> 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.
When I think of funding Africa, I think of Andrew Millison's video blogs about building a green belt.
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.
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 a huge long standing systemic problems that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically.
[1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...
But also we need to do more for ending poverty!
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've checked it when giving funds to new charities.
Oxfam, for example, are quite inefficient - https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...
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.
And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
Where in Africa is this common?
That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common.
The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
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.
which focus on providing folks with the means to raise their own food and be self-sufficient are the key.
That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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...
Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
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.
> 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 third world dictatorships survive by suppressing citizens' rights to defend themselves to enforce order of just law.
The second amendment is not protecting you against an army with tanks, jets, bombs etc