Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We can end poverty right now simply by making the rules of our global economy fairer for the world’s majority (I describe how we can do this in The Divide, looking at everything from wages to debt to trade). But that is an approach that you and Gates seem desperate to avoid, in favour of a blustering defense of the status quo.
So while there’s much to be said for population control, I think the notion that population control is the most important precursor to economic development and environmental protection is problematic.
We live in an age where more than 4 billion people – some 60% of the human population – live on less than what is required for meeting basic human needs. This is a ringing indictment of the global economy by any standard.
The release of the U.N. report on extreme poverty in the United States comes amid a nationwide, weeks-long direct action campaign known as the new Poor People’s Campaign, aimed at fighting poverty and racism in the United States.
Looking into this has made me even more convinced that tackling global poverty has to be done in tandem with tackling climate change. They are intricately connected. I think it’s important that we remember climate change is a historical injustice: the poorest countries suffer the worst impacts yet have done least to cause it and have the least capacity to address it.
[Jamies’] paper suggested that growing up in poverty can result in decrements in attentional processes, working memory, and a measurably smaller hippocampus. In an exploration as to the reasons why, as a culture, we might be less able to constructively imagine the future, Jamie felt like an important person to talk to.
It is not an idle myth, that the poor will always be with us, but a vital myth, a powerful and essential means of sustaining our culture and the business of it as usual. It is a myth that has haunted me throughout my two and a half decades of feeling and actively expressing both compassion and indignation in relation to the persistence of hunger, homelessness and poverty in our affluent nation and abroad.
Press coverage (including a Hollywood-style trailer) of Pope Francis’s coming papal letter calling for an end to the "tyrannical" exploitation of nature. NYT says it"could place the Roman Catholic Church at the forefront of a new coalition of religion and science."
A Q&A with John Boik founder of the Principled Societies Project and author of the book Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being.
The poverty rate in the U.S. would be 15 percent higher if not for the War on Poverty and government anti-poverty programs since 1967.
Inequality and poverty are suddenly hot topics, not only in the United States but also across the globe.
Those who follow climate change in the news will know that the latest IPCC report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change does not paint a very rosy picture.
