Aid: Ending Global Poverty

Growth of average incomes globally has resulted in a stunning decline in abject poverty. Yet more than a third of the world’s population – some 2.2 billion people – live on less than $2 a day, many without access to clean water, electricity, sanitation, and basic protection of the law. And the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. What can be learned from the successes and failures of the West’s $2.3 trillion aid investment over the past 50 years? What are the most promising solutions? And where do we go from here?

  • Global Poverty Today

    Growing global income inequality and the absence of the rule of law underlie most of the social and economic problems in developing countries, including the roadblocks to effective foreign aid.

  • Multilateral and Bilateral Aid

    Whether aid is given through multilateral organizations or bilaterally state-to-state, the impediments to the aid’s effectiveness are the same, including oppressive, corrupt regimes, political and economic instability, and the lack of civil rights, among others.

  • The World of the Poor

    The poor live with lawlessness, poor nutrition, low quality of education, and have so little cash reserves that simple mistakes or health problems can have devastating consequences.

Featured Book

End Times

Elites, Counter Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

By Peter Turchin
Review by John Zada, Contributing Writer

In End Times, Turkin examines the complex interplay of socio-economic factors that, he asserts, repeatedly throw societies into decay, crisis, and often violent collapse. These patterns, he says, span the end of the Neolithic Period to the present day.

Featured Book

Capital in the Twenty First Century

Thomas Piketty

A leading economist documents the trend of income inequality through history, stressing that the way an economy functions is directly related to a power structure that is determined and maintained by the few who hold the wealth.

Featured Book

Doughnut Economics

7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist

Kate Raworth; reviewed by George Kasabov

A “renegade economist” advances a new, more comprehensive and regenerative economic model – one based on a view of humans as socially adaptable beings in a world of limited natural resources. A view that factors in the love and caring of family life, the kindness and cooperation of society, and the search for meaning and morality over the getting and spending of money as the essential aim of human existence.

Featured Book

The Business of Changing the World

How Billionaires, Tech Disrupters, and Social Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Aid Industry

Raj Kumar

In 2000, Raj Kumar and friends created Devex, an online community for global development that matches up organizations with funding opportunities and provides the largest database of grants, tenders, and other funding information. This book was written 20 years later to provide a clearer picture of how the aid industry operates, and where it’s headed.

Featured Book

Creating a Learning Society

A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress

Joseph E. Stiglitz

A Nobel economist and a leading finance expert posit the view that learning is more important to growth and development than the accumulation of capital. The traditional view of an inherently efficient free market, and of government regulation as the major source of economic difficulty, impedes the raising of a society’s standard of living by discouraging the production and dissemination of knowledge.

Further Reading »