Nandy Article

Nandy's article rails against poverty, however it seems to accept the fact that it will always be in existence. While he describes poverty as a moral issue, he always seems to realize that poverty will need to detatch itself from other issues such as disease, war/ethnic cleansing, etc. In saying all of this he goes on to make the point that perhaps we will have to live with poverty, but that destitution is the real problem (extreme poverty). However where morals come into this is the fact that the concept of eradicating world poverty has sort of become the default "do good promise" of the state. It uses the ethics that it will help to stop poverty to blind itself to the fact that it's not really doing anything constructive to help the world's poor.

As always, I agree with certain parts of the article. Those currently in the IR120 class which meets right after ours, led by Prof. Menon, will have read more than they wish on global poverty. I particularly liked Jagdish Bhagwati logic to the situation. He studied the rates of the poor in many countries, and realized that the bottom X percent always get Y portion of the nation's wealth (where Y is only a fraction of X). After realizing that the percentages of what deem "the poor" is pretty much the same in all countries, he realized that no matter how the state shifts around incomes and has policies that it thinks is helping the poor there is only one partial solution to the problem; if you can't change the percentage of the pie that some people get to make sure they have more, you must simply grow the size of the pie so their piece is bigger (if not relatively, then absolutely). So there are some instances in which a state can have certain policies that help the poor... by helping the rest of the economy.

And as for the fact that the state has no morals, that is probably true. But the state isn't supposed to have morals, it should act in the interests of his own citizens. And if those citizens have the drive to do something to help the world's poor, that's where the charity and money should come from. Think Bill and Melinda Gates, think Bono, who shared Time's Person of the Year in 2005. So it should be those in the state who benefit from it's policies rather than the state itself whose job it is to help the world's poor. The state has no conscience, and thus doesn't have morals. But in a democracy, the people can push the state to have morals.