Senate Global Poverty - causes and solutions

According to one study, for the first time in history, over half of the global population isn't poor (and that's debatable, I think);

http://theweek.com/speedreads/801062/half-world-now-middle-class-rich

While I have doubts on the report that the 50% mark has finally been crossed (though I hope it's true)... global poverty has definitely been in decline, and it's projected to continue.



Even if the article is true, that's still close to half the world... billions of people... who are living in extreme poverty.

There is still a lot to be done, due to lack of access to clean water, nutritious food, education, infrastructure... as well as civil wars and other conflicts.

The legacy of colonialism/imperialism looms large over it all.

Globalization has both helped and hurt... lifting people out of poverty in some places, redistributing wealth away from developed nations through outsourcing (wealth that was often originally amassed through colonialism, slavery, conquest, etc... though the victims of the redistribution are often the working poor and lower middle class in those developed nations... and the main beneficiaries of this wealth transfer are actually the multinational corporations, even if does benefit the exploited workers in those less-developed countries even if it's just a fraction when compared to how the MNCs and their top executives have gained). So while it has helped lift some out of extreme poverty, it's also enabled worker exploitation in those areas at the same time, as well as creating a political backlash in developed countries and especially hurting their working poor.
And this is just skimming the surface, I know others here could describe it better than I.
This is a very messy, complicated issue.



Extreme global poverty was recently recalculated as living on less than $1.90 a day.

A lot of the time, when we talk about poverty and income inequality, the focus is on developed countries... and the discussion of solutions is "easy" - usually a debate on whether higher taxes & more social services or empowering and deregulating businesses/entrepreneurs are the best path. That is definitely a discussion worth having, and it's very possible to do fight poverty on all fronts at once. But then extreme global poverty, and how to end it, is usually glossed over. So let's focus on it here. (And I don't deny that extreme poverty, such as living on less than $2/day, does exist in developed countries too, just not to the same extent.) Unlike developed countries, while there is a small club of the very wealthy in most of the most poor countries, it's not nearly enough to solve their country's poverty problems even if their wealth was totally redistributed within that country. And it's not like there's a world government to tax all the rich of the world to provide services for all the poor of the world, and make all businesses play by the same rules, for better or for worse. Solving global poverty is a much trickier issue... with its own unique barriers from lack of literacy to rarely-spoken languages to even the geography and lack of infrastructure to even account for or reach all of these people.

What is the true problem, what are the root causes? And how does the world get together to solve this... or the most affected countries by themselves with the help of some individuals and charities, if the governments and international businesses of the world won't get together to solve it in a "kumbaya" moment?

 

Partying hard on your Friday night, huh Ghost?

 

Or just accurately, at a start.

Please tell me what's going on with Chinese wages from the period 2002-2018?

 

They just need a job.

 

Bootstraps

 

No it's not that. And it's annoying that this is going to be another beauty contest where people compete to say the most woke things for fear of being called out.

Chinese wages have gone up to the point of no longer being competitive. That, coupled with labour safety laws and higher expectations with a higher standard of living, has meant conditions materially improved for the Chinese.

Everywhere that we outsourced our work to, if they diversified away from cheap, cheap labour they got labour protection laws and richer as a result. You cannot bypass that stage of not having it though; it's a necessary evil. If you do then there's no point using Country X because the labour's not cheap anymore.