Global Poverty

The World Bank made the news last week with a forecast that the number of people living in poverty, defined as subsisting on an income less than $1.90 per day, will fall to about 702 million this year. That is down from 902 million just three years ago and represents less than 10% of the global population for the first time in human history. The UN has also released new Millennium Development Goals including one to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. With the kind of progress made in recent decades that almost seems achievable. Of course there are obstacles. Hundreds of millions of Indians and Africans will have to have access to cheap and reliable electricity they don't have today. All sorts of infrastructure will have to be put in place and paid for. We are in the midst of the worst refugee crisis we've seen since the end of WWII. And there there is a rising chorus demanding we all reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, with most proposals to do that making us less well off, not better. Frankly I don't see it happening in fifteen years. Turning the lights on all over India will require staggering amounts of fossil fuel to power them. All the alternatives together won't come close to satisfying the need, not in the near future. China's emergence as a world economic power was a miracle but it took decades. They did it in no small part with coal fired power plants and goods manufactured for export. Nobody wants to see the air in India or Africa choked with coal dust the way China's is. I doubt the international community would finance new coal powered electrical capacity anywhere in the third world, certainly not in the quantities needed. As for exports, the recently negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership not withstanding, protectionist sentiment is pretty high. TPP is in for a rough time in congress if it passes at all. Tens of thousands of protesters are expected in Berlin this week opposing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact currently being negotiated. The Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations is dead for the foreseeable future. There is lots of room for more trade and that is a good thing but it won't be an explosion. Then there is corruption. Where hunger and extreme poverty exist in the world today the problem is bad governance. With the exceptions of much of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Latin America a great deal of progress has been made there too. And before Iraq, Syria, and Libya descended into the chaos of civil war, even those basket case economies were showing promise. They are all salvageable but it will take some time. There are some ways we can help move things along. We can pass TPP. Every trade agreement we ever did faced stiff opposition. We can speed up the development of more modern, smaller, safer, and cheaper nuclear technologies and there are some that could be ready in ten years or so, maybe even sooner. We can influence the governance issues in Central America. We've done it before and that would at least begin to deal with the refugee problem at its source. And we can address some of our poverty issues here at home. We've been doing some pretty dumb things lately that have put a lot of people out of work and kept them out of work. We really need to take a sober look at that. So I don't think we will eradicate extreme poverty in fifteen years. But there is a better than even chance it will happen within the lifetimes of the generation currently coming of age. There are fewer people living in poverty today, there will be even fewer tomorrow and poverty becomes more manageable when there is less of it.