Reddit Reddit reviews The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

We found 8 Reddit comments about The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Economics
Development & Growth Economics
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
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8 Reddit comments about The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time:

u/encinarus · 38 pointsr/science

Sure. Simply help them out economically, get them out of the poverty trap and birth rates will go down. The End of Poverty and Common Wealth go into the trend in good detail. My copies are lent out so unfortunately I'll have to do hand waving around figures and which countries have had successes here. If you are more interested than just a snarky comment I highly recommend reading both books.

Short summary: Families in countries with poor overall health and economies get caught in a poverty trap. In most of these countries the parents need to depend on their children to provide for them later on. The odds are quite high of any individual child dying before they are in a position to be able to help out so parents would prefer to double up. In societies where women are not considered able to provide such the families average about four children - they want two boys and need on average 4 children to get there.

Due to the bad economic conditions the larger family is almost always poorer than the previous generation. Fewer resources to go around and no available infrastructure to grow what they have. Also, the larger family is harder to provide for. Schooling typically gets neglected in everyone but the oldest boy and there isn't enough food to go around.

The solutions? One tends to be increased women's rights so they are viewed to be able to support a family and help support the parents. Getting to that point reduces the average family size to a little more than 2 per family. Reducing mortality rates has a similar effect in reducing family sizes and allows families to invest more in the children in terms of food and schooling.

The average family size tends to fall below 2 after lowering mortality rates, providing contraceptives and increased women participation in the workforce.

These transitions in family size take place over the course of some years of course.

Edit: Want to help?

Microloans are a great way to do so. They are small zero interest loans to poor entrepreneurs. These help people invest in themselves and have helped raised the status of women in many countries (most notably Bangladesh through the Grammeen Bank). This happens because women repay much more reliably than men and tend much more to use the money earned from the investment towards helping the family and community rather than gambling or drinking it away.

The NY Times had a nice article of one success story. You can make a microloan at Kiva.org (my profile). When the debt is repaid in full you get the money back and can either recycle into a new loan or withdraw it.

Another good organization to give to is Millennium Promise - they focus on trying to break the poverty trap in targeted villages within Africa since the poverty trap affects almost all of the continent and we as a culture tend to dismiss them as lazy breeders without addressing the real causes.

u/Cragsicles · 4 pointsr/AskSocialScience

I'm glad you've become interested in such a fascinating topic. However, it's pretty expansive, so here are some links to books and topics in terms of broad, global, and more specific studies related to the issue of income equality:

Broad Topic/Global:

u/Zaerth · 3 pointsr/Christianity

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time
by Jeffrey Sachs

An economic adviser to the United Nations, Sachs wrote this book in 2025 to present nine steps as to how we could eliminate the world's worst poverty by 2025.

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When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.

This book talks about the causes of poverty and the misconceptions Christians often have.

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Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity by Ronald J. Sider

Sider first wrote this book in 1978, but came out with this latest edition in 2005, exploring the causes of global hunger and the different viewpoints (both conservative and liberal) on poverty.

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Too Small to Ignore: Why the Least of These Matters Most by Wess Stafford.

Stafford grew up in West Africa and discusses the importance of investing in the futures of children, especially those who are less fortunate.

u/auntie-matter · 2 pointsr/worldnews

OK, fine.

Cost to end extreme poverty worldwide, according to this UN report and Jeffery Sachs (Professor of Economics, Colombia), $175bn/year over 20 years.

That's using proven techniques (don't have Athens on hand? here's an article discussing the same in less detail)

The US alone has 540 people worth more than a billion. Worldwide, there's 1810 of them. If we spread it over all of them, that's a shade under $100m/year per person, or $2bn each in total. That much might have an impact on some of the people towards the bottom of the list, so maybe let's restrict this to the top 500 richest people on earth, the poorest of which has a mere $3.3 billion

So that's $350m per person per year. Jeff Bezos, admittedly somewhere near the top of the list, made $296m in the last 24 hours alone. If you bias the payments so the richest pay more and the "poorest" pay less, it's hard to imagine a single person having to remotely tighten their belts.

The question of "not even notice" is a little more difficult. At what point do you think you stop noticing spending money? When you have $3.3bn in the bank, it's hard to imagine $350m a year isn't going to hurt too much. I mean, assuming you have no income and you're not getting much return on your investments (and that's a huge assumption) you'll definitely have less money at the end of the year than you started with, but it's not going to stop you doing anything. I don't know how much money is enough that you can never spend it all, but Brian Chesky (no 500 on the list) could hand over his $2bn right now, then spend $87,000 $71,000 (edit, whoops, misplaced a digit) a day for the next 50 years and still have money left at the end. Again, that's assuming no income at all, and I'm fairly sure AirBNB isn't going to stop making money right away, and Chesky has his money somewhere safe and profitable.

Although with a sliding donation scale, it might not even be that much. For reference, Gates (again towards the top of the list) gives away $1.4bn a year, on average.

So yeah, I think it's feasible.

u/besttrousers · 2 pointsr/Economics

The big 2 are:

The End of Poverty

and

The White Man's Burden

Which conveniently, disagree on most particulars. Also read every paper written at
JPAL

u/malpingu · 2 pointsr/books

Barbara Tuchman was brilliant writer of history.

Albert Camus was a brilliant absurdist philosopher and novelist.

Jared Diamond has written some brilliant books at the intersection of anthropology and ecology. Another good book in this genre is Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World.

Gwynne Dyer is an acclaimed military historian turned journalist on international affairs who has written a number of very engaging books on warfare and politics. His most recent book Climate Wars is the ONE book I would recommend to someone, if so limited, on the subject as it embodies both a wonderful synopsis of the science juxtaposed against the harsh realpolitiks and potential fates of humankind that may unfold unless we can manage to tackle the matter seriously, soon. Another great book on climate change is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.

For social activists interested in ending world hunger and abject poverty, I can recommend: Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom; Nobel Prize winning micro-financier Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism; UN MDG famed economist Jeffrey Sach's End Of Poverty; and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea

For anyone of Scottish heritage, I heartily recommend Arthur Hermann's How The Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

For naval history buffs: Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought.

Last, but not least: Robert Pirsig's classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Enjoy!

u/NottherealOG · 1 pointr/theydidthemath

This is an interesting question and comes with many answers depending on how you define certain things like "poverty". IMO, the best answer is given by Jeffery Sachs in this book. He says that if we used $175 billion per year for 20 years, we could end extreme poverty.

u/Kirkaine · -1 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

That's a monster of a question. Hell, development economics is an entire academic field, you might as well ask 'ELI5: Physics'. Anyone who seriously thinks they can give you an answer here is lying to you, and probably to themselves as well.

That being said, for my money there are three books that are really required reading on the topic of how countries end up poor, plus two books that are required reading on why it's so hard to fix. I'd call them the bare minimum to call yourself literate on the subject.

  1. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond. Essential reading on the big (i.e. several millennia) question of how the world ended up broadly split between rich and poor. I think they made it into a documentary, that's probably worth checking out.

  2. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. If you only read one of these, make it this one. Perfect blend of big picture history and modern policy analysis.

  3. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Much more micro-focused, this one is about poor people more than it's about poor countries. I mainly include it because Esther is a beast, and this is one of my favourite books of all time. Definitely worth the read.

    Two that you should read on why it's so hard to fix global poverty (Poor Economics sits at the intersection).

  4. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time, Jeffrey Sachs. Jeff Sachs is one of those names that everyone in the world should know. Read this book, end of story.

  5. The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, William Easterly. Easterly is another name everyone should know. To be honest, I don't agree with him on a whole lot of things. But pretending the other side of the debate doesn't exist is utterly moronic, and you can always learn a lot from people you disagree with.