alt Hacker NewsI have family that has worked to fight corruption and poverty, for decades.
They believe that poverty is the root cause of most human problems. For example, some of the worst despots in history, got there, escaping grinding poverty, in their youth.
When you are skint, your priorities change, and things like labor laws, ecology, and species diversity, are non-starters.
It also doesn't help, to have rich people, dancing around, showing off their wealth. That tends to breed resentment (see "war").
Replies
The majority of wars are fought over control of territory, not resentment, and the aggressor is almost always either on equal footing or more powerful than the victim. The leaders of a nation won't start a war if they think they could lose it so they must have some materially founded belief that their nation can over power the other (a stronger economy, a more powerful military, a technological advantage). Resentment can be used as a rhetorical tool to motivate hatred of an enemy and to justify an already planned war but it's not the instigating factor.
does your family promote free market capitalism? Can you cite a economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than free markets? I'm open minded here, but all my research has shown that free markets combined with new land to expand to is historically the best way to eliminate poverty.
I do believe that poverty can be (psychologically) traumatising, potentially resulting in abusive behaviour by those affected. However, I don't see that most human-made catastrophes are caused by such individuals.
Firstly, political decisions are never made by a single person. Even the most brutal dictator needs to be enabled by his environment.
Secondly, most powerful people have always been as far away from poverty as possible. For dictators, corrupt presidents and oligarchs, growing up in a wealthy environment seems the most unifying factor among the people in such positions. They are also the ones that cause wars, poverty, starvation.
Your family is on the right side of history in this.
Poverty is the default state of the world and is definitionally the absence of resources to solve problems. I’m not surprised that if you’re struggling to eat, you’re not going to have surplus energy to be concerned with longer-term problems, but this doesn’t seem especially insightful to me, and further, would lead me to invest in net-GDP-positive actions as opposed to poverty- or inequality-reducing ones so that there are more resources to bring to bear to longer-term and larger-scale problems.