"Measuring Poverty & Delivering Aid" (Response to Week Two)

Measuring Poverty and Delivering Aid

The idea of measuring poverty was particularly pertinent to a lecture I heard by Allison Jaggar on the “Feminization of Global Poverty”. As I was reading in Moss about the widely used UN’s HDI, I began to ask myself “Why do we need to raise people out of poverty?” I asked myself this not because I think we don’t, but because I think the answer to this question is essential to how we measure poverty and how we approach development. If the idea is that we have a collective human responsibility to ensure a “decent” and “dignified” life for all, we must consider that the definitions of “dignity” and “decency” are culturally sensitive and that theWestern world is measuring non-Western people by Western values. These are issues that need to be visited in our definitions of poverty and our definitions of non-poverty. Jaggar argued in her lecture that definitions of poverty have been entirely from a Western point of view, and that this creates a bias against the poor themselves, and even more disproportionately against women. I agree with Jaggar, and I agree that we should include the poor themselves in the definitions of poverty that we measure them against. Jaggar helped me to take a better understanding away from the Moss and Easterly readings. I think that reexamining our definition of poverty will help us in reexamining how we approach and understand development.

Moss discusses the need for pro-poor growth, as all growth is not good growth. This reminds me of my visit to Ghana, when I visited a town where the people were literally sitting on a gold mine. The town was very poor, though, because the gold mine was only benefiting the already-wealthy, mostly foreign investors who had been given the rights to the mine after wanted the money from selling those rights to jumpstart their newly independent nation. To me this reflects in some ways what Helpman discusses with regard to capital accumulation and technological innovation. There is a great need for capital resources in order for nationals to be able to benefit from their own resources. Technological innovations are important, but not on their own—they must be available to Ghanaians themselves (and this brings us back to the idea of demands for pro-poor growth). This presents a good argument for aid to help national investment in physical and human capital.

Furthermore, this situation also brings us back to the question of how we define poverty, because I would argue that this mine actually lowered the welfare of the people in this town delving them deeper into poverty, if you choose to include health and environmental welfare as well as the ability to make decisions for themselves in the definition, as the mining of the gold contaminates their water and the people have no say in this happening.

Technological innovation is working, according to Moss: “the world is getting more efficient at turning new income gains into welfare gains” (171). Helpman argues for increasing TFP which in turn will encourage capital accumulation. But of course health problems can undermine this attempt, as education may be unpopular or difficult to acquire. There is a spiraling cycle of circumstances that creates a sort of poverty trap that is difficult to escape.

Easterly and Moss both discredit the idea of a poverty trap, and whether or not this is true is a debate I’m not sure I’m equipped to handle. But traps aren’t necessarily natural, like quick-sand. They can be man-made booby-traps set up by the scarring remnants of colonial powers, neo-colonial influence, and the greedy self-interests of investors—all of which continue to plague the African continent. Moss’s explanation of poverty as a result of “Africa’s unlucky history, bad geography, and inhospitable climate” grants amnesty to the selfish, murderous history of Western influence on the continent.