ignorant remark seems to indicate that you think I mean a certain "race" or "culture" is inherently less capable of becoming wealthy than another, which is not the case.

There are many factors which contribute to why a region or nation is not wealthy and suffers from poverty or extreme poverty, and you haven't addressed many of them in your "estimation" of what to (not) do. Exploitation by more powerful nations or corruption within the system are only two among many. Pure luck when it comes to natural resources and natural disasters are two, historical factors is yet another (a very important one, often neglected by many, as if things happened without a reason) and the willingness to exploit other cultures is yet another prominent factor.