Blog Action Day - Poverty Demystified

This post is being written in participation with Blog Action Day. This year's topic is poverty.

Poverty. We view it as one of life’s big mysteries. We wonder, “How have we let this happen? How is it that we have created a world around us where millions have little to eat themselves, while others have such excesses of wealth that their dogs spend their days at the spa?”. The problem feels so overwhelming that it hardly seems possible that we can ever overcome it on a global scale.

What is true is that it is an overwhelming and tragic problem that is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. What is false is thinking that it is a mystery how and why this situation exists – a mind-baffling mystery it certainly is not.

Let us do a little mental experiment. Let’s say we have five children, and every day we have ten apples available . Enough for each child to have two apples per day – if our goal was to distribute these equally. But let’s imagine that this is not our goal. Rather, let us imagine that we fashion a game for these children whereby they run a lap around the track, and the child who wins the race gets an apple. The first day, child A, who is naturally talented at this particular game, wins all 10 races, thus getting all 10 apples.

The second day, the other kids realize they need to practice a bit in order to keep up – and so the second day child B wins 3 races and child A wins only 7. With more time, more practice, and more skill developed at this game, eventually we get to a situation where 3 of the children win 2 to 3 races each per day, while the other 2 children continue to come in last place. So, 3 of these children end up accumulating quite a wealth of apples, while the other 2 have none.

As these 2 children become hungrier and hungrier with each passing day (assuming apples are the main source of nutrition available), their chances of ever developing the skill to win this game become lower and lower. Similarly, as the other 3 children nourish their bodies with their won apples, their ability to win the daily races becomes easier and more assured. This pattern perpetuates and, over time, the end result is that 3 children accumulate quite a wealth of apples, while the other 2 remain quite apple-poor. With their malnourished bodies, it becomes almost impossible that the final 2 children will ever be able to catch up in this game.

Is it a great mystery how this situation arose? Is it baffling or mind-boggling? Or is it simply a pre-condition of the game itself – for one to win, another must lose. For one to accumulate masses of a finite resource, another must remain resource-poor.

Let us keep in mind that the world we have chosen to create and propagate is very similar to this analogy above. In a globalized capitalism, those with power will create the rules of the game. As such, they will excel at it and, over time, those who do not excel will move farther and farther away from the start line. It is a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

Poverty is inevitable in any capitalist society. Why? Because the goal of a capitalist society is not the equal distribution of resources. The goal is to accumulate wealth. And wealth begets wealth for the wealthy, while it begets poverty for the poor. So, poverty is simply an expected by-product of a capitalist structure.

The true tragedy is not poverty itself – the true tragedy is that despite the disgusting by-products of the “free market”, we continue to drink from its cup, believing it to be as wholesome as our ginseng-infused pomegranate tea. The tragedy is that we have adulterated a good idea – that of trade and barter for the efficient functioning of society – and turned it into a cash grab at all costs.

Where are the checks and balances? What accountability does a large corporation have to its faceless employees who work in factories across oceans? So long as the poor remain poor, they have no buying power and, thus, no voice in the corporate world. Where in the book of capitalism is the concept of not abusing one’s power and not holding people hostage to unfair wages and unfair trade exchanges? The common and misguided argument “at least we’re giving them a job” would be akin to child A above offering a piece of apple peel to starving child D in exchange for doing his/her daily chores for a week!

The checks and balances in small-scale capitalism are the human conscience. But, unfortunately, the globalization experiment has proven that human conscience is limited by what the eyes are able to see directly. No one would ever think of making such unfair face-to-face trades with their poor neighbour. So why do we feel okay to do so with poor individuals overseas? Our conscience is unable to comprehend suffering unless we see it with our own eyes. Our conscience is unable to inform our actions unless we are forced to see the horrific consequences of those actions in front of us. Our conscience does not stop us from buying clothing made in sweatshops, or buying coffee grown by labourers working for pennies a day – because we don’t see them with our own eyes. We can pretend they don’t exist. Once capitalism operates outside of the normal structures of human interaction, the checks and balances disappear. This is the crux of poverty.


No amount of foreign aid will ever help. No amount of “Make Poverty History” schemes will ever help. They might make us feel a bit better about ourselves – but they won’t help create sustainable change. Nothing will ever help, unless we change the rules of our game. So long as we continue playing our make-believe game of free market capitalism on a global scale, the playing field will continue to become increasingly unequal. So long as the goal of our game is to win and accumulate resources, we need to accept that the inevitable corollary of that is that the loser is going to starve. And so long as we don’t have to see people starving while we’re eating our three-course meal, we’re not going to care enough to change the rules of our game.