Topic: What do We Need to Do to End Poverty--Pragmatically and Soon?
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David,
I suggest that it does not help to blame the "rich" - that only continues dividing humanity and the conflict between us. I prefer to think in terms of our essential unity: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_essential_unity I think we agree, however, that there will be poverty until such time as we have "systems of production" in which everyone can participate. I have some ideas on that which you can see at: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Self-help_Corporation I would be pleased to discuss this in more detail - if you are interested. |
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Hey, all:
Hey, David: I would simply say that whether it would "help to blame the "rich"" does not change anything. I also do not want to have this turn into an argument on blame. The topic is ending poverty. I would say that the majority of the world's abject poor do not have the resources to end their own poverty. Otherwise, it seems they would have done already it on a very broad scale. Assuming the poor have no skills is incorrect, but what is correct is that their skills are not respected with a living wage, or at least enough food to maintain life and heath. Ask thousands of American farmers if their extensive skills disappear with the price drops for farm products. What is needed is a commitment by governments to take some of the most important crucial steps below, and any others the good people propose. Governments as currently constituted do not respond to this sort of crisis in an altruistic manner, hence the problem, so governments on the whole need a populist makeover. Most governments still contain the basic structures, but generations of elitism have distorted law, taxes, and economics do the extent that poverty is institutionalized. Regardless of what we call the major patrons, beneficiaries, and participants in most governments, we can measure their per capita income, and discover that it is magnitudes higher than that of the poor. Depending on them to change is folly. Instead, and consistent with the movement WiserEarth celebrates and promotes, the makeover is one we must push. I guess we can begin to separate ourselves on the basis of who are here with a serious motive to effect improvement, and those here for other reasons. Finally, David, I am interested, as evidenced by the fact I started the topic. What we still need are real, effective, pragmatic solutions. Electing responsive and responsible public servants is one place to start. Political activism is essential for that step. Poverty will not end without determined serious action. David Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun! |
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Sustainable David,
I agree with your assessment about governments and the influence the elite ruling class has on them. Governments are often run by people who use their position to influence policy that will benefit the social and economic group they belong to. As an example the government in the US was designed from the beginning to protect the wealth and property of the ruling elite. This creates a huge hurdle for those living in poverty to try to overcome. To answer your question I feel their are many changes that need to take place and one of the most important is making the lives of those living in poverty a priority of governments. |
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I am not disagreeing with you that government is not doing anything to solve poverty. I am saying that expecting government to fulfill that role, or expecting the "we" can make government accept that role is unproductive.
<a href="http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_whole_system">Whole Systems</a> I am also not saying that the poor have no skills. <a href="http://www.aboutus.org/Self-help_Corporation">Self-help Corporations>/a> We need not limit ourselves to the tired debate between capitalism and socialism. Government is incompetent to solve poverty. Business can only take us so far. The rest is up to people figuring out that those who are not needed in the "market economy" can produce for their own consumption. Anyway, if you would like to talk about that, I have quite a bit of material on it. |
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David Braden,
I read your link about the self-help corporation and found it interesting. I took a philosophy class and a sociology class where the professor discussed these ideas. I wonder if this is something that looks good on paper but doesn't work well in the real world? My concerns are that there are too many variables for people to screw up. If everyone involved was genuinely interested in cooperating and taking care of their responsibilities then perhaps it would work very well. Do you have any examples of self-help corporations? |
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Thanks for asking Barrett. No, there are no "self-help corporations" that I know of. There are all sorts of organizations that employ different aspects of it - one response I often get is "Oh, that's a cooperative," and that is true in some ways but not others. See:
http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Collectives There are two main distinctions between the Self-help Corporation and any other business model. First, labor is treated as a capital contribution rather than an expense - giving the workers "ownership" of the profits: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Economics_of_Integrated_Production Secondly, unlike a cooperative like Mondragon and other businesses engaged in the "market", the self-help corporation does not pursue economies of scale. It is designed to pursue economies of integration in which each assets is used for as many purposes as possible: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Whole_System_Design_Process See also: http://www.zeri.org |
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Here is a discussion of how the principles might apply in a real situation:
http://www.ned.com/group/neduganda/news/2/ |
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the opinion of me is that we need to focus on really sustainable activities for the poor people communities of the developing countries, i am one of social worker from Lower Sindh Pakistan and have experienced that there is solution of poverty if we know and do on mass scale the rural communities can get started towards sustainable development. I personally think and prepared on VDM model village development model in which 7 actvities are incorporated
1. Village lvel CBOs/VDO/SHG formation 2. Safe and clean drinking water promotion 3. Adult literacy centers for women especially 4. Veritable (kitchen gardening) training at household level 5. Revolving loan funds schemes (heifer/goats) 6. Fuel efficient stove construction (smoke free cooking) 7. Skill training and awareness the said model will bring change in the poor villages within a 1 year time frame and through which the whole world can move towards sustainable development. for more please visit www.ahdpak.org of the VDM model where you will find activities snaps and concept paper. there is need to do something to eradicate poverty of the world or email me for a copy of VDM model at ahdpak@yahoo.com, ahdpak@gmail.com |
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Thank you for sharing Abdul. Looking forward to learning more about your model.
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I have founded and organized a tangible way for individuals to come aboard and find out more about Poverty and Homelessness. I have discovered most citizenry refer to an individual rather than the greater collective root causes of Poverty. ( meaning either the President; and on the other side refer to a specific case of someone they personally know who lives in poverty and or has/is homeless) Real solutions as this gentleman in Pakistan is discussing is correct. Tangible answers for personal involvement even from afar will have a greater impact on economic disparity in the long run. I recently heard "do not wait on the governments, they are part of the problem often not the solution." Policy making and or systems change from a citizen centered approach; where concrete realities are able to be realized is what is also needed. You are right, "not talk but do" is the truth . More doers are needed ,those that are able to present local and global hardships to everday folks who really are seeking for answers , though want a viable outlook to turn to.
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Dear all,
The Millennium Villages project led by Jeffrey Sachs at the Earth Institute looks very promising to me. To be found at http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu. Would you consider these people a group of doers led by good strategic insights? Best, Sven |
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growth of poverty level is largely due to misunderstanding poverty. Measures controlling poverty should be linked to the suitability of the country, as reasons of poverty changes due to social conditions of the country. For example, countries like India and other who has thick population and dominated by illiterates and semi- literates (semi-literate means with less literacy level which deprives them from employment in high tech or medium industries). This category does not fit into high tech industries. For them agricultural, small and cottage industries are most suitable.
http://www.sadashivan.com/quotpovertyquotasubject/index.html Many problems in social structure when accumulated, poverty is borne. That may be unemployment, over population, education, government performance, and relation with neighboring country. Poverty A SUBJECT that is enjoyed by poets/ writers and politicians. Is curse for who experience, and boon as a subject for politicians to promise for vote! And subject of appreciation by public to writers and poets! Many books have been written and many promises made, nevertheless, poverty level has dominated the world. Governments and International Organizations who study and spend exorbitant amount in their research on poverty and things end up in racks with full of files and books on poverty |
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The solution to solving poverty is not straightforward - but is it achievable and possible. There are many aspects to a full and comprehensive solution - but in my opinion one of the most important issues is the redistribution of wealth. In Islam, there is the concept of zakat - where EVERY individual pays 2.5% of their annal residual income (wealth left over after expenses) to a fund - the zakat fund - and this is used for development.
I envisage a system where everyone - every working person in the world, PLUS corporations and governments - commit to depositing just 2.5% of their excess wealth to such a fund. The fund would then be used to: - help natural disaster victims - earthquakes, floods, famine, crop failure - provide for the *basic* needs of all people who do not have food, clothing, shelter - put in place systems where people can be self-sufficent - education for all One of the core problems we have is that 80% of the wealth of the worth is with just 17% of the population. There MUST be a redistribution of wealth - that will provide the means of sustainable development. There must be a WILL and RECOGNITION amongst peoples of the world, corporations and governments that poverty eradication is OUR problem - not just governments, or NGO's or UN - no - poverty alleviation is the responsibility of every man, woman and child. We need to create a culture of giving and caring, as opposed to the capitalist mentality of me, me, ME! Khalid |
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I think that zakat is a great concept (though I would have to know a lot more about how such funds would be allocated), and I love how you said "There must be a WILL and RECOGNITION amongst peoples of the world, corporations and governments that poverty eradication is OUR problem".
We need to do a better job at making the connection between poverty and sustainability. By helping people who need help, we empower them to help others as well. By providing people with basic necessities such as food, healthcare and shelter and by improving schools and literacy rates we create not only more self-sufficient people, but people who can devote more to the world around them. |
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Ending poverty is a simple matter of changing the system of society. The system of society creates poverty. Partly due to Capitalism's system of reward training, which teaches people to care only for themselves. The more greedy you are, the more you are rewarded. The other part is the pyramid command structure, which makes people at the top think they are so much more important that they need to take everything, and the people at the bottom get nothing.
In a moneyless leaderless society, there is no poverty. The trick is creating a moneyless leaderless society that works, and I believe I have the solution for that. What makes Capitalism work is not the rewarding people to make them work harder, that actually fails miserably. People don't work harder for the reward, rather they find ways to trick their boss into thinking they work harder, and they tell their boss they work harder and they tell their boss that other people work slowly or do things wrong to get their boss to give them more money. People are very successful at doing that, and the result is the bad workers get more money and more responsibility and the result is things are done wrong. What makes Capitalism work is the allowing individuals to make decisions. If you have enough money, you can make decisions. If you have enough money, you can invent new things. Even so, Capitalism is not very good in that area, 'cause almost nobody has enough money, but it works better than the alternative systems of the past. Previous moneyless leaderless societies have always had a huge problem in that area. They don't allow individual freedom. Everything is decided by the group. The result is poor technology, very slow to develop new sources of income, resulting in extreme poverty. This is basically what makes the Amish live 200 years in the past, although they tend to be fairly wealthy I've heard. This is a problem that can easily be fixed. We can add individual decision making to a moneyless leaderless society and the result will be super efficient (because moneyless society is extremely efficient which allows them to exist in spite of such extreme poverty), super fast growing, extremely fast technology development, and virtually no poverty what so ever. Such a society would very quickly absorb all the poor people, by offering them a much better life, and then it would continue to absorb the more wealthy until it has all people on Earth. The wealthy are not wealthy unless there are poor people under them. Here's my website for more info: http://conceivia.com Tony |
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Ending or significantly alleviating poverty likely requires mega-changes in governmental policies and economic systems that likely will take many years to achieve. So what to do with and about people who are hungry, homeless, etc. in the meantime? It is a temporary, band-aid response to problems that need permanent solutions, but here in the U.S. and increasingly elsewhere around the world food banking (re-routing the food industry's surpluses and useable discards to churches and charity agencies who provide food aid to needy people) is proving remarkably successful in alleviating immediate needs. Through preventing senseless waste food banks relieve senseless suffering. In the U.S., for example, total food waste has been estimated to be as much as 180 billion pounds per year; the U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that as much as 32 billion pounds of that waste may be recoverable/useable; while hunger in the U.S. is estimated to equal about 8 billion pounds of food per year. Again, it is a temporary patch on what should be fixed permanently, but while those more long-term solutions get themselves advanced please be aware that there is much that can be done to relieve suffering in the meantime. You can download my organization's blueprint for local communities adequately addressing their area's hunger problem free from our web site at www.wmgleaners.org; we've used those methods to meet 100% of the estimated need in one of the forty counties we serve, and have five counties over 60%, with others edging up toward that range quite rapidly. Additional information is available from America's Second Harvest and the Global Foodbanking Network.
John Arnold Second Harvest Gleaners Food Bank of West Michigan Comstock Park, MI |
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John Arnold said:
"Ending or significantly alleviating poverty likely requires mega-changes in governmental policies and economic systems that likely will take many years to achieve." I'd like to think that this statement is not true - but rather, we can all start right now implementing the new systems that we need to end poverty and heal nature. I would invite your organization to join with other people and organizations in you locality to answer the question, "What can We do to make Our community a better place to live?" So we can start looking at the set of connections we need in three dimensions, See: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Introduction to build systems of production in which everyone can participate - ending poverty - and that cooperate with natural processes - healing nature. See: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Self-help_Corporation |
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If organized religion had not gotten (or even started) the civil rights movement it would have taken a great deal longer for those gains to be made. If religious groups dialed up the pressure on politicians all over the world for governments to keep their millennium promises then those promises would likely be kept. I invite every person, and every congregation of every faith in every country to pledge to say The Counting Prayer, "The world now has the means to end extreme poverty, we pray we will have the will" at every worship service until the millennium development goals are met. A counter on the website will tally these pledges, and be a virtual witness to the will of the faithful. And, the politicians sitting in the congregations will experience first hand the will of the people.
The civil rights movement would also not have gotten very far without marches. I further invite congregations to consider having at least two persons briefly leave each service to go out-of-doors and offer The Counting Prayer at least ten times. Whole congregations can participate and say the prayer fifty or 100 times. All these prayers being tallied on a virtual and literal Billion Prayer March to end extreme poverty. These BPM events are repeatable and free. Will the politicians responsible for keeping the millennium promises march outside with their congregations? To register go to www.countingprayers.org |
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Like David, (we know each other from other discussions) I'm an advocate for self-help. I also acknowledge the power of Islamic finance as one tool for achieving the end to poverty (see www.opencapital.net for the concept of shared risk and reward based on assets rather than debt)
We have made a beginning at the grass roots level. This has been done by people in effect, showing the way in developing the tools for poverty eradication but we are always lacking in seed funding, which will be needed no matter what mechanism is our final objective. Back in 1996, my present colleague and founder of our org, pitched a whitepaper at the Clinton government calling for a new approach to the way we do business. It described a formal model, which without requiring mutuality made business people-centered, by directing profits to social purpose. Unlike a nonprofit, collecting and distributing donations which were spent on aid, it would be profit for purpose replacing "revenue drains with revenue gains" Nearly a decade later, a similar concept was adopted in law by the United Kingdom and became known as the Community Interest Company and Professor Yunus.winner of last years Nobel Prize for economics also endorses the profit for purpose approach as the way forward once "more than full cost recovery" can be reached if we redefine our interpretation of capitalism. http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/socialbusinessentrepreneurs.htm What People-Centered Economic Development, my organisation, has been doing about it, recognising our own capital limitations is to leverage funding from International Development aid with the aim of deploying it toward self-sustaining business creation. The pitch to the former President, by 1999 offered the opportunity to deliver a pilot and this became the Tomsk Regional initiative in Russia, a five year project which was to lift 10,000 mostly women micro-entrepreneurs out of poverty, return more than the original investment and leave behind a flourishing microcredit bank. The real kind, which demands no collateral. What we're doing now is simply scaling up the concept to a national level in laying out a 'Marshall Plan' for microeconomic development with a zero tolerance approach to corruption. http://wiserearth.org/resource/view/5099fd47ea27e1456b854293c70cde79 Our targets are the consequences of poverty - Economic orphans, street children, the HIV epidemic, child exploitation and human trafficking, but rather than treat the symptoms we aim directly at the root cause of poverty which brings these things into being. We can certainly relieve 100,000 and more children from their present plight, but what we want to do, is to prevent another 100,000 following in their footsteps. We can, I believe, only do do so much privately and run the risk of developing the kind of sustainability which depends on continued suffering. To end it once and for all, we need large scale backing. Hence, the 'Marshall Plan' |
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Okay, let's have some pragmatic, real, effective actions to end poverty.
I would say we have to bring education to the poor, so they can see a means of moving themselves and their people out of poverty. Education has the benefit of ending ignorance and bias of many kinds.
We need to bring health to the poor, so disease will not waste so much wealth and potential lives. Poor health lessens the ability to support oneself and families, and perpetuates poverty.
We need to bring population control to all levels of income and all cultures, to reduce demand on services at all levels.
We need to bring reproductive rights to women so they will have control over their own bodies, and not be subject to cultural and social bias.
We need to bring a restructuring of taxes so the very rich will part with a larger portion of their income, which, especially in the West, has become so imbalanced that it has become obscene.
We need to end the new manufactured paradigm of "continuous war for continuous peace". It is a vast waste of money and life, both of which victimizing the poor and enriching the rich.
We need to bring to society a better model of economics not based on 'spending money now for what is forced upon us by TV'.
We need to reduce the constantly marketed impulse to buy on credit until it becomes a trap from which there is no escape.
We could simply propose to eat the rich. They would not feed very many (the percent breakdown is on the order of 97:3), but it would eliminate a major part of the problem.
Please add any and all needs that scream to be included. This is not meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive, and it would be arrogant to maintain so.
Once this particular topic is exhausted, once we have introduced and vetted all the things that need to be done, we should move on to practical effective means of getting them done. Systemic, systematic, top to bottom solutions and thinking are encouraged.
David
Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!