Reducing Poverty Is Good

I was saddened that the Washington Post editorial on the UN’s report on global poverty contained so little real insight. You can read it if you like but it can be summarized by the title of this post. It doesn’t address why poverty has declined or the factors that can reduce poverty.

The answer is that although we don’t really know there are some things we can assert with confidence. Autarky (neither importing nor exporting) produces poverty. Both China and India, where most of the world’s poor lived, have greatly reduced poverty by opening their countries to exports and, to a lesser degree, imports. Could they have achieved more had they opened their markets more? We don’t really know.

Sad as it is to say, adopting liberal democracy has little or nothing to do with alleviating poverty other than possibly as a side effect. China greatly reduced poverty without adopting liberal democracy.

Policies that move workers from subsistence farming to manufacturing reduces poverty. Consequently, encouraging subsistence farming or discouraging manufacturing increases poverty. Those include bans on imports of agricultural products.

Educating women may reduce poverty indirectly by reducing the number of births.

Here in the United States we still have people who are genuinely poor. I think we would do better by, rather than fulminating on relative poverty, concentrating on real poverty. The relatively poor we will always have with us but the only reason we have genuinely poor people here is indifference. In the United States most of the genuinely poor live on Indian reservations or rural areas where the social safety net does not reach. Increasing the depth of that safety net without increasing its breadth will do little to eliminate poverty in the U. S.