I might have considered myself unique, maybe even virtuous, had I been born a baby-boomer. But my story is common enough now to be a grimacing cliché. Millennial America seems newly self-conscious about its staggering wealth, and consequently obsessive over the world’s dearth. Growing up in a white, middle-class American family in the ’90s and 2000s comes with a concomitant awareness of ugly poverty in the rest of the world. Indeed, a recent report makes clear that young people are in search of ways to explicitly tie their careers to social change, with 84 percent of millennials believing they have a duty to improve the world. So it wasn’t long before I began asking myself: What am I going to do about poverty?
We know the most self-centered manifestation of this: the young Americans who make their way onto a plane to “Africa” with a misplaced sense of duty, usually helping no one.
But those are not the only stories. There are young people who aren’t caught up in a white savior mentality. Who acknowledge complexity and don’t naively believe they can solve wholesale problems. These young people truly want to move the needle on poverty — but don’t fully know how.
IInternational development pundits, at the broadest level, offer two distinct hypotheses for how to solve poverty. On one hand, you have a group I’ll call the Developers. The Developers believe the poor are poor due to a lack of development — and that the solution to poverty is some form of modernization. Developers will often cheerlead the idea of ending poverty. They set targets (most recently the sustainable development goals, or SDGs) and make wildly optimistic projections. Development economists like Jeffrey Sachs truly believe that, in Sachs’ words, “For the first time in history, global economic prosperity, brought on by continuing scientific and technological progress and the self-reinforcing accumulation of wealth, has placed the world within reach of eliminating extreme poverty altogether.”
On the other side is a group I’ll call the Liberators, who say that the poor are poor because of development. According to this view, there is no solution to poverty until the power structures that systematically exclude the poor are overthrown. As long as wealth is built unequally, poverty is a sort of iatrogenic disease caused by development technocrats. The Liberators would agree with this passage from the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to another, carried on in an uninterrupted, now hidden, fight.”
Obviously, these are broad strokes characterizations. The point is not to pigeon-hole anyone in particular, but to highlight the fact that these two fundamentally opposing viewpoints exist, side by side, with similar ultimate goals.
Both sides are, as expected, right and wrong. The Developers are right in that over the last 25 years, over one billion people have moved out of extreme poverty. The Liberators are also right to point out that this says nothing about income inequality. “Absolute poverty, the poverty in which the poorest of the poor are now living, is but one expression of the underlying structures that give rise to relative poverty,” wrote development scholar Tim Unwin. Indeed, over the same time period that absolute poverty has decreased, the Gini Index in many wealthy countries (a measure of income inequality) has steadily increased. Statistics become the battleground for truth.
But it goes beyond the numbers. In the scramble toward modernization and growth, the Developers may neglect the inherent rights and traditional knowledge of the poor. The Developers need to be reminded — or perhaps learn — that poverty is not merely a mechanical inefficiency that can be reengineered, but also an outcome of a tangled human system of justice and rights.
Meanwhile, the Liberators may unwittingly impose a victim posture on the poor by focusing on the external, structural causes of poverty. This could undermine practical action and erode the inherent capacities of the poor to increase their livelihoods at local levels. Poverty is not solely an issue of justice, but also tied to physical realities that can be improved with the right tools.
I know this polarization from my own ongoing exploration of what to do about poverty. I started on one side of the mountain in college and came down on the other in graduate school. I’ve been every combination of cynic and sucker, frustrated by the indifference toward practical solutions on one side and the lack of attention to social justice on the other.
Of course, there is a grey area where many individuals and organizations working to combat poverty blend the strengths of these two poles. However, we all too often fall into a second trap — we see poverty strictly through the lens of what is missing.
We all tend to understand poverty in terms of deficiencies. The Developers tend to see a lack of adequate shelter, food, sanitation and clean water — and thus build the infrastructure and systems to deliver those physical realities. The Liberators tend to see a lack of justice, education, and rights — and thus advocate on behalf of the poor. Either way, we think about poverty as an empty vessel that needs to be filled.
As a result, the poor become consumers of what countless development agencies and NGOs provide. Not surprisingly, the poor become increasingly dependent on these institutions, rather than independent actors with the freedom to shape their own world. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire reminds us that this is a false form of generosity, a giving that subdues the poor and compels them to continually “extend their trembling hands,” rather than strengthening them.
What if, instead of relying on the rhetoric of the Developers or Liberators, we forged a new path? Could we both mend the divide and alter our relationship with the poor to be more constructive and dignifying?
What if we saw the poor not as empty vessels, but as potent actors temporarily hindered by various obstacles? The hands of the poor are weighed down, but not empty. They have been held back, but are not incapable.
By reframing the perceived deficiencies of the poor in terms of barriers — and importantly, many individuals and organizations already do so — poverty reduction is not the goal so much as “obstacle reduction.”
In recasting our understanding of poverty in terms of obstacles, we not only are able to integrate the best of the Developers and Liberators, but we also send the poor a different message in the way we treat them: that they are not dependent and incapable, but are themselves change-makers in the world.
And, of course, if we adopt such a stance honestly, we may find that there are situations that point to ourselves, Developers and Liberators alike, as the very obstacle. We might need to learn to simply get out of the way. A project’s value — whether it be improved sanitation marketing, distribution of cleaner cook stoves, gender equality programs, or environmental justice — should be measured by the space it creates for the poor to act as decision makers. To do so, we will have to listen to the poor with greater humility and fewer goals.
Typically, it has been the wealthy who are told they can change the world. White, millennial Americans like myself have been so steeped in this belief that we, predictably, feel that it is up to us to “solve poverty,” to Develop and to Liberate. But let’s take a moment to consider that impulse. The next time we get on that plane, let’s go to find friends, and learn how they, too, are changing the world.
