What makes the poor poor?

Why is there poverty? It is not like death and illness, a natural part of human existence. Or, is it?

What made the difference among the developing countries, the developed countries, that allowed them to remove poverty from among its citizens?

Why, even among the most prosperous nations in human history, is there poverty, side-by-side with luxurious wealth?

Is it a law of human society that there must be a gulf between rich and poor, and the twain shall never meet?

Is Marxist theory about capitalist society correct, at least concerning exploitation and class struggle? Can liberal democracies win the final battle in the Cold War? If globalization cannot bring happiness to all, then surely the remaining poor, and getting poorer, people of the world will eventually unite to bring a new world order. Maybe not in the near future, but perhaps within three generations. Can we condemn our grandchildren to wars and revolutions that, if Bill Joy is right, will be certainly Armageddon. Afterall, for the poor with nothing to lose, MAD is not out of the question. What the jihad suicide bombers do today, will be but mere prelude to the devastation of Mutually Assured Destruction in the future dystopia.

What makes the poor poor? What can we do to make them rich, or at least, comfortable?

The early American founders thought it was freedom. Given that they had bountiful resources, and a huge continent left to explore, to exploit, they were probably right.

Thomas Jefferson thought it was education. Witness the success of the American century, he was probably right.

The new liberal democracies in East Asia believe it has to do with industrious hard work, and social stability. Witness their amazing economic prosperity, they are probably right.

Yet, even in America, the land of golden opportunities and dreams, there are more than a fair share of people living in dreadful poverty, generations after generations, passing inheritance of not wealth nor the pursuit of happiness, but poverty and misery. It remains to be seen, if the new capitalist converts in East Asia can surpass their American teacher, and create social stability in the form of utopia without poverty.

To understand the poor, we need to see not a collective, but the individuals. Each poor person has a unique history. As in medicine, many diseases share a common symptom. Not all poor people are created the same. Each has a story to tell. Some are made poor by circumstances beyond their control, like childhood poverty that cling to them worse than ill-fitting clothes; others are made poor by personal choices and bad judgment, like addiction or investment or greed; others are made poor by global shifting winds, from globalization to global warming to oursourcing.

Most of all, the root cause of poverty is a lack of education - not only an education in the traditional sense, the three R's, and the new skills in computing, but also an education in life - the life skills one need to survive, to excel, in making fuzzy decisions answering questions that have no clear answers. Traditional education requires memorization of facts and procedures. Life requires more than that, and many of the poor are poor because they find it difficult to live in a world without structure, without clear boundaries. Their own internal compass is confused. That's why historically, poor countries have always done better with a strong autocratic leader. In liberal democracies, the poor also need a strong paternalistic government, or organization to provide the strong structural foundation from which to rebuild their lives. A major failure of today's liberal democracies has been the inevitable lack of strength in organizations that are suppose to help the poor. The left is warm and fuzzy with desire to help, the right is hard-nosed and hard-hearted with an attitude of let them pull themselves up by their own bootstrap like everyone else. In fact, the poor needs someone in the middle, with a firm hand, a warm heart, and a clear head to guide them on a long road to maturity. Like a child, the poor does not need a parent's unconditional hand-out, nor a parent's total neglect, but a responsible parent's guidance one-step at a time.

The family of nations, like all families, have members who mature at different speed. Some mature faster than others. Whether we stick together in a family, depends on how each member is treated. As M. Scott Peck pointed out, a community can be formed only when all the members in the group are willing to empty themselves of their own personal perspective, to all others, each of the others, to enter, and to accept each of the others. The mature rich nations of the world can continue to eat, to drink, and to be merry, while the still maturing poor nations of the world watch helplessly while a part of their inheritance goes up in smoke, and smog, to become a part of global warming. If we think Bill Joy's vision of the future dystopia where rogue individuals can wreck havoc on the world, if we think the Armaggedon described in the book of Revelation, are but mere speculations of distant improbable events, then the lesson of the past has taught us that we will be sure to be poorer together, perhaps not today, not this century, but certainly within our life time of our children and their children.

If a budget surplus of the Clinton years can be turned into a budget deficit of the Bush years in the span of a few years, imagine what a decade of ill-management will do.