Thomas Pogge Quotes About Poverty

Quotes about: Poverty

• The bottom half of humanity is living in severe poverty; not all of them are malnourished or severely deprived now, but they are extremely vulnerable to even small upsets in their income or in the prices they face of basic necessities, and when something like this happens, they can be thrown off kilter in terms of a disease of a family member or a change in food prices; anything like that can throw them into destitution.

  Thomas Pogge

  Upset, Humanity, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.

  Thomas Pogge

  Data, Numbers, Interesting

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

  Thomas Pogge

  Average, People, Giving

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• To make a proper moral appraisal of the prevalence of severe poverty today, we should focus not on comparisons with times past, when the global average income was much lower, but on a comparison with what would be possible in our time, given the current global average income and level of technological and administrative development.

  Thomas Pogge

  Past, Average, Focus

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Given the total income and wealth available in the world today, we could easily overcome poverty, which would require raising the share of the bottom half from three to roughly five percent. Unfortunately, the trend is going in the opposite direction.

  Thomas Pogge

  Opposites, Overcoming, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Severe poverty is getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable.

  Thomas Pogge

  Get Better, Poverty, Becoming

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom - the bottom quarter and also the bottom half - see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share.

  Thomas Pogge

  Average, People, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• A few hundred years ago, perhaps 85 or even 90 percent of humanity lived below a standard of living that today only 40 or 45 percent fail to reach. But at that earlier time only part of this poverty could have been eradicated, and this at substantial cost not only to the pleasures of the affluent, but also to their well-being and to human culture. In our time, nearly all severe poverty could be eradicated at a cost to the affluent that is truly trivial.

  Thomas Pogge

  Years, Humanity, Culture

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• I see a violation of human rights not in the mere fact that people don't have enough to eat and that they are very vulnerable, but I see it in the fact that the economic institutional order of the world is associated with this very persistent poverty and that different institutional arrangements at the supranational level could stop and even reverse the slide towards ever-greater income disparities.

  Thomas Pogge

  Rights, Order, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• It is perfectly consistent - and also true - to say that the world poverty problem today is smaller (relative to world population) than before and yet also a much graver injustice.

  Thomas Pogge

  Population, World, Today

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The collective shortfall of the 3.08 billion people (47 percent of world population) who, in 2005, lived below $2.50 per day was $507 billion per annum, which indeed comes to about two-thirds of the present US military budget. This gives us a rough sense of how much the eradication of poverty would cost.

  Thomas Pogge

  Military, Two, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• We have the ability now to arrange global economic institutions so that poverty declines to a fraction of what it is now.

  Thomas Pogge

  Poverty, Economic, Decline

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• It seems far-fetched, even preposterous, to blame the global economic order for the persistence of severe poverty in countries that are ruled by obvious thugs and crooks.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Persistence, Thug

• We should not think of poverty eradication as a matter of collecting money and giving it to the poor so much as of reforming the global rules that are disadvantaging the poor and making it impossible for them to fend for themselves.

  Thomas Pogge

  Thinking, Giving, Matter

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• We live in a world where economic positions - income and wealth - are very unevenly distributed, and this leads to the widespread persistence of poverty.

  Thomas Pogge

  Persistence, Income, World

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• We should condemn as unjust a global economic order that leads to ever-increasing economic disparities - provided this effect is foreseeable and provided it is also avoidable through some alternative institutional design that would foreseeably lead to much less poverty and inequality. Those involved in designing or imposing the existing rules are collectively responsible for the resulting excess deprivations and human rights deficits.

  Thomas Pogge

  Rights, Order, Design

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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