What is the cause of global poverty?
- multithoughts1
- Jan 23, 2021
- 4 min read
On the written comprehension of the last term, we were assigned to write a text that had to do with our blog theme in my case particularly "multiculturalism". So I ended up choosing "what is causing global poverty" as a theme to write about.
However, things didn´t go as planned for a number of reasons so I ended up writing a messy text with quite a few misspellings.
So today I'm going to rewrite it and modify it with the advice that the teacher gave me.
So what exactly is causing global poverty?
Poverty is often invisible, those living in poverty are often ashamed to talk about it or lack the means to ensure their voices are heard.
And when we do face poverty right in front of our own eyes, for example, seeing a homeless person begging on the street a lot of us tend to ignore it and just turn our heads to the opposite side, afraid of being confronted with the reality that suffering is actually happening nearby and not just on the other side of the world.
Worldwide there are about nearly 3.6 billion people living in poverty which means that half of the world is currently living badly and in inhuman conditions. A lot of people will try to argue that extreme poverty actually decreased over the years, so even though poverty is still a prevalent matter it´s not as bad as it used to be (graphic 1).
However, this is not factually correct, this data comes from the World Bank which only purpose is to serve the narrative that poverty is being eradicated from the world so of course, they weren´t going to show opposing data to that idea so what they are presenting as factual is pure propaganda.
The way they get these numbers lower and lower every year is by making the extreme poverty line $1.90 a day and using this same $1.90 line it appears that only 700 million people live in poverty worldwide. But note that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity. 1.5 billion are food insecure and do not have enough calories to sustain “normal” human activity. And 2.1 billion suffer from malnutrition. How can there be fewer poor people than hungry and malnourished people? If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low.
Numerous economists state that for achieving basic nutrition people need at least 7.4 dollars a day which is around 6 euros a day and when we take a look a the number of people below this 6 euro line the results are drastically different (graph 2) and when we take China out of the equation for the reason that China is the number one responsible for the drop on poverty we see that nothing actually changed anywhere alse (graph 2/3).
So what is causing this global poverty?
Well there isn´t just a specific reason why it is happening there are a lot of variables to take account but in my view, I think there are two main reasons why it is still so prevalent:
The systematic oppression of certain groups in society
The exploitation of the working class
I will address the first one on my next post but today I'm here to talk about the second one.
Some people like to blame poverty on individuals and on their personal choices stating also that anyone can rise above the poverty line if they just work hard enough for it.
However the truth couldn't be farther from it, it's not that people are not working enough, it's that they don't get paid fairly for their labour.
For example recently Elon Musk the owner of Tesla recently surpassed Jeff Bezos and became the richest man in the world having a net worth that is valued close to 190 billion dollars.
However, his whole net worth as you would expect is not earned with ethical values for example in the Republic of the congo, there are children dying in cobalt mines living in inhuman conditions getting paid as little as they can and working extremely long hours not even to mention the exploitation of Earth´s natural resources just for the sake of reducing the costs of primary materials to achieve a bigger profit in the end.
I´m not saying that we should put Elon´s head on a spike though I'm just reaffirming that the people living in these conditions do not need to be more intelligent or make other personal choices to escape their situation they just need to be paid fairly for their labour and to have better working conditions in general but of course, that does not happen because profit is the ultimate goal.
A lot of people also like to claim that if you are not satisfied with your job you should "just get another one" and to me, this just comes out as an extremely privileged talking point ignoring the reality outside of their bubble because we all know that finding a job is not like picking a flavour of ice cream and the chances that you are going to find a better one are also against you.
For example, woman in Bangladesh have little to few choices on jobs that have minimal humane conditions and wages, ending up most of the times working in jobs that pay poverty wages. It is estimated that these poverty wages are accountable for 50% of the jobs in Bangladesh so it's not reasonable to ask them to get another job when most jobs there are unethical and put their workers at risk in dangerous working facilities so we here on the West can buy three euros t-shirts.
To sum up there are a lot of reasons why people are struggling and living in poverty but the roots of those problems have one common factor: the exploitation of the working class by making their wages as tiny as they can be and consequently not paying fairly for the labour that they produce.
What it boils down to is a mass disparity in wealth around the globe and the perception of rich people as successful hard-working people and poor people as lazy and dumb for not working hard enough to escape the horror of their situation.
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