Rich / Poor Gap
National & International Impacts
We all have an image in our minds of a poor person. Perhaps we think of a homeless man panhandling on a street corner, a starving Ethiopian child, or a ragged family fleeing the ravages of a civil war. But we rarely think beyond the immediacy of that image to all the other ways being poor affects a person’s life, or how that poverty affects the larger world.
Wealth and poverty are closely coupled to population. As population increases, more and more people must share resources. When there are too few resources to adequately support the population, scarcity and poverty result. That scarcity and poverty may then drive or exacerbate discrimination, migration, environmental destruction, and conflict.
Poverty often drives families to treat their children as an economic asset. They may raise food, haul water, gather fuel, hire out to sweatshops, or be sold into slavery or prostitution to help support their families. Coupled with a lack of education, and reproductive and community health care, this helps explain why poor families are generally larger, and why poverty tends to be “intergenerational.” Children raised in poverty without adequate access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity tend to be poor themselves, and to repeat the cycle with their own children.
On the other hand, higher levels of education and income are closely coupled – to each other and to family size. More educated and affluent families tend to be smaller, and those families with fewer children can focus their resources on those children, generating better health, educational, and economic outcomes. With higher levels of social health and education, affluent countries like Germany and Japan continue to see declines in their birth rates.
Wealth and poverty are tightly linked to environmental concerns as well. Ecosystem decline is a major cause of poverty, as well as a major result of it. Overexploitation and degradation of the resource base can tilt people into poverty, just as people living in poverty are often forced to overexploit and degrade their environment. Poverty also leads to environmental problems as toxic products are freely sold in poorer regions, and polluting factories or waste dumps are often located in areas where economic necessity dictates lower standards.
On the other end of the economic spectrum, excessive consumption patterns of wealthy nations and individuals have led to major impacts on the environment. Rich nations and individuals consume the vast majority of world resources, generate the majority of toxic wastes, and produce the largest share of greenhouse gases that drive global warming.
Cycles of violence are often sustained by conditions of poverty, and there are many examples of civil conflicts in the developing world in which citizens most directly affected by the war are the nation’s poorest. Further, poor countries wracked by civil conflict only get poorer. Statistics suggest that many poor countries in Africa and Asia have put a higher priority on building a strong national defense than budgeting funds for education, health and other nation-building efforts.
Being poor often means that one’s human rights are more likely to be abused. For example, child labor and forced prostitution offer many families, especially in South Asia, a partial solution to their economic problems, but not without denying these young men and women their basic human rights.
Another critical link in the chain is the connection between poverty and health. Poverty is the main reason that children are not vaccinated, clean water and sanitation are not available, life saving drugs and treatments are inaccessible, and mothers die in childbirth. Even if one avoids the scourge of malaria, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS or other debilitating disease, poor diet may limit people’s ability to escape poverty. Many of the world’s poor fall below the minimum caloric intake recommended by the World Health Organization. Because the poor often can’t afford adequate nutrition, they may lack the physical and mental development necessary to fully participate even in a local, much less global, economy.
Finally, the disparity between rich and poor nations impacts the world as a whole. Terrorist attacks, illegal immigration, and “economic refugees” are just a few examples of the reactions of the poor to their plight. And the rich nations often react strongly to these actions.