With growing attention being paid to the ever greater concentration of wealth and income in western nations in the hands of a small minority of their populations, we hear less often nowadays that phrase that a rising tide lifts all boats. However, we still often hear of the numbers ‘lifted out of poverty’ in the developing nations.
A recent contributor to debate on the Guardian about the performance of the IMF told us that in the last decade something like 700 million people had been taken out of poverty by global economic growth (2010 having been ‘the second wealthiest year in human history’ and 2011 almost certain to be the record breaker, in terms of measured global GDP). Somewhere someone, probably in Geneva or New York, has numerically defined what constitutes ‘poverty’, and everywhere, from Chad to China, the statistics are diligently collected, to produce – a very round number.
What is it that makes the phrase, ‘lifted out of poverty’, with its very distinctive use of words, so attractive to those who see our present international economic order as the best available and, on the whole, a good thing for humanity?
The wording suggests that poverty is a distinct or absolute state: once people are lifted out of it the job is done; join the club; no more grounds for discontent. It also suggests that the benefit is bestowed on the erstwhile poor by an outside force or agency: it is not their own efforts that have brought them this boon.
Inescapably the phrase brings to the back of the mind the relief helicopter lifting refugees out of the floodwater. All the necessary connotations are there: the technically sophisticated intervention; the charitable intent; the complete helplessness of the victim; the rescue decisively achieved; the condition from which the victim is rescued as something malignly aberrant and unpredictable, quite unconnected to the means of rescue. To question the benefit would be inhuman or uncivilised.
As we, greater beneficiaries of the global economic order, lift these people out of their poverty, we are likely to lift them out of a good many other things besides: their cultures; their homes; their social networks; their relationship to the land. No doubt the poor long to be lifted and probably, at least at the time, would mostly accept the hoist even if they understood what else was part of the process. Yet none of us make good decisions all of the time – which is not to say that we should make the decision for these people, but rather that we should examine critically the world our ways, and still overwhelmingly our benefits, are creating.
