Is extreme wealth a greater evil than extreme poverty?

Railing against the super-rich is all the rage, but Maarten Boudry says that instead of trying to eradicate billionaires we should instead be focused on reducing the evils of poverty

Friday 31 January 2020 20:52 GMT
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A world without poverty by 2030 isn’t a pipe dream... but it’s not a guaranteed success yet either
A world without poverty by 2030 isn’t a pipe dream... but it’s not a guaranteed success yet either

Imagine you could wave a magic wand to make one thing disappear from the world: extreme poverty or extreme wealth. Which would you choose? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we won’t be liquidating anyone: we’ll just hand out and take away money, respectively. According to Oxfam’s annual report on inequality released last week, there are currently 2,153 billionaires in the world. And if we adopt the definition of poverty used by the World Bank (living on less than $1.90 per day), more than 600 million people qualify as (extremely) poor. So what will it be: a world without billionaires or one without beggars?

I hope you didn’t hesitate for even a second: of course we would want to conjure away extreme poverty. This is exactly what the United Nations has resolved to achieve by 2030 with its Millennium Goals, albeit not with a magic wand, but with the proven methods of economic development, wealth redistribution and foreign aid (or any other methods that work). Despite the tremendous progress that we have witnessed in the past three decades, 8.3 per cent of the global population is still living in absolute destitution.

A world without poverty by 2030 is not a pipe dream, but it’s not a guaranteed success either. At this point, we’re behind schedule. Ramping up our efforts and ending poverty once and for all should be the world’s top priority today. And yet, these days I find myself encountering more and more people who, judging by their rhetoric and their allocation of moral outrage, seem to consider extreme wealth the greater of the two evils, and who would even make some sacrifices in the fight against poverty if only they could get rid of billionaires.

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