Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach t
The conclusion, and one of the harder hitting parts of the article. Solving poverty does not require complex solutions and long timeframes.
I'm reminded of that one part in Frederick Douglass's autobiography where he gets to the north for the first time and assumed, since they didn't have slaves, that everyone was about as poor as non-slaveowning white southerners. And they weren't! There were poor people, sure, but there were lots of people living very comfortably or in luxury.
He mentions how angry it made him, that not only were thousands and thousands of people suffering to create luxury for a few, but that slavery wasn't even necessary for wealth to exist. That's really stuck with me.
First image description (edited from alt text):
screenshot of a tweet by @pot8um: “Does anyone have that recent study that determined all 8 billion of us could be easily housed and fed with only 30% of the current global labor output and that our collective suffering is manufactured by capitalism...”
reply by @jasonhickel: “Yes: sciencedirect.com/... [a url that is cut off in the screenshot]” and an attached image of text:
“With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large creases in total global throughput and output. Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to” [text is cut off here].
Second image transcription:
Poverty is not an intractable problem that requires complex solutions, long timeframes and large increases in production and throughput that conflict with ecological objectives. The solution is straightforward. We need to actively plan to shift productive capacities away from capital accumulation and elite consumption in order to focus instead on the goods and services that are necessary to meet human needs and enable decent living for all, while ensuring universal access through public provisioning systems. We have framed this work around the concept of human needs, following the recent literature. However it is important to underscore that this approach is ultimately about far more than just satisfying material requirements for human well-being. Achieving decent-living for all is critical to enabling broader human capabilities, individual and collective self-realisation, full participation in society and politics and, ultimately, freedom.
