The Lived Experience of Poverty

Business School professor Ronald Paul Hill examines six poverty subpopulations and their strategies for coping with consumer restriction in their daily lives. He also develops some strategies for poverty eradication in the 21st century. From the conclusion…

However, in a global economy of approximately $25 trillion, the financial resources necessary to eliminate poverty currently exist. The United Nations estimates the price tag to provide universal access to essential goods and services (e.g., health care, nutrition, safe drinking water, and education) and to provide monetary transfers to abolish income poverty is $80 billion annually. This amount is less than .5 percent of the world’s income or the net worth of the seven richest men on the planet.

One proposal to help pay for meeting the goal of poverty eradication in the 21st century is the 20:20 Initiative. First advanced by the United Nations Development Programme in their Human Development Report 1992 and endorsed by the World Summit in Copenhagen three years later, this proposal recommends that governments allocate twenty percent of their budgets to funding a baseline package of goods and services for all citizens. The same proposal asks that donor countries dedicate an equivalent percentage of their aid budgets to the provision of universal coverage, regardless of their political agendas.

Nonetheless, money alone will not be enough. A universal standard of living may prolong the lives of the impoverished, but it does not guarantee a better quality of life. In a world where the poor are segregated from mainstream society, vilified or misrepresented by politicians, and ignored or mistreated by those who control the provision of basic goods and services, their lives will continue to be characterized by humiliation, alienation, anxiety, and rage. I hope these stories help us to go beyond the negative stereotypes that portray the poor as unworthy of our respect or support. In the final analysis, when we remove our middle-class lenses of affluence and opportunity and replace them with lenses of poverty and restriction, our understanding of how and why people become and/or remain impoverished is forever changed.

http://www.loyno.edu/twomey/blueprint/blueprint-October2001.htm