The Myth of the Poverty Trap (1 Viewer)

[NWRatCon]

This OP is about the ideas presented in the Atlantic piece,

The Myth of the Poverty Trap​

The Myth of the Poverty Trap

We know how to end extreme poverty. Why haven’t we done it?

www.theatlantic.com

(Gifted link)

The premise:

"We used to be trapped. And by “we,” I really do mean all of us. A few hundred years ago, the majority of the world lived in extreme poverty, and even in recent decades, people lucky enough to clear the $2.15-per-day threshold were living lives that others in the developed world would find unrecognizable.

Death is inevitable. Living in poverty is not.

From 1981 to 2019, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell from 44 percent to just 9 percent—an astronomical achievement."

The piece is about what happened, why it happened and how it can be extended.

"For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable. Starvation, disease, death. As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood. This was the natural order of things.

And then everything began to change. Looking at a graph of development measures over the past two hundred years is to witness the miracle of human development: On any measure you can think of—child mortality, nutrition, poverty—more and more people are able to live significantly better lives than their ancestors could even dream of.

Just 35 years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number is just under 700 million. That’s still a lot of people, but this staggering improvement proves that mass poverty isn’t preordained."

 

[ataraxia]

This really is a sea-change in the human condition. I think in the future, historians will look at the rise of the industrial revolution in the same way they look at something like the rise of agriculture ~10,000 years ago, or the rise of civilization ~6000 years ago.

In addition to the elimination of extreme poverty, I think the elimination of slavery as a socially acceptable norm has been another effect of this revolution.

I suspect there will be other effects which we still have not fully seen. For example, although it may not quite look like it right now, if you stand back and look at it from a broader historical perspective, this may even eventually lead to the end of warfare as an acceptable method of settling disputes. The general trend, when looked at over the past 2-3 centuries, has been strongly in that direction. Maybe then, hopefully, one day our children and grandchildren will look at warfare as barbaric and bizarre an institution as slavery and misogyny.

 

[cpwill]

Poverty and early death (as identified) is indeed the natural state. It is security, health, and wealth that are so rare, so recent, and so fragile (one reason why tearing at the institutions that uphold those things is dangerous)

I scanned the article in the OP, but did not see a summary of major pathways identified by the author. I would say that the ticket is pretty obvious: Capitalism, especially when combined with (Classic) Liberal Governance and strong Social Norms that reinforce high trust societies, but OP wants us to keep to the ideas in the Atlantic article, at least as a starting point.....

....so.... what.... were they?

 

[Rogue Valley]

The Trump administration is tearing down the institutions that ameliorated sickness and poverty, both here and abroad.

From defunding government/university research projects to shuttering USAID.

 

[NWRatCon]

Poverty and early death (as identified) is indeed the natural state. It is security, health, and wealth that are so rare, so recent, and so fragile (one reason why tearing at the institutions that uphold those things is dangerous)

I scanned the article in the OP, but did not see a summary of major pathways identified by the author. I would say that the ticket is pretty obvious: Capitalism, especially when combined with (Classic) Liberal Governance and strong Social Norms that reinforce high trust societies, but OP wants us to keep to the ideas in the Atlantic article, at least as a starting point.....

....so.... what.... were they?

If you dont bother to read the materials, you won't pass the class, right? Is this how you got through school, only reading Cliff notes and copying classmates' papers?

You could listen to it, if reading is too difficult.

 

[cpwill]

If you dont bother to read the materials, you won't pass the class, right? Is this how you got through school, only reading Cliff notes and copying classmates' papers?

You could listen to it, if reading is too difficult.

Not to be a dick, but, I have a lot of plates spinning this week. Happy to engage ideas, but, if the answer is "consume this hour of content and then get back to me"...... I don't do that when people post YouTube videos to "DEBUNK" claims that Russia started the war in Ukraine, either, because I'm not going to do that to try to figure out whether or not a poster is posting something of interest.

I mean, what are the ideas?

 

[Gimmesometruth]

....so.... what.... were they?

Good grief, you just exposed what I suspected. You get an article, for you it is "tldr", and then you demand an answer. Wonderful. Now I know why it is that every time we have a disagreement about basic facts on a topic, it IS due to your ignoring the text. This is no different from the rest of the cons here. That is pathetic.

The answer is multi-part, but the basics are; we need better tracking of individual economic mobility (the economic rise), we need to stop individuals from backsliding into poverty when headwinds hit (illness, disasters) and we need targeted basic levels of monetary support.

Some are going to go with "well... capitalism!", which is an ignoring of the article. Yes, moving from farm to city is part of the story, but as the article shows, a lot of it is simply getting money into the hands of those that need a little capitalization ( women) that allows them to create self employment.

 

[Gimmesometruth]

Not to be a dick, but, I have a lot of plates spinning this week. Happy to engage ideas, but, if the answer is "consume this hour of content and then get back to me"...... I don't do that when people post YouTube videos to "DEBUNK" claims that Russia started the war in Ukraine, either, because I'm not going to do that to try to figure out whether or not a poster is posting something of interest.

I mean, what are the ideas?

This is the game you play, you will get second hand info, and then invariably you will discount it due to who it comes from, then you get to act as if the info is unreliable.

PS...if you are SOOO busy, why in the hell do you spend SOOOOOOO much time on the forum?

 

[NWRatCon]

Not to be a dick, but, I have a lot of plates spinning this week. Happy to engage ideas, but, if the answer is "consume this hour of content and then get back to me"...... I don't do that when people post YouTube videos to "DEBUNK" claims that Russia started the war in Ukraine, either, because I'm not going to do that to try to figure out whether or not a poster is posting something of interest.

I mean, what are the ideas?

Take your time, do what's important. Obviously, the thread title intrigued you enough to look at it. Hopefully, it will intrigue you enough to follow along with the discussion as it develops.

One of the things I found was particularly surprising is that direct transfers are far more effective than "common knowledge" would expect. And relatively cheap - like .1% of your income cheap. $75. (You and I have discussed the merits of Universal Basic Income programs, for example.)

Another is that programs like USAID are impacting far beyond their meager costs. NGOs that focus on one or another aspect of extreme poverty - food, shelter or medicine - have a collective impact. Social safety nets work.

 

[eohrnberger]

This OP is about the ideas presented in the Atlantic piece,

The Myth of the Poverty Trap​

The Myth of the Poverty Trap

We know how to end extreme poverty. Why haven’t we done it?

www.theatlantic.com

(Gifted link)

The premise:

"We used to be trapped. And by “we,” I really do mean all of us. A few hundred years ago, the majority of the world lived in extreme poverty, and even in recent decades, people lucky enough to clear the $2.15-per-day threshold were living lives that others in the developed world would find unrecognizable.

Death is inevitable. Living in poverty is not.

From 1981 to 2019, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell from 44 percent to just 9 percent—an astronomical achievement."

The piece is about what happened, why it happened and how it can be extended.

"For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable. Starvation, disease, death. As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood. This was the natural order of things.

And then everything began to change. Looking at a graph of development measures over the past two hundred years is to witness the miracle of human development: On any measure you can think of—child mortality, nutrition, poverty—more and more people are able to live significantly better lives than their ancestors could even dream of.

Just 35 years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number is just under 700 million. That’s still a lot of people, but this staggering improvement proves that mass poverty isn’t preordained."

Yet another liberal myth falls, and the greatest of all ironies, it's from one of their own left wing sources.

 

[Peter]

Ok, lets do this.

Please tell me how a peasant in medieval England who has a subsistence farm and zero other sources of income can get out of poverty?
The Lords and Ladies of the era controlled everything and could and did have them locked up for no reason if they felt even slightly threatened.

If that wasn't a poverty trap I don't know what is.

The same is true today where many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
How exactly are they going to build an investment portfolio or start buying property to invest in?
They can barely afford to pay for the home they live in and have enough food.

 

[dmpi]

People fail to make a distinction between relative poverty and absolute poverty. Absolute poverty is when people actually starve to death because of no food or freeze to death because they're no shelter. Or there's relative poverty where the poor survive but they struggle hard unlike their richer counterparts. When we're taking about ending earth's poverty where talking about poverty in absolute terms. When we're talking about poverty in America, it's relative terms. People conveniently interchange the two when they want to spin a political narrative usually implying that we are not doing enough for our poor. It's like 'hunger', not matter how overweight the American poor get they still experience hunger and we need to do something about it.

 

[Evilroddy]

2NWRatCon:

An interesting transcript even if at times the wording and explanations are hard to follow. I am still not sure on what the second point was in any great clarity. But the three facts were nonetheless enlightening.

My responses are also threefold:

1) There was a rather Western-centric and institution centred thinking deeply underlying what was being discussed. China got itself out of intergenerational poverty by moving towards the economic sentre and adopting a state capitalism and essentially a neo-mercantilist policy to lift hundreds of millions of its people out of the depths of intergenerational poverty. Dung Xiao Ping started that ball rolling and it worked well until the imperial aspirations of President Xi may have caused economic setbacks - too early to tell yet. Internationalism played a role but China did the heavy lifting.

2) Likewise India got itself out chronic intergenerational poverty by also moving towards the economic and political centre (albeit in the opposite direction from China) and raised hundreds of millions out of deep poverty. The offering of micro-loans to women to start very rudimentary businesses in India was a boon to the Indian economy. But with the coming of Modi that progress has slowed and once again concentration of wealth is increasing faster than dispersion of wealth. His banking reforms and farming reforms are actually killing Indians and sinking more back into poverty now.

3) Finally Africa. Africa was ravaged by the AIDS crisis which killed many of its poorest and most marginalised people along with famines and malnutrition. The continent has also been consumed by war, conflict and violent insurrection which has killed many of the poorest people too. Some conflict/war has been rooted in neo-colonial interests out of the West. Chinese investment and technical aid has improved the pan-African situation somewhat but as the West begins to confront China and attempt to encircle it once more there is likely to be less investment and more conflict on the continent. Africa has been trying to die its way out of deep rooted poverty, unsuccessfully.

The Greater Middle East is still a basket case so I will not comment on that now.

Moving to the political and economic centre and being willing to cooperatively invest in the poor and in the poorest of countries is the key to raising people out of intergenerational and deep poverty. Ideology triumphing over pragmatism, unfettered greed, great state rivalries and local regimes fearful of losing control and facing powerful political changes are the four horsemen of poverty. The talk of NGOs, the United Nations and transfers of money will all play a small role in correcting this phenomenon because the interests and forces which began this poverty reduction progression forty plus years ago are now reversing.

The most telling (and distressing) section of the interview came near the end. It reveals a very real message behind this poverty and why it can be reduced or made worse today:

The other thing that I think is really interesting—I’ll just riff on this a little bit about teaching a man to fish—is the origins of it. So today you hear it, and the way we interpret it is it’s saying, like, Don’t just give people money, because they’re not going to use it in ways that have a lasting benefit. It’s important to kind of help them in these other ways, which I think is just empirically untrue.

But actually, if you trace it back, the first place that I’ve been able to find it, it shows up in this Victorian novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and she has this ironic character in one of her novels saying that the reason that we don’t do these things is because affluent people really don’t want it. They said you could really help somebody make progress, but affluent people would feel uncomfortable with that—it would upend the social order. So it’s funny that the origins of the term are actually this critique of inequality and of people’s unwillingness to—

White-mans; Burden thinking is still behind this but to that we can add Asian-mans' Burden and Indo-Caucasian-mans' Burden too. Colonialism is still here but just went underground disguised as commerce and international finance. No need for pesky armies and navies when you can control economies effectively and remotely through global finance and trade mechanisms.

Cheers? and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Evilroddy]

Poverty and early death (as identified) is indeed the natural state. It is security, health, and wealth that are so rare, so recent, and so fragile (one reason why tearing at the institutions that uphold those things is dangerous)

I scanned the article in the OP, but did not see a summary of major pathways identified by the author. I would say that the ticket is pretty obvious: Capitalism, especially when combined with (Classic) Liberal Governance and strong Social Norms that reinforce high trust societies, but OP wants us to keep to the ideas in the Atlantic article, at least as a starting point.....

....so.... what.... were they?

cpwill:

It is a regrettable lesson of history that one group's wealth accumulation often further impoverishes other groups' population-wide wealth through exploitation. One group's security infrastructure often destabilises other groups' economic and political stability and infrastructure, thus increasing the other groups' conditions of poverty and privation. One group's pursuit of better health outcomes coupled with the profit motive often diminishes other groups' health security through denying access to their own resources by intellectual property laws and denying them the capacity to better maintain their own collective health through local production of the best medicines and foods. One group's security is too often another group's insecurity. It's not a natural state of affairs at all but rather the aggregate results of many decisions made by people with economic or political power from far away in foreign states.

Be, rich well and be safe. Others will miss out though.
Evilroddy.

 

[cpwill]

Take your time, do what's important. Obviously, the thread title intrigued you enough to look at it. Hopefully, it will intrigue you enough to follow along with the discussion as it develops.

One of the things I found was particularly surprising is that direct transfers are far more effective than "common knowledge" would expect. And relatively cheap - like .1% of your income cheap. $75. (You and I have discussed the merits of Universal Basic Income programs, for example.)

Another is that programs like USAID are impacting far beyond their meager costs. NGOs that focus on one or another aspect of extreme poverty - food, shelter or medicine - have a collective impact. Social safety nets work.

I would certainly concur with both of those points. USAID and other programs offer us pennies-on-the-dollar opportunities (though I would heartily concur we waste much of it, too - it's still run by the Government).

IIRC where we differed on UBI was my concern with creating negative incentive structures (ie: decoupling work from sustained living). I prefer a Negative Income Tax for that reason, though there are plenty of voices I respect (Charles Murray, of all people!) who are on the UBI train.

 

[cpwill]

cpwill:

It is a regrettable lesson of history that one group's wealth accumulation often further impoverishes other groups' population-wide wealth through exploitation

This is true - I would say, throughout history, this has been far and away the most common means of wealth accumulation. When Humanity was still within the Malthusian Trap, our ability to increase wealth was mostly limited to superior social organization, expanding agricultural production, and stable political structures that allowed for Trade. We could rise well above our natural state of animal-like privation, but, had a cap.

One group's security infrastructure often destabilises other groups' economic and political stability and infrastructure, thus increasing the other groups' conditions of poverty and privation. One group's pursuit of better health outcomes coupled with the profit motive often diminishes other groups' health security through denying access to their own resources by intellectual property laws and denying them the capacity to better maintain their own collective health through local production of the best medicines and foods. One group's security is too often another group's insecurity. It's not a natural state of affairs at all but rather the aggregate results of many decisions made by people with economic or political power from far away in foreign states.

Indeed - conquest and the use of political force to coerce resource acquisition has a very zero-sum (or net negative) dynamic to it, especially during the initial takeover.



Fortunately, we have managed to technologically escape the trap drawn out by Malthus, and have solid working examples of how we can also escape the trap created by coercive exploitation. When trade is freed, exchanges require the willing participation of both parties - both must believe that it is better for them to engage in the exchange - or it doesn't happen. This wildly changes our incentive structures and, as a result, our activity. Where men (and women) of ambition once had few pathways to grow in wealth or power beyond the oppression of others, now, seeking to abuse your trading partners leads to reduced wealth and power. If you want to become wealthy in a free market, you can only do so by finding a way to reliably serve others, preferably as many others as you possibly can (if you want to get stupid rich, a good way to do that in stable nations with free trade is no longer to conquer and enslave, but to figure out a way to improve the lives of millions - or billions - of others).


The more of the world we put onto this system, the more we see them rise out of poverty - at scales and to heights that would have been frankly unimaginable to previous generations. Capitalism, especially when combined with (Classic) Liberal Governance and strong Social Norms that reinforce high trust societies has proven the most effective means of poverty reduction at a national and global scale.

Be, rich well and be safe. Others will miss out though.
Evilroddy.

Indeed - though we are now at a shocking (insanely shocking, historically) place where the average American can become wealthy. I could do more, but, I do try to teach an average of a class a year on basic finance for that purpose.

 

[NWRatCon]

Fortunately, we have managed to technologically escape the trap drawn out by Malthus, and have solid working examples of how we can also escape the trap created by coercive exploitation. When trade is freed, exchanges require the willing participation of both parties - both must believe that it is better for them to engage in the exchange - or it doesn't happen. This wildly changes our incentive structures and, as a result, our activity. Where men (and women) of ambition once had few pathways to grow in wealth or power beyond the oppression of others, now, seeking to abuse your trading partners leads to reduced wealth and power. If you want to become wealthy in a free market, you can only do so by finding a way to reliably serve others, preferably as many others as you possibly can (if you want to get stupid rich, a good way to do that in stable nations with free trade is no longer to conquer and enslave, but to figure out a way to improve the lives of millions - or billions - of others).


The more of the world we put onto this system, the more we see them rise out of poverty - at scales and to heights that would have been frankly unimaginable to previous generations. Capitalism, especially when combined with (Classic) Liberal Governance and strong Social Norms that reinforce high trust societies has proven the most effective means of poverty reduction at a national and global scale.

I endorse all of this. Especially the bolded.

I also found this quote from the article to be a good thinking point.

"So maybe a good sort of broad way to think about it is: It’s good to not be looking for, sort of, the solution and saying, What is the path that people need to walk? and more thinking about, like, What are the right paths for a given person in a given context, and how can we accelerate that and help them along that? As opposed to coming in expecting there to be one thing that’ll work well for everybody."

 

[NWRatCon]

"So maybe a good sort of broad way to think about it is: It’s good to not be looking for, sort of, the solution and saying, What is the path that people need to walk? and more thinking about, like, What are the right paths for a given person in a given context, and how can we accelerate that and help them along that? As opposed to coming in expecting there to be one thing that’ll work well for everybody."

I want to expand on this. The article addresses at length the fact that not everyone can migrate to jobs, and many don't want to. This is true in America, too. People who grew up in small towns or on a family farm like that lifestyle. But, making it as a family farmer is getting increasingly difficult. What a farmer needs to prosper in place is different than someone looking for work in the city.

A farmer might need help marketing their produce. A factory worker might need better pay or benefits. One of the biggest reason for falling into (or back into) poverty is a health crisis. Both could use a safety net or preventative health care.

So, one can have a general preference for one approach, but it likely can't address all circumstances.

 

[Real blank]

Please tell me how a peasant in medieval England who has a subsistence farm and zero other sources of income can get out of poverty?
The Lords and Ladies of the era controlled everything and could and did have them locked up for no reason if they felt even slightly threatened.

Yes, the lords at the time had access to the best blood letting technology. I get your point but you are going to the extremes a bit here.

 

[Peter]

Yes, the lords at the time had access to the best blood letting technology. I get your point but you are going to the extremes a bit here.

It's what Trump wants to return America into.
He wants the rich to run everything and the government neutered so it can't interfere.

 

[Real blank]

It's what Trump wants to return America into.
He wants the rich to run everything and the government neutered so it can't interfere.

The American government as a whole decided to give way too much power to the executive branch over the last few decades.

 

[bomberfox]

This OP is about the ideas presented in the Atlantic piece,

The Myth of the Poverty Trap​

The Myth of the Poverty Trap

We know how to end extreme poverty. Why haven’t we done it?

www.theatlantic.com

(Gifted link)

The premise:

"We used to be trapped. And by “we,” I really do mean all of us. A few hundred years ago, the majority of the world lived in extreme poverty, and even in recent decades, people lucky enough to clear the $2.15-per-day threshold were living lives that others in the developed world would find unrecognizable.

Death is inevitable. Living in poverty is not.

From 1981 to 2019, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell from 44 percent to just 9 percent—an astronomical achievement."

The piece is about what happened, why it happened and how it can be extended.

"For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable. Starvation, disease, death. As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood. This was the natural order of things.

And then everything began to change. Looking at a graph of development measures over the past two hundred years is to witness the miracle of human development: On any measure you can think of—child mortality, nutrition, poverty—more and more people are able to live significantly better lives than their ancestors could even dream of.

Just 35 years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number is just under 700 million. That’s still a lot of people, but this staggering improvement proves that mass poverty isn’t preordained."

Pinker’s numbers are rather misleading on what extreme poverty is. Even 5 dollars a day is ludicrous to have the bar for lowering extreme poverty, it masks the difference in income and cost of living. Ha Joon Chang and Jason Hickel have addressed this claim.

A letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates, for that matter) about global poverty — Jason Hickel

*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about

www.jasonhickel.org

 

[SoccerCoach]

This OP is about the ideas presented in the Atlantic piece,

The Myth of the Poverty Trap​

The Myth of the Poverty Trap

We know how to end extreme poverty. Why haven’t we done it?

www.theatlantic.com

(Gifted link)

The premise:

"We used to be trapped. And by “we,” I really do mean all of us. A few hundred years ago, the majority of the world lived in extreme poverty, and even in recent decades, people lucky enough to clear the $2.15-per-day threshold were living lives that others in the developed world would find unrecognizable.

Death is inevitable. Living in poverty is not.

From 1981 to 2019, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell from 44 percent to just 9 percent—an astronomical achievement."

The piece is about what happened, why it happened and how it can be extended.

"For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable. Starvation, disease, death. As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood. This was the natural order of things.

And then everything began to change. Looking at a graph of development measures over the past two hundred years is to witness the miracle of human development: On any measure you can think of—child mortality, nutrition, poverty—more and more people are able to live significantly better lives than their ancestors could even dream of.

Just 35 years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number is just under 700 million. That’s still a lot of people, but this staggering improvement proves that mass poverty isn’t preordained."

The trap is called the welfare state that destroyed the 2 parent family and created a culture dependent on the government. The main cause of poverty and crime is the single mother

 

[ataraxia]

The trap is called the welfare state that destroyed the 2 parent family and created a culture dependent on the government. The main cause of poverty and crime is the single mother

That’s not what experience shows. The countries with the highest social mobility in the world are the most robust welfare states. They also happen to be the happiest societies in the world

“Denmark ranks top of the World Economic Forum’s new Global Social Mobility Index, which finds the five Nordic nations and parts of Europe outperform the rest of the world when it comes to giving everyone the chance to succeed.”

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/01/these-are-the-10-countries-with-the-best-social-mobility/#:~:text=Moving%20up%20the%20socio%2Deconomic,everyone%20the%20chance%20to%20succeed.&text=If%20you%20were%20born%20into,in%20Brazil%20or%20South%20Africa.

Why The Nordic Countries Are the Happiest in the World – The Nordic Mum

Why the Nordic countries are the happiest in the world? What can we learn from The Nordics? My decoding of the World Happiness Report.

www.thenordicmum.com

 

[ataraxia]

This is true - I would say, throughout history, this has been far and away the most common means of wealth accumulation. When Humanity was still within the Malthusian Trap, our ability to increase wealth was mostly limited to superior social organization, expanding agricultural production, and stable political structures that allowed for Trade. We could rise well above our natural state of animal-like privation, but, had a cap.




Indeed - conquest and the use of political force to coerce resource acquisition has a very zero-sum (or net negative) dynamic to it, especially during the initial takeover.



Fortunately, we have managed to technologically escape the trap drawn out by Malthus, and have solid working examples of how we can also escape the trap created by coercive exploitation. When trade is freed, exchanges require the willing participation of both parties - both must believe that it is better for them to engage in the exchange - or it doesn't happen. This wildly changes our incentive structures and, as a result, our activity. Where men (and women) of ambition once had few pathways to grow in wealth or power beyond the oppression of others, now, seeking to abuse your trading partners leads to reduced wealth and power. If you want to become wealthy in a free market, you can only do so by finding a way to reliably serve others, preferably as many others as you possibly can (if you want to get stupid rich, a good way to do that in stable nations with free trade is no longer to conquer and enslave, but to figure out a way to improve the lives of millions - or billions - of others).


The more of the world we put onto this system, the more we see them rise out of poverty - at scales and to heights that would have been frankly unimaginable to previous generations. Capitalism, especially when combined with (Classic) Liberal Governance and strong Social Norms that reinforce high trust societies has proven the most effective means of poverty reduction at a national and global scale.




Indeed - though we are now at a shocking (insanely shocking, historically) place where the average American can become wealthy. I could do more, but, I do try to teach an average of a class a year on basic finance for that purpose.

What do you make of the fact that many European, especially Scandinavian countries, far out, performed the US in terms of social mobility, and yet have far more robust welfare systems?

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/01/these-are-the-10-countries-with-the-best-social-mobility/