Why So Many Poor in a World of Riches?

“YOU always have the poor with you,” said Jesus Christ in the first century C.E. (Matthew 26:11) From Jesus’ time down to the present, there has always been a large number of impoverished people. But why does poverty afflict so many in a world of such great wealth?

Some believe that people become poor because they make bad decisions. That may be true in some cases. Those who choose to indulge cravings for alcohol, drugs, and gambling may easily lose their material assets. But not all poor people are poor as a result of their own bad judgment.

Many have lost jobs because of changes in industry. Many working people have seen their life savings consumed by skyrocketing medical costs. And of the hundreds of millions of impoverished people in the developing world, most are poor through no fault of their own. The causes of poverty are often beyond the control of its victims, as the following shows.

 A Lesson From the Past

In the early 1930’s, the world was in the grip of the financial catastrophe that came to be known as the Great Depression. In one country millions lost their jobs and hundreds of thousands of families lost their homes. But while many went hungry, farmers poured immense quantities of milk into ditches and government officials forced farmers to kill millions of farm animals.

Why that waste? The economic system stipulated that farm products and other commodities be sold for a profit. Milk, meat, and grain had great value to the poor. But when those foodstuffs could not be sold profitably, they were deemed worthless and were disposed of.

Food riots broke out in many cities. Some citizens, unable to buy food for their families, snatched what they needed at gunpoint. Others starved. Those events happened in the United States. Early in the Great Depression, that country’s mighty financial system failed those with the lowest incomes. Instead of according the first importance to the needs of all citizens for food, shelter, and work, the economic system viewed those needs as mere side issues to the moneymaking process.

Conditions Today

The world economy recovered from the Great Depression, and now many people appear to be richer and more secure than ever. Amid the great abundance that exists, however, the poor often have little opportunity to improve their lot in life. Reports of famine and poverty in the developing world are so common that many tire of reading them. However, when refugees are driven to starvation because of war, when stores of food rot because of political manipulation, and when market forces push the cost of life’s necessities to levels that the poor cannot pay, we are  seeing the results of a system unable to care for its most vulnerable subjects. The world economic structure neglects millions of impoverished humans.

In truth, no economic system of human origin has adequately met the material needs of all mankind. Some 30 centuries ago, a keen observer of life drew this conclusion: “I myself returned that I might see all the acts of oppression that are being done under the sun, and, look! the tears of those being oppressed, but they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, so that they had no comforter.” (Ecclesiastes 4:1) In these days of great material bounty, acts of financial oppression still abound.

Millions now have little opportunity to lift themselves from the abyss of poverty. Yet, many people have learned to deal with their economic problems successfully. These have also come to look forward to a better life in the future.

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The Struggle to Live

In his book The Working Poor​—Invisible in America, author and journalist David K. Shipler gives us an idea of the situation of some in the United States who live on the edge of an economic cliff: “A run-down apartment can exacerbate a child’s asthma, which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which forces the purchase of an unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mother’s punctuality at work, which limits her promotions and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing.” That child and its mother live with disaster hanging over them, even though they live in the world’s richest nation.

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Are Good Intentions Enough?

In November 1993, inside a government building in Washington, D.C., a group of officials were trying to handle a serious problem. With hundreds of millions of dollars available, those officials wanted to benefit homeless people in the United States. As they talked, policemen, firefighters, and emergency medical workers gathered at a bus stop across the street. Ambulance personnel were picking up the body of a homeless woman. She had died in front of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the government agency responsible for helping people with no place to go.

A reporter for The New York Times later interviewed a worker at HUD, who commented on the number of emergency personnel and vehicles present at the scene: “It’s just strange to see how many resources a person gets after they die​—not a fraction of that beforehand.”

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A migrant mother with her three children during the Great Depression of the 1930’s

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Dorothea Lange, FSA Collection, Library of Congress

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In sweatshops like this one, the average salary is $14 a month and laborers may be forced to work 70 hours a week

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© Fernando Moleres/​Panos Pictures