4 ms·

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

• inglor_cz 6mo 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 6mo 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...