Schism

Preview - R.F.H. Chapter 2 - Ending Poverty part 1

Chapter 2: Poverty

AN UNLIKELY HERO

Most of the heroes we come across in books, movies or real life are on the altruistic side.  They do things because they are supposed to, because it’s the right thing to do.  But every now and then, we come across a hero that simply looks out for number one.  They’ll help you…if it helps them at the same time.

Some of the most loved characters of film and literature are antiheroes like this.  Rick Blain from Casablanca, Han Solo, Captain Jack Sparrow or Lisbeth Salander are characters we love to watch or read about.  We can imagine how fun it would be to spend a day with them, to get to know them better.  But we wouldn’t loan them twenty dollars.

In the story of our fight against poverty, we don’t have a typical hero, one who struggles to give basic human needs and dignity to the poor.  Yes, there have been many who have dedicated their lives to lifting others up, but the greatest impact has been made by a completely different character.

As the hero in this story, imagine someone who offers you work and pays you as little as possible, then sells what you make for as much as possible.  This individual would do anything imaginable to maximize their own profit, including firing you and hiring anyone who would work for less money, no matter how unskilled they might be.  “Anything for a buck,” would be his motto.  Except that this antihero isn’t a he or a she.  It isn’t even a human being. It is instead a concept, an economic system: capitalism.

And this story is made all the more amazing not only because this often untrustworthy anti-hero isn’t human, but because of what it faced and when it joined the fight.  In poverty, capitalism faced a problem so complex that it has proved almost impossible to measure.  It also came to the rescue very late in the story, after the problem had existed for many thousands of years.  And to top it all off, the positive effects brought on by capitalism were almost completely accidental.

MANY FACES

In order to help fight poverty, economists and governmental leaders have been trying to define it for many years.  Some have focused purely on income, with earning less than one dollar or $1.25/day as measures of extreme poverty.  Others involve complex formulae that include multiple factors such as health, longevity, infant mortality, the ability to be involved in your culture or an equal right to education.  Consider the following possibilities.

Imagine you work all day and come home to your spouse and three children.  One third of what you earn immediately goes to your housing.  But instead of dividing up the rest between costs like insurance, car payments, utilities or maybe even a few luxuries, every remaining cent has to go toward feeding your family.  That is because you only earn five dollars a day.  After trying to earn enough to feed your family, there is nothing left over to save, nothing left for emergencies, nothing left to invest in a plan that might pull your family into a better life.  In this example, you fall under the classic, monetary classification of extreme poverty, but might not under other formulae.

Or, you have a small house and enough food, but the tiny stream that runs through your neighborhood is brown, stagnant and reeks of all the waste that people have dumped into it.  You know that the people that drink it or bathe in it become sick.  Some of them die.  But the nearest clean water source is nearly four miles away, so you spend hours a day walking and carrying water, which leaves you less time to try to earn a living.  But when you leave your neighborhood, you are treated as an outcast.  You feel trapped, as though you and your family shouldn’t leave your run-down neighborhood for the necessities of life or to do anything with everyone else that lives nearby.  You feel like you don’t belong to the community, not even enough to go vote.  In this scenario, you might earn too much to be classified by some organizations as living in poverty, but everything else in your life says that you are.