The Causes of Poverty

In Part II of the book, we will examine debates over whether there are moral obligations to reduce or ameliorate global poverty. Participants in these debates nearly always make arguments that rely upon empirical premises. Some of these empirical premises are claims about the causes of poverty. In public discourse, critics of programs to reduce poverty often claim that poverty is caused by a lack of personal responsibility, or a weak work ethic, or bad decision making on the part of poor people. Defenders of programs to reduce poverty commonly claim that poverty is caused by inequalities of opportunity, or failing schools, or bad macro-economic policy. In this chapter, we explore the causal mechanisms that explain why some people, and some societies, stay or become poor while others prosper. Though this remains a contested debate among social scientists, we will give pride of place to institutional explanations of global poverty.