5 ms·

One neat trick to end extreme poverty

65 points by andsoitis 7mo ago

https://archive.is/BnBFT https://archive.is/BnBFT

marojejian 7mo ago
archive: https://archive.is/BnBFT https://archive.is/BnBFT paper cited: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34583 https://www.nber.org/papers/w34583 >it would cost $318bn a year to reduce the global poverty rate to 1% at the $2.15-a-day line—roughly 0.3% of global GDP— with imperfect, real-world information. >around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty. While in reality I'm sure this would be much harder than the article suggests, I buy the direction of the key points: 1) it costs a feasible amount, 2) there is strong support to do it. 3) creative approaches might be effective. Note: I kept the title I found in the print Economist version, since it is more informative.
- datadrivenangel 7mo ago
  The challenge is distributional. Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful, so at a certain point more money does not result in less poverty. But also we need to do more for ending poverty!
  - WillAdams 7mo ago
    That is why organizations such as Heifer International: https://www.heifer.org/ https://www.heifer.org/ which focus on providing folks with the means to raise their own food and be self-sufficient are the key.
  - darth_avocado 7mo ago
    > Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful It’s not even that malicious, bureaucracy takes over and more money is spent on the middle men than the recipients. In the US we already spend about $600B in charitable giving, yet most of the problems still remain. Even if you fix the distributional challenge, the second order effects of how the modern economy is setup ensure that extreme poverty will always exist. If the poverty line is $10k and you give every single person $10k, the corporations and rent seekers will adjust the cost of living so that the new poverty line is now $20K and extreme poverty still exists.
    - WJW 7mo ago
      I think you are overly focused on how things are done in the US, where it is thankfully quite rare to outright starve. In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
      - darth_avocado 7mo ago
        Well yes, I think if you’re talking about war torn countries then yes. But when you talk about stable countries, poverty still exists and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and its impact on distribution is still the same. And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
        philipallstar 7mo ago
        It's less inefficient bureacracy (although it is definitely that) and more culturally-normal corruption.
      - cogman10 7mo ago
        > In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Where in Africa is this common?
        mathgeek 7mo ago
        Best source I could find: https://humanitarianoutcomes.org/AWSR_2025 https://humanitarianoutcomes.org/AWSR_2025
        cogman10 7mo ago
        Yeah, quickly browsing this source it looks like Gaza is the primary location where aid workers are in danger (by a long shot. 181 killed in a year). Followed by Sudan, which is in an active civil war (60 aid workers killed). That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common. The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
  - hakfoo 7mo ago
    I always wondered "what if the Salvation Army had tanks?" If so much of the problems of aid delivery are due to failed, corrupt states, could we be better served by using some of the foreign aid spend to install and maintain governments that at least aren't an impediment to aid delivery? Yes, this would be a neocolonial programme, but one done with slightly less blatantly self-serving intentions than the previous generation of "civilization is mysteriously completely coupled with letting the home country raid your natural resources." But there's also meta-question: assume we're given all the logistical support we need. Are we even delivering the right kind of aid? Aid programmes are often sold to the donor countries as a convenient sink for their agricultural overproduction or scrap merchandise as much as anything else, and meanwhile the locals are begging for tooling to pull themselves up the value chain and increase self-sufficiency rather than just bags of rice and unwanted T-shirts that leave them dependent again in a few months.
- anonym29 7mo ago
  >around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty. If they really were, they already be doing it, and it would be a solved issue. For many folks, it's a lot easier to say 'yes' to a survey about whether you would give your own money to the poor than it is to actually give your own money the poor.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
    When it happens collectively e.g. through taxes, you get somewhat of a middle ground between the survey and giving your own money (directly and visibly). There seems to be some kind of international target of 0.7% of GNI (~GDP) for developmental aid already, which governments often don't meet fully but come close to (e.g. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03714/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...), so the 0.5% would probably be viable in tax form.
- JKCalhoun 7mo ago
  "…around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty." That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    I suspect a percentage of the 40% don't believe it's possible, or believe it would end up being 0.5% of their income to enrich a select few (as has seemed to happen with previous attempts to "save" entire countries).
    - Teever 7mo ago
      Of course, the bigger question is what percent of that 40 actually want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another — be it that they hate the people who are currently poor and can’t envision it happening to them or their community or because they have some weird cognitive defect like the just world fallacy that causes them to believe this is a positive condition for the world to be in. Some people also think that we should spend that money on other stuff that they’re interested in like cool space stuff and just don’t care about poor people and never will.
      - AlexandrB 7mo ago
        Another interesting question is what part of the 60% want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another? Probably the same portion as of the 40%, just the reasons differ.
        tempestn 7mo ago
        If they wanted it to persist, why would they give up a portion of their income to end it? Are you suggesting the 40% is just more honest than the 60?
      - jl6 7mo ago
        Remember it said rich-world respondents, not rich people. There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
- throwup238 7mo ago
  We don’t even have to get creative! Building out infrastructure is enough to get most people out of extreme poverty and it doesn’t have to be sold as aid, it can be sold as expanding markets. Based on stats from IFAD [1]: > There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer. Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further. That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem. [1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-can-feed-the-world_e-pdf https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...
deleted 7mo ago
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oliver236 7mo ago
one neat trick is to end poverty, ok, yea, that makes sense
- inglor_cz 7mo ago
  Hmm. The article says extreme poverty. By now, various forms of large-scale welfare are over 100 years old, so we have a lot of collective experience in what works and what doesn't as much. It seems that there is a big difference between attacking extreme poverty in severely underdeveloped places, which was often quite successful and resulted in economic development, and attacking "standard" poverty of the lowest decile of the population in developed countries, which seems a lot less tractable. My working theory is that in extremely underdeveloped places, most of the population is quite capable of productive work and building a competitive economy, but lacks the know-how, institutions, stability and means to do so. If provided with those, they can kick-start their own future. While in the developed countries, the permanently impoverished subset are the people who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot do the same regardless of the means invested into them. It is quite sobering to know that the most generous social system in the world, in France, spends about a third of the national GDP on social spending, and still has some really bad banlieues and very persistent class conflict. If a third of GDP of a developed country cannot do the job, the problem isn't in the raw amount of money spent, but somewhere else.
  - oliver236 7mo ago
    i think culture can also play a role. there are places in the world (southern italy for example) where people do not want to work, and so live in poverty. same for other places...
someperson 7mo ago
> 1.2bn people escaped penury in those 25 years, bringing the global poverty rate down from 43% to 13% (using today’s poverty line). Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline; red-hot India and Indonesia did much of the rest. It looked as though growth miracles might consign poverty to the past. > poverty is now concentrated in places where growth is harder to achieve, and population size is rising fast. Around seven in ten of the world’s poor are in sub-Saharan Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria alone account for a quarter of the total. If current poverty rates persist, rapid population growth means that these three could be home to more than two-fifths of the world’s poorest by 2050. The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea. Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance to make the growing issues in sub-Saharan Africa more like the success stories in Asia and other parts of Africa. Harder to steal infrastructure. But obviously still possible especially before and during construction, and after during maintenance contracts.
- inetknght 7mo ago
  > Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance When I think of funding Africa, I think of Andrew Millison's video blogs about building a green belt. https://www.youtube.com/@amillison https://www.youtube.com/@amillison
  - CincinnatiMan 7mo ago
    Can you give a summary of his videos?
    - inetknght 7mo ago
      tl;dr: teach people how to regenerate soil health, even in the Sahara (or other inhospitable places); teach people how to grow food while regenerating soil to help fight food insecurity which helps prevent violence
      - 7mo ago
jmyeet 7mo ago
The framing is wild (emphasis added): > The 189 member states of the United Nations set a target to bring the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to half its 1990 level by 2015 ... Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline That's one way to put it. Another way is that China set out to intentionally raise 800M people out of extreme poverty as a decades-long, multi-faceted priority and policy goal of the CCP. According to the World Bank [1]: > China’s approach to poverty reduction has been based on two pillars, according to the report. The first was broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support was initially provided to areas disadvantaged by geography and the lack of opportunities and later to individual households. The report points to a number of lessons for other countries from China’s experience, including the importance of a focus on education, an outward orientation, sustained public investments in infrastructure, and structural policies supportive of competition. Or, as The Economist put it, "economic growth". None of this is new. Another oft-cited example is Brazil's Bolsa Familia [2]. Back to The Economist: > None of this is insurmountable, though. As Alfred Marshall, a founding figure of modern economics, once observed, eradicating poverty is less a quandary for economics than for the “moral and political capabilities of human nature”. That's so weird. We apparently can't blame income and wealth inequality on economics. No, it's a moral and political failure. [1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... [2]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/05/27/br-bolsa-familia https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/05/27/br-bols...
lorenzohess 7mo ago
[flagged]
- permo-w 7mo ago
  the Haber process
- HappyPanacea 7mo ago
  Technology, crediting this to capitalism is just as dumb as blaming every society’s ills on capitalism.
khelavastr 7mo ago
[flagged]
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  I just love this thought process where people think they and their fellow yokels playing militia in the woods can protect themselves against the might of the US Government… The second amendment is not protecting you against an army with tanks, jets, bombs etc
- tempestn 7mo ago
  Do you think carrying a gun gives the child soldier power to change his circumstances? It's a problem of organization and collective action, not lack of arms.
- foltik 7mo ago
  Pssh, who needs clean water and schools, the missing piece in the developing world is clearly a well regulated militia!
davedx 7mo ago
[flagged]
- kelseyfrog 7mo ago
  Trickle down altruism
amazingamazing 7mo ago
The answer is capitalism. Unfortunately in most of Africa corruption prevents it from actually doing its thing properly. I don’t know how anyone can honestly look at India and china and say anything else. Excellent governance is useless without money and most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution. Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- aktenlage 7mo ago
  > most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution I didn't know that "giving capital and opportunity" to people is inherent to capitalism. My understanding of capitalism is, that if people have money, they can "use their own money to further their own life", but capitalists avoid giving money to other people unless the return on investment is greater than 1.
- kamov 7mo ago
  This is an oversimplification, adopting "capitalism" wholesale as a developing nation without guardrails is incredibly risky because foreign capital will just buy out or crush native industries. The way China actually succeeded was by adopting state capitalism and implementing incredibly strong protectionist measures to ensure domestic growth, not by opening the floodgates to a pure free market. > Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website. Not limiting yourself to an ideological bubble is actually a good thing, regardless of what website you're on.
- codeforafrica 7mo ago
  The problem is not that corruption prevents capitalism from working. The problem is that capitalism doesn't prevent corruption. Corruption is enabled because of capitalism, and any measures to curb corruption will also interfere with capitalism. I spoke to a local director of a mineral mine in Tanzania. He told me that all of the profits of the mine go to the chinese owners who invested into the mine. That's capitalism at work. The corruption here is (if any) that local officials who brokered the deal allowed this deal to go through without making sure that at least some of the profits remain in the country. It is not even clear that corruption is the cause here. It may well be that the investors simply demanded that much and the locals thought that that would be the best they could get. In my opinion most of the profits from mining should remain in the country. Those minerals are Tanzanias wealth, that they should use to build up their own country. But capitalism demands that investors make as much profit as possible, disregarding side benefits. So no, capitalism is not the answer.
tehjoker 7mo ago
crazy to see that china is doing most of the poverty reduction and not say hey developing countries, copy china (in the ways that you can, china has a unique advantage in size of domestic market)
- titanomachy 7mo ago
  America and Europe haven’t been willing or able to copy the parts of the Chinese system that have worked well. Why would Nigeria be able to?
  - tehjoker 7mo ago
    Less racism and not part of the imperial core, though the actions of imperialists make it very difficult for other countries.
pstuart 7mo ago
The one neat trick to end extreme poverty is to give women full and equal rights, most importantly, bodily autonomy.
- noIdeaTheSecond 7mo ago
  I do not follow, could you expand please?
  - pstuart 7mo ago
    There's a lot out there if one were to search on the topic, but basically, by allowing women to engage in entrepreneurial endeavors by giving the rights to conduct that work, and, more importantly, not forcing them to be baby-making machines unlocks the potential of half the population. In societies where they are effectively slaves (and breeders), they are not part of the economy and therefore cannot add to it. And then there's just the humanitarian part of it too... https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/3-essential-issues-to-empower-women-and-end-poverty/ https://caribbean.unfpa.org/en/news/empower-rural-women-%E2%80%93-end-hunger-and-poverty-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8293807/
    - codeforafrica 7mo ago
      It's more complicated than that. Here in East Africa women are allowed to work and run businesses. In fact, most of my friends here who run a business are female. The majority of them run small shops selling food, one sells phones and accessories and another works in such a shop that is also female owned. A number of these are also single mothers because their husbands left them, mostly because they were unable to provide for their families. It is not just about the right of women to earn an income, but also about men being under pressure by their peers to be good providers, and being unable to do so. Some women told me they are not even interested in getting married any more. They just want to have some kids and then manage on their own. Either way, only education can change things. Both men and women (boys and girls) need to be educated about better ways and how to cooperate to provide for their families together.
jillesvangurp 7mo ago
It used to be that agriculture was most of our economies. These days it's a relatively small part of the economy. The good news with that is that the burden of making sure the entire planet is well fed is not that high anymore. In the west, the food we throw away could easily feed the rest of the planet. A couple of trillionaires could probably fund most of it. People like Bill Gates actually have done quite a bit on this front, which whatever else you think of the man is quite admirable. However, just giving people money or food isn't a long term solution. Empowering people to earn a living and grow or buy food is a much more structural fix. Mostly it boils down to ending local conflicts and wars. In the eighties, Live Aid was a big campaign against hunger in places like Ethiopia. It's doing somewhat better these days. But it still has a lot of conflict. But, it also has economic growth and that has slowly been pulling people out of poverty there. Another fix is restoring land. There's a big project to stop the Sahara from expanding further south that involves a green wall. It's a successful project where people dig simple U shaped trenches to capture rain water. Instead of flooding away with top soil, the water now stays and turns land back into usable farm land. This project has been running for a few years. The local population seems to get it and is now enthusiastically implementing it all over the place. They can grow food, sell it on local markets, and graze their live stock. The Sahel is also a region where poverty has fueled a lot of conflict over land and resources. So, it's a double success in the sens that it takes away some of the root causes for that kind of conflict.
smarm52 7mo ago
> while wrongly targeting about half of those above it. This is a feature, not a bug. Making payments to those that don't need in exchange for support for those in power is a function of many governments. De Mesquita, B. B., & Smith, A. (2011). The dictator's handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics. Hachette UK.

65 points by andsoitis 7mo ago

https://archive.is/BnBFT https://archive.is/BnBFT

archive: https://archive.is/BnBFT https://archive.is/BnBFT paper cited: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34583 https://www.nber.org/papers/w34583 >it would cost $318bn a year to reduce the global poverty rate to 1% at the $2.15-a-day line—roughly 0.3% of global GDP— with imperfect, real-world information. >around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty. While in reality I'm sure this would be much harder than the article suggests, I buy the direction of the key points: 1) it costs a feasible amount, 2) there is strong support to do it. 3) creative approaches might be effective. Note: I kept the title I found in the print Economist version, since it is more informative.

datadrivenangel 7mo ago
The challenge is distributional. Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful, so at a certain point more money does not result in less poverty. But also we need to do more for ending poverty!
- WillAdams 7mo ago
  That is why organizations such as Heifer International: https://www.heifer.org/ https://www.heifer.org/ which focus on providing folks with the means to raise their own food and be self-sufficient are the key.
- darth_avocado 7mo ago
  > Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful It’s not even that malicious, bureaucracy takes over and more money is spent on the middle men than the recipients. In the US we already spend about $600B in charitable giving, yet most of the problems still remain. Even if you fix the distributional challenge, the second order effects of how the modern economy is setup ensure that extreme poverty will always exist. If the poverty line is $10k and you give every single person $10k, the corporations and rent seekers will adjust the cost of living so that the new poverty line is now $20K and extreme poverty still exists.
  - WJW 7mo ago
    I think you are overly focused on how things are done in the US, where it is thankfully quite rare to outright starve. In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
    - darth_avocado 7mo ago
      Well yes, I think if you’re talking about war torn countries then yes. But when you talk about stable countries, poverty still exists and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and its impact on distribution is still the same. And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
      - philipallstar 7mo ago
        It's less inefficient bureacracy (although it is definitely that) and more culturally-normal corruption.
    - cogman10 7mo ago
      > In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Where in Africa is this common?
      - mathgeek 7mo ago
        Best source I could find: https://humanitarianoutcomes.org/AWSR_2025 https://humanitarianoutcomes.org/AWSR_2025
        cogman10 7mo ago
        Yeah, quickly browsing this source it looks like Gaza is the primary location where aid workers are in danger (by a long shot. 181 killed in a year). Followed by Sudan, which is in an active civil war (60 aid workers killed). That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common. The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
- hakfoo 7mo ago
  I always wondered "what if the Salvation Army had tanks?" If so much of the problems of aid delivery are due to failed, corrupt states, could we be better served by using some of the foreign aid spend to install and maintain governments that at least aren't an impediment to aid delivery? Yes, this would be a neocolonial programme, but one done with slightly less blatantly self-serving intentions than the previous generation of "civilization is mysteriously completely coupled with letting the home country raid your natural resources." But there's also meta-question: assume we're given all the logistical support we need. Are we even delivering the right kind of aid? Aid programmes are often sold to the donor countries as a convenient sink for their agricultural overproduction or scrap merchandise as much as anything else, and meanwhile the locals are begging for tooling to pull themselves up the value chain and increase self-sufficiency rather than just bags of rice and unwanted T-shirts that leave them dependent again in a few months.
anonym29 7mo ago
>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty. If they really were, they already be doing it, and it would be a solved issue. For many folks, it's a lot easier to say 'yes' to a survey about whether you would give your own money to the poor than it is to actually give your own money the poor.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
  When it happens collectively e.g. through taxes, you get somewhat of a middle ground between the survey and giving your own money (directly and visibly). There seems to be some kind of international target of 0.7% of GNI (~GDP) for developmental aid already, which governments often don't meet fully but come close to (e.g. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03714/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...), so the 0.5% would probably be viable in tax form.
JKCalhoun 7mo ago
"…around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty." That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
- bombcar 7mo ago
  I suspect a percentage of the 40% don't believe it's possible, or believe it would end up being 0.5% of their income to enrich a select few (as has seemed to happen with previous attempts to "save" entire countries).
  - Teever 7mo ago
    Of course, the bigger question is what percent of that 40 actually want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another — be it that they hate the people who are currently poor and can’t envision it happening to them or their community or because they have some weird cognitive defect like the just world fallacy that causes them to believe this is a positive condition for the world to be in. Some people also think that we should spend that money on other stuff that they’re interested in like cool space stuff and just don’t care about poor people and never will.
    - AlexandrB 7mo ago
      Another interesting question is what part of the 60% want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another? Probably the same portion as of the 40%, just the reasons differ.
      - tempestn 7mo ago
        If they wanted it to persist, why would they give up a portion of their income to end it? Are you suggesting the 40% is just more honest than the 60?
    - jl6 7mo ago
      Remember it said rich-world respondents, not rich people. There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
throwup238 7mo ago
We don’t even have to get creative! Building out infrastructure is enough to get most people out of extreme poverty and it doesn’t have to be sold as aid, it can be sold as expanding markets. Based on stats from IFAD [1]: > There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer. Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further. That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem. [1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-can-feed-the-world_e-pdf https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

oliver236 7mo ago

one neat trick is to end poverty, ok, yea, that makes sense

inglor_cz 7mo ago
Hmm. The article says extreme poverty. By now, various forms of large-scale welfare are over 100 years old, so we have a lot of collective experience in what works and what doesn't as much. It seems that there is a big difference between attacking extreme poverty in severely underdeveloped places, which was often quite successful and resulted in economic development, and attacking "standard" poverty of the lowest decile of the population in developed countries, which seems a lot less tractable. My working theory is that in extremely underdeveloped places, most of the population is quite capable of productive work and building a competitive economy, but lacks the know-how, institutions, stability and means to do so. If provided with those, they can kick-start their own future. While in the developed countries, the permanently impoverished subset are the people who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot do the same regardless of the means invested into them. It is quite sobering to know that the most generous social system in the world, in France, spends about a third of the national GDP on social spending, and still has some really bad banlieues and very persistent class conflict. If a third of GDP of a developed country cannot do the job, the problem isn't in the raw amount of money spent, but somewhere else.
- oliver236 7mo ago
  i think culture can also play a role. there are places in the world (southern italy for example) where people do not want to work, and so live in poverty. same for other places...

someperson 7mo ago

> 1.2bn people escaped penury in those 25 years, bringing the global poverty rate down from 43% to 13% (using today’s poverty line). Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline; red-hot India and Indonesia did much of the rest. It looked as though growth miracles might consign poverty to the past. > poverty is now concentrated in places where growth is harder to achieve, and population size is rising fast. Around seven in ten of the world’s poor are in sub-Saharan Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria alone account for a quarter of the total. If current poverty rates persist, rapid population growth means that these three could be home to more than two-fifths of the world’s poorest by 2050. The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea. Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance to make the growing issues in sub-Saharan Africa more like the success stories in Asia and other parts of Africa. Harder to steal infrastructure. But obviously still possible especially before and during construction, and after during maintenance contracts.

inetknght 7mo ago
> Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance When I think of funding Africa, I think of Andrew Millison's video blogs about building a green belt. https://www.youtube.com/@amillison https://www.youtube.com/@amillison
- CincinnatiMan 7mo ago
  Can you give a summary of his videos?
  - inetknght 7mo ago
    tl;dr: teach people how to regenerate soil health, even in the Sahara (or other inhospitable places); teach people how to grow food while regenerating soil to help fight food insecurity which helps prevent violence
    - 7mo ago

jmyeet 7mo ago

The framing is wild (emphasis added): > The 189 member states of the United Nations set a target to bring the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to half its 1990 level by 2015 ... Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline That's one way to put it. Another way is that China set out to intentionally raise 800M people out of extreme poverty as a decades-long, multi-faceted priority and policy goal of the CCP. According to the World Bank [1]: > China’s approach to poverty reduction has been based on two pillars, according to the report. The first was broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support was initially provided to areas disadvantaged by geography and the lack of opportunities and later to individual households. The report points to a number of lessons for other countries from China’s experience, including the importance of a focus on education, an outward orientation, sustained public investments in infrastructure, and structural policies supportive of competition. Or, as The Economist put it, "economic growth". None of this is new. Another oft-cited example is Brazil's Bolsa Familia [2]. Back to The Economist: > None of this is insurmountable, though. As Alfred Marshall, a founding figure of modern economics, once observed, eradicating poverty is less a quandary for economics than for the “moral and political capabilities of human nature”. That's so weird. We apparently can't blame income and wealth inequality on economics. No, it's a moral and political failure. [1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... [2]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/05/27/br-bolsa-familia https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/05/27/br-bols...

lorenzohess 7mo ago

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permo-w 7mo ago
the Haber process
HappyPanacea 7mo ago
Technology, crediting this to capitalism is just as dumb as blaming every society’s ills on capitalism.

khelavastr 7mo ago

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raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
I just love this thought process where people think they and their fellow yokels playing militia in the woods can protect themselves against the might of the US Government… The second amendment is not protecting you against an army with tanks, jets, bombs etc
tempestn 7mo ago
Do you think carrying a gun gives the child soldier power to change his circumstances? It's a problem of organization and collective action, not lack of arms.
foltik 7mo ago
Pssh, who needs clean water and schools, the missing piece in the developing world is clearly a well regulated militia!

davedx 7mo ago

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kelseyfrog 7mo ago
Trickle down altruism

amazingamazing 7mo ago

The answer is capitalism. Unfortunately in most of Africa corruption prevents it from actually doing its thing properly. I don’t know how anyone can honestly look at India and china and say anything else. Excellent governance is useless without money and most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution. Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.

deleted 7mo ago
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aktenlage 7mo ago
> most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution I didn't know that "giving capital and opportunity" to people is inherent to capitalism. My understanding of capitalism is, that if people have money, they can "use their own money to further their own life", but capitalists avoid giving money to other people unless the return on investment is greater than 1.
kamov 7mo ago
This is an oversimplification, adopting "capitalism" wholesale as a developing nation without guardrails is incredibly risky because foreign capital will just buy out or crush native industries. The way China actually succeeded was by adopting state capitalism and implementing incredibly strong protectionist measures to ensure domestic growth, not by opening the floodgates to a pure free market. > Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website. Not limiting yourself to an ideological bubble is actually a good thing, regardless of what website you're on.
codeforafrica 7mo ago
The problem is not that corruption prevents capitalism from working. The problem is that capitalism doesn't prevent corruption. Corruption is enabled because of capitalism, and any measures to curb corruption will also interfere with capitalism. I spoke to a local director of a mineral mine in Tanzania. He told me that all of the profits of the mine go to the chinese owners who invested into the mine. That's capitalism at work. The corruption here is (if any) that local officials who brokered the deal allowed this deal to go through without making sure that at least some of the profits remain in the country. It is not even clear that corruption is the cause here. It may well be that the investors simply demanded that much and the locals thought that that would be the best they could get. In my opinion most of the profits from mining should remain in the country. Those minerals are Tanzanias wealth, that they should use to build up their own country. But capitalism demands that investors make as much profit as possible, disregarding side benefits. So no, capitalism is not the answer.

tehjoker 7mo ago

crazy to see that china is doing most of the poverty reduction and not say hey developing countries, copy china (in the ways that you can, china has a unique advantage in size of domestic market)

titanomachy 7mo ago
America and Europe haven’t been willing or able to copy the parts of the Chinese system that have worked well. Why would Nigeria be able to?
- tehjoker 7mo ago
  Less racism and not part of the imperial core, though the actions of imperialists make it very difficult for other countries.

pstuart 7mo ago

The one neat trick to end extreme poverty is to give women full and equal rights, most importantly, bodily autonomy.

noIdeaTheSecond 7mo ago
I do not follow, could you expand please?
- pstuart 7mo ago
  There's a lot out there if one were to search on the topic, but basically, by allowing women to engage in entrepreneurial endeavors by giving the rights to conduct that work, and, more importantly, not forcing them to be baby-making machines unlocks the potential of half the population. In societies where they are effectively slaves (and breeders), they are not part of the economy and therefore cannot add to it. And then there's just the humanitarian part of it too... https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/3-essential-issues-to-empower-women-and-end-poverty/ https://caribbean.unfpa.org/en/news/empower-rural-women-%E2%80%93-end-hunger-and-poverty-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8293807/
  - codeforafrica 7mo ago
    It's more complicated than that. Here in East Africa women are allowed to work and run businesses. In fact, most of my friends here who run a business are female. The majority of them run small shops selling food, one sells phones and accessories and another works in such a shop that is also female owned. A number of these are also single mothers because their husbands left them, mostly because they were unable to provide for their families. It is not just about the right of women to earn an income, but also about men being under pressure by their peers to be good providers, and being unable to do so. Some women told me they are not even interested in getting married any more. They just want to have some kids and then manage on their own. Either way, only education can change things. Both men and women (boys and girls) need to be educated about better ways and how to cooperate to provide for their families together.

jillesvangurp 7mo ago

It used to be that agriculture was most of our economies. These days it's a relatively small part of the economy. The good news with that is that the burden of making sure the entire planet is well fed is not that high anymore. In the west, the food we throw away could easily feed the rest of the planet. A couple of trillionaires could probably fund most of it. People like Bill Gates actually have done quite a bit on this front, which whatever else you think of the man is quite admirable. However, just giving people money or food isn't a long term solution. Empowering people to earn a living and grow or buy food is a much more structural fix. Mostly it boils down to ending local conflicts and wars. In the eighties, Live Aid was a big campaign against hunger in places like Ethiopia. It's doing somewhat better these days. But it still has a lot of conflict. But, it also has economic growth and that has slowly been pulling people out of poverty there. Another fix is restoring land. There's a big project to stop the Sahara from expanding further south that involves a green wall. It's a successful project where people dig simple U shaped trenches to capture rain water. Instead of flooding away with top soil, the water now stays and turns land back into usable farm land. This project has been running for a few years. The local population seems to get it and is now enthusiastically implementing it all over the place. They can grow food, sell it on local markets, and graze their live stock. The Sahel is also a region where poverty has fueled a lot of conflict over land and resources. So, it's a double success in the sens that it takes away some of the root causes for that kind of conflict.

smarm52 7mo ago

> while wrongly targeting about half of those above it. This is a feature, not a bug. Making payments to those that don't need in exchange for support for those in power is a function of many governments. De Mesquita, B. B., & Smith, A. (2011). The dictator's handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics. Hachette UK.