Poverty: Origins, Causes & Avoidance

[Avichal]

When humans started settling they divided tasks like farming, building etc. And perhaps then each profession was equally fruitful(in terms of money).
How after this did poverty start?
Was it an inevitable conclusion for the humans society or could it have been avoided?

 

[arildno]

??

 

[Andre]

Whilst there is no way to point out a certain moment and place in time when the first poor chap starved, it's well established that in just about any complex society of animals, there is a pecking order from the alpha male and female to the poor omega's who may have to struggle to get anything to survive, so maybe it was already an issue in a random group of Hominidae in the Miocene.

Just my two cents. Google wasn't very helpful.

 

[Borek]

In Japanese macaques if the monkey is not born into a privileged caste, it can't use hot springs during winter. That's poverty to me.

 

[Jim Kata]

According to David Graeber's book Debt: the first 5000 years. Class systems and monetary systems are intimately tied. As in before there was money there wasn't really class systems. This might be part of the answer.

 

[arildno]

In Japanese macaques if the monkey is not born into a privileged caste, it can't use hot springs during winter. That's poverty to me.

That answer is more intelligent than the original question. I guess, on an idealistic level, I really ought to improve thread quality, rather than merely provide an accurate judgment of it.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

In Japanese macaques if the monkey is not born into a privileged caste, it can't use hot springs during winter. That's poverty to me.

Along the lines of Borek's answer, poverty started when the first person who was better off emerged.

 

[SteamKing]

IMO, poverty didn't start at some arbitrary time; it was and is always present. The development of human civilization from tribes of hunter/gatherers to agricultural communities to the modern industrial society is the response to the question, "What's for dinner?"

In the oldest human colonies, if you weren't fleet of foot or didn't have a weapon handy, the answer to the question above was 'You are.'

Money and monetary systems are a relatively recent innovation. Money, in the sense of coins and whatnot, developed in Asia Minor in the first millennium BC.

Before that development, there was plenty of poverty and class systems (pace Mr. Graeber) to go around. The Egyptians and the civilizations living in Mesopotamia did not have money as we know it, but they did have rulers/priestly castes, scribes, artisans, merchants, farmers, and finally ordinary working stiffs and slaves. All had their prescribed spheres of living and associations. Even in modern so-called 'classless' societies (cf. the Soviet Union and China), there was a definite sorting of individuals into various groups. Before WWI, Russia was an exporter of grain; within 15 years of the Bolshevik takeover, there was famine and starvation in the Ukraine, which previously supplied much of the grain harvested by tsarist Russia.

Today, with all of the technology and scientific knowledge man has developed, the planet could be returned to widespread starvation in a matter of months if a natural disaster caused the loss of a significant portion of our agriculture. Man can only stockpile so much food because of its perishable nature.

 

[russ_watters]

Along the lines of Borek's answer, poverty started when the first person who was better off emerged.

No, the way I see it is at first everyone was in poverty, then when someone became better off, poverty started to decrease.

Heck, in my judgement, anyone who doesn't have access to electricity is poor, so that includes anyone who lived before about 1900.

 

[arildno]

No, the way I see it is at first everyone was in poverty, then when someone became better off, poverty started to decrease.

Did they whine about being poor then, or did they live in blessed (or cursed?) ignorance about their poverty?

 

[russ_watters]

Did they whine about being poor then, or did they live in blessed (or cursed?) ignorance about their poverty?

I have no idea, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

 

[Evo]

When humans started settling they divided tasks like farming, building etc. And perhaps then each profession was equally fruitful(in terms of money).
How after this did poverty start?

And then rivals/bullies took what you had and left you nothing, so your were poor. Those bullies became rulers, taking more and more that didn't belong to them causing more poverty. A wealthy couple, the husband dies, no male heirs of age, the woman and her children are impoverished. Murder, evil rulers, greedy neighbors, sickness, natural disasters. Being captured and forced into slavery (I'm referring to white slavery in what is now Eurasia going back to the beginning). There is no one thing going back to the beginning of humans that you can point to.

 

[Astronuc]

When humans started settling they divided tasks like farming, building etc. And perhaps then each profession was equally fruitful(in terms of money).
How after this did poverty start?
Was it an inevitable conclusion for the humans society or could it have been avoided?

The better question is "how did economic disparity develop?"

 

[ImaLooser]

When humans started settling they divided tasks like farming, building etc. And perhaps then each profession was equally fruitful(in terms of money).
How after this did poverty start?
Was it an inevitable conclusion for the humans society or could it have been avoided?

Through most of history famine occurred regularly. Starving to death is certainly poverty, so poverty came and went. Aside from that, in tribal life there is usually egalitarianism with lots of sharing. Everyone is related to everyone else so the guy short on food is your cousin or uncle.

Constant, inescapable poverty probably started with slavery, which is a very old practice. Captives from other tribes might become slaves.

It has never been the case that every profession was equal. You start out with pretty much everyone hunters/farmers, with a few tradespeople and craftsmen. Then someone gets the idea of organizing militarily and enriching themselves through organized crime. Their victims are often impoverished via extortion/tribute.

Poverty is not inevitable. Hardly anyone starves to death in the USA and I can't recall anyone dressed in rags, so I'd say there is no poverty.

 

[Avichal]

The better question is "how did economic disparity develop?"

Okay as suggested I will rephrase my question as this.
So how and why did it start? I am not looking for any specific point in time where it started. Just looking for vague and approximate answers as to why it is so.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

You might be interested in buying the book Debt: the first 5000 years. It's already been bought up in thread, it charts the history of various forms of monetary systems and loosely discusses their social consequences.

As for the rest of the conversation it would be best to start using terms like absolute and relative poverty rather than the catchall poverty.

 

[BWV]

the better question is how poverty ended in some parts of the world

 

[Ryan_m_b]

BWV GDP per capita is not the end of the poverty story by far.

 

[BWV]

BWV GDP per capita is not the end of the poverty story by far.

it is totally the end of the story - in developed countries absolute poverty barely exists

 

[jedishrfu]

You could approach this as a probability problem:

you have 100 farmers each year some make money and some lose money.

the amount of money each farmer makes or loses is a percentage with his total worth.

If you run this simulation through many iterations then you see a bell curve with the middle being the majority of farmers who earn enough money to break even and to the right would be the arbitrarily defined poverty line with those the right of it becoming wealthy and those to the left living in poverty.

You could also look at as an evolutionary problem adding in geographic disasters, risk-taking on the part of the farmer where they may invest a lot or be more conservative... Some farmers do quite well but others due to weather or bad decisions do very poorly. So it comes down to how adaptable they are to changing environments as to how well they will do over time.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

it is totally the end of the story - in developed countries absolute poverty barely exists

I wasn't just thinking of absolute poverty.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

You could approach this as a probability problem:

you have 100 farmers each year some make money and some lose money.

the amount of money each farmer makes or loses is a percentage with his total worth.

If you run this simulation through many iterations then you see a bell curve with the middle being the majority of farmers who earn enough money to break even and to the right would be the arbitrarily defined poverty line with those the right of it becoming wealthy and those to the left living in poverty.

You could also look at as an evolutionary problem adding in geographic disasters, risk-taking on the part of the farmer where they may invest a lot or be more conservative... Some farmers do quite well but others due to weather or bad decisions do very poorly. So it comes down to how adaptable they are to changing environments as to how well they will do over time.

True but that's a very simple scenario that misses out a lot of factors e.g. A rich farmer buying out a poor farmer and keeping them as staff, over time a land owner class develops increasing wealth inequality and contributing to relative poverty.

 

[jedishrfu]

True but that's a very simple scenario that misses out a lot of factors e.g. A rich farmer buying out a poor farmer and keeping them as staff, over time a land owner class develops increasing wealth inequality and contributing to relative poverty.

Also true but that's not necessary to show how poverty could start. I figured the OP could expand the model as needed.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Also true but that's not necessary to show how poverty could start. I figured the OP could expand the model as needed.

Good effort but I think a big problem is such a model starts by assuming no poverty. I'm with borek and steam king in saying that poverty of all kinds pre-date our species. Your model could be a good tool for exploring how poverty persists however.

 

[BWV]

You could approach this as a probability problem:

you have 100 farmers each year some make money and some lose money.

the amount of money each farmer makes or loses is a percentage with his total worth.

If you run this simulation through many iterations then you see a bell curve with the middle being the majority of farmers who earn enough money to break even and to the right would be the arbitrarily defined poverty line with those the right of it becoming wealthy and those to the left living in poverty.

You could also look at as an evolutionary problem adding in geographic disasters, risk-taking on the part of the farmer where they may invest a lot or be more conservative... Some farmers do quite well but others due to weather or bad decisions do very poorly. So it comes down to how adaptable they are to changing environments as to how well they will do over time.

except that wealth distributions are not normal - they have a power law - the richest farmer will have a wealth of 10x or 100x the average. If you sampled 100 adult males at random from the global population you could get a very accurate measurement of the height distribution, but a very bad representation of the wealth distribution

 

[russ_watters]

I wasn't just thinking of absolute poverty.

I suspect that like me, BWV rejects the concept of "relative poverty" as a recently invented perversion of the term "poverty". It appears to me that the term was invented in the west as a way around the politically unpalatable eradication of poverty in the west. A way to try to keep the issue relevant.

In actuality, "relative poverty" is just a re-labeling of inequality, completely unconnected to the actual concept of poverty.

That said, you are indeed correct that the term now exists, so its use becomes necessary to avoid confusion.

 

[Evo]

This thread seems to be getting off topic Please remain on the topic the OP has clarified.

Okay as suggested I will rephrase my question as this.
So how and why did it start? I am not looking for any specific point in time where it started. Just looking for vague and approximate answers as to why it is so.

Bolding mine. It is an interesting topic. Let's discuss it.

Modern day poverty can be discussed in Economics.

 

[jedishrfu]

except that wealth distributions are not normal - they have a power law - the richest farmer will have a wealth of 10x or 100x the average. If you sampled 100 adult males at random from the global population you could get a very accurate measurement of the height distribution, but a very bad representation of the wealth distribution

Yes, that's why I used the % of total wealth in the model at each iteration as wealth building is kind of like gambling.

But the whole point was that random events can make some wealthy and others not so much depending on how well they learn from past experience.

 

[russ_watters]

This thread seems to be getting off topic Please remain on the topic the OP has clarified.

Bolding mine. It is an interesting topic. Let's discuss it.

Interesting or not, the difficulty is that it is a wrong question. Poverty didn't start, it is itself the starting point. The zero point from which development is measured. All animals are poor and all humans were poor prior to the development of civilization. And the development of economics only made it easier to start to measure/quantify something that already/always existed.

Whether understanding this leads to a different and more correct and useful question, I don't know, but the attempt to reframe by the Astronuc only further confuses the issue (to me):

The better question is "how did economic disparity develop?"

That implies that economic disparity is a measure of poverty (just covered) which isn't really correct on its own. Beyond that, again, economics just made it easier to quantify disparity that already existed. It is misleading to imply that economic disparity "developed" when disparity predates economics. It wrongly implies that people were equal before economics and that after economics developed, disparity developed.

It seems to me that this thread is just an unfocused pile of misconceptions about human development.

 

[ImaLooser]

You might be interested in buying the book Debt: the first 5000 years. It's already been bought up in thread, it charts the history of various forms of monetary systems and loosely discusses their social consequences.

As for the rest of the conversation it would be best to start using terms like absolute and relative poverty rather than the catchall poverty.

I have read David Graeber's writing and thought he was grinding a political ax and his ideas were contradicted by the evidence. Stone Age cultures in New Guinea survived untouched until the 20th century, and they contradict his theories. I've also read some of his commentary on contemporary events in which his ideas were clearly fallacious. This was a few years ago and I've forgotten the details, but I can dig them up if necessary.