Questions about inequality

In the last several decades, inequalities of wealth and income within many countries (especially, though not only, 'developed' countries) have been increasing, even as aggregate income and wealth gaps between countries have been tending to decrease somewhat (though still leaving wide disparities).  Within-country inequality has reached a point where it has now become an issue in, to take one of many possible examples, the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Is inequality of income and wealth objectionable because it produces other harms, or at a certain level is there something intrinsically objectionable about extreme inequality, irrespective of any possible consequences?  Why should people care, say, that, given current trends, the top 1 percent of Americans will soon hold more wealth than the bottom 99 percent (as I have seen asserted): is it because the very wealthy exercise disproportionate political power, thus distorting or nullifying democracy, or is there something inherently offensive and objectionable about the disparities?  Similarly, should the extreme disparity between CEO pay and the pay of a median worker be of intrinsic concern?  Or, to cite an example from the previous post on Lagos, is the existence of slums in close physical proximity to wealth objectionable in itself, or is it objectionable only or mainly because the basic material needs of those living in the slums are not being met in an economy that is operating well for the upper layer(s) of the population?

Many are probably familiar, either from first-hand experience or from photos, with the phenomenon of upscale houses or apartment buildings built right up against slums in cities in 'developing' countries; by contrast, in cities in 'developed' countries there tends to be more physical distance between poor neighborhoods and affluent ones.  (ETA: Of course, one can also find that distance in certain cases in the developing world as well.)  Is inequality more morally objectionable when wealth and poverty exist in close physical proximity, or is that simply an aesthetic, for lack of a better word, consideration?  Are poor people injured in some additional way by being physically confronted, as it were, on a daily basis by the existence of people who are enormously better off than they are?

More questions.  Is it "better" to live in an urban slum than in rural poverty, or does it depend on individual preferences?  Is that sort of like asking whether someone would prefer to be executed by injection or by firing squad?  Or does it depend on the particular circumstances of each case?  (I think probably it does.)  The continuing movement of people especially in the developing world from rural to urban areas is well known, but how many move back in the other direction?  (I assume rough figures are available for particular countries, but I'm not going to look for them right now.) 
 
In sum, I'm not altogether sure of the answers to many of these questions, but they strike me as worth asking, perhaps especially by those who think of themselves as egalitarians. 

ETA/update: See the comment thread for, among other things, a helpful comment by js. on what it means to say that something is "intrinsically" objectionable.

Poverty and wealth in Nigeria

Extreme inequality is certainly not unique to Nigeria, but this report, which aired on the PBS NewsHour a couple of nights ago, vividly depicts the economic disparities in Lagos.  It's part of a series on Nigeria that is exactly the sort of thing public television should be doing.*   Note, incidentally, Bill Clinton's appearance toward the end in the section on Eko Atlantic City.

(*I watched it online, as I don't have a working TV setup, as I've mentioned before.)

ETA: As discussed in the comment thread, the issue is not inequality per se, but rather the failure to meet the basic needs of a large portion of the population despite economic growth. 

Deaton interview

This year's economics Nobelist, Angus Deaton, was interviewed a couple of days ago on the NewsHour. I was a bit bothered by his statement toward the end that "there’s been very little serious discussion [of inequality] until recently," which I think was, well, unhappily or unfortunately worded (trying to give him every benefit of the doubt here -- he probably meant a particular kind of serious discussion, but it came out as just a bald statement).  I also thought one of Judy Woodruff's questions was rather silly (n.b. I think she's generally a competent, hard-working journalist), but I won't waste time pointing out the question. (Or more precisely, I won't take the time to point it out.)

Extreme poverty in Africa: glass half full?

Sometime in the next few days I was planning to post a link to the new UNICEF figures on global child mortality (once I had taken a look at the report), but Jeffrey Sachs in the NYT (via) beat me to it (at least w/r/t the figures for Africa).

Sachs has a glass-half-full view of poverty and its effects in Africa, observing, among other things, that malaria is down by 30 percent (over what period exactly he doesn't say) and that economic growth is up to 5.7 percent in the period 2000-2010. He doesn't discuss how that growth has been distributed, however. And the child mortality figures, although better than they were, are still terrible: almost 10 percent under-5 mortality per 1000 births in 2012 (or in plain language, for every 1000 children born, 98 died before their fifth birthday). [ETA: Oh yes, the (supposedly) key figure: the percent living below the W.Bank's $1.25-a-day extreme poverty line was down to 49 percent in 2010 for sub-Saharan Africa, 21 percent for developing countries taken altogether.]  

Sachs is probably right that private-public 'partnerships' are required to make progress on further reducing extreme poverty. But structural reforms are also needed, such as, to mention just one, ending offshore tax havens that cost developing countries more money every year than they receive in official development assistance. This last point I take from a book that I've checked out of the library but as yet have only glanced at: Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford U.P., 2009). She discusses taxation and its connection to global poverty in chap.5. (I'm assuming this particular problem is as bad now as it was several years ago when Brock wrote. In the unlikely event that's wrong, someone can correct me.)

Progress, pleasure, and poverty

An NYT op-ed by Manu Joseph (via E. Loomis at LGM) insists that the poor, in this case in India, want to have fun and that they should be given Internet connectivity via cellphones and should decide the uses to which it is put (as opposed to a government official telling them). Because, Joseph intones: "It is not always true that entertainment is the collateral consequence of progress; progress, often, is the collateral benefit of the pursuit of pleasure."

I'm happy to agree with Joseph that fun is "a profound human need" and I'm for autonomy and all that, but I'm not sure about the notion that progress is often a collateral benefit of the pursuit of pleasure (sometimes it may be, sometimes not). Anyway, it's beside the point, which is, as I pointed out in a comment at LGM, that extreme poverty remains a serious problem in India, despite its considerable economic progress in recent years. Whether a parent whose child has died of a preventable poverty-related cause will be consoled by watching serials on TV or online seems to me an open question, to put it mildly.

(This reminds me that I've had a related post sitting in draft for a while. Will try to post it fairly soon.)

The justification for poverty reduction is...poverty reduction

The Monkey Cage links to this post on aid and conflict in Asia, which contains this passage:

...issues of inequality, discrimination and identity rather than poverty are often the drivers of sectarian violence and conflict. ...Yet it is often business as usual for aid donors, who continue to focus on traditional projects for poverty reduction and access to services. Many projects are justified on the basis of 'contributing to peace' but evidence suggests that, at best, development alone does not guarantee peace. At worst, aid risks doing harm by exacerbating existing drivers of conflict or by reinforcing local power dynamics and discriminatory practices.

Which is why poverty reduction should not be justified as "contributing to peace," but rather on the basis that poverty reduction is a good thing in itself. The justification for poverty reduction is poverty reduction.

QOTD: Gates on eradicating polio

Excerpted from an interview with E. Klein:

Ezra Klein: How do you ensure you hit every tiny village in a mountainous, rural, poor country?

Bill Gates: We began using satellite maps and we’re finding particularly in Nigeria we were missing a lot of settlements, a lot of nomadic people. The thing we were missing the most was a village would be on a border, and one government would say, “Oh, that’s on their side,” and the other guy would say, “No, that’s on their side.” So your chance of getting polio was super elevated if you happened to live on the border between these local government administrative boundaries.

Then in terms of the teams doing their job, we now put a phone with a GPS sensor in it, every three minutes it says where this team is. It’s in the box with the vaccine so when they come in at the end of the day we plug that in and see if they really went where they were supposed to go.

Our biggest problems now are violence, which causes campaigns to be canceled, or people just not ... willing to go into various neighborhoods, and refusals having to do with bad rumors about the vaccine campaign. And these are both serious issues in both Pakistan and Nigeria.

A call to end 'extreme wealth' by 2025

This is offered without comment, as I don't have much time right now, except to say that it might have been framed in terms of ending extreme inequality. But the point of the 'extreme wealth' phrase is the symmetry with 'extreme poverty.'

Richard Cohen's unfair comparison

Readers of this blog will know that I have not been an uncritical booster of Obama, though I am definitely supporting him for re-election. But Richard Cohen's WaPo column comparing Obama unfavorably to Robert Kennedy strikes me as somewhat unfair.

Cohen writes:

Kennedy had huge causes. End poverty. End the war. He challenged a sitting president over Vietnam. It could have cost him his career. It did cost him his life. The draft is long gone, and with it indignation about senseless wars. Poverty persists, but now it is mostly blamed on the poor. When it comes to the underclass, we are out of ideas . . . or patience. Or both. Pity Obama in this regard. It’s hard to summon us for a crusade that has already been fought and lost. We made war on poverty. Poverty hardly noticed.

If you accept the premise of this passage, then the fault lies more with the times than with Obama. 1968 was a different era. Yet Cohen then proceeds to ignore his own insight. I agree Obama should have been more vocal about climate change, about the plight of young black men many of whom are in prison or unemployed (or underemployed), and about some other matters, too. But Obama is who he is: his 2008 campaign was not an especially marked departure from the center of gravity of the Democratic party, which has shifted rightward since the days of RFK. For that matter, it's shifted rightward even since 1980, when Edward Kennedy gave his unforgettable speech at the Democratic convention of that year ("the dream will never die").

Richard Cohen knows this, which is another reason his column seems unfair. It has attracted a lot of comments on the WaPo site, or so I surmise from the fact that the "loading comments" function there seems to be groaning under the strain. But I haven't read any of the comments there except one or two. A lot of them, no doubt, won't  have anything to do with what Cohen wrote.

Added later: I don't agree, by the way, with Cohen's implicit blanket dismissal of the 'war on poverty', which had some real accomplishments. But that's a whole other subject.

Unmentioned issues

Two issues that went unmentioned at both conventions: (1) the absurdly high number of people in U.S. prisons; (2) the extent of poverty in the U.S.

Unemployment and financial hardship were mentioned a lot, but there was little or no mention of poverty beyond a vague reference now and then, except in the biographical parts of speeches, which are always tales of a rise out of poverty or straitened circumstances. See this review of C. Hedges and J. Sacco's book on poverty in the U.S. (Btw, this year is the 50th anniversary of M. Harrington's The Other America.)

The mantra of growth; or, Bhagwati vs. Pogge

Given the nature of the news cycle, the debate sparked by Pres. Obama's (successful) nomination of Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank has long since been eclipsed by a spate of fresher stories. But I wanted to write this post before the Kim story faded into complete oblivion, because the debate over Kim raised again some fundamental questions about economic growth, inequality, and poverty.

In a column published last month criticizing the choice of Kim, Jagdish Bhagwati asserted that the Obama administration has the wrong view of development. He wrote:

...perhaps the most compelling factor in Obama’s choice [of Kim] seems to have been a fundamental misunderstanding of what "development" requires. Micro-level policies such as health care, which the Obama administration seems to believe is what "development" policy ought to be, can only go so far. But macro-level policies, such as liberalization of trade and investment, privatization, and so forth, are powerful engines of poverty reduction; indeed, they are among the key components of the reforms that countries like India and China embraced in the mid-1980’s and early 1990’s....

[I]t is the rapid acceleration of economic growth in the major emerging countries that has reduced poverty, not only directly, through jobs and higher incomes, but also by generating the revenues governments need to undertake the public-health, education, and other programs that sustain poverty reduction – and growth – in the long term.

Now, there's no question that economic growth in India and especially in China has enabled millions of people to improve their living standards and leave the ranks of the extremely poor. And it's also true that economic growth generates revenues that governments, if they have wise priorities and some administrative resources, can use for public-health, education, and similar purposes. But Bhagwati failed to ask an important question: Could 'emerging countries' have reduced poverty even more by following a different, more equitable growth path?

A 2008 article by Thomas Pogge suggests that the answer is yes.* Pogge used China to illustrate his case. He argued that although poverty in China has gone down substantially, "it is likely that more equitable growth," i.e., growth accompanied by less income inequality, "would have been much better for the Chinese poor." Pogge pointed out that although China's gross national income (GNI) increased dramatically from 1990 to 2004, the relative income share of the bottom ten percent (decile) of China's population decreased from 30.8% in 1990 to 16.0% in 2004. This decrease in its relative share meant that the absolute income of the poorest decile increased "by only 75 percent" at a time when China's GNI was going up by a whopping 236 percent (see section 5.3 of the article as reprinted in Pogge's Politics as Usual, pp.100ff.).

What if China had preserved the income distribution as it existed in 1990, even if that meant sacrificing some growth? Pogge assumed, for the sake of argument, that preserving the existing income shares would have cost China 2.3 percentage points in per capita GNI growth from 1990 to 2004. Under this assumption, the poorest decile "would have done much better..., ending the period [in 2004] at an average income of $715, rather than $500, thus with a gain of 150 rather than 75 percent." (p.101) Slower, more equitable growth also would have caused less environmental degradation, a consideration that, coupled with equity, suggests that "all countries should conceive growth much more from the standpoint of their poorer population segments" (p.102, italics in original). He also pointed out that economic inequality is much easier to create (or generate) than to reverse, because the better-off are able to change the relevant rules in their favor (ibid.). There are, in other words, lock-in effects (though Pogge does not use that phrase).

Pogge also highlighted the growth in global income inequality from 1988 to 2002, with the relative share of "the poorest 30 percent of humanity" down by about 20 percent during that period, "from 1.52 to 1.22 percent of global household income" (p.106). Again, inequality translates into differential influence over the rules that shape the distribution of global income and wealth (p.107).

These are the sorts of considerations one should keep in mind when reading the celebratory assertions of Bhagwati and others about rapid economic growth in 'the emerging countries' and its effect on poverty. Of course such growth has reduced poverty, in some cases substantially, but poverty would have been reduced even more if that growth had been more equitable, even if less rapid. Neoliberal globalization, heralded by its supporters for reducing poverty, has likely not reduced poverty as much as a more equitable form of globalization would have, and it has perpetuated the unequal structure of influence in global institutions. The appointment of Kim to the Bank will obviously not drastically change this, since no single appointment could have such an effect and the institution will no doubt exert its organizational pull over any leader. But Kim's critical stance toward neoliberal globalization -- or what was his critical stance some years ago, at any rate -- perhaps offers a bit of hope. In any event, Bhagwati's critique was completely off the mark.

-----
*T. Pogge, "Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices," Dissent (Winter 2008), reprinted (in slightly different form) in his Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Polity Press, 2010), pp.93-109.

How can they know that?

As I've had occasion to mention before, I'm on the e-mail list of the ONE campaign.

The following message from ONE arrived in my in-box today:

Dear ___,

Budget battles are never easy - except when there's a clear choice to save lives.

Right now, the House is proposing 18% cuts to global agriculture and economic development programs in next year’s budget. They’re proposing 9% cuts to global health programs.

And the Senate? No cuts at all - and in some cases even small increases.

It’s time to tell the House to think again.

…
It’s easy to just throw around numbers, but what would these House budget cuts really mean for the world’s poorest people? Nearly 50,000 children will not receive treatment for malaria. 900,000 children won’t receive nutrition interventions. 1.1 million children won’t be immunized. 1.9 million people won’t be able to escape extreme poverty.

We’ve got to let Congress know that the Senate bill is the only way to go. So today, we’re joining with our partners - Bread for the World, CARE, Oxfam, RESULTS, Save the Children - and making as many phone calls as we can to Capitol Hill.

I agree with ONE on the legislative issue here, but the sentence "1.9 million people won't be able to escape extreme poverty" is odd. You don't have to know a whole lot about development programs to know that it's extremely difficult to estimate, even to this kind of rounded figure, how many people will or won't escape extreme poverty as a result of a particular level of funding for certain programs. ONE's cause, which I support, is not well served by this.

World Bank: aid should emphasize justice systems, police

The World Bank's 2011 World Development Report calls for directing more aid to the reform of justice systems and strengthening of police, especially in countries experiencing conflict, where poverty rates are higher than in other places. The emphasis on police may seem at first glance like a somewhat odd proposal, but it is not new in development circles. The development-conflict connection isn't particularly my field, but I recall hearing John Richardson talk some years ago about his work on Sri Lanka and he emphasized, among other things, strengthening police forces. How strengthening the police in a country that is descending into or emerging from civil war, or caught in a cycle of violence (as opposed to 'ordinary' crime), helps things is a bit mysterious to me, but apparently it does. I note in this connection that training of the Afghan national police has lagged behind training of the Afghan army, or at least that was the case when I last heard something about it. Presumably a well-trained police force is less open to corruption; however, corruption in Afghanistan seems so deeply ingrained (see Dexter Filkins's piece "The Afghan Bank Heist" in the Feb. 14/21 New Yorker), one wonders whether anything would make any difference. (Cf. also the ongoing Mexican drug wars, which I've not blogged about.)

Brazil's progress on poverty

One reason Brazil's president Lula left office recently with such high approval ratings is the reduction in both poverty and income inequality that occurred during his time in office. An NYT article, discussed in this blog post, looks at the source of the success in the Bolsa Familia program.

New estimates of malaria death rates in India

A study published in the Lancet suggests that roughly 200,000 deaths per year in India are due to malaria, a figure some 13 times higher than the World Health Organization estimates. As this BBC story notes, about 1.3 million deaths from infectious diseases, with acute fever as the main symptom, occur in rural parts of India each year, but the causes of these deaths are hard to determine, since most of them are not medically certified. The Lancet study used an interview technique called verbal autopsy. The WHO says the study's estimates are too high, but this story certainly raises questions about the numbers of those dying from this preventable disease. The study was jointly funded by NIH, the Canadian Institute of Health Research, and Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute.

Blattman on Brooks

I denounced the Brooks column as nonsense, but Chris Blattman -- who, unlike me, is a work-in-the-field and crunch-numbers social scientist (heck, let's just say that, unlike me, he is a real social scientist) -- took a more measured approach, contenting himself with the observation that Brooks's air of certitude made him "uncomfortable." Blattman says he's undertaking a randomized control trial, involving a project with street youth in Monrovia, Liberia, to test Brooks's notion of "intrusive paternalism."

Brooks's nonsense about Haiti and poverty

I hadn't intended to post again this month, but this passage from David Brooks's NYT column today (hat tip: HC) is beyond the pale in trotting out stale, dubious clichés about the alleged cultural roots of poverty:

"As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book 'The Central Liberal Truth,' Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10."

The notion that these things are why Haiti is poor is arrant nonsense. In fact I've just read the whole column and virtually the whole thing is nonsense. It starts at the very beginning of the piece, where Brooks confuses GDP growth with poverty alleviation. The two are related but they are not the same. You can have a lot of GDP growth without much poverty alleviation, and vice-versa. This has been obvious for decades. Then there's all this stuff about culture and poverty. It's a convenient device to obscure the way in which global institutional and economic structures (in which we're all complicit) create conditions that facilitate the continuation of poverty and maldistribution. To be sure, there are local differences. The Dominican Republic is much better off than Haiti. But is that because they have different cultures, because the Dominican Republic has "a culture of achievement" and Haiti doesn't? I don't think so. In all likelihood it's a result of complicated histories (including U.S. occupation) and the different ways they are positioned in the regional and global economies, among other things.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about Haiti, except what I see and read in the media. But David Brooks knows nothing about global poverty and its causes and possible solutions. An intelligent seventh-grader could have written a better column than this piece of garbage.

Humanitarian intervention, social science, and "the new aid imperialism"

In a review of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, William Easterly criticizes what he calls "the new aid imperialism," i.e., "the willingness to combine foreign military intervention with traditional aid work" in developing countries ("Foreign Aid Goes Military!" The New York Review of Books, 12/4/08).

Easterly notes, among other things, that the "share of U.S. foreign aid distributed by the Pentagon increased from 6 percent in 2002 to 22 percent in 2005." What Easterly does not note, however, is that the overall amount of U.S. foreign aid increased from 2002 to 2005, so the Pentagon was distributing 22 percent of an expanded pie, not a shrinking one, which thus still left more in absolute terms for civilian agencies, such as the Millennium Challenge Corp. and AID, to distribute. Nonetheless, it's true that the line between military activity and foreign aid, as far as the U.S. is concerned, has been blurring in recent years.

Is this a good or a bad thing? Easterly thinks it's bad, and he does have a case to make. In using a review of Collier's book to make it, however, he runs into some difficulties. I'll mention a couple of them.

1) The basic argument of Collier's book, according to Easterly, is that the poorest countries in the world "are trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, civil war, military coups, looting of natural resources, and failed states. They need outside rescue by the rich nations." Easterly questions this argument on several grounds, accusing Collier's book of failing adequately to distinguish correlation from causation and of engaging in selection bias. Among other things, Easterly notes that poor countries have experienced "growth reversals...in both directions."

"Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, and Zimbabwe had good growth between 1960 and 1980, before falling prey to economic decline -- brought on by political disasters and other factors -- from 1980 to the present. Conversely, Bangladesh, India, Uganda and Vietnam [my emphasis] had mediocre to negative growth between 1960 and 1980, before registering impressive growth from 1980 to the present. If there is so much movement into and out of success and failure, it is hard to argue looking forward that the Bottom Billion are trapped in failure."

Vietnam? Why do you suppose Vietnam might have had "mediocre to negative growth between 1960 and 1980"? Might it have had something to do with the facts that virtually the entire able-bodied adult male population, at least of N. Vietnam, was mobilized for military service, and that the U.S., from 1965 to the early 1970s, dropped more bombs on N. Vietnam than were dropped during the entirety of World War II? These count as extraordinary circumstances that give the case of Vietnam no probative weight at all, in my opinion, on the point Easterly is adducing it to support.

2) Easterly writes:

"...[B]oth statistical exercises and case study analysis give ambiguous direction on military intervention [for humanitarian or ostensibly humanitarian ends]. I think the moral of the story is that, as tragic as poverty and violence are, social science does not have much to offer as a guide to using military force to stop them. This is not so surprising: why should social scientists have any strategic expertise on whether a contingent of foreign or international troops will pacify a country easily (Sierra Leone) or with great difficulty, or not at all (Somalia)? It is regrettable if social science is used to give spurious cover to military intervention."

Easterly is right to strike a note of caution, I think, but he may go a bit too far in dismissing social-scientific expertise: surely there are scholarly experts on Sierra Leone and Somalia who might have provided insights about the relative likelihood or unlikelihood of successful intervention in the two countries.

In making his case, Easterly himself draws on social science, namely the research of political scientist Alan Kuperman, who has written about "the moral hazard" of humanitarian intervention. In Easterly's words, Kuperman "argues that the hope of international intervention may embolden rebels to undertake military action that will inevitably catch many civilians in the crossfire between the rebels and the government before the interveners arrive. This is exactly what happened with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose members admitted in interviews with Kuperman that their violence against Serbs starting in 1997 was motivated by hopes of foreign intervention." (Although Easterly does not give a footnote citation to an article by Kuperman, I assume he is drawing on Kuperman's "The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans," International Studies Quarterly 52:1, March 2008, pp.49-80. Full disclosure: I have not read the article, only the abstract.)

Political judgments about whether, when and how to intervene in humanitarian crises such as genocide or ethnic cleansing must be recognized as political and not masquerade as purely scientific, neutral decisions: on this point Easterly is unquestionably correct. But in his concern to reveal the weaknesses of what he takes to be unduly optimistic and pro-intervention standpoints, Easterly may be in danger of condemning, by implication if not explicitly, all social-scientific efforts to understand the consequences of intervention and the possible conditions of its success or failure. Careful case studies backed up, where appropriate, by statistical analysis that does not claim too much for itself may still have a role to play in helping politicians reach defensible, intelligent, and practical judgments on these matters.

But you can read the Easterly piece for yourself (see link above) and reach your own conclusions.

UN report on sanitation

On a day when Nelson Mandela, celebrating his 90th birthday, called for renewed attention to poverty in South Africa and the rest of the world, it's worth noting this recent U.N. report on access to clean water and basic sanitation. Although the number of people without access to clean water has been cut in half since 1990, roughly 1.2 billion people still lack basic sanitation, and this causes a significant part of the daily toll of child mortality. Even in a time of economic uncertainty and recession, most people (not everyone to be sure, but most) who live above subsistence level can do something constructive about extreme or 'absolute' poverty, even if it's just contributing something to Oxfam or a similar organization every month or every year, signing up for the One Campaign's email list, or something comparable.