> 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.
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
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.
I suspect a percentage of the 40% don't believe it's possible, or believe it would end up being 0.5% of their income to enrich a select few (as has seemed to happen with previous attempts to "save" entire countries).
Of course, the bigger question is what percent of that 40 actually want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another — be it that they hate the people who are currently poor and can’t envision it happening to them or their community or because they have some weird cognitive defect like the just world fallacy that causes them to believe this is a positive condition for the world to be in.
Some people also think that we should spend that money on other stuff that they’re interested in like cool space stuff and just don’t care about poor people and never will.
I know a number of people who view basically any kind of aid as morally wrong, ultimately leading to the downfall of the people you're trying to help. Even with their own kids, once they're 18 they're on their own -- no help with college, no inheritance, no etc. They really believe that handouts create a situation worse than whatever ill they're solving.
Mind you, they still think poverty is bad, but they'd object to something like paying for basic infrastructure and be happy to create the modern-day equivalent of CCC camps to pay the poor people to build that infrastructure. That sort of thing.
Remember it said rich-world respondents, not rich people. There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
Another interesting question is what part of the 60% want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another? Probably the same portion as of the 40%, just the reasons differ.
Rich world respondent doesn’t mean Rich themselves. When you’re struggling to make ends meet, philanthropy takes a back seat. Half the population in the us is in debt, has almost no savings and is living paycheck to paycheck. I’d assume even 0.5% would be difficult to part ways with.
> Half the population in the US ... has almost no savings and is living paycheck to paycheck
No. The median American household net worth is $193k, and of that, $8k in checkings/savings accounts. 54% of adults have cash savings that can pay for 3 months of expenses (this excludes non-cash savings, and obviously an even greater percentage have cash savings that would cover 1-2 months of expenses, which is still not paycheck-to-paycheck).
None of these stats (including the person you're replying to) are directly comparable.
- Median net worth is $193k, of which $185k is in their home. Suppose a $10k emergency crops up. Well...you're fucked. If you're lucky you can take out a loan against the accrued value relatively quickly, but otherwise you're taking a 10% haircut having to sell quickly, another 10% in transaction fees, and another $10k in the sudden move/storage/renting/loss-of-work/etc situation you found yourself in liquidating your home to cover an extortionist colonoscopy+lawyer pricing or something. You're _fine_, but when minor road bumps can cause $45k setbacks ($55k if we count the $10k expense this depended on) you're not not living paycheck to paycheck.
- You can't compare the median savings to the median net worth. They're not the same person, and the cross-terms can take almost any distribution.
- The 54% stat is based on self-reported vibes and is pretty blatantly wrong. The median household also has $5200 in unavoidable (without delinquency, losing your home, etc) expenses, which doesn't jive very well with $8k in savings somehow lasting 3 months (assuming the cross terms I complained about aren't too terribly distributed). You would expect 2+ paychecks of stability (which, incidentally, is also the usual prompt for "paycheck-to-paycheck" stability -- not whether it takes one paycheck to be screwed but two), but then you're hosed.
And so on.
You're _right_; the median US household won't go broke missing a paycheck; but 2-3 paychecks is enough to cause major problems at the 50th percentile, give or take friends and family stepping in to soften the blow.
You can quibble with the details but ultimately GP is wrong; the median American isn’t broke or living paycheck to paycheck — which were the claims made — and it isn’t close.
>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.
When it happens collectively e.g. through taxes, you get somewhat of a middle ground between the survey and giving your own money (directly and visibly).
There seems to be some kind of international target of 0.7% of GNI (~GDP) for developmental aid already, which governments often don't meet fully but come close to (e.g. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...), so the 0.5% would probably be viable in tax form.
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.
> 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.
There's a lot out there if one were to search on the topic, but basically, by allowing women to engage in entrepreneurial endeavors by giving the rights to conduct that work, and, more importantly, not forcing them to be baby-making machines unlocks the potential of half the population.
In societies where they are effectively slaves (and breeders), they are not part of the economy and therefore cannot add to it.
And then there's just the humanitarian part of it too...
It's more complicated than that. Here in East Africa women are allowed to work and run businesses. In fact, most of my friends here who run a business are female. The majority of them run small shops selling food, one sells phones and accessories and another works in such a shop that is also female owned. A number of these are also single mothers because their husbands left them, mostly because they were unable to provide for their families. It is not just about the right of women to earn an income, but also about men being under pressure by their peers to be good providers, and being unable to do so. Some women told me they are not even interested in getting married any more. They just want to have some kids and then manage on their own.
Either way, only education can change things. Both men and women (boys and girls) need to be educated about better ways and how to cooperate to provide for their families together.
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.
The problem is not that corruption prevents capitalism from working. The problem is that capitalism doesn't prevent corruption. Corruption is enabled because of capitalism, and any measures to curb corruption will also interfere with capitalism.
I spoke to a local director of a mineral mine in Tanzania. He told me that all of the profits of the mine go to the chinese owners who invested into the mine. That's capitalism at work. The corruption here is (if any) that local officials who brokered the deal allowed this deal to go through without making sure that at least some of the profits remain in the country. It is not even clear that corruption is the cause here. It may well be that the investors simply demanded that much and the locals thought that that would be the best they could get.
In my opinion most of the profits from mining should remain in the country. Those minerals are Tanzanias wealth, that they should use to build up their own country. But capitalism demands that investors make as much profit as possible, disregarding side benefits. So no, capitalism is not the answer.
This is an oversimplification, adopting "capitalism" wholesale as a developing nation without guardrails is incredibly risky because foreign capital will just buy out or crush native industries. The way China actually succeeded was by adopting state capitalism and implementing incredibly strong protectionist measures to ensure domestic growth, not by opening the floodgates to a pure free market.
> Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
Not limiting yourself to an ideological bubble is actually a good thing, regardless of what website you're on.
> most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution
I didn't know that "giving capital and opportunity" to people is inherent to capitalism. My understanding of capitalism is, that if people have money, they can "use their own money to further their own life", but capitalists avoid giving money to other people unless the return on investment is greater than 1.
Do you think carrying a gun gives the child soldier power to change his circumstances? It's a problem of organization and collective action, not lack of arms.
I just love this thought process where people think they and their fellow yokels playing militia in the woods can protect themselves against the might of the US Government…
The second amendment is not protecting you against an army with tanks, jets, bombs etc
By now, various forms of large-scale welfare are over 100 years old, so we have a lot of collective experience in what works and what doesn't as much.
It seems that there is a big difference between attacking extreme poverty in severely underdeveloped places, which was often quite successful and resulted in economic development, and attacking "standard" poverty of the lowest decile of the population in developed countries, which seems a lot less tractable.
My working theory is that in extremely underdeveloped places, most of the population is quite capable of productive work and building a competitive economy, but lacks the know-how, institutions, stability and means to do so. If provided with those, they can kick-start their own future.
While in the developed countries, the permanently impoverished subset are the people who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot do the same regardless of the means invested into them.
It is quite sobering to know that the most generous social system in the world, in France, spends about a third of the national GDP on social spending, and still has some really bad banlieues and very persistent class conflict. If a third of GDP of a developed country cannot do the job, the problem isn't in the raw amount of money spent, but somewhere else.
i think culture can also play a role. there are places in the world (southern italy for example) where people do not want to work, and so live in poverty. same for other places...
> 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.
Just give China a bit.
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...
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.
We've thrown out 80 years of soft power in 8 months.
Someone will fill in the gap.
Free college in Chinese seems like a great deal vs paying over 100k for Western college.
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!
Parent is not making a claim about benevolence, merely about a soft power incumbent that is about to be replaced.
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.)
> Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance
When I think of funding Africa, I think of Andrew Millison's video blogs about building a green belt.
https://www.youtube.com/@amillison
Can you give a summary of his videos?
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
[dead]
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.
archive: https://archive.is/BnBFT paper cited: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34583
>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.
[1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...
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.
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.
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.
Saying “in Africa” makes it sound like this is common in every location in Africa. This isn’t true.
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.
> 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?
Best source I could find: https://humanitarianoutcomes.org/AWSR_2025
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.
It's less inefficient bureacracy (although it is definitely that) and more culturally-normal corruption.
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.
Oxfam, for example, are quite inefficient - https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...
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?
That is why organizations such as Heifer International:
https://www.heifer.org/
which focus on providing folks with the means to raise their own food and be self-sufficient are the key.
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."
That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
I suspect a percentage of the 40% don't believe it's possible, or believe it would end up being 0.5% of their income to enrich a select few (as has seemed to happen with previous attempts to "save" entire countries).
Of course, the bigger question is what percent of that 40 actually want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another — be it that they hate the people who are currently poor and can’t envision it happening to them or their community or because they have some weird cognitive defect like the just world fallacy that causes them to believe this is a positive condition for the world to be in.
Some people also think that we should spend that money on other stuff that they’re interested in like cool space stuff and just don’t care about poor people and never will.
I know a number of people who view basically any kind of aid as morally wrong, ultimately leading to the downfall of the people you're trying to help. Even with their own kids, once they're 18 they're on their own -- no help with college, no inheritance, no etc. They really believe that handouts create a situation worse than whatever ill they're solving.
Mind you, they still think poverty is bad, but they'd object to something like paying for basic infrastructure and be happy to create the modern-day equivalent of CCC camps to pay the poor people to build that infrastructure. That sort of thing.
Remember it said rich-world respondents, not rich people. There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
> There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
Poverty is a relative concept. Even among billionaires, there are poor billionaires that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
Another interesting question is what part of the 60% want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another? Probably the same portion as of the 40%, just the reasons differ.
If they wanted it to persist, why would they give up a portion of their income to end it? Are you suggesting the 40% is just more honest than the 60?
Apparently 75% of the world's population believe in some kind of god. 60% is a low number as far as fantasy beliefs go.
Rich world respondent doesn’t mean Rich themselves. When you’re struggling to make ends meet, philanthropy takes a back seat. Half the population in the us is in debt, has almost no savings and is living paycheck to paycheck. I’d assume even 0.5% would be difficult to part ways with.
> Half the population in the US ... has almost no savings and is living paycheck to paycheck
No. The median American household net worth is $193k, and of that, $8k in checkings/savings accounts. 54% of adults have cash savings that can pay for 3 months of expenses (this excludes non-cash savings, and obviously an even greater percentage have cash savings that would cover 1-2 months of expenses, which is still not paycheck-to-paycheck).
None of these stats (including the person you're replying to) are directly comparable.
- Median net worth is $193k, of which $185k is in their home. Suppose a $10k emergency crops up. Well...you're fucked. If you're lucky you can take out a loan against the accrued value relatively quickly, but otherwise you're taking a 10% haircut having to sell quickly, another 10% in transaction fees, and another $10k in the sudden move/storage/renting/loss-of-work/etc situation you found yourself in liquidating your home to cover an extortionist colonoscopy+lawyer pricing or something. You're _fine_, but when minor road bumps can cause $45k setbacks ($55k if we count the $10k expense this depended on) you're not not living paycheck to paycheck.
- You can't compare the median savings to the median net worth. They're not the same person, and the cross-terms can take almost any distribution.
- The 54% stat is based on self-reported vibes and is pretty blatantly wrong. The median household also has $5200 in unavoidable (without delinquency, losing your home, etc) expenses, which doesn't jive very well with $8k in savings somehow lasting 3 months (assuming the cross terms I complained about aren't too terribly distributed). You would expect 2+ paychecks of stability (which, incidentally, is also the usual prompt for "paycheck-to-paycheck" stability -- not whether it takes one paycheck to be screwed but two), but then you're hosed.
And so on.
You're _right_; the median US household won't go broke missing a paycheck; but 2-3 paychecks is enough to cause major problems at the 50th percentile, give or take friends and family stepping in to soften the blow.
You can quibble with the details but ultimately GP is wrong; the median American isn’t broke or living paycheck to paycheck — which were the claims made — and it isn’t close.
I'm sure the approval rate was even lower among the Actually Rich
I'm not even sure I believe that. Try raising taxes by 0.5% and see how ok people are with it. Doesn't matter what it's for.
60% lied out of habit when asked the question, 40% didn't bother lying.
>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.
When it happens collectively e.g. through taxes, you get somewhat of a middle ground between the survey and giving your own money (directly and visibly).
There seems to be some kind of international target of 0.7% of GNI (~GDP) for developmental aid already, which governments often don't meet fully but come close to (e.g. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...), so the 0.5% would probably be viable in tax form.
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.
The framing is wild (emphasis added):
> 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...
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Trickle down altruism
The one neat trick to end extreme poverty is to give women full and equal rights, most importantly, bodily autonomy.
I do not follow, could you expand please?
There's a lot out there if one were to search on the topic, but basically, by allowing women to engage in entrepreneurial endeavors by giving the rights to conduct that work, and, more importantly, not forcing them to be baby-making machines unlocks the potential of half the population.
In societies where they are effectively slaves (and breeders), they are not part of the economy and therefore cannot add to it.
And then there's just the humanitarian part of it too...
It's more complicated than that. Here in East Africa women are allowed to work and run businesses. In fact, most of my friends here who run a business are female. The majority of them run small shops selling food, one sells phones and accessories and another works in such a shop that is also female owned. A number of these are also single mothers because their husbands left them, mostly because they were unable to provide for their families. It is not just about the right of women to earn an income, but also about men being under pressure by their peers to be good providers, and being unable to do so. Some women told me they are not even interested in getting married any more. They just want to have some kids and then manage on their own.
Either way, only education can change things. Both men and women (boys and girls) need to be educated about better ways and how to cooperate to provide for their families together.
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)
America and Europe haven’t been willing or able to copy the parts of the Chinese system that have worked well. Why would Nigeria be able to?
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the Haber process
Technology, crediting this to capitalism is just as dumb as blaming every society’s ills on capitalism.
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.
The problem is not that corruption prevents capitalism from working. The problem is that capitalism doesn't prevent corruption. Corruption is enabled because of capitalism, and any measures to curb corruption will also interfere with capitalism.
I spoke to a local director of a mineral mine in Tanzania. He told me that all of the profits of the mine go to the chinese owners who invested into the mine. That's capitalism at work. The corruption here is (if any) that local officials who brokered the deal allowed this deal to go through without making sure that at least some of the profits remain in the country. It is not even clear that corruption is the cause here. It may well be that the investors simply demanded that much and the locals thought that that would be the best they could get.
In my opinion most of the profits from mining should remain in the country. Those minerals are Tanzanias wealth, that they should use to build up their own country. But capitalism demands that investors make as much profit as possible, disregarding side benefits. So no, capitalism is not the answer.
This is an oversimplification, adopting "capitalism" wholesale as a developing nation without guardrails is incredibly risky because foreign capital will just buy out or crush native industries. The way China actually succeeded was by adopting state capitalism and implementing incredibly strong protectionist measures to ensure domestic growth, not by opening the floodgates to a pure free market.
> Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
Not limiting yourself to an ideological bubble is actually a good thing, regardless of what website you're on.
> most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution
I didn't know that "giving capital and opportunity" to people is inherent to capitalism. My understanding of capitalism is, that if people have money, they can "use their own money to further their own life", but capitalists avoid giving money to other people unless the return on investment is greater than 1.
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Do you think carrying a gun gives the child soldier power to change his circumstances? It's a problem of organization and collective action, not lack of arms.
I just love this thought process where people think they and their fellow yokels playing militia in the woods can protect themselves against the might of the US Government…
The second amendment is not protecting you against an army with tanks, jets, bombs etc
Pssh, who needs clean water and schools, the missing piece in the developing world is clearly a well regulated militia!
one neat trick is to end poverty, ok, yea, that makes sense
Hmm. The article says extreme poverty.
By now, various forms of large-scale welfare are over 100 years old, so we have a lot of collective experience in what works and what doesn't as much.
It seems that there is a big difference between attacking extreme poverty in severely underdeveloped places, which was often quite successful and resulted in economic development, and attacking "standard" poverty of the lowest decile of the population in developed countries, which seems a lot less tractable.
My working theory is that in extremely underdeveloped places, most of the population is quite capable of productive work and building a competitive economy, but lacks the know-how, institutions, stability and means to do so. If provided with those, they can kick-start their own future.
While in the developed countries, the permanently impoverished subset are the people who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot do the same regardless of the means invested into them.
It is quite sobering to know that the most generous social system in the world, in France, spends about a third of the national GDP on social spending, and still has some really bad banlieues and very persistent class conflict. If a third of GDP of a developed country cannot do the job, the problem isn't in the raw amount of money spent, but somewhere else.
i think culture can also play a role. there are places in the world (southern italy for example) where people do not want to work, and so live in poverty. same for other places...