War on Poverty

According to the World Bank the number of people living on $1.25 per day or less dropped from 2 billion to about 1.3 billion between 1990 and 2008. With that encouraging news, I am reminded of a few things we can and should be doing, not just to make life easier for the poorest of the poor, but to make it possible for a lot more of them to pull themselves up from that status.

One obvious measure would be to stop this insane use of food crops to make ethanol. Social justice advocates ought to be all over this. Can you imagine the good that could be done if billions in charity dollars were redirected to education, clean water, anti-malaria, and other programs that have direct positive impacts on poverty rates? This is not a trivial matter. Over 40% of the US corn crop and a large part of Brazil's sugar goes into ethanol. It doesn't save anybody any money, benefits mostly well off farmers, and has a devastating ripple effect on prices all through the food chain. We know all this. Why aren't we making more noise?

Another major issue is the campaign against anthropogenic global warming. Most of the measures put forward to combat it are designed to suppress economic activity by making energy more expensive. Emerging nations like China and India are having none of it and neither should we. I am a skeptic about this but if global warming is inevitable, and the alarmists are essentially saying it is, then we will need a more prosperous world to deal with it. Plentiful and inexpensive energy supplies are absolutely essential. We should be speaking up for the poor in this debate too.

One of my favorite subjects is trade and, except for fair trade, it's another area where we don't hear much social justice advocacy but should. As a general rule, the more we trade the more prosperous we become on both sides of the transaction. The knock on some "free" trade pacts is that they aren't really free, and that they often benefit the rich disproportionately. But less trade is no answer. The equity issues can be addressed and we should be pressing our trade representatives to address them but we should also be cheering them on as they negotiate and implement these agreements. They can have a greater impact on more people than a mountain of fair trade chocolate.

In this time of budget cutbacks and unsustainable government deficits those concerned about social justice issues are rightly lobbying officials and elected representatives to protect anti-poverty and emergency relief programs as much as we can. But not every anti-poverty policy requires government funding. There are things government can do that would have enormous impact and not cost anything. And it isn't just the poor that would benefit. The savings on engine repairs alone would more than justify eliminating ethanol mandates.

The steps I'm arguing for are doable. There are others but they all need public support. We need a national discussion without demagoguery to air them out. Most of us can agree that widespread prosperity is a good thing. We have opportunities to promote it on a global scale without sacrificing our own. We really should get a move on.

In eighteen years the world reduced the ranks of the most desperately poor by 700 million people. Hundreds of millions more moved up into the middle class. That still leaves a lot of poverty but if we could do that again over the next eighteen years  we would se it at levels unimaginable a generation ago. By at least one measure that would be leaving the world a better place than we found it.