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Apr 30, 2012

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c141nav

Michael,

Think about this... IF

"Millions of these individuals are being empowered by the social and technological progress of the last decades. The main drivers of this trend are, first and foremost, the global emergence of the middle class, particularly in Asia, near-universal access to education, the empowering effects of information and communications technology (ICT), and the evolution in the status of women in most countries."

why do so many people in America remain poor?

Michael W. Kruse

Poverty is a relative thing. Most people who are poor in the USA have cellphones, TVs, climate controlled places to live, don't confront infectious diseases like Malaria, don't deal with chronic hunger, etc. Furthermore, half of people who are classified as poor at any given moment are not poor a six months later. There is a lot of churn.

Over the past two hundred years we have picked the long-hanging fruit in terms of creating greater prosperity. We achieved a basic level of universal education (human capital) and applied technology (economic capital), the latter likely being the more critical. I suspect the key emphasis in advanced economies like ours is now moving more toward generating more human capital, fruit that is not so low hanging.

Meanwhile, emerging nations still have a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick and can to some degree imitate the past of developed nations.

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