Mass poverty and inequality are created

August 28, 2015 by The Rules No CommentsDebunking The Gates Foundation Narrative Project, Ideas, The story of poverty

Mass poverty and inequality are created

If we can spread the idea that poverty is created, we can help expose the causes of poverty and #inequality, and create awareness that we need to change the rules of neoliberal #capitalism, not just provide a little bit of palliative care.

Here are three articles to start with.

3 ways humans create poverty

Poverty isn’t just a fact of nature. We made it happen, and we can fix it. Written By This is a big year for anyone interested in, or caught in the teeth of, poverty and extreme inequity. It’s the year of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (#SDGs), to be agreed by heads of state in New York in September.

The Delusion at the Heart of the Sustainable Development Goals

This is a big year for the development industry. In September, the world’s heads of state will gather in New York City to decide on the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will replace the Millennium Development Goals as they expire.

4 things you probably know about poverty that Bill and Melinda Gates don’t

Bill and Melinda Gates just released their annual letter, ” Our Big Bet for the Future,” with their thoughts on the current state of global poverty and the suite of projects they are funding to tackle it.

Purpose:

Mass poverty and inequality are created. They are the logical and inevitable outcomes of the global economic system we have right now. But that’s not how the it is commonly understood. Many people would like us to believe that they are just a natural ‘background’ conditions, to be addressed with technical fixes. Where they do exist, it is always and only the fault of poor, lazy people, or those who fall outside the system.

Neither of these come close to an accurate of reasonable explanation, but they do help people in power spin the story that everything should stay the same. Because they blame individuals, and lead logically to a focus on symptoms rather than causes, they distract our attention from the fundamental rules of the system that are the real problem.

There is an antidote to this way of thinking: the idea that poverty is created. It’s not only factually true, but it’s politically powerful. If we can spread the idea that poverty is created, we can help expose the causes, and create awareness that we need to change the rules of neoliberal capitalism, not just provide a little bit of palliative care.

So let’s tell the creation story for poverty. Let’s make it unacceptable that anyone would believe or claim that poverty is “just a part of nature.”