{"id":206515,"date":"2022-03-07T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=206515"},"modified":"2022-03-07T13:18:36","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T13:18:36","slug":"ending-poverty-by-rethinking-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/03\/ending-poverty-by-rethinking-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Ending Poverty by Rethinking Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

First Premise:\u00a0 \u201cThere is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.\u201d<\/em> \u00a0\u00a0–Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n

Second Premise:\u00a0 \u201cI regard any considerable increase in human happiness, unaccompanied by changes in the state of desires, as hopeless.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 –John Stuart Mill<\/p>\n

My general idea is simple:\u00a0 We should all be working together to make sure everyone\u00b4s needs are met, if not one way then some other way.\u00a0 Nonetheless, this unbounded realistic ethical approach is so different from orthodoxy that when you try to fit any of the proposals below into the framework of now standard rationality\u00a0 (the common sense of an economic society, Pareto optimality, maximizing the bottom line, the requirements of sustained growth etc.) you will find that my proposals require rethinking thinking.\u00a0 We are in a civilizational crisis because we are dominated by irrational rationalities that paralyze our ability to use existing and in-the-pipeline techniques and resources to welcome every sister and every brother into what Dr. King called the Human Family living in a World House.<\/p>\n

I will sketch an unbounded critical realist ethical open-ended and always -subject- to- revision plan to end poverty.\u00a0\u00a0 Be warned, however, that it does not fit the bogus economic logic that currently defines what is accepted as making sense in policy-making circles.\u00a0 Unbounded ethics calls for a long critical process separating the wheat from the chaff\u00a0 in currently dominant thinking.\u00a0 And in currently widespread emotions.\u00a0 As Mill intimates in the quote above, without changes of heart, without healthy desires curing the current epidemics of rage, fear, and sick desires, no improvements in logic or in science will save us.<\/p>\n

A beginning point for my plan is to focus on converting free riders.\u00a0 I refer to people who possess surpluses they could share with the poor, who are happy to benefit from the social peace, the lower rates of crime and disease, and all the other benefits the non-poor derive from the absence of poverty. (See the studies by Wilkinson and Pickett\u00a0 that document the benefits the non-poor derive from living in more equal societies), \u00a0\u00a0But the free riders do not contribute to paying for ending poverty.\u00a0\u00a0 Free riders \u00a0often stash money they do not really need\u00a0\u00a0 in secret trusts in tax havens, instead of using the same money to \u00a0buy food\u00a0 and subsidize child care for the single mom across town struggling to survive balancing caring for her kids with working twenty hours a week at McDonalds.<\/p>\n

Karl Marx and Milton Friedman, speaking from different perspectives, argue that \u00a0the free riders will inevitably dominate the prosperous people who care and share.\u00a0 The essence of their\u00a0 arguments is that businesses like Google and donors like Bill and Melinda Gates, who donate large sums to poverty-alleviation\u00a0 will inevitably be driven to the wall by free riding competitors like Apple. Some free riders\u00a0 accumulate enormous stashes of cash skillfully protected from taxation.\u00a0 They are positioned to drive their nice guy competitors \u00a0out of business.\u00a0 As Marx puts it, whatever higher ethical level individual capitalists may subjectively achieve, they are prisoners of objective social relations beyond their control.<\/p>\n

Given today\u00b4s huge surge in philanthropic giving, and given that a substantial portion of the corporate shares traded on stock exchanges is held by non-profits whose income flows serve\u00a0 one or another aspect of the common good, there must be\u00a0 something wrong, or something inapplicable to today\u00b4s realities, in \u00a0the abstract\u00a0 reasoning of Marx and Friedman.<\/p>\n

The free riders\u00a0 intimidate the givers.\u00a0\u00a0 Prudent \u00a0givers\u00a0 are trying to follow Cicero\u00b4s advice to be generous, although \u00a0not so generous that they impoverish themselves to the point where they are no longer are able to \u00a0generate surplus to share. \u00a0\u00a0They are naturally intimidated by the fear of being gobbled up by less idealistic competitors.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0A plan to \u00a0help the free riders to see the light and to cooperate for the common good \u00a0is a giant step toward encouraging more sharing by prudent givers who are already motivated to share.<\/p>\n

The point Marx and Friedman make is while not the whole truth, not to be dismissed.\u00a0 As Friedman put it, anybody in business who does not concentrate single-mindedly on maximizing profit and accumulating reserves to fight off future challenges from future competitors \u201cwill not be in business for long.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Friedman\u00a0 is\u00a0 not entirely wrong.\u00a0 Savage capitalism, to a large extent in the form of the British Empire later followed by the American Empire, came to dominate the earth largely by accumulating wealth\u00a0 far beyond the money cost of enabling the owners of wealth to\u00a0 climb the lower rungs of Maslow\u00b4s hierarchy of needs and graduate to pursuing higher needs for \u00a0meaningful self-realization.\u00a0\u00a0 Accumulated wealth made it possible to accumulate military power. Military power made it possible to accumulate more wealth.\u00a0 And so on. \u00a0\u00a0One might draw from history the conclusion that savage capitalism \u2013or savage any ism\u2014has an inherent tendency to win, while peace and love have an inherent tendency to lose.<\/p>\n

Ending poverty would remove a major obstacle to ending crime, racism, sexism, massive drug addiction and drug gang turf wars. It would \u00a0deflate\u00a0 bogus anti-ecological arguments alleging that the human population must continue to multiply beyond the carrying capacity of the earth in order to\u00a0 stimulate economic growth and to have enough young people working to pay the pensions of retired old people.<\/p>\n

Despite the historical tendency of accumulators to win and sharers to lose, today ending poverty is not hard to achieve.<\/em> \u00a0Today is not yesterday.\u00a0 Being aware of the inherent historical advantage of the free riding accumulators,\u00a0 we can take steps to neutralize their advantage, as advocated above. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We are at a point in history where the accumulators have won the class struggle, not because they are so smart or so strong, but because the dominant social structures require regimes of accumulation that make investment profitable.\u00a0 Having \u201cwon\u00a8 through no merit of their own, Warren Buffet\u00b4s class finds itself in a world nobody wants to live in.\u00a0 It is a world nobody can<\/em> live in much longer because it is unsustainable.<\/p>\n

Ending poverty would benefit everyone.\u00a0 \u00a0It would be relatively inexpensive.\u00a0 It would open paths to sustainability.\u00a0 \u00a0Rethinking thinking is needed to see why ending poverty is feasible.<\/p>\n

Funding is feasible. The amount of \u00a0funds required, \u00a0counting both enhanced private sector and substantial public sector contributions, and adding crowdfunding among the many millions who are already not-poor; and then adding approaches like ABCD (mentioned below) that mobilize resources the poor already have, \u00a0adds up to:\u00a0 Doable.<\/p>\n

Given funding, meaningful work that leads to dignity and self-discipline is not hard to find.\u00a0 Dr. King suggested that any number of people could be employed caring for the young, the old, and the sick.\u00a0 Any number of people could also be employed greening the planet.\u00a0 The ocean will not pay you for cleaning up the plastic that is poisoning it, but work with dignity can be organized to clean the ocean.\u00a0 The same can be said for reforestation and any number of essential tasks that are now neglected.\u00a0 We should also include funding the arts and sciences and any activity that develops intrinsically valuable human talents.<\/p>\n

Meeting\u00a0 human needs is not expensive.\u00a0 Admittedly the magic word \u201cneed\u201d is just a good place to start conversations about how to allocate time, talents, and treasure.\u00a0\u00a0 An appeal to \u201cneeds\u201d \u00a0is not a cookie-cutter shortcut to specifying objectives and drafting budgets.<\/p>\n

Without oversimplifying, we can rely on the general principle \u00a0that meeting\u00a0 human material needs\u00a0 so people can move on to satisfying \u00a0emotional and spiritual needs is comparatively inexpensive compared to other ways to spend the same money.\u00a0 Wars are expensive.\u00a0 Persuading big \u00a0investors to invest in markets already well supplied with quality goods at affordable prices, produced by firms that got there first and already occupy all known profitable niches is expensive.\u00a0 Creating good jobs by enticing big investors \u00a0typically requires government subsidies; tax breaks; \u00a0public spending on security, \u00a0infrastructure, and skills training; public-private partnerships where the public takes most of the risk and the private investors get most of the profits (as in the case of the Santiago metro) \u00a0and so on.<\/p>\n

Paying interest on astronomical unpayable debts is expensive.\u00a0 Creating employment at good wages to be paid from funds generated by projected future sales is expensive.\u00a0 (See the World Bank statistics on how much money must be invested up front to create a good traditional \u00a0job.)<\/p>\n

Ending \u00a0poverty intelligently at an affordable cost \u00a0often \u00a0begins by mobilizing the resources poor people already have, as in the ABCD (Asset Based Community Development) approach that Barack and Michelle Obama were trained to apply.\u00a0\u00a0 Community development \u00a0is mainly about dignity.\u00a0 It is mainly about building positive human relationships amid the massive trauma-induced emotional wreckage that is mass-produced by today\u00b4s dysfunctional societies.\u00a0 However, it requires money too.\u00a0 It requires steady flows of money from property income, from haves to have-nots.<\/p>\n

It is a great illusion to think all the poor can\u00a0 become mini entrepreneurs using \u00a0subsidies to get started, and thereafter be self-supporting\u00a0 selling merchandise to willing buyers.<\/p>\n

An ethical shift is required,\u00a0 a shift to caring and sharing, a shift to\u00a0 mission-driven vocations of service.\u00a0\u00a0 The resources already exist: the free time, the expertise\u00a0 (for example Doctors Without Borders) and the\u00a0 material resources.\u00a0 \u00a0It is a simple matter \u00a0of working together to make sure everyone\u00b4s needs are met, if not one way then some other way.<\/p>\n

The money required to end poverty \u00a0is dwarfed by the trillions traded every day in the global casino of speculative investments.\u00a0\u00a0 It is dwarfed by \u00a0the trillions devoted to FIRE.\u00a0\u00a0 FIRE refers to Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.\u00a0 The RE parts, speculative real estate investments, are normally counter-productive.\u00a0\u00a0 They drive up the cost of buying a house.\u00a0 They drive up \u00a0the cost of renting. \u00a0\u00a0Many people end up sleeping on the sidewalk or in the back seats of their cars; while others work overtime at low-paying jobs just to pay the rent.<\/p>\n

Ending poverty is not expensive, but it requires curbing speculation that drives up prices without serving any ethically valid \u00a0purpose.<\/p>\n

Big ticket items like hernia operations and cancer treatments are best handled by single-payer health care funded \u00a0by nation-states that do not have to depend exclusively on taxes for income.\u00a0 A nation-state dependent on taxes for income is\u00a0 what Joseph Schumpeter called a tax-state, ein Steuerstaat<\/em>.\u00a0 Schumpeter correctly predicted \u00a0in 1918 that tax-states attempting to be welfare states would be unsustainable.\u00a0 An example of a nation-state that is a sustainable welfare state and not a tax state is Norway.\u00a0\u00a0 Its government can count on the backstop of publicly owned North Sea oil that makes possible \u00a0an enormous diversified sovereign wealth fund.\u00a0\u00a0 The Norwegians are aware that while their model solves the problem of the high cost of hernia operations and cancer treatments, it does not solve the problem of ending dependence on fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

The rethinking of thinking that can end poverty welcomes what Shiv Visvanathan calls the defeated epistemologies.\u00a0 They are the epistemologies\u00a0 that were demoted to being \u201ccultures\u201d as opposed to \u201ccivilization\u201d when the weapons possessed by the indigenous peoples of America, Africa and Asia proved to be no match for European fire power.\u00a0 Rethinking thinking \u00a0must forget the \u201ccivilized\u201d European doctrine of John Locke that a person is entitled to all and only \u00a0the value of what the person produces.\u00a0\u00a0 Locke\u00b4s notion of entitlement was the starting point for Adam Smith\u00b4s theory of the natural level of wages. \u00a0And for David Ricardo\u00b4s more mathematical doctrine \u00a0that the supply of\u00a0 labour (a commodity whose supply is determined by birth and by how many of those born\u00a0 survive) is regulated, like anything that is bought and sold, by the law of supply and demand.\u00a0 (See the chapter on wages in Ricardo\u00b4s Principles<\/em>).\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong>King got ethics right; Locke and Ricardo got ethics \u00a0wrong.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. He <\/em>is a philosopher\u00a0of social science <\/em>and<\/em> Research Professor of Philosophy at <\/em>Earlham College, Richmond<\/em>, Indiana<\/em>, USA<\/em>.\u00a0He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0His books include:\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action; Letters from Quebec; Understanding the Global Economy; The Dilemmas of Social Democracies; Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking; Unbounded Organizing in Community;\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, <\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival, is now available from the publisher, Dignity Press, and from Amazon and other major booksellers, as a print book and as an eBook<\/em>.<\/em> howardri@earlham.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ending poverty would benefit everyone. It would be relatively inexpensive. It would open paths to sustainability. Rethinking thinking is needed to see why ending poverty is feasible\u2026 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":198781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1966,610,996],"class_list":["post-206515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-hunger","tag-inequality","tag-poverty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}