Saturday, February 28, 2009

Poverty amidst the plenty

I am in Seattle to meet a very large donor who is very committed to eradication of poverty and is attempting to ensure that socio-economic conditions of poor people across the world can be elevated so that all human lives has equal value. Seattle is a very homely city, locals and shopkeepers are very kind and warm (they make up for the gloomy weather). However, I could not help but notice a certain sense of anxiety and fear among them. There is no doubt that this is related to the current economic crisis. News channel (local and national) are either lamenting the past or presenting a very frightful future - some even compare it to the Great Depression. It seems to me that a common person in America has lost access to credit, his savings have disappeared, is highly indebted, with no job security, and very limited access to health and proper education. These are precisely the conditions poor people in third world countries live in on a daily basis. The only difference is that in technical terms of minimum consumption (less than a dollar a day), the common man in America is not poor. 
Poverty is a way of life. If individuals loose their capacity to change their well being by hard work and industry then the individual is poor. If individuals loose access to basic health and education then the individual is poor. No matter what its origin, poverty feeds on individual freedom, it erodes the institutions of free society. This has to be halted at any rate before it becomes a structural problem. We know from the experience of third world countries that poverty has destroyed the foundation of free society where individuals are masters of their own fate. It has become a herculean task to rebuild these foundations. Government help should not aim at fixing the leak, rather the focus should be on how to get the common man out of poverty.