To answer this question the first difficulties is in establishing cause and – effect relations in the history of human societies.

From Neanderthals to the disappearance of the Woolly Mammoth to the dropping of the Atom bomb exploitation of the weakest has ensured POVERTY.

So I don’t think the answer is to be gained by dredging in past history.

The answer needs no other understanding than exploitation of the weakness since time began.

Geographic connectedness has exerted both positive and negative effects on all of us. Simple societies evolve into large complex ones.

We are seeing this today in the development of technology.

Now called the age of HYPERCONNECTIVITY (78% in the USA have household computers, 76% in Europe, 8% in Africa.)

Naturally, additional factors contributed to history’s courses, but they are becoming more a more irrelevant now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the internet.

Entirely news powers are emerging with new rules, with cultural factors and influences of individual people looming large that will make future history more unpredictable. Raising an important unanswered question that may make future history inexplicable in term of environmental forces or indeed of any generalizable causes.

How do we rebalance and reorganize the economy so that it benefits everybody.

To build a new anti-poverty movement will require an Organisation and Actions that are creative, visible,and gripping. There are too many ways to keep people impoverished. We know the cost of everything and not the value. When you do nothing take on action you are tarnished by the abuse.

It’s just pure stupidity to say that poverty has being reduced.  

When you exclude China between 1990 – 2008 the number of people living in extreme poverty shrank only incrementally, from 1.2 billion to 1.1 billion.

Of total world income, 42% goes to those who make up the richest 10% of the world population, while just 1% goes to those who make up the poorest 10%. It’s no wonder that  equality is increasing out of control.

When you consider that value of $2 dollars in 1947 depending on which formula you work it out with was as follows.

Commodity:

Real Price – $20.60.  Labour Value – $29.60.  income Value – $59.60

Income or Wealth:

Historic Standard of Living – $20.16. Economic status $59.60 Economic Power $130

Project:

Historic Opportunity Cost – $16.30. Labour Cost $35. Economic Cost $130

Two Dollars is today purchasing power is worth sweet f all never mind the new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) of five dollars.

So where are we?

Bill Gates points to the three Myths of Global Aid ( see TIme Jan 21,2014)

The Conference Board of Canada points to World Income Inequality.

Technology points to Job losses due to automation.

World history points to  exploitation.

Governments and politicians point everywhere but at themselves.

Our World Organisations, IMF < WORLD BANK < UNITED NATIONS point at World trade.

Banks point at a disaster. while the Economists and Politicians said” That’s terrible for the economy, let’s give them trillions.

I SAY UNLESS WE CAP GREED ( see previous blogs) and make our economies work for all  Poverty/ Inequality is here to stay. 

More than a quarter of the inhabitants of developing countries still have nothing to live on…

Almost one person in five – 1.2 billion men, women and children – are currently living in a situation of extreme poverty, surviving on the equivalent of less than one dollar a day; half the people in the world are trying to manage below the poverty level of two dollars a day.

About 824 million people go hungry or have a precarious food supply; 500 million of them suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Throughout the world, 170 million children suffer from malnutrition, more than 100 million never attend school, 230 million have no access to secondary education, and almost 250 million work to pay for their own needs and those of their families.

In the industrialised countries, more than 100 million people live below the income poverty line, 37 million are jobless, and more than 5 million people are homeless.

1.6 billion people in the world have no access to drinking water.

More than 840 million adults in the world are illiterate – 65% of them are women.

800 million people have no access to health care.

In Africa, the continent that numbers 33 of the 49 poorest countries in the world, 28.1 million people are living with HIV and AIDS. Over the next ten years, 40 million African children will lose their parents as a result of AIDS.

The developing countries have one doctor per 6 000 inhabitants, compared with one doctor for 350 inhabitants in the industrialised countries.

20% of the population of the industrialised countries account for 86% of the world’s total consumption expenditure, while the poorest 20% in the world consume no more than 1.3%.

The world has the necessary resources and skills to eradicate poverty totally in less than one generation…

The current net wealth of the ten richest billionaires is 6 billion, more than twice the total national income of the least developed countries.

The cost of eradicating poverty is 1% of global income. billion a year (equivalent to 0.5% of annual global income) would ensure universal access to basic social services (basic education, health, nutrition, access to water and sewerage disposal).

An effective improvement in the situation of the 20 poorest countries would cost .5 billion – equivalent to the cost of building EuroDisney.

Reducing the debt of the most heavily indebted countries would cost between .5 and 7.5 billion – less than the cost of a Stealth bomber.

Extreme poverty could be banished from the globe by 2015...

The proportion of humankind living in poverty has fallen faster in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years.

Literacy levels of adults in developing countries have increased from 48% in 1970 to 72% in 1998; income poverty has fallen from 29 to 24%, and nowadays only 14 rather than 20% of newborn babies are likely to die before reaching the age of 40 years.

Over the past three decades the proportion of people with access to drinking water has almost doubled – from 36 to nearly 70%.

Each year for the past 20 years, basic immunization campaigns have saved the lives of about three million children.

Since 1960 infant mortality rates in developing countries have more than halved, and malnutrition rates have fallen by almost a third.

Between 1960 and 1993 average life expectancy increased by more than a third in developing countries. Life expectancy now exceeds 70 years in 30 countries.

Poverty is no longer inevitable; it must now be relegated to past history, alongside slavery, colonialism and nuclear war.

Huffington post recently published an article

“HALF OF THE GLOBAL WEALTH ‘ OWNED BY 85 PEOPLE COULD ALL FIT ONTO A SINGLE-DECKER BUS”

Hard to BELIEVE but true.

Bill Gates predicts in the recent Gates Foundation Letter that by 2035 there will be no more poor countries.

Hard to BELIEVE.

China economy has lifted a stunning 680 million out of Extreme Poverty accounting for 3/4 of the worlds decline in poverty over the last 30 years.

True. Their economy moved from $1.25 a day to 6.3 Yuan a day or $365 p.a.

China still has a billion people living on $5 a day.

The United Nations recently announced it had achieved the promise made in 2000 by world leaders to halve Extreme Poverty by 2015.

Yet to-day 4.1 billion people still live in Extreme Poverty and every four seconds a child died from preventable causes.

All the above good news is a small step in the right direction.

The real world however paints a different picture. Inequality is growing everywhere while human Rights are being undermined.

Mankind has gone from fighting with stones – swords – to muskets – to machine guns – to right up to modern era of poison gas and nucks that can eradicate all poverty in a minute.

There is no getting away from it the 20th century has had to be the most violent in human history. Two world wars.

When you have a silent majority what has happened in History.

The Communist Russia were responsible for the murder of 20 million. The Chinese Communist managed a staggering 70 million. The Japanese 12 million. The Rwandans God Knows.

What does all this prove. Nothing I suppose other than anyone who doubts that the issue of Equality is not serious is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problem to expand. We are Silent – and then silenced.

But here is the real question.

Do you BELIEVE that in the next thirty years poverty is going to be removed from the planet by growth of 1% in GDP per head which reduces poverty by 1.7%.

Or would an increase of 1% in the living wage be better.

It would reduce poverty in the riches countries by 4.3%.

The bad news is that a living wage will have little or no effect.

Why? Because 47% of all to day’s jobs will be automated in the next twenty years. Most will be the living wage jobs, so inequality will widen and the countries that are not up to date with technologies will become poorer.

What happens will arrive on you DOORSTEP.

THERE IS ONLY ONE OPTION/SOLUTION.

POVERTY IN ALL ITS PRESENT DAY FORM WILL NOT DISAPPEAR ALL ON ITS OWN. FOR THIS TO HAPPEN IT MUST HAVE AN EXTERNAL SOURCE OF RESOURCES TO TACKEL IT.

THIS SOURCE IS GREED ITSELF. ( see previous posts)

You want to be more than naive to BELIEVE that the whole world is going to get richer. That inequality is going to narrow. That climate change is not going to have any effect. That there is going to be peace. That the worlds renewable resources are not going to run out. That SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUNDS WHICH ARE THE SILENT FACE OF GREED ARE GOING TO SHARE THEIR PROFITS.

THE IMPROBABLITIES ARE ENDLESS.