The end of poverty?
BACK in 1975, this is how Time magazine presented the conflict between rich and poor. Roughly 750 million people in two dozen or so industrialised countries consumed most of the world's resources, produced most of its manufactured goods and enjoyed the highest standard of living. In stark contrast, 2 billion people in about 100 countries lived in the shadows of death by disease and starvation.
Mollie Orshansky, who developed the poverty measurements used by the US government, describes that conflict in simpler terms. She defines the poor as people who are deprived of goods, services and pleasures taken for granted by the rest of us. If it's true amongst countries, it's also true within each of them. A small segment of the population is affluent, whereas a preponderant majority lives from hand to mouth.
In the last 50 years, the world population has grown from 3 billion to 6.4 billion. The World Bank estimates that almost half of them are victims of extreme and moderate poverty, living on less than $2.50 a day. If we go by the Copenhagen Declaration at the UN Summit on Social Development, then the net expands further. A much higher percentage of people are severely deprived of basic human needs, including, food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information.
It's comforting that the percentage of world population living in poverty has been declining over the years, going from over 90% in 1820 to 51.3% in 1992. Another study shows that this percentage has steadily diminished from 51.8% in 1981 to 25.2% in 2005. But what throws a spanner in the works is that while bridging the gap between rich and poor, the riverbanks are drifting apart. Poverty reduction is bringing down the number of the poor, but the poor are also getting poorer compared to the rich.
How is it possible? When French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote The Philosophy of Poverty in 1847, he perceived an inner connection between poverty and property. He proposed to abolish property in order to abolish poverty.
In 1880, Karl Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy in response to Proudhon. Poverty, he argued, was not just a question of how much a labourer was paid. It was mostly the result of the increased alienation from society that capitalism brought with it. The accumulation of wealth at one pole is accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, he explained.
So, the accumulation of wealth has happened in some hands and countries faster than others. Economic historian Angus Maddison analysed the growth of inequality over the last two thousand years. What she found was that the ratio of inequality between the richest economies and the poorest economies of the world was barely more than two to one until about five centuries ago.
But it began to accelerate for more than two hundred years. Usha Patnaik, an Indian economic historian, shows the significance of capital transfers from places such as the Indian subcontinent and the British West Indies to Britain. It was around that time that such capital accumulation heavily contributed to the success of the industrial revolution.
The UN Millennium Development Goals aim to halve between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day. The question is whether it will reduce poverty or increase inequality amongst them. The experience is that the poor are being reduced along with poverty. Once mainstream, they are being marginalised.
And that marginalisation is seeping into the rocks of the society, including national parliament. The rich tend to dominate our own parliament, and nominations are auctioned to the highest bidders. Even in the world's largest democracy, the rich are gaining over the poor. In 2009, 300 crorepatis have been elected to the Lok Sabha, double the number elected in 2004. The number of its MPs with criminal records also went up from 128 in 2004 to 153 in 2009.
Is the debris of dwindling poverty cementing the building blocks of inequality? In other words, is the suffering of have-nots getting transformed into the anguish of have-not-enoughs? Is the hunger that once growled in the stomach of the hungry, now going to howl in the heart of the envious?
How will the rich-poor conflict look in future? A negligible percentage of people will still be poor, even if most people will have their basic needs satisfied. Yet, the man with a private jet will look down upon the man without it. Or, someone having a mega yacht will envy somebody who has a super yacht.
The end of poverty is a distant dream, but a change is obvious. It will take a lot more to feel rich, and a lot less to feel poor.
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