Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s topic is poverty. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus famously said “For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.” This may have been intended as a reference back to Deuteronomy 15, in which Moses said that every seven years all debts among neighbors should be forgiven. He goes on to say, among other things, “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.” Needless to say, this seven year debt redemption thing was never widely honored.

So, according to Jesus, we’re stuck with the poor. But these days it’s actually pretty easy to avoid them. If you live in the suburbs and drive to work and to stores, you can go quite a long time without ever seeing a poor person. It’s fairly likely that you will see more pictures of the very poor people in Darfur than you will of the poor people living in the nearest city. If you never see poor people, are you more or less likely to give money to support them? I’m inclined to vote for less, although it’s not entirely obvious. When you do see poor people (as I do, since I don’t live in the suburbs and don’t drive most places) you are reminded that many, though by no means all, of the visible poor in the U.S. are poor because they are using some sort of drug (including alcohol) or are in some way unable to function in society. Should we personally support all of those people, or should we somehow send our charity to the ones who deserve it? Like the ones in Darfur, perhaps?

As various people have pointed out, the existence of money implies poverty. If you have a society which has no poverty, there are no scarce resources, and there is no need to use money to divide them up. Therefore, in order to eliminate poverty, we must eliminate money. This is unlike, say, hunger, or homelessness, which we could eliminate while retaining money. In order to eliminate money, we must eliminate scarcity. I see two approaches to that, both somewhat fantastic. The first is to reach the two dreams of nanotechnology and fusion power. If both of those can be attained, then it is possible to create any physical object, and we always have the energy needed to do it. The second approach would be to figure out a way to upload minds into machines, and then upload everybody.

In the meantime, I’m inclined to focus on trying to eliminate hunger, and to in general ameliorate the effects of poverty, rather than trying to eliminate poverty itself.