Mark Galli has a challenging piece in the February edition of Christianity Today. The short of it: Governments are better suited to fight global poverty than faith-based groups, and they’re actually doing a reasonably good job at it.
Poverty is shrinking worldwide, according to the article, and is anticipated to continue to take a slide over the coming years. The raw numbers and percentages are still enormous, but… “the seemingly audacious UN Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half between 1990 and 2015 was met three years ago.”
Why?
Mostly because of the economic booms experienced by India and China.
Galli explores how large scale economic development, of the kind typically fueled by government engagement, is more effective than the small-scale engagement that faith groups muster. This does not mean that we should not continue to help the poor, or to pursue various avenues for lifting persons or villages out of poverty. However, large scale elimination of poverty is beyond us and, suggests Galli, not our calling.
A few thoughts: (1) It’s complicated. The elimination of numerous people from the poverty roles in India and China does not simply mean that the economic pie has gotten larger so that now many more people are earning a living wage for their families. We’ve been experiencing economic struggles in the U.S. for a decade or so as manufacturing jobs and tech jobs have gone overseas. I’m not saying the development of India and China is bad, or that we should become isolationist–just pointing out that it’s complicated.
(2) I think Galli is right to call us away from a results-oriented perspective. We do always want to see exactly what our returns are and invest so as to maximize them. But the Kingdom of God often doesn’t work this way. Or, at least…
(3) We should be prepared to be surprised. In keeping with 2, the point of so much of the Gospel story is God demonstrating that abundance flows from nothingness, greatness comes from humility, harvest comes from a single seed, thousands are fed on a loaf. Faithfulness in tending to the poor may look like ineffectiveness, or foolishness, but we scatter abroad in faith.
(4) Even though as faith based communities we can do little to eliminate global poverty, in the U.S. and elsewhere we have the power as those who vote to tell our leaders to look abroad and care for the poor. This might be an important way for us to be faithfully Christian in the public square.
What do you think? What should we learn, if anything, from the success of these large countries and the relative ineffectiveness of programs on the ground? How do we participate in what is going on already that is good, further the reduction of slavery and poverty, and recognize the global forces at work in issues of wealth, power, and poverty?
I have a couple of thoughts. 1) the economic power of governments is a lot larger than Christians so we should expect that the economic results of governments are larger than those of Christian poverty elimination program. Christian poverty programs are small. 2) Christian poverty program are actually significantly funded by governments. Some anti-poverty programs are majority secular and/or government funding. 3) I like Galli’s basic point, that we should be doing these things because we are told by God to do them. But 4) we still need to do evaluation to see if what we are doing is actually helping or hurting in the long term.
The good we do should actually be good, not just feel good to us. My church includes missions trips as part of our missions budget. When you take out missions trips, you realize that our church missions budget is very small. The missions trips are important to expose our people to Christianity around the world, but it is not actually accomplishing much of anything for missions. So we feel good we are doing something, but we are not actually doing much.
Daniel, I think what we need is a much better view of theology of work and the economy. John Knapp explains in “How the Church Fails Business People” that throughout history the church has looked at economics from the micro and messo levels. People did not have the tools to see things at a macro level. As of the 20th Century the church processes things only from a macro level and his little constructive guidance for either people who are in business or for addressing poverty issues. We need a more holistic theological reflection.
My most extensive formal training is in the areas of demography and development economics. There is no question that the world’s wealth is expanding. China’s GDP continues to grow at 6%. Nearly every nation on the planet has GDP growth every year (minus the occasional recession or national crisis.) That means wealth is expanding. As the article notes, the number of people living in abject poverty is shrinking rapidly. For an excellent graphic summary of what has been unfolding for the past 200 years see this video by Hans Rosling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Also see this follow up one about the washing machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w
The mythos of a world where the rich are getting richer and the size and depth of poverty is exploding is just not true.
That doesn’t mean there are not major challenges. I don’t want to minimize them. But we are not sliding into some deep dark global Dickens dystopia.
“The mythos of a world where the rich are getting richer and the size and depth of poverty is exploding is just not true.”
That statement is only half false. The gap is still quite large and spreading even if we managed to raise the floor from $2 a day…
A few thoughts.
I just want to be clear about who the “we” is. I wouldn’t say “we” … wealthy Westerners … haven’t raised anything except indirectly through trade. The transformative events have been nations opening up to trade while instituting more just forms of government. Low-skilled workers get opportunities to develop skills. As they become more skilled they become more productive. As they become more productive, they earn more money. With more money, they buy more goods and services. That leads to expansion in the provision of goods and services, leading to new jobs being created … and on the upward spiral goes. When we say that the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day shrank from 1.3 billion to 800 million in five years, we are not saying that 500 million people moved from one static status to another but that they have been caught up in a upward spiral of prosperity. The issue is the trajectory.
Yes, the distance between top and bottom expands. But think in terms of a bell curve measuring distribution of wealth. In poor nations, there is a mass of people living in abject poverty (70-90%) causing a huge spike at the left end of the curve with a tiny tail off to the right representing the tiny minority of wealthy people. Inequality is very high. As economic growth kicks in the distance between the two tails expands but the hump of the curve moves to the center of the graph more like a bell curve. Measures of inequality shrink even as the distance between bottom and top widen. And this leads to another point. Agrarian societies and the pre-Twentieth Century powers in Europe had higher inequality than modern Western societies. Capitalism shrank … not expanded … inequality. While each emerging nation is different, we are seeing a similar path for these societies.
Distance between top and bottom AND inequality have been increasing in the US since 1974, though not steadily. There was a surge in the mid-1980s and again in the late 1990s. The most recent decade has been more flat. But inequality is also rising even faster in European nations (though they began at a lower point and are still lower than the US.) There is something happening with advanced post-industrial societies, not just the US.
We can’t narrow such macro trends down to one single factor but I’m persuaded that a central piece to the growing inequality is human capital. The principal hindrance to material prosperity had been low individual productivity and limited trade opportunities. The spiraling up of these two lifted the “low hanging fruit” out of poverty. But a key to the advance in productivity has been ever more education and application of technology. Simply having increased opportunity for low-skilled worker is no longer effective at lifting folks out of poverty. Folks at the bottom must have the support structures in place that develop their human capital to a point that they can be sufficiently productive. We aren’t doing an equitable job in helping people develop human capital. Economist Robert Fogel suggests that if the 20th Century was about reducing the inequality in material outcomes, this century is going to be about decreasing inequality in human capital
And that brings us full-circle to the point of this article. Large bureaucratic structures have a role to play but they aren’t suited toward developing human capital. That requires face-to-face investment of people in others in community … family, neighborhood, civic and religious institutions, etc. The mythos that has guided us for decades no longer corresponds with the state of the world (and hasn’t for a while.) But there are entire institutional structures and theological paradigms that have this mythos as the vision that animates them. And that is a major part of what has to change.
You might also be interested in this post by Vinoth Ramachandra on the weaknesses of micro-credit: http://vinothramachandra.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/micro-credit-hype/
I don’t have much to add here. In fact, I have nothing. I just wanted to jump in with a quick, albeit lame, comment to the effect that I’ve learned a great deal from the thoughts voiced in these comments. Thanks, everyone.
Also, I didn’t mean to suggest that there was no growth in the economic pie, but I did want to highlight that it’s complicated. Thanks, all, for helping put some pieces in place for the larger, continuing conversation.
Hey Daniel,
I’ve done a little bit of study in this area, though probably less than some of the other commenters. My only contribution is to recommend William Easterly’s book The White Man’s Burden. Dambisa Moyo is also worth paying attention to.