How to Eradicate Poverty

07/11/2007

A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision and a task is the hope of the world.
Alex Ikonn and UJ Ramdas

In his New York Times Magazine article on the candidacy of John Edwards ("The Poverty Platform"; June 10, 2007), Matt Bai provides this interesting, if not totally unbiased, view of the ideological approaches to eradicating poverty:

"On the far right of the spectrum are those folks who don't see inequality as much of a problem at all: the trickle-down conservatives.... This theory holds that markets work at maximum efficiency when left to their own devices, enabling some of the money flowing into Wall Street and corporate boardrooms to 'trickle down' to the middle class and poor through spending and investment.

"In the center would be those...who make up what could be called the redistribution camp. This group...subscribes to John Kennedy's dictum that 'the rising tide lifts all boats.' They share the conservative philosophy that growth at the upper echelons of society is good for everyone, but with a significant difference: government has to redistribute some of that wealth by progressively taxing the affluent and giving that money back to the poor through carefully incentivized social programs and tax breaks.

"The redistribution folks think of globalization as inevitable, a transformation as unstoppable as industrialization was at the turn of the century. That's why they generally embrace free trade, and it's also why they believe that more workers will have to go to college in order to compete for some high-paying jobs.

"On the left end of the spectrum are the populist Democrats who...espouse a philosophy you might call 'predistribution' — using the tools of government to divert money from the wealthiest Americans before they earn it. According to these Democrats, the rising tide stopped lifting all boats sometime in the 1970s, when manufacturers, challenged by foreign competitors, began to seek out cheaper labor overseas. That's when the fortunes of American employers and their workers, so closely aligned throughout much of the 20th Century, began to diverge....

"Predistribution Democrats dispute the notion that the effects of globalization are inevitable; to them, the decline of American industry was inflicted on the country through policies that favored business at the expense of wage earners. And, they think it's still possible, by reversing those policies, to live in a country where a guy with a high-school degree can have a rosy economic future."

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