> 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.
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.)
> 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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.