Causes of Wealth

by rrusczyk, Jun 4, 2009, 1:00 PM

djcordeiro wrote:

Some people focus on the "causes" of poverty and it leads them to believe that poverty is an unnatural state whose root cause must be exploitation.

I think that it is better to admit that poverty is the natural state of man, historically, globally and individually if one decides to stop working against it.

Therefore it is the causes of wealth creation that should be understood, appreciated, preserved and duplicated.

This just seems so right to me that I should have incorporated this into my standard yapping about the importance of education, technology, and economics. I think djcordeiro is very right here in asserting that "causes of poverty" is not nearly as constructive a way of looking at the world as "causes of wealth". As in, "AoPS is a cause of wealth"

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At the same time, exploitation can be a cause of poverty. I don't think it is, usually, but it happens. Think about sharecropping in the early 1900s South for one of the more egregious examples.

by worthawholebean, Jun 4, 2009, 5:00 PM

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Quote:

At the same time, exploitation can be a cause of poverty.

I'd never deny the existence of exploitation or its role in diminishing wealth (I'm reminded every two weeks by the deductions in my pay check).

However, it may be good to recognize that our species may be evolved to be highly sensitive to exploitation, and like our tendency to see faces where they don't exist, we apply "exploitation" as an explanation to a wide range of situations.

Having evolved in small hunter gatherer bands, it would seem that an individual skilled in threatening or deceiving the rest of the troop to draw disproportionately from the small pool of resources would have a competitive advantage. Countering this strategy may have been an evolved instinct to identify and punish such behavior.

My question is whether or not modern "exploitation" can exist in the absence of violence or deception?

by djcordeiro, Jun 5, 2009, 11:39 AM

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I think saying "exploitation is a cause of poverty" somewhat misses the point -- good legal institutions to allow individual freedoms that permit people to fight and avoid exploitation are causes of wealth. The key here is not to focus on the exploitation that makes the situation bad, but rather the legal and cultural institutions that have allowed people to escape exploitation.

by rrusczyk, Jun 5, 2009, 12:05 PM