Tonight was doubly painful. I had to miss Socrates Cafe because of an event at the Foreign Language Department which for a couple of reasons I felt it would be in my best interest to attend. It seems they have a foreign language festival every two years and tonight there was a "tea party" out on the balcony of the sixth floor of the Foreign Language Building. I had turned down an invitation already, but my counterpart teacher called asking me to go. And as it happened, someone else was actually set up to moderate the discussion at the Cafe. And Kristin (the other Peace Corps volunteer) had agreed to run things. So I thought it would both be a good idea to attend this event and also to have the Socrates Cafe run without me there. This is what it is hopefully intended to do after I leave, and I will be proud to have left something behind in China besides some underwear I don't plan on taking back. But still I would much rather have been at the Cafe. And the second pain (the first being missing the Cafe) was that the "tea party" was pretty much what I thought it would be, a three hour English Corner (see the entry "Do Americans eat their young" if you want to know more about English Corner).  The topic of the Cafe was especially interesting: "why are there poor people?" The moderator was a retired American who found out about our meeting my checking yahoo groups and started showing up this fall.  Here is the introduction.

"why are there poor people?"
For many people the answer is simple: people are poor because they have either a bad character or are lazy. Opportunity is everywhere: anyone can find a job and get out of poverty. If you are poor it is your own fault.

Another point of view can be expressed by an ancient Christian saying: if a poor man steals bread from a rich man, the rich man is the thief. People are poor because there is an unequal distribution of wealth.

Before we get into the discussion of why there is poverty in the world, it may be helpful to describe what poverty is. For the sake of our discussion I will describe people as poor if they have little or no access to enough food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and jobs. People are not poor if they make a fair salary which is a wage that lets breadwinners raise their families having enough to eat, a roof over their heads, clothes to wear, and money enough to provide their children with a decent education and health to enjoy life.

Here are two facts.

One half the world’s population makes less than 15RMB per day.

In 2003 10.6 million children died before they turned 5 years old.

What causes poverty?

The first reason for poverty is that many persons do not share the value that we are all equal. All human beings are part of the same family and because of that have equal rights, one of which is having a fair share of the world’s resources. We all have equal dignity and value as human beings. When a person or a company or a country ignores this basic truth, there are poor people. So in human history we see slavery, children forced to work, women consistently earning less than men, wretched working conditions because there is no sense we are all the same family entitled to human rights.

Secondly, there are poor people because our way of judging success is wrong. Instead of human beings and their welfare being the measure of economic success, we place economic value over human value. We do not use human well being and the common good as the benchmark for a successful economic system. Instead we use rising market shares and profits as the judge of a successful enterprise. People are made poor because keeping salaries low, using as little human workforce as possible, not paying for appropriate human benefits like health care and disability are judged to be the way to wealth and success. The bottom line, profits, drives economic decisions and not the well being of humans. In America the stock market goes down when worker salaries go up. This is an example of a system that puts profit over persons.

My third point is people are poor when there is no respect for justice. When the head of a company makes 300% more than the worker who is making or providing the goods or services, we have injustice and the company boss takes more than is needed for a good life leaving others with less. In history we can see another form of this injustice in colonialism and imperialism where a stronger country takes the resources of a weaker country without fair compensation. The United States for instance has made many of the people of Haiti poor by taking its natural resources of trees and sugarcane with little in return to the poor Haitian.

Finally, another reason for poor people is that there is a massive misuse in the spending of our resources. The world’s priorities are wrong. For instance, the world spends more money on building weapons of destruction than creating systems for all to have enough. President Dwight Eisenhower once told the American people: "every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross."

Why do you think there are poor people?