Society & Culture - Posted by David Jarmul-Duke on Thursday, August 12, 2010 16:46 - 8 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Roots of world poverty misunderstood
Few people worldwide become or remain poor because of alcoholism, drug use, or idleness, says Anirudh Krishna, left. "Laziness is not particularly a trait of those who are poor." What’s more common is people succumbing to dangers that are largely preventable. (Credit: Mahesh Kapila)
DUKE (US)—Too much focus is spent on finding new ways to lift people out of poverty instead of coming to terms with why they became poor in the first place, according to a new book.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“It seems almost as if we have taken it for granted that all poor people are born poor—which they are not,” writes Anirudh Krishna, associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.
Krishna’s team spent the past decade conducting thousands of interviews in nearly 400 diverse communities around the world.
“A large proportion of currently poor people were not born to poverty; they have become poor within their lifetimes.”
His book, One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty calls on government officials, economists, and others to pay more attention to the everyday lives and ordinary events that underlie poverty.
Beyond country-level statistics and political headlines that grab attention, he says, people in barrios and remote villages are confronting challenges whose solutions may not lie with economic growth alone.
Poverty unfolds every day as individuals are overwhelmed by illness, debt, drought, and other pressures, Krishna says.
“No universal solvent exists that can ‘fix’ poverty,” he says. “We need to learn more about accelerating growth, but we also need to learn more about macro-micro links and about grassroots-level opportunities and threats.”
The factors that drive individuals into poverty vary from place to place, although unexpected illnesses are a major cause almost every place where health care resources are lacking, Krishna says.
Expensive funerals and weddings are common in some countries, while high-interest debt is more of a problem elsewhere.
Concepts such as “poverty level” inadequately capture the lives of those affected, since someone earning a penny above a poverty level of one dollar per day fares little better than a neighbor earning a penny below the level. Too often, Krishna says, such statistics mask the harsh realities facing those living at the margins.
“Commentators who applaud the rapid economic strides taken by China and India should take note of the large-scale human tragedies that are occurring in parallel,” he writes.
“The official Chinese news media are regularly filled with accounts of the desperate choices that people are regularly forced to make over health care, of brothers who must draw lots to see whose serious illness will be treated because their family cannot afford to treat both, or of a father who sells a kidney to treat an ill son. A similarly grim picture is emerging in many other developing countries.”
Working with other scholars, Krishna has developed a methodology to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor themselves, highlighting the pathways by which their lives change.
“New tactics are required along with new methods of investigation,” he writes. “The thrust and direction of targeting policy has to change. In the past, programs have focused attention on whom to target, ignoring what to target, which is a mistake.”
Few people become or remain poor because of alcoholism, drug use or idleness, according to Krishna, who says “laziness is not particularly a trait of those who are poor.” What’s more common is people succumbing to dangers that are largely preventable.
Even when they do escape the starkest poverty, they are unlikely to rise much higher. “Raising a mass of people out of poverty is certainly a praiseworthy achievement—but it is hardly enough,” he writes.
“Imagine if someone like Einstein had been born into poverty. Would it be a sufficient achievement to raise him to day laborer?”
Some nations have succeeded in counteracting the factors within their borders that lead people to become or remain poor, according to Krishna. He cites countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Cuba, Thailand, Malaysia, and Colombia that established health care systems that help citizens avoid financial ruin from illnesses.
The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, founded by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has shown how to combine innovative financial programs with effective social initiatives. Similarly deliberate actions on a wider scale helped Japan reduce its poverty rate to 2 percent, much lower than the U.S. rate of more than 13 percent, he argues.
“Waiting until someone has fallen into poverty is hardly the time when assistance can or should be provided,” writes Krishna.
“Preventive assistance must become the norm. In parallel, efforts must be made to substantially augment the prospects for upward mobility.
“By addressing descents directly and effectively, and at the same time, by promoting more and better pathways for escape, we will be able to make faster progress against poverty than we have at any time in the past.”
More news from Duke University: www.dukenews.duke.edu
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8 Comments
koniczynek
Tony - KS
It’s, first of all, about resources. We all breathe air without paying for it. Why should we pay for land and water?
J Hays
Consider this in light of the situation in the United States today. Big banks are bankrupting people after giving them mortgages they could not afford. For-profit medical businesses – doctors and hospitals, insurance companies and drug companies are draining resources from medical consumers (in the old days we called them “patients”) with services and products (drugs) that they do not need, often do not work and sometimes worsen their conditions. Energy companies – post ENRON – still milk their consumers, manipulating prices to keep users addicted and profits high.
Americans themselves are not without blame – they are addicted to consuming, trusting of the medical practitioners (and previously bankers) and often too stupid to understand their plight.
So America is seeing more division between the rich and the poor and nobody seems concerned enough to do something.
I’ve done lots of business in 3rd world countries and the norm is the government makes noise about helping the poor but all the while everyone in the government and their friends in business are stealing everything they can. Here in the US, it’s the for-profit businesses causing the problems and they are able to control the government through unbridled lobbying.
When the US recognizes the decline it is in, it will blame unbridled capitalism.
Susan Taylor
The the long term base answer is really knowledge. The kind of knowledge that solves the problems that make and keep adults poor. There are few “stupid” people, just people who have learned by hook or by crook to solve small problems when the big problems are kept out of the curriculuum until the few who study at a higher level are too few and/or too greedy to solve them. The simplicity and responsibility should be part of the curriculuum starting in kindergarten. Home economics should be put back in the curriculuum also starting in kindergarten. Such economics would include the the costs that need to be addressed and planned for that make or keep a family or individual poor. Sesame Street could show us the way.
The short term base answer is the same except for the need in this country to work for the removal of lobbyists and the electoral college.
Polaris
J Hays:
Economic advancement in the U.S.can be attributed to our private sector, not the public sector. Take a look at the economic systems present in many of the world’s poorest countries and compare them to our own. As you stated, much of the politicians in these 3rd world countries take advantage of their countries situations; however, don’t make the mistake of thinking that our politicians are selfless and extraordinarily philanthropic individuals. Our politicians just happen to be in a situation where checks and balances limit the power they have in government.
Polaris
Pardon the typos in above post ^
Jason Moon
The article rightly looks at another line of inquiry into the intractable poverty around our world, pointing out once again that the roots and solutions to poverty are more complex than economic development alone. Community health, education, political systems, culture and climate are all factors. One can make the case, however, that those with power and money simply do little to alleviate and much to create poverty, be it from ignorance, neglect or design.
Putting aside the declining standard of living in the US, the fierce, debilitating poverty of the developing world is supported primarily by corrupt leadership and clan cultures that subvert individual achievement through a variety of mechanisms. Catastrophic illnesses wipe out savings and income nearly everywhere. How societies step up to address this has a great deal to do with the amount of poverty it eventually creates. Compare Scandanavia to the US, for example. The work in this article is interesting, but doesn’t necessarily show an insightful avenue for broad anti-poverty interventions
Megersa Debela
within country how individual saving bring new resource as it circulates within a country? so how a poor leave his poor lifestyle from the scratch ?
poor people are necessary for rich people to feel rich… maybe that’s why we want to help poor and we do not want ot prevent them from getting poor?