The proper definition of poverty is unfinanced economic decision making. This is not to be conflated with scarcity or even subsistence living. Universal prosperity can all be achieved in the most primitive societies and has been. You may not like how they treat each other, but then it is not your business.
Solving all that and the whole world does change. In a more civilized world we wand all prosper and in particular the least advantaged third of the population. What has to be done is to create a societal protocol that allows that sector to naturally self finance and mange their internal wealth creation. Recall that we actually have those protocols in place to support the top two thirds of the population.
The central most important task of governance is to ensure that this lowest third does in fact self finance and prosper. The reason for this is as simple as can be. If the bottom third is completely prosperous, then the rest will do just dandy.
I have watched the promoted land price protocol go from nowhere to the present point that it has forced thousands out of housing. This has happened over fifty years. The day i separate the land aspect from the financial equation we have all the cash resources to house everyone and to assist their full participation. This is easily done by building temporary housing that can be picked up and moved as needed. After that it is a simple case of supporting your natural community itself as it arises..
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The Problem of Poverty
[Chapter One of The Conquest of Poverty.]
https://mises.org/wire/problem-poverty?
The history of poverty is almost the history of mankind. The ancient
writers have left us few specific accounts of it. They took it for
granted. Poverty was the normal lot.The ancient world of Greece and
Rome, as modern historians reconstruct it, was a world where houses had
no chimneys, and rooms, heated in cold weather by a fire on a hearth or a
fire-pan in the center of the room, were filled with smoke whenever a
fire was started,and consequently walls, ceiling, and furniture were
blackened and more or less covered by soot at all times; where light was
supplied by smoky oil lamps which, like the houses in which they were
used, had no chimneys; and where eye trouble as a result of all this
smoke was general. Greek dwellings had no heat in winter, no adequate
sanitary arrangements, and no washing facilities.1
Above all there was hunger and famine, so chronic that only the worst
examples were recorded. We learn from the Bible how Joseph advised the
pharaohs on famine relief measures in ancient Egypt. In a famine in Rome
in 436 B.C., thousands of starving people threw themselves into the
Tiber.
Conditions in the Middle Ages were no better:
The dwellings of medieval laborers were hovels -- the
walls made of a few boards cemented with mud and leaves. Rushes and
reeds or heather made the thatch for the roof. Inside the houses there
was a single room, or in some cases two rooms, not plastered and without
floor, ceiling, chimney, fireplace or bed, and here the owner, his
family and his animals lived and died. There was no sewage for the
houses, no drainage, except surface drainage for the streets, no water
supply beyond that provided by the town pump, and no knowledge of the
simplest forms of sanitation. 'Rye and oats furnished the bread and
drink of the great body of the people of Europe. ... Precariousness of
livelihood, alternations between feasting and starvation,
droughts,scarcities, famines, crime, violence, murrains, scurvy,
leprosy, typhoid diseases, wars, pestilences and plagues ' -- made part
of medieval life to a degree with which we are wholly unacquainted in
the Western world of the present day.2
And, ever-recurring, there was famine:
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries famine [in
England] is recorded every fourteen years, on an average, and the people
suffered twenty years of famine in two hundred years. In the thirteenth
century the list exhibits the same proportion of famine; the addition
of high prices made the proportion greater.Upon the whole, scarcities
decreased during the three following centuries; but the average from
1201 to 1600 is the same, namely, seven famines and ten years of famine
in a century.3
One writer has compiled a detailed summary of twenty-two famines in
the thirteenth century in the British Isles, with such typical entries
as: "1235: Famine and plague in England; 20,000 persons die in London;
people eat horse-flesh, bark of trees, grass, etc."4
But recurrent starvation runs through the whole of human history. The
Encyclopedia Britannica lists thirty-one major famines from ancient
times down to 1960.5 Let us look first at those from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century:
1005: famine in England. 1016: famine throughout Europe. 1064-72:
seven years' famine in Egypt. 1148-59: eleven years' famine in India.
1344-45: great famine in India. 1396-1407: the Durga Devi famine in
India, lasting twelve years. 1586: famine in England giving rise to the
Poor Law system. 1661: famine in India; no rain fell for two
years.1769-70: great famine in Bengal; a third of the population -- 10
million persons -- perished. 1783: the Chalisa famine in India. 1790-92:
the Deju Bara, or skull famine, in India, so called because the dead
were too numerous to be buried.
This list is incomplete -- as probably any list would be. In the
winter of 1709, for example, in France, more than a million persons,
according to the figures of the time,died out of a population of 20
millions.6
In the eighteenth century, in fact, France suffered eight famines,
culminating in the short crops of 1788, which were one of the causes of
the Revolution.
I am sorry to be dwelling in such detail on so much human misery. I
do so only because mass starvation is the most obvious and intense form
of poverty, and this chronicle is needed to remind us of the appalling
dimensions and persistence of the evil.
In 1798, a young English country parson, Thomas R. Malthus, delving into this sad history, anonymously published an Essay on the Principles of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society
. His central doctrine was that there is a constant tendency for
population to outgrow food supply and production. Unless checked by
self-restraint, population will always expand to the limit of
subsistence, and will be held there by disease, war, and ultimately
famine. Malthus was an economic pessimist, viewing poverty as man's
inescapable lot. He influenced Ricardo and other classical economists of
his time, and the general tone of their writings led Carlyle to
denounce political economy as "the Dismal Science."
Malthus had in fact uncovered a truth of epoch-making importance. His
work first set Charles Darwin on the chain of reasoning which led to
the promulgation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. But
Malthus greatly overstated his case, and neglected to make essential
qualifications. He failed to see that, once men in any place (it
happened to be his own England) succeeded in earning and saving a little
surplus, made even a moderate capital accumulation, and lived in an era
of political freedom and protection for property, their liberated
industry, thought, and invention could at last make it possible for them
enormously and acceleratively to multiply per capita production beyond
anything achieved or dreamed of in the past. Malthus announced his
pessimistic conclusions just in the era when they were about to be
falsified.
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution had begun, but nobody had yet recognized or
named it. One of the consequences of the increased production it led to
was to make possible an unparalleled increase in population. The
population of England and Wales in 1700 is estimated to have been about
5,500,000; by 1750 it had reached some 6,500,000. When the first census
was taken in 1801 it was 9,000,000; by 1831 it had reached 14,000,000.
In the second half of the eighteenth century population had thus
increased by 40 percent, and in the first three decades of the
nineteenth century by more than 50 percent. This was not the result of
any marked change in the birth rate, but of an almost continuous fall in
the death rate. People were now producing the food supply and other
means to support a greater number of them.7
This accelerating growth in population continued. The enormous
forward spurt of the world's population in the nineteenth century was
unprecedented in human experience. "In one century, humanity added much
more to its total volume than it had been able to ad d during the
previous million years."8
But we are getting ahead of our story. We are here concerned with the
long history of human poverty and starvation, rather than with the
short history of how mankind began to emerge from it. Let us come back
to the chronicle of famines, this time from the beginning of the
nineteenth century:
1838: intense famine in North-Western Provinces (Uttar Pradesh),
India; 800,000 perished. 1846-47 famine in Ireland, resulting from the
failure of the potato crop. 1861:famine in northwest India. 1866: famine
in Bengal and Orissa; 1,000,000 perished. 1869:intense famine in
Raiputana; 1,500,000 perished. 1874: famine in Bihar, India.
1876-78:famine in Bombay, Madras, and Mysore; 5,000,000 perished.
1877-78: famine in north China; 9,500,000 said to have perished.
1887-89: famine in China. 1891-92: famine in Russia. 1897: famine in
India; 1,000,000 perished. 1905: famine in Russia. 1916: famine in
China. 1921: famine in the U.S.S.R., brought on by Communist economic
policies; at least 10,000,000 persons seemed doomed to die, until the
American Relief Administration, headed by Herbert Hoover, came in and
reduced direct deaths to about 500,000. 1932-33: famine again in the
U.S.S.R., brought on by Stalin's farm collectivization policies;
"millions of deaths."
1943: famine in Bengal; about 1,500,000 perished. 1960-61: famine in the Congo.9
We can bring this dismal history down to date by mentioning the
famines in recent years in Communist China and the war-created famine of
1968-70 in Biafra.
The record of famines since the end of the eighteenth century does,
however, reveal one striking difference from the record up to that
point. Mass starvation did not fall on a single country in the now
industrialized Western world. (The sole exception is the potato famine
in Ireland; and even that is a doubtful exception because the Industrial
Revolution had barely touched mid-nineteenth-century Ireland -- still a
one-crop agricultural country.)
It is not that there have ceased to be droughts, pests, plant
diseases, and crop failures in the modern Western world, but that when
they occur there is no famine, because the stricken countries are
quickly able to import foodstuffs from abroad, not only because the
modern means of transport exist, but because, out of their industrial
production, these countries have the means to pay for such foodstuffs.In
the Western world today, in other words, poverty and hunger -- until
the mid-eighteenth century the normal condition of mankind -- have been
reduced to a residual problem affecting only a minority; and that
minority is being steadily reduced.But the poverty and hunger still
prevailing in the rest of the world -- in most of Asia,Central and South
America, and Africa -- in short, even now afflicting the great majority
of mankind -- show the terrible dimensions of the problem still to be
solved. And what has happened and is still happening in many countries
today serves to warn us how fatally easy it is to destroy all the
economic progress that has already been achieved. Foolish governmental
interference led the Argentine, once the world's principal producer and
exporter of beef, to forbid in 1971 even domestic consumption of beef on
alternate weeks.Soviet Russia, one of whose chief economic problems
before it was communized was to find an export market for its huge
surplus of grains, has been forced to import grains from the capitalist
countries. One could go on to cite scores of other examples, with
ruinous consequences, all brought on by short-sighted governmental
policies.
More than thirty years ago, E. Parmalee Prentice was pointing out
that mankind has been rescued from a world of want so quickly that the
sons do not know how their fathers lived:
"Here, indeed, is an explanation of the
dissatisfaction with conditions of life so often expressed, since men
who never knew want such as that in which the world lived during many
by-gone centuries, are unable to value at its true worth such abundance
as now exists, and are unhappy because it is not greater."10
How prophetic of the attitude of rebellious youth in the 1970s! The
great present danger is that impatience and ignorance may combine to
destroy in a single generation the progress that it took untold
generations of mankind to achieve.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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