Why is it okay for people to be in poverty?

It isn't ok...unfortunately the list of people who think it's 'not my problem' is always going to be high as long as their are people with more money than them.

I mean I have basically no money. If it wasn't for my parents I would be screwed. BUT that will change eventually and I will have some money.

Now even if I get to the stage where I have more money than I need to survive you can bet your arse I'm going to be keeping basically all of it. It's not that I don't want to help people or that other people don't deserve it more than I do, it's just that even if I get money I won't have enough that I feel I can just get rid of it.

 

I think if jobs actually paid people a decent wage people wouldn't be in poverty

 

"Money doesn't exist." What. OP, what do you mean by that?
I'd like it if nobody was poor, but there will always be people with less wealth than you. Likewise, there will always be those who have more money than you. I think we should encourage people to innovate and make lots of advances in every field.

 

Global poverty HAS been cut in half since 1990.. so we're working on it.

 

I thought you mean literally, because it seems to me that money is an idea, as real as a number. The stock market is practically tinker bell.

 

Actually not strictly true. You could argue that it doesn't exist in the sense that the monetary system is essentially just the transfer of implied debt. A dollar bill for example doesn't have any inherent value, it just means that the person you give it to trusts that it is worth what it says it's worth. Currency is an I.O.U accepted on a grand scale. So you could argue that it has no real meaning.

Having said that, we do kind of need it.

I mean let's go way back to when all we had was the barter system. Everyone needed to be able to do something useful and could trade it for whatever it's agreed value was.

For example, let's say we have 5 people, named Al, Ben, Cid,

Al makes bread. Keeps 5 chickens.
Ben grows wheat. Owns a cow.
Cid Keeps 20 chickens and 4 sheep.


Now Al needs wheat for bread. Ben has wheat so he takes it to Al. Ben wants something for the wheat, so he gets some eggs. So let's say he gets 4 eggs for an armful of wheat.

Now if Ben went to Cid, who has lots more chickens, he could get more eggs for less wheat, because what the heck does Cid need all those eggs for.

Now you repeat this process for every type of thing you could possibly need (and there are a LOT of basic things you need) you end up being completely unsure of what anything is worth and how much you actually traded.

To get around this, it turns out people started using a counting system that worked in the same sort of way.

Instead of carrying around a whole load of chickens whenever Cid needed bread, he just goes to Al, hands him a stick, cuts some notches in it, takes his bread and leaves. Then Al can get his chickens later on.

It came about from convenience.

Now then we started to try and regulate prices a bit, and it turned into money.

Point is, money is a time saving device which is basically inevitable in any society where free trade exists. The only way you can get round it is by creating a society where everything is communal.

 

Sadly, there are powerful people whose power depends on mantaining certain countries and part of the society poor. We can do little about global poverty apart from helping poor people ourselves as we can.

 

Trust me you need money to do things even the most basic things , If the people who are rich weren't trying to stop other people from getting a piece of the pie and to do better , it wouldn't be so bad but things are not easy out in the real world . lack of education plays a huge part but sadly even if you do have good education you can't get a decent Job today . I even heard some one say because of that you don't need college . and even college is very expensive . But the one thing that bothers me is when people take jobs in the sex industry and other people look down at them for it tell them go work at wall mart or burger king then insults for having a job . But if that same person was working for burger king they would insult them for that too . It's like you can't win . I've even thought of stripping for money to move out of my parents house but because of my pride I will not do it . :dry:
It's one thing to argue and say how can people be poor in a high tech society today but you don't know their life story or what I've been through so when your on the other end it's easy for you to look down on them or think they shouldn't be poor . but not everyone get's dealt the same hand of cards .

 

So the world is $40 trillion in debt, but who are they in debt to? Mars?

It would be awesome to live in a world where money wasn't an issue, but sadly it isn't the case. It would only take a few billion dollars to eradicate poverty.

 

Thing is, that system isn't currently viable. To make it work you would need total destruction.

Essentially most of the worlds economy is based on unnecessary items. Now humans have ALWAYS done 'luxury goods' to some extent, or at the very least we have always done things that we didn't absolutely need. Didn't necessarily sell or trade them, but we HAD them.

I mean if you go back say 1500 years (in England, for the sake of it), everyone, and I mean EVERYONE knew how to drop-spin wool into thread. Everyone knew how to do SOMETHING, and most of the time it was something useful. But even then we had a class of merchants who went around getting fancy stuff from elsewhere that people wanted for no other reason than 'we don't have those around here'.

Everyone likes a bit of a status symbol is what I'm saying.

Now 1500 years ago, things weren't so much communal, so much as people basically worked well together because they needed to. You know, people did the things they knew how to do and occasionally someone would either figure out a way to do it better, or differently or they would bring in something new. This worked pretty well because MOST people were doing something useful and your level of merchant trade was minimal. Now when I say merchant trade I am again talking about the guy who goes off and takes a bunch of stuff from A and sells it in B because people want to show it off.

What we have now is the reverse of that. Almost nobody does anything really useful. By this I mean that if the modern world just ended tonight, most people would be dead in about a week because they wouldn't be able to keep going.

Sure I could probably knock together some things out of wood and I can weave with willow. But can I farm? Hell no. Can I hunt? No. Is there anything TO hunt? No. Most of us belong to the merchant class now. We either produce or sell things none of us really need so we can go out and buy other things we don't need.

I like my computer but when the power goes off it's useless to me. The guys selling computers right now are doing a job that is completely useless without power.

I keep talking about the power going off and the end of the world for a reason. Currently we have an overwhelming amount of people whose existence depends on the sale of goods we don't NEED.

To make that system work we need to significantly cut down that number.

My friends and I did try working out the effect of making food free once, and it did not end well...

 

Unfortunately, while there are power-hungry and greedy people left on the planet, there will always be a large gap in social and economic class. While much progress has been made in bringing economic equality in the developing world, there will always be, in my opinion, a handful of people that rule over the masses until populist reforms are made.

 

How it ended?

 

Some feel that the poor have brought it upon themselves, and that it's fair for one person to have a dollar and for another to have a billion.

I believe in rewarding ingenuity and hard work, and I'm against government regulation in terms of redistribution of wealth*, but people are dicks. Either that, or the obscenely rich DO donate to charity and it just isn't enough. I could not sleep at night knowing I bought frivolous luxuries while I could help people who are drowning a little more every day. To a point we all do it, because some people dream of even a "bottom-feeder" life in a developed country, but plain and obnoxious decadence makes my blood boil.

*Generally speaking. I would totally be for our president and legislature being paid minimum wage until the budget is balanced, which is sort of geared towards economic equality.

 

I'm not against relative poverty, but am against abject and absolute poverty. We use money to reward ingenuity, progress, innovation etc., because it's what rewards risk that brings rewards to society (generally speaking). We need a system that incentivizes that. We are humans and we will always want "more" than the neighbors. Might as well harness that carnal instinct for society's well-being.

That said, I feel terrible of the atrocities I see on television and in the world and wish we all could have the basics to lead a healthy and long life.

 

Why some of you think that ingenuity must be rewarded? I don't believe that someone is better than other because he/she's more clever or smarter. For me, that's like saying that we must give more money to those who have better eyesight, or who are more talkative or who are better at cooking, or who are more heterosexual, etc. It tends to make society think that certain people is better than others, and I don't like it.

 

I get your reasoning and agree to a point, but if there is no reward for carrying society forward, nobody will do it, and we will have the modern equivalent of medieval stasis. Granted some things will change just because of practical convenience. But if people see something amazing and say "cool, thanks", it just isn't worth the backbreaking work involved. Personally, I am motivated to create partially because of the possibility of money.

And to insist that everyone should be equal in recognition of ability is just reducing humanity to the lowest common denominator, which is pretty frickin' low, you have to admit. :S

**I apologize for getting off topic and hope nobody thinks I'm equating monetary worth to intangible value as a person. There are rich dicks and impoverished saints, but the fairer the system, the less frequent that will become.

 

Poverty exists because we let it exist. The systems that let billionaires get tax breaks while over a billion people are in dire poverty are not the fault of a handful of evil governments and businesses. The middle classes everywhere and workers in rich countries are generally complicit in allowing poverty to exist, though often under the silent condition that poverty and cruel labour be carried out somewhere else, somewhere hidden.

Money may be an artificial concept, but that doesn't make it any less real nor would its dissolution be a solution; bartering systems cause even more inequality and corruption. Money is a rather ingenious solution to a lot of problems, it's just the distribution that is wrong.

Opposition to redistribution of wealth disgusts me most of the time. The people who oppose it (who almost invariably have a decent amount of money) seem to think that fortunate circumstance upon fortunate circumstance was somehow irrelevant, and their wealth (even if only relative) was fully earned, and with a culture of delusional "wealth comes from hard work," that breeds a belief in superiority.

I've witnessed that recently with someone (who still lives at home) calling themself a harder worker than the vast majority of people, despite having a headstart in life in multiple ways and not even being independent of their parents. Sheer ignorance on the part of people with wealth (relatively wealthy and fully wealthy) and therefore political significance is a large obstacle.

Poverty causes more poverty, and the poor usually have no means to escape it. It's not something that can be broken with sheer hard work on the part of an individual, and nowhere is there true equal opportunity. I can't think of any circumstance in which poverty was alleviated without government intervention. We have the money, but it's wasted on various things (which often create more poverty in themselves). It's either ridiculous ignorance or social arrogance and deliberate malice to say hard work is enough in itself.