Right. This isn’t about transforming the world’s poorest people into middle class citizens at a Western standard. This is more about improving the overall level of the poorest countries/economies.
In many of these poorest countries, the primary economic activity is desperately trying to grow enough food to not starve. If you improve the health, sanitation, basic infrastructure, and governance, even the subsistence farmers can have a better life. They won’t lose as much precious time and resources to disease and corruption. That means they can grow a bit more food, and with improved infrastructure they can sell some of their crop, and buy tools or fertilizer to further increase their productivity. They can afford to send their kids to school. Eventually, with sufficient infrastructure and a better educated population, the country can attract foreign investment to develop manufacturing.
It’s about transforming countries where the vast majority are in abject poverty to countries with poverty that isn’t as bad, where there are some industrial jobs and the nucleus of a middle class.
I’ve read and heard some things recently about the living and working conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories. The life is almost incomprehensibly impoverished compared to the middle class Western lifestyle I enjoy. But people keep flocking to the city to get these jobs, because they offer a major improvement over their parents’ lives as subsistence farmers.
(I welcome any corrections of my misimpressions from even sven or anyone else!)
Re: India and Pakistan have a educated middle class that has a relatively comfortable life. But isn’t there a lot of poverty too? I’m not sure what the numbers are.
‘A lot of poverty’ in India is rather an understatement.
If you look at individual states, and compare them using the Human Development Index, the most thriving states have a HDI roughly equivalent to Russia or Montenegro, the worst states have a HDI equivalent to Burundi or Sierra Leone. The most populous state (UP) has actually seen a regress in the last few years.
even sven I’m much less sanguine than you about African development, but what do you do in international development? I was a Peace Corps volunteer for about three years, and while I work in academic research now, I have a number of friends still working in the international development area.
The MMR vaccine alone has drastically reduced the death rates from measles across the world. India just got rid of polio. Efforts are being made to get even more access to vaccines to poor people. That would help a lot in developing countries by reducing infant mortality rates and decreasing overall death and disability rates. Gates and his wife have probably saved more lives than anyone on the planet. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he’s completely right on this prediction as well.
I went back and collected some data. In 1991, the World Bank considered 52 countries to be low income. In 2002, that number had risen to 64. Currently, there are 36 low income countries. I think it is pretty remarkable that the number of low income countries has been cut almost in half in the last ten years.
Unlikely, even given such an exclusive definition of “poor” that Sudan is not included and Angola is two tiers above “poor”. It is difficult for people in North Atlantic countries to grasp just how poor other parts of the world are and how sparsely held together civil society and capitalist institutions (or their surrogates) are in some regions. I hope to see the marked improvements in the next two decades, but it’s unrealistic to think that almost all countries will have a standard of living comparable to Albania’s* by 2034.
*My arbitrary definition of “not poor,” even though something as flimsy as a MLM scheme wreck the economy only a decade ago.
Yeah, nobody is saying everyone is going to have a Prius and an iPhone. The type of “not poor” being referenced here is having access to basic healthcare, universal primary education, a trained birth attendant at every birth, houses that withstand ordinary hazards, access to clean water and a sanitary toilet, no raging epidemics, etc. Achieving that won’t solve all of the worlds problems, but it will alleviate a lot of needless suffering and put people in a positions where they can continue to improve their lives.
I’m sure this point has been made thoroughly in other discussions of his remarks, but this is all assuming there is no exchange of nuclear weapons (on any scale larger than tactical warheads; the existence of such arsenals means there is a chance greater than 0 that they will be used, and the quick-launch protocols make it even more likely), and no ongoing environmental catastrophe.