Global poverty as symptom

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, focused on global poverty; I’ve been ruminating on this subject for several days now, which is why I asked the question I did this past Monday. In approaching the subject, I have a couple basic assumptions. One, poverty is the consequence of human sin: we have poor people because our hearts (all of our hearts, not just the hearts of the rich) are evil. Two, poverty is both a systemic result and an individual result of human sin. This is to say that many people are poor because of the sinful acts of individuals, whether themselves (becoming addicted to drugs) or others (grand theft), but this takes place within a reality in which poverty as a whole exists because of the systemic effects of human sin. As such, poverty must be addressed at both the lowest possible level—person by person—and at the level, not merely of the national or even global economic system, but of the national global relational system.What this means, I think, is not that specifically economic responses focused on ameliorating poverty are wrong, but that they’re premature, because the economic condition is a symptom of deeper systemic problems which must first be addressed before economic approaches can truly be effective. On a global scale, Paul Collier (former director of research at the World Bank) has some critically important things to say about this in his book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote in his article on Collier’s book,

It is precisely Collier’s argument that poverty itself is not a trap. If poverty were a trap, the whole world would be as poor as it once was. Collier writes: “Nor do I believe that poverty itself is a trap. These development failures occurred against a backdrop of global development success—poverty is something that most people are managing to escape. Since 1980 world poverty has been falling for the first time in history. Nor was it just a matter of Africa. Elsewhere there were also development failures: countries such as Haiti, Laos, Burma, and the Central Asian countries, of which Afghanistan has been the most spectacular. A one-size-fits-all explanation for development failure doesn’t ring true against such diversity.” In sum . . . the great challenge is not world poverty but the plight of the bottom billion.Instead of the “poverty trap,” Collier contends that the bottom billion are caught in four other traps: the conflict trap, involving civil wars and genocides; the natural resource trap, in which oil or other riches deflect attention from economic development; the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, which results in the stifling of trade and communications; and the trap of bad governance in a small state, creating pervasive governmental corruption and the undermining of legal economic order.These four traps, individually and working in combination, result in the marginalization of the bottom billion from the dynamics of global development. In this respect and others, Paul Collier’s argument complements and reinforces the analysis offered in John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. Marx was wrong, the pope explained, in claiming that the poor are poor because they are exploited by the rich. The great problem is not exploitation but marginalization. With some exceptions, the pope wrote, the poor are poor and getting poorer because they are excluded, or exclude themselves, from the circle of productivity and exchange.

From my own ministry connections to folks in various parts of Africa, that’s spot-on. Countries like Uganda and Zimbabwe are naturally rich—but many or most of the people aren’t, because they’re prevented. In the case of Uganda, the problem is the civil war in the north that began a quarter-century ago and raged unabated until recently; Zimbabwe, of course, has been ruined by Robert Mugabe, its president. These and other traps must be addressed in order for the poor of such nations to have any chance at all of escaping poverty. As Neuhaus continues,

Collier illustrates the conflict trap and the natural resource trap by reference to the rebel leader Laurent Kabila, who, leading his troops across Zaire to seize the government, explained to a journalist that all you need for a successful coup is $10,000 and a satellite phone. With the money, you can buy yourself an army, and with the phone you can, as Kabila did, arrange $500 million worth of deals with corporations that are willing to bet on your winning. This is what Collier calls the natural resource trap, when a country’s possession of oil or diamonds or gold is a curse rather than a blessing, making corruption and conflict more profitable than development. China, which has few qualms about democratic niceties, is busily buying up whoever can be bought in Africa.Throughout the continent, the military is an engine of devastation. . . . Collier reports that in Africa around 40 percent of development aid money inadvertently ends up supporting the military and that in some cases only 1 percent of funds designated for health care, for instance, are used for that purpose.

This is what happens when “corruption and conflict [are] more profitable than development”; indeed, given human sin, it’s what happens any time destructive behavior is (or appears) more profitable than constructive behavior. In the US—which is such a rich nation that even our poor are among the richer people in the world—we have a different set of issues and circumstances surrounding poverty than exist in places like Zimbabwe; but the same fundamental dynamics are in play, and the same four basic traps. Here too, simply spending money isn’t going to fix the problem: we need to change the system by addressing those traps and changing the incentive structure that benefits destructive behavior. Before any assistance to the poor of this country can work on any kind of large scale, we need to set them free.