Thomas pogge poverty pdf

Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people mired in poverty, traps like poor nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to health care, and others and presents eight keys to escaping these traps. Smith gives readers the tools they need to help people overcome poverty and to determine what approaches are most effective in fighting it. For example, celebrities in commercials who encourage viewers to "adopt" a poor child really seem to care, but will sending money to these organizations do the most good?

How can we have been entitled to the assumption by showing that the usual ways great head start our countries enjoyed going of justifying our great advantage fail. All in-text citation references are to face can be justified by reference to how it this book. The histori- tional arrangements, such as a radically cal path from which our exceptional afflu- inegalitarian property regime—harms them ence arose greatly weakens our moral claim in violation of a negative duty.

For Locke, the to it—certainly in the face of those whom justice of any institutional order thus the same historical process has delivered depends on whether the worst-off under it into conditions of acute deprivation. They, are at least as well off as people would be in the global poor, have a much stronger moral a state of nature with a proportional claim to that 1 percent of the global product resource share. The existing distribution is tice, it may leave others unmoved.

Appeal to such a fic- organization. John below the state-of-nature baseline to capture Locke does much better, holding that a fic- more than the entire cooperative surplus.

Whoever deprives others of World Poverty and Human Rights, ch. The radical the institutional rules that give rise to it. Many broadly consequentialist and contrac- These three challenges converge on the con- tualist conceptions of justice exemplify this clusion that the global poor have a com- approach.

They differ in how they charac- pelling moral claim to some of our affluence terize the relevant affected parties groups, and that we, by denying them what they are persons, time slices of persons, and so on , morally entitled to and urgently need, are in the metric they employ for measuring actively contributing to their deprivations. These conceptions either diachronically or subjunctively: consequently disagree about how economic someone is harmed when she is rendered institutions should be best shaped under worse off than she was at some earlier time, modern conditions.

But I can bypass such or than she would have been had some ear- disagreements insofar as these conceptions lier arrangements continued undisturbed. My third challenge, addressed to torical crimes, or by holding them below adherents of broadly consequentialist and any credible state-of-nature baseline. But contractualist conceptions of justice, is that my third challenge does not conceive justice we are preserving our great economic and injustice in terms of an independently advantages by imposing a global economic specified notion of harm.

Leaving social justice: we are harming the global this whole debate to one side, I focus on poor if and insofar as we collaborate in what it ignores: our moral duties not to imposing an unjust global institutional harm.

We do, of course, have positive duties order upon them. And this institutional to rescue people from life-threatening order is definitely unjust if and insofar as it poverty. But it can be misleading to focus on foreseeably perpetuates large-scale human them when more stringent negative duties rights deficits that would be reasonably are also in play: duties not to expose people avoidable through feasible institutional to life-threatening poverty and duties to modifications.

It requires The usual empirical debates concern how me to substantiate three claims: Global developing countries should design their institutional arrangements are causally economic institutions and policies in order implicated in the reproduction of massive to reduce severe poverty within their bor- severe poverty.

The Bank will not count as poor an Indian household that, in , could buy as much food, per person per day, as one could get for 93 cents in the US. In the average poor country, this amount is even lower, about 83 cents.

Now—bearing in mind that, if such a household really spent all its money on food, it would have nothing left for clothing, shelter, medical care, water and other utilities—we can surely conclude that a higher poverty line is needed, one at least twice as high as the one preferred by the Bank.

While this finding gets no air time, the Bank and the media continue to propagate the story that the global elite wishes to be told: that the number of poor has declined by 24 percent in those 15 years.

Another important response should be made to the Panglossians. To make a proper moral appraisal of the prevalence of severe poverty today, we should focus not on comparisons with times past, when the global average income was much lower, but on a comparison with what would be possible in our time, given the current global average income and level of technological and administrative development.

Consider a more distant case where our attachment to the status quo does not cloud our judgment. Think of US slavery in , or the subjection of women. Both of these injustices could have been—and were! Slaves, in particular, were worked less hard, beaten and raped less frequently, better fed, and less often ripped apart from their families.

So would a celebration of moral progress have been appropriate in ? Surely not. Slavery could have been and should have been abolished —then, if not before. And this is what I say about severe poverty.

Yes, it's getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable.

A few hundred years ago, perhaps 85 or even 90 percent of humanity lived below a standard of living that today only 40 or 45 percent fail to reach. But at that earlier time only part of this poverty could have been eradicated, and this at substantial cost not only to the pleasures of the affluent, but also to their well-being and to human culture.

In our time, nearly all severe poverty could be eradicated at a cost to the affluent that is truly trivial. It is perfectly consistent—and also true—to say that the world poverty problem today is smaller relative to world population than before and yet also a much graver injustice.

KB: This is crucial, because in the midst of such immense misery, cheerleading for the status quo is only morally justifiable if, as Margaret Thatcher said, "there is no alternative. It didn't adhere to prevailing dictates. So the policy prescriptions are much wider, right? TP: Yes, and I would transfer that to the global level and say that we have the ability now to arrange global economic institutions so that poverty declines to a fraction of what it is now.

KB: People like Princeton philosopher Peter Singer believe that India and China's alarming increases in carbon emissions and environmental degradation must be, in some sense, tolerated. After all, the industrialized world had to pollute like mad to achieve its poverty reductions. But if, as you say, the number of poor in these countries is drastically undercounted and there are better development models that can be envisioned and implemented, there's much less of a reason to accept such high emissions increases.

The resulting wealth in those countries has largely accrued into the hands of a relatively small group, while many, if not most, have languished during all these years of eight to nine percent growth. Is it right to say that rapidly increasing emissions for this kind of development is not an attractive tradeoff for the global community?

TP: I agree with that. It's not an attractive tradeoff, and we should, if we can, find ways of incentivizing different paths of development. So India seems to be going the route that China went a few years ago and that developing countries all over the world seem to want to follow, namely, to rely on these personal vehicles, which is just an irrational way of organizing transport. So I think one big improvement would be if we somehow made it cheaper and easier for developing countries to learn from the sad experience of some of the developed countries, and also from some of the positive experiences we have of building good transportation systems, like high-speed rail.

The Chinese are becoming leaders in high-speed rail transport, but they have also added nearly 14 million new passenger cars in Another important point is that we have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented.

This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting. What we should do instead is require or at least permit innovators to license their green innovations free of charge in exchange for public payments based on the impact this innovation has on the environment—emissions averted or something of this sort. KB: This touches on some practical engagement and policies.

What is it and what are some of its general features? TP: The Health Impact Fund is based on the same idea, namely that it is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized.

It is much better to sell them at cost and then to reward the innovator in some other way. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example.

But in the case of medicines, green technologies and seeds in agriculture, such an alternative reward mechanism is fairly straightforward.

In the domain of pharmaceuticals, we need a metric for health impact, and with this metric we can then assess the value of the introduction of a new product and pay its innovator accordingly, say on the basis of the product's measured health impact during its first ten years on the market. In exchange, innovators must of course renounce the usual rewards they are otherwise entitled to, namely the patent-protected markup on the price of their product. KB: You're the architect of this initiative and have assembled some of the greatest minds in economics, public health, bioethics and government to support you.

Yet it wouldn't be so obvious based on your positions that you would lead a project to attract and persuade the big pharmaceutical companies that in many ways dominate the global institutional order. TP: It's a team effort, actually, but I am certainly fully behind it despite some regrettable actions by pharmaceutical companies, including their strong and successful lobbying of the Clinton administration in behalf of the TRIPS agreement.

The reason is that I want to help achieve some actual progress in the design of the global institutional architecture. What is realistic is to create a parallel track, giving innovators at least the option of being rewarded in a different way. I think pharmaceutical companies would appreciate having this option. It does not cost them anything to have the option and they wouldn't have to use it. Insofar as they would use it, it would give them a separate income stream for some innovations that would be less profitable or unprofitable on the patent track and it would also bring them substantial gains to their image.

KB: It seems like there's a bloc of developing countries that does not want to be pushed around much anymore. They won't accept the policies that were rammed down their throats. TP: Yes, some of the developing-country governments and populations are tired of having things rammed down their throats, but we're not yet at the stage we want to get to, namely where the developing countries join forces with one another on behalf of creative alternative ideas about how to take things forward.

That is where the Health Impact Fund would be a welcome departure, and I'm happy to report that it is supported by a number of developing countries and also finds some support in the developed world.

What is really nice about the Health Impact Fund is that it is a win-win, something that without much cost to anyone makes a lot of people better off.

If you ask yourself who is paying for pharmaceutical innovation today, the answer is that it's the more affluent populations paying for still-patented advanced medicines at the pharmacy, for comprehensive insurance coverage or for a national health system. With the Health Impact Fund in place, these same people would still pay the lion's share of the cost of innovation—now exclusively via taxes.

But there would be a huge difference. For the present system to work, poor people must be excluded from the innovation, because if they could get access at an affordable price, then affluent people would find ways to buy it cheaply as well—and then the innovator would be poorly rewarded and introductions of new medicines would decline. With the Health Impact Fund, the innovation is paid for separately, through publicly funded health impact rewards, and the product is sold at the cost of production to all.

Here, the cruel injustice of preventing the poor from buying at cost—evidenced by today's suppression of the trade in generic versions of patented medicines—would no longer be needed. So you can think of the HIF as a mechanism that would keep the benefits and burdens of pharmaceutical innovation for the affluent roughly as they are while massively reducing the burdens presently imposed upon the poor.

This sounds like magic. But it really works because the current system is not Pareto efficient. It's a system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in litigation costs and deadweight losses that HIF-registered medicines would sidestep. By avoiding these losses, the HIF reform can bring improvements all around—including for pharmaceutical innovators. KB: This seems like a smart, practical first step. That way you cut out the privatization and monopoly rents on the end results of basic, taxpayer-subsidized research.

First, the alternative proposal is not politically realistic in the United States and most other affluent countries with a substantial pharmaceutical industry. Second, companies are actually much better than governments and other bureaucracies at organizing in a holistically efficient way the extremely complex path from the examination of molecules all the way to the delivery of medicines to patients.

Already in the conception and selection of research projects, companies would anticipate all the challenges down the line that they will need to overcome in order to achieve actual health impact. Bureaucratic organizations, by contrast, are notoriously bad at this sort of optimizing. This is partly due to the fact that they operate with push-funding and thus have an incentive to spend more on, and seek more money for, an existing project even if another one now seems more cost-effective.

Competing companies evolve toward efficiency as the more efficient ones profit and expand while those who fall behind fail. And companies being efficient and profiting under the HIF, this is exactly what we want, because the company's profit is directly driven by the health impact its registered products achieve.

TP: It would surely be worth trying, and I wish this were politically feasible. But I remain skeptical. To justify this a bit more, let me expand on the thought I just offered. To improve global health, it's not enough just to have a really good new product and to obtain marketing approval.

You still need to market the product and bring it to patients, follow up, create the infrastructure, and so on—the whole pipeline, the network.

That's something that companies are extremely good at: organizing a whole pipeline in a cost-effective way. As an example, let me mention Coca-Cola's distribution network. You can get an ice-cold Coke for around fifty cents in most developing countries, not just in the major population centers, but at the most remote and surprising places.

The contributors are largely moral and political philosophers who have set their minds to the task of clarifying a normative basis, and in particular developing arguments, relevant to the shaping of claims around severe poverty. We have here a rich and engaging analysis of the relationship between human rights-holders and duty-bearers, informed, but unencumbered by, the constraints of a state-centric international human rights legal order.

As one would hope, this book confronts the key issues demanding resolution on any consideration of world poverty. Central among them is the question of assigning moral responsibility, which itself is comprised of two main lines of inquiry: what agents Most users should sign in with their email address. Eradicating systemic poverty: brief for a Global Resources Dividend.

The current appropriation of wealth from our planet is highly uneven. Affluent people use vastly more of the world's resources, and they do so unilaterally, without giving any compensation to the global poor for their disproportionate consumption. Keywords: Systemic world poverty - Natural resources - Economic inequality - Global institutional order.