Poverty in Medellin, Colombia. Luis Pérez/Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.
Inequality
is the worst kind of poverty, because inequality is precisely what causes it.
Measuring poverty and allocating budget lines in the absence of public policies
against inequality is like applying a tourniquet below the wound. According to
the OECD, $ 134 billion in official aid were spent in 2013 to fight poverty. The
number of poor people in the world, however, is not diminishing.
Poverty for an individual is the
lack of what he or she needs to live. Inequality in a society is the structural
lack that generates poverty, which is due to five causes:
–
lack of quality public goods;
–
absence of public
institutions;
–
lack of social fabric;
–
inability to
organize collectively;
–
no access to
opportunities.
When, in a context of inequality – Latin America is the most unequal
region in the world -, government programs are restricted to implementing
assistance plans and public policies are not structured to address the five
causes mentioned above, the end result is poverty being managed in a way that perpetuates
it rather than management aimed at putting an end to the inequality that
generates it.
The first factor of inequality is when a sector of the population lives
in a context lacking quality public goods, because a society that lacks these
goods and services – which should be available to all equally, both in quantity
and quality – is actually denying large-scale social inclusion. A hospital is a
public good not because the state manages it, but because both the person with
the largest resources and the person in most need in a community get the same
quality of service, regardless of who manages it. If the health system provides
poor attention to the vulnerable segments of society and directs people to the
private system for quality care, then only the most affluent sectors will be
able to afford it and healthcare will no longer be a public good, in so far as
it no longer guarantees the same living standard quality to the population as a
whole. A government's first policy measure should thus be the setting up of a
collaboration agreement with both civil society and the business sector to
produce, manage, distribute, and safeguard quality public goods. All three
actors contribute distinctive elements to the generation of these goods: the
state adds scale, the business sector quality, and social organizations
specificity.
The lack of public
institutions is another decisive factor of inequality,
since those who suffer most from it are the sectors who live in poverty and
have no way of preventing the impact of discretion in the allocation of public
resources, of concentration of power and institutional abuse, of welfare
provision (a blend of assistance and cynicism), cronyism, structural corruption
and organized crime from damaging their living conditions. There cannot be zero
poverty if there is no zero corruption and zero discretion. If we are to deal
with, and solve, institutional weakness, tools of participatory democracy should
be introduced and citizens empowered to demand full enforcement of the rule of
law, while businessmen should actively assume their role as citizens.
Another characteristic of inequality is the lack of social fabric. The
poor sectors’ social links are restricted to a reduced environment, they engage
in isolated socio-economic relationships, and they have limited or even non-existent
contacts with those who facilitate access to the social ladder. The lack of
quality links undermines the consolidation of upward social mobility and leaves
people exposed, lacking buffer spaces and containment areas, facing the abuse of
power of both public institutions and the powers that be. The state should
create the necessary conditions for public spaces and public goods and services
to be the place where cross-cutting social and economic links are made – as used
to be the case with the Latin American public education system which shaped, for
example, the Argentine middle class.
The
inability of vulnerable sectors to organize collectively is another inequality
factor that contributes to their being in poverty. Fragmented populations, which
are the victims of pork-barrel politics, which are incapable of creating the
social conditions for organizing to defend their rights, control the discretion
of those in charge and influence the quality of collective life, are doomed to
being defined as objects of assistance by the people in charge who break the
social fabric. The state should promote civic education aiming at providing the
community with the capacity to organize collectively as a subject for change,
capable of defining its own quality of life, of influencing the quality of
collective life, and of setting limits to the discretionary power of the people
in charge. In addition, the state should facilitate the formalization of social
organizations through changes in the current legal, fiscal and labour regulations,
which are responsible for keeping 90% of these organizations in the informal
sector, thus preventing them from acquiring legal status and meeting the
requirements for receiving donations.
The
fifth aspect of inequality has to do with the
denial of access to opportunities. Public policies should provide the means for
the members of a community to access equitably the capacities which ensure high
standards of human dignity, guaranteed respect for human rights, and quality
public services. Restoring the quality of the public education system is
essential, because education is the primary source of equitable access to
opportunities.
The situation requires that fight against poverty should take the form
of disarmament of the system of inequality: offering quality public goods,
establishing democratic institutions, promoting the building of social
networks, ensuring the capacity to organize collectively, and guaranteeing
access to opportunities.
In 1965 the world population was 3.3 billion. Today, it is 7.3 billion,
and the population living below the poverty line is nearly 4 billion. That is
to say, the number of poor people in the world amounts to the population
increase of the last fifty years – the figure shows that despite the millions
of dollars invested in fighting poverty, we have actually been unable to
increase the number of people enjoying quality living standards. So, it is
clear that poverty will only be properly fought when governments stop
addressing it as a problem of the poor, and start defining public policies from
the perspective of inequality – which, in turn, should be addressed as a state
problem.