> 1.2bn people escaped penury in those 25 years, bringing the global poverty rate down from 43% to 13% (using today’s poverty line). Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline; red-hot India and Indonesia did much of the rest. It looked as though growth miracles might consign poverty to the past.
> poverty is now concentrated in places where growth is harder to achieve, and population size is rising fast. Around seven in ten of the world’s poor are in sub-Saharan Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria alone account for a quarter of the total. If current poverty rates persist, rapid population growth means that these three could be home to more than two-fifths of the world’s poorest by 2050.
The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea.
Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance to make the growing issues in sub-Saharan Africa more like the success stories in Asia and other parts of Africa.
Harder to steal infrastructure. But obviously still possible especially before and during construction, and after during maintenance contracts.
They're going to replace USAID in the poorest nations, offer more free Chinese education.
In time they'll unseat English as the global language.
The best colleges, by some metrics are already Chinese. Give a few hundred thousand Africans tier 1 free Chinese education and see how global perspectives shift in a few decades.
Next the Yuan will become the world reserve currency.
> In time they'll unseat English as the global language.
The data strongly suggest otherwise.
English’s dominance is growing, with over 80% of online content in English.
There are 1.5 billion English speakers vs 1.1 billion Mandarin speakers. In third place is Hindi at 600 million, followed by Spanish at 560 million and French at 280 million.
86% of Mandarin speakers are native speakers while only 25% of English speakers are native speakers. The ratio for Mandarin has been holding steady while for English more and more non-native speakers are learning it.
Not only is Mandarin mostly spoken by native speakers as the ratios above illustrate, the Chinese birth rate is dropping.
So no, not only is English the world’s true lingua franca, it is extending its lead.
Ah yes, the Chinese will be the benevolent overlords of the world, of course. They'll be so much more benevolent than the previous benevolent overlords, or the ones before them, let alone the ones after the Chinese hegemony has finally been broken after decades of abuse and corruption. History does not repeat but it certainly rhymes.
It's heartbreaking. There's plenty of US History to be ashamed of, but lots of accomplishments too.
We've not just thrown it away, but but set fire to it so that if it ever is possible to wrest control away from these vandals, it could take generations to repair.
Likewise, there's plenty about China to be wary of, but the way that they have collectively invested in the country to move it from a backwater to a premiere superpower (without the shortcut that WWII gave the US), must be recognized as a triumph.
We could be living in prosperity for all, but no, we have to argue over pronouns and bathrooms. FFS, we can do better than that!
I moved to East Africa with my children a few years ago, and I have the same impression. Investments in infrastructure and education seem like the best way to improve everyone's life here.
Here in Tanzania they are building a rail line across the country. That will reduce the travel time by half. Near Mwanza they built a large bridge crossing a bay that replaces an unreliable ferry service. (whenever the ferry was down, people used small boats which occasionally capsized and killed people)
Rural areas need better access to water, and even in cities many people still don't have water on tap. Electricity is mostly there but often breaks down. I brought a desktop computer with me and I am afraid to run it because it would crash to often. In Uganda we once had to wait three days until electricity came back.
Education could use a lot of improvement. There are usually 50 kids or more per class. Corporal punishment is still being used, and although there is ambition to teach modern subjects (including IT, programming, etc) schools lack the resources and the teachers, especially in rural areas, but also in cities. Private schools are not much better than public schools.
The real question is how to get the investments into the country. I just learned that Kenya is seeking funding to complete their rail line. There is your investment opportunity.
On a smaller scale, you can fund schools. Or hire local developers. (Contact me if you are interested in that. I collaborate with local developers on software projects and I volunteer teaching IT/programming in schools. Your support would be appreciated.)
tl;dr: teach people how to regenerate soil health, even in the Sahara (or other inhospitable places); teach people how to grow food while regenerating soil to help fight food insecurity which helps prevent violence
> The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea.
It's how much of international politics works. Paying off governments is a good way to get what you want.
McGillivray, F., & Smith, A. (2008). Punishing the prince: a theory of interstate relations, political institutions, and leader change. Princeton University Press.
Exactly this. It’s counterintuitive for most people, but the more complexity you add to the systems (the more organic they are), the more sustainably successful they become.
Everyone is looking for a simple solution, but simple solutions don't take into account human social dynamics.
>it would cost $318bn a year to reduce the global poverty rate to 1% at the $2.15-a-day line—roughly 0.3% of global GDP— with imperfect, real-world information.
>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty.
While in reality I'm sure this would be much harder than the article suggests, I buy the direction of the key points:
1) it costs a feasible amount,
2) there is strong support to do it.
3) creative approaches might be effective.
Note: I kept the title I found in the print Economist version, since it is more informative.
We don’t even have to get creative! Building out infrastructure is enough to get most people out of extreme poverty and it doesn’t have to be sold as aid, it can be sold as expanding markets.
Based on stats from IFAD [1]:
> There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer.
Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further.
That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.
The challenge is distributional. Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful, so at a certain point more money does not result in less poverty.
> Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful
It’s not even that malicious, bureaucracy takes over and more money is spent on the middle men than the recipients. In the US we already spend about $600B in charitable giving, yet most of the problems still remain.
Even if you fix the distributional challenge, the second order effects of how the modern economy is setup ensure that extreme poverty will always exist. If the poverty line is $10k and you give every single person $10k, the corporations and rent seekers will adjust the cost of living so that the new poverty line is now $20K and extreme poverty still exists.
I think you are overly focused on how things are done in the US, where it is thankfully quite rare to outright starve.
In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
OK that is true and I didn't mean to imply it was happening everywhere. Sorry to offend. At the same time, my point that "it's not always just bureaucracy" is sadly still quite true too.
Yeah, quickly browsing this source it looks like Gaza is the primary location where aid workers are in danger (by a long shot. 181 killed in a year). Followed by Sudan, which is in an active civil war (60 aid workers killed).
That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common.
The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
There are quite a few in non-war zones - e.g. Nigeria has 47 just being killed or kidnapped by armed gangs in the country as they seem to have really taken defunding the police to heart. I wouldn't call that pretty tame.
No, that 47 number is for all incidents in Nigeria.
The number of killed is 12 according to this report. I should also mention the fact that these aren't killing "foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy". Instead the report calls out just general crime being the primary reason for the deaths.
> Nigeria saw a significant increase in all victim types (killed, injured, kidnapped) from 2023 to 2024, with fatalities up to 12 from just 2 the previous year. Ongoing insurgency and criminal activity made road ambushes the most common attack location, with small arms fire and assaults both rising as types of violence. More kidnappings and violent robberies occurred at personal residences across several regions than in previous years, highlighting the increasing risks of targeted attacks.
Well yes, I think if you’re talking about war torn countries then yes. But when you talk about stable countries, poverty still exists and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and its impact on distribution is still the same.
And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
A really good thing the UK charity commission does is to list the efficiency of charities - how much they spend to acquire their funds. Also the wages they pay.
I've checked it when giving funds to new charities.
How does that work mechanically? If I have a home to rent out, why don't I reduce prices to $19k to guarantee zero occupancy-related losses, and why doesn't somebody else out-compete me?
I always wondered "what if the Salvation Army had tanks?"
If so much of the problems of aid delivery are due to failed, corrupt states, could we be better served by using some of the foreign aid spend to install and maintain governments that at least aren't an impediment to aid delivery?
Yes, this would be a neocolonial programme, but one done with slightly less blatantly self-serving intentions than the previous generation of "civilization is mysteriously completely coupled with letting the home country raid your natural resources."
But there's also meta-question: assume we're given all the logistical support we need. Are we even delivering the right kind of aid? Aid programmes are often sold to the donor countries as a convenient sink for their agricultural overproduction or scrap merchandise as much as anything else, and meanwhile the locals are begging for tooling to pull themselves up the value chain and increase self-sufficiency rather than just bags of rice and unwanted T-shirts that leave them dependent again in a few months.
>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty.
If they really were, they already be doing it, and it would be a solved issue. For many folks, it's a lot easier to say 'yes' to a survey about whether you would give your own money to the poor than it is to actually give your own money the poor.
> The 189 member states of the United Nations set a target to bring the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to half its 1990 level by 2015 ... Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline
That's one way to put it. Another way is that China set out to intentionally raise 800M people out of extreme poverty as a decades-long, multi-faceted priority and policy goal of the CCP. According to the World Bank [1]:
> China’s approach to poverty reduction has been based on two pillars, according to the report. The first was broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support was initially provided to areas disadvantaged by geography and the lack of opportunities and later to individual households. The report points to a number of lessons for other countries from China’s experience, including the importance of a focus on education, an outward orientation, sustained public investments in infrastructure, and structural policies supportive of competition.
Or, as The Economist put it, "economic growth". None of this is new. Another oft-cited example is Brazil's Bolsa Familia [2].
Back to The Economist:
> None of this is insurmountable, though. As Alfred Marshall, a founding figure of modern economics, once observed, eradicating poverty is less a quandary for economics than for the “moral and political capabilities of human nature”.
That's so weird. We apparently can't blame income and wealth inequality on economics. No, it's a moral and political failure.
It used to be that agriculture was most of our economies. These days it's a relatively small part of the economy. The good news with that is that the burden of making sure the entire planet is well fed is not that high anymore. In the west, the food we throw away could easily feed the rest of the planet.
A couple of trillionaires could probably fund most of it. People like Bill Gates actually have done quite a bit on this front, which whatever else you think of the man is quite admirable.
However, just giving people money or food isn't a long term solution. Empowering people to earn a living and grow or buy food is a much more structural fix. Mostly it boils down to ending local conflicts and wars. In the eighties, Live Aid was a big campaign against hunger in places like Ethiopia. It's doing somewhat better these days. But it still has a lot of conflict. But, it also has economic growth and that has slowly been pulling people out of poverty there.
Another fix is restoring land. There's a big project to stop the Sahara from expanding further south that involves a green wall. It's a successful project where people dig simple U shaped trenches to capture rain water. Instead of flooding away with top soil, the water now stays and turns land back into usable farm land. This project has been running for a few years. The local population seems to get it and is now enthusiastically implementing it all over the place. They can grow food, sell it on local markets, and graze their live stock. The Sahel is also a region where poverty has fueled a lot of conflict over land and resources. So, it's a double success in the sens that it takes away some of the root causes for that kind of conflict.
crazy to see that china is doing most of the poverty reduction and not say hey developing countries, copy china (in the ways that you can, china has a unique advantage in size of domestic market)
The answer is capitalism. Unfortunately in most of Africa corruption prevents it from actually doing its thing properly. I don’t know how anyone can honestly look at India and china and say anything else. Excellent governance is useless without money and most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution.
Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
75 comments
> 1.2bn people escaped penury in those 25 years, bringing the global poverty rate down from 43% to 13% (using today’s poverty line). Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline; red-hot India and Indonesia did much of the rest. It looked as though growth miracles might consign poverty to the past.
> poverty is now concentrated in places where growth is harder to achieve, and population size is rising fast. Around seven in ten of the world’s poor are in sub-Saharan Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria alone account for a quarter of the total. If current poverty rates persist, rapid population growth means that these three could be home to more than two-fifths of the world’s poorest by 2050.
The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea.
Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance to make the growing issues in sub-Saharan Africa more like the success stories in Asia and other parts of Africa.
Harder to steal infrastructure. But obviously still possible especially before and during construction, and after during maintenance contracts.
They're going to replace USAID in the poorest nations, offer more free Chinese education.
In time they'll unseat English as the global language.
The best colleges, by some metrics are already Chinese. Give a few hundred thousand Africans tier 1 free Chinese education and see how global perspectives shift in a few decades.
Next the Yuan will become the world reserve currency.
Edit: Sources are always better than opinions.
https://globalchinapulse.net/confucius-institutes-and-the-sp...
> In time they'll unseat English as the global language.
The data strongly suggest otherwise.
English’s dominance is growing, with over 80% of online content in English.
There are 1.5 billion English speakers vs 1.1 billion Mandarin speakers. In third place is Hindi at 600 million, followed by Spanish at 560 million and French at 280 million.
86% of Mandarin speakers are native speakers while only 25% of English speakers are native speakers. The ratio for Mandarin has been holding steady while for English more and more non-native speakers are learning it.
Not only is Mandarin mostly spoken by native speakers as the ratios above illustrate, the Chinese birth rate is dropping.
So no, not only is English the world’s true lingua franca, it is extending its lead.
A smart African student might decide to learn Chinese as well as English.
A smart Chinese student may learn English, French among others.
We'll see what happens in the next 30 years.
Someone will fill in the gap.
Free college in Chinese seems like a great deal vs paying over 100k for Western college.
We've not just thrown it away, but but set fire to it so that if it ever is possible to wrest control away from these vandals, it could take generations to repair.
Likewise, there's plenty about China to be wary of, but the way that they have collectively invested in the country to move it from a backwater to a premiere superpower (without the shortcut that WWII gave the US), must be recognized as a triumph.
We could be living in prosperity for all, but no, we have to argue over pronouns and bathrooms. FFS, we can do better than that!
Here in Tanzania they are building a rail line across the country. That will reduce the travel time by half. Near Mwanza they built a large bridge crossing a bay that replaces an unreliable ferry service. (whenever the ferry was down, people used small boats which occasionally capsized and killed people)
Rural areas need better access to water, and even in cities many people still don't have water on tap. Electricity is mostly there but often breaks down. I brought a desktop computer with me and I am afraid to run it because it would crash to often. In Uganda we once had to wait three days until electricity came back.
Education could use a lot of improvement. There are usually 50 kids or more per class. Corporal punishment is still being used, and although there is ambition to teach modern subjects (including IT, programming, etc) schools lack the resources and the teachers, especially in rural areas, but also in cities. Private schools are not much better than public schools.
The real question is how to get the investments into the country. I just learned that Kenya is seeking funding to complete their rail line. There is your investment opportunity.
On a smaller scale, you can fund schools. Or hire local developers. (Contact me if you are interested in that. I collaborate with local developers on software projects and I volunteer teaching IT/programming in schools. Your support would be appreciated.)
>
Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governanceWhen I think of funding Africa, I think of Andrew Millison's video blogs about building a green belt.
https://www.youtube.com/@amillison
> The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea.
It's how much of international politics works. Paying off governments is a good way to get what you want.
McGillivray, F., & Smith, A. (2008). Punishing the prince: a theory of interstate relations, political institutions, and leader change. Princeton University Press.
Everyone is looking for a simple solution, but simple solutions don't take into account human social dynamics.
>it would cost $318bn a year to reduce the global poverty rate to 1% at the $2.15-a-day line—roughly 0.3% of global GDP— with imperfect, real-world information.
>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty.
While in reality I'm sure this would be much harder than the article suggests, I buy the direction of the key points:
1) it costs a feasible amount, 2) there is strong support to do it. 3) creative approaches might be effective.
Note: I kept the title I found in the print Economist version, since it is more informative.
Based on stats from IFAD [1]:
> There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer.
Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further.
That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.
[1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...
But also we need to do more for ending poverty!
> Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful
It’s not even that malicious, bureaucracy takes over and more money is spent on the middle men than the recipients. In the US we already spend about $600B in charitable giving, yet most of the problems still remain.
Even if you fix the distributional challenge, the second order effects of how the modern economy is setup ensure that extreme poverty will always exist. If the poverty line is $10k and you give every single person $10k, the corporations and rent seekers will adjust the cost of living so that the new poverty line is now $20K and extreme poverty still exists.
In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
> In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy.
Where in Africa is this common?
That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common.
The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
The number of killed is 12 according to this report. I should also mention the fact that these aren't killing "foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy". Instead the report calls out just general crime being the primary reason for the deaths.
> Nigeria saw a significant increase in all victim types (killed, injured, kidnapped) from 2023 to 2024, with fatalities up to 12 from just 2 the previous year. Ongoing insurgency and criminal activity made road ambushes the most common attack location, with small arms fire and assaults both rising as types of violence. More kidnappings and violent robberies occurred at personal residences across several regions than in previous years, highlighting the increasing risks of targeted attacks.
And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
I've checked it when giving funds to new charities.
Oxfam, for example, are quite inefficient - https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...
https://www.heifer.org/
which focus on providing folks with the means to raise their own food and be self-sufficient are the key.
If so much of the problems of aid delivery are due to failed, corrupt states, could we be better served by using some of the foreign aid spend to install and maintain governments that at least aren't an impediment to aid delivery?
Yes, this would be a neocolonial programme, but one done with slightly less blatantly self-serving intentions than the previous generation of "civilization is mysteriously completely coupled with letting the home country raid your natural resources."
But there's also meta-question: assume we're given all the logistical support we need. Are we even delivering the right kind of aid? Aid programmes are often sold to the donor countries as a convenient sink for their agricultural overproduction or scrap merchandise as much as anything else, and meanwhile the locals are begging for tooling to pull themselves up the value chain and increase self-sufficiency rather than just bags of rice and unwanted T-shirts that leave them dependent again in a few months.
That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty.
If they really were, they already be doing it, and it would be a solved issue. For many folks, it's a lot easier to say 'yes' to a survey about whether you would give your own money to the poor than it is to actually give your own money the poor.
> The 189 member states of the United Nations set a target to bring the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to half its 1990 level by 2015 ... Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline
That's one way to put it. Another way is that China set out to intentionally raise 800M people out of extreme poverty as a decades-long, multi-faceted priority and policy goal of the CCP. According to the World Bank [1]:
> China’s approach to poverty reduction has been based on two pillars, according to the report. The first was broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support was initially provided to areas disadvantaged by geography and the lack of opportunities and later to individual households. The report points to a number of lessons for other countries from China’s experience, including the importance of a focus on education, an outward orientation, sustained public investments in infrastructure, and structural policies supportive of competition.
Or, as The Economist put it, "economic growth". None of this is new. Another oft-cited example is Brazil's Bolsa Familia [2].
Back to The Economist:
> None of this is insurmountable, though. As Alfred Marshall, a founding figure of modern economics, once observed, eradicating poverty is less a quandary for economics than for the “moral and political capabilities of human nature”.
That's so weird. We apparently can't blame income and wealth inequality on economics. No, it's a moral and political failure.
[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
[2]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/05/27/br-bols...
A couple of trillionaires could probably fund most of it. People like Bill Gates actually have done quite a bit on this front, which whatever else you think of the man is quite admirable.
However, just giving people money or food isn't a long term solution. Empowering people to earn a living and grow or buy food is a much more structural fix. Mostly it boils down to ending local conflicts and wars. In the eighties, Live Aid was a big campaign against hunger in places like Ethiopia. It's doing somewhat better these days. But it still has a lot of conflict. But, it also has economic growth and that has slowly been pulling people out of poverty there.
Another fix is restoring land. There's a big project to stop the Sahara from expanding further south that involves a green wall. It's a successful project where people dig simple U shaped trenches to capture rain water. Instead of flooding away with top soil, the water now stays and turns land back into usable farm land. This project has been running for a few years. The local population seems to get it and is now enthusiastically implementing it all over the place. They can grow food, sell it on local markets, and graze their live stock. The Sahel is also a region where poverty has fueled a lot of conflict over land and resources. So, it's a double success in the sens that it takes away some of the root causes for that kind of conflict.
> while wrongly targeting about half of those above it.
This is a feature, not a bug. Making payments to those that don't need in exchange for support for those in power is a function of many governments.
De Mesquita, B. B., & Smith, A. (2011). The dictator's handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics. Hachette UK.
Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.