Blocked

I suspect that one of the barriers to reducing, let alone eliminating, poverty is simply this: The exploitation of poverty creates active incentives to perpetuate poverty, because poverty itself becomes a resource. And one that's much more renewable than many others one might name. As I've grown older, I've come to believe that the "wealthy world" including, or perhaps especially, the United States, has built its economy in such a way that were global poverty to go away tomorrow, the system would quickly become unsustainable. The idea that the world's leading economies would structure things in a way that could actually solve global poverty presupposes that people who have built their affluence on the exploitation of poverty are careless enough to kill even a shabby goose that lays golden eggs.

And, to be sure, I'm not simply talking about nameless, shadowy "élites" in a figurative smoke-filled backroom somewhere. Irrespective of how precarious they feel their lives might be, a lot of middle class Americans (and likely some people for whom the middle class is out of reach) rely on the low labor costs, and thus poor returns on labor, that poverty enforces to have the comforts they do have in their lives. And people are loathe to surrender their comforts, even when it can be shown that they come at a cost to others.

This strikes me as a recurring theme in life. When I was young, Generation X's "generational anxiety" was about the nation's level of debt, which began to climb sharply after Ronald Reagan's slashing of income (and other) taxes. But that anxiety only seemed to last long enough for the cohort to understand that if government spending was to be brought under control, "we" would need to be the ones on whom less was spent. And the political establishment understood that; so while there's political benefit in pointing the finger at someone else and vowing to raise their taxes, telling the public as a whole it's time to pay the buffet bill is a non-starter.

There are constituencies for the continuation of all of life's big problems. I'm curious how many of them I'm a member of.