For a scholarship, I wrote a short essay responding to the question "Do you think it is possible to end extreme poverty in the next thirty years? If so, how?"
For the entire course of human history, poverty has existed. Empires have risen and fallen, plagues, famines, and times of prosperity have come and gone. Saviors with names like Muhammad, Christ, Gandhi, or King have passed through the world and touched it, leaving their mark on the lives of the misfortunate. And people alive today with names like Gates, Buffet, or even Clooney, have set examples of beneficence before the world.
But in all that time, extreme poverty has existed. No amount of action or activism has changed that.
In Africa, AIDS and Malaria rage. India contains a third of the world’s poor. In America, Wars On Poverty have been fought, Great Societies have been dreamt up—all reduced now to simply Alphabet Soup in the eyes of History. Hearty men and women have stood on street corners ringing bells in the name of poverty. But despite our noblest efforts, soup kitchens are forced to turn away their would-be patrons, and food banks struggle to keep fully stocked shelves.
But never, never has there been a time in which extreme poverty has not existed in the darkest corners of the world. In the growing industrial cities of the Far East, and in those as glamorous as New York or Los Angeles, there exists a class of impoverished citizens who struggle to rise above their condition in the underbellies of those towering metropolises.
In a world where one billion people cannot find clean drinking water, where do we start? And if this is the state of poverty, what will we accomplish in thirty years?
I don’t like to paint a grim picture, and I wish I could craft a solution. But the situation is this: the Earth is a place with finite and limited resources incapable of servicing every single inhabitant because we have not constructed a society in which these resources can be shared equally or distributed to each person. Clearly, extreme poverty exists all over the world, but a global system to eradicate extreme poverty has not been achieved during the entire trajectory of human life on Earth.
So I ask: how would we possibly dream up and enact such a system in thirty years? Especially if such a thing would have the adverse affects of stunting the growth of emerging economies like China and India, or putting at risk the comfortable middle class life many around the world have come to expect.
We can’t convince world leaders to design and enact a system to eradicate extreme poverty—there simply isn’t the political will behind such a venture. But we can support philanthropy and promote awareness of the issue. We can volunteer at shelters, make sandwiches for food banks, or serve dinner to the needy on Friday nights, and do what we can, within our means. For now, that’s the best we have.
