Public Good
By: Rebecca Hang
Global poverty is a battle we have been fighting for as long as most can remember. It is
an intriguing and important topic to be informed about because first, the rate at which individuals
are dying due to poverty. An average of 25,000 children under the age of five die each day, from
preventable interventions. And second, if we look at the statistics, there is no reason global 1
poverty should be as severe as it is today. The annual income of the richest 100 people in the
world is enough to end global poverty. A $3 net invention could prevent children from getting 2
malaria. The change in our pockets could supply three meals a day for child in a third-world
country. The means to end global poverty have existed for a long time, but implementing a
procedure to carry out these means is the difficult part. The enlightenment era which led to rapid
industrialization significantly rose incomes. For the last couple of decades, global poverty went
from 44% to less than 10%. This is a massive success. As seen by the figures below, income
equality among countries around the world has become exceedingly prominent. World leaders
are doing a fantastic job but there is still much to do be done.
1 See the Oxford.org website for more information on poverty statistics
2 See the Unicef.org website for more information on poverty statistics
A strong point made by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo in their book, Poor
Economics, is that we as individuals must fight the feeling that battling poverty is too
overwhelming to take on. They used the example of an individual who is generous when faced
with the opportunity to feed a starving child versus an individual who feels there is no point
because it is just one meal and it is not going to cure world hunger. The authors encourage that
we think again and not be the latter. It is crucial to think of world poverty as a series of small
problems that we can fix one at a time. In policy, they have the opposite mindset. They discuss
“big question” issues such as: “What is the cause of poverty? Is democracy good for the poor?”
when we should really be focusing on questions such as, “In India, how can we distribute this
invention to the most amount of individuals in the most effective manner?” I may sound
hypocritical by answering that first question throughout this essay. However, this essay in not
intended to solve world poverty, just to inform the readers on the issues that are occurring
worldwide.
Another point that speaks to why global poverty exists at the extreme it does is traps.
This is an interesting perspective because it does not pertain to the fact that global poverty is
inevitable and exists because more fortunate human beings do not have it in their hearts to help
those less fortunate humans beings. It pertains to the fact that we are explicitly doing this to our
own people. This point is made by Paul Collier in his book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest
Countries...
