While the West laments the bursting of the dot com bubble and fears the cooling winds of recession, most of the world’s people languish in the quicksand of sustained and deadly poverty.
The human detritus of economic stagnation is everywhere; Africans washing up on Spanish beaches after trying to swim through the Straits of Gibraltar, Mexican immigrants dying of thirst attempting to cross the Arizona desert. These bodies and their stories remind us that the forty-year, trillion-dollar international war on poverty being waged by the U.S. and other industrialized countries is by many measures a flop.
Maybe it’s because we haven’t done enough, maybe we just haven’t done it right. Regardless, the world’s poor are still with us, and they are getting poorer and more numerous.
(Hosted by John Donvan)
Guests:
William Easterly, Senior Advisor, Development Research Group, the World Bank
Ray Offenheiser, President, Oxfam International
Bruce Scott, Professor, Harvard Business School