Ordinary people like you and me can achieve very little on their own. TP: The key insight here is organization. KB: It's interesting to apply this to mainstream discussions. Our Supreme Court has even lifted this practice of buying legislation to the level of a constitutional principle by repeatedly protecting corporate spending for and against political candidates, as well as promises and threats of such spending to bribe and blackmail such candidates, by appeal to the free-speech clause of the First Amendment. Website. FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It does not cost them anything to have the option and they wouldn't have to use it. Severe poverty is the greatest source of human misery today causing more suffering and deaths than all violent conflicts around the world combined. The banks and other corporations love the system because it allows them to buy legislation that serves their own interests even at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. If you ask yourself who is paying for pharmaceutical innovation today, the answer is that it's the more affluent populations paying for still-patented advanced medicines at the pharmacy, for comprehensive insurance coverage or for a national health system. Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals, edited by Alberto Cimadamore, Gabriele Koehler and Thomas Pogge, brings together scholars to interrogate their success in reducing global poverty. The bottom half of humanity is living in severe poverty; not all of them are malnourished or severely deprived now, but they are extremely vulnerable to even small upsets in their income or in the prices they face of basic ⦠We make these rules, those of the WTO [World Trade Organization] Treaty for instance, which fill tens of thousands of pages. Now this mechanism works only for commodities that are cheaply tradable across national borders. KB: Let's talk more in detail about that, because your framework for understanding poverty is distinct from that of other philosophers. My sense is that companies are better able to do this sort of holistic planning and continuous rethinking of how health impact can be realized most cost-effectively than bureaucracies. TP: That's right, the massive corruption common in so many developing countries would be quite impossible if Western countries did not provide convenient opportunities to ship ill-gotten funds out of the country. This sounds like magic. The crisis shows major flaws in the way the US financial system is regulated and, more importantly, in our political system, which is essentially a bazaar of legalized bribery where financial institutions can buy themselves the governmental regulations they want, along with the regulators who routinely receive lucrative jobs in the industry whose oversight had formerly been their responsibility, the so-called revolving-door practice. You say that as citizens of rich countries, you and I are responsible for this suffering and we should be working to minimize our role in their impoverishment. But I remain skeptical. Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge (/ËpÉÉ¡i/; born 13 August 1953) is a German philosopher and is the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. Abstract. It is estimated that 830 million human beings are chronically undernourished, 1100 million lack access to safe water and 2600 TP: Yes, social rules are susceptible to moral analysis. '�. TP: Yes, indeed, these two are closely connected in both directions. Book review, forthcoming in the Leiden Journal of International Law (Cambridge University Press) Roland Pierik (r.pierik@uvt.nl) TP: My analysis is not really a conspiracy theory, but it is certainly an analysis that is supporting what you report as a widespread perception in the US: that the country is run by the rich and powerful in their own interest. The resulting wealth in those countries has largely accrued into the hands of a relatively small group, while many, if not most, have languished during all these years of eight to nine percent growth. So the policy prescriptions are much wider, right? In our time, nearly all severe poverty could be eradicated at a cost to the affluent that is truly trivial. Economics is like a church, and it fulfills the same function the church had fulfilled for centuries: the justification of the status quo. thomas.pogge@yale.edu. The TRIPS agreement was such a compromise among industries eager to maximize their revenues from intellectual property. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science as well as co-founder of Academics Stand Against Poverty ⦠By using general consumption PPPs, the World Bank is, in effect, saying to the poor: "Sure, you cannot buy as much food as the dollar value we attribute to your income would buy in the United States. The effects of severe poverty are staggering. In the domain of pharmaceuticals, we need a metric for health impact, and with this metric we can then assess the value of the introduction of a new product and pay its innovator accordingly, say on the basis of the product's measured health impact during its first ten years on the market. There exist better models of decisionmaking, for the governance of states, corporations and other large organizations, for example in Germany, as you say. At the time of publication, "46 percent of humankind live [d] below the World Bank's $2/day poverty line" and 43 percent of those people fell "below the World Bank's better-known $1/day poverty line." The company would be paid for health impact, and it would have to arrange the entire pipeline in between—all the steps of invention, of clinical testing, of getting marketing approval in many different countries, of wholesalers and retailers and prescriptions and so on—in a holistically optimal way. Is it right to say that rapidly increasing emissions for this kind of development is not an attractive tradeoff for the global community? But it will also lead to spheres of influence. If I am right to claim that these two provisos are satisfied (something that, of course, can be empirically disputed), then those involved in designing or imposing the existing rules are collectively responsible for the resulting excess deprivations and human rights deficits. TP: It would surely be worth trying, and I wish this were politically feasible. This is a positive (thus weak) duty. TP: The Health Impact Fund is based on the same idea, namely that it is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized. TP: I also rely on Milanovic for my figures; he is doing the best, most independent work on this. Poverty and Human Rights Thomas Pogge Human rights would be fully realized, if all human beings had secure access to the objects of these rights. But the World Bank's own data show that, if they had chosen a more adequate poverty line, perhaps one twice as high at $2.50 per person per day, US dollars of the year 2005 converted at purchasing power parities, then they would have found a slight increase in the number of poor people between 1990 and 2005, the last year for which full data are now available. As a result, huge differences also persist in the price of labor, as you can see when you get a haircut in rural India or hire a driver or babysitter in Bolivia. With the Health Impact Fund, the innovation is paid for separately, through publicly funded health impact rewards, and the product is sold at the cost of production to all. Given the total income and wealth available in the world today, we could easily overcome poverty, which would require raising the share of the bottom half from three to roughly five percent. The World Bank uses the outrageously low poverty line of $1.25 per person per day, in US dollars of the year 2005. This does not come natural to us more intellectual types, as we tend to be averse to hierarchy and groupthink; we don't like to be part of anything like a disciplined and well-organized team or movement. Box 208306 New Haven, CT 06520-8306 Connecticut Hall 344 College St. New Haven, CT 06511-6629 This is subject to the same sorts of regulatory capture which then drives the persistence of severe poverty I mentioned earlier. TP: It's a team effort, actually, but I am certainly fully behind it despite some regrettable actions by pharmaceutical companies, including their strong and successful lobbying of the Clinton administration in behalf of the TRIPS agreement. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example. The poor do not buy services—they are services, on their luckier days. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one—a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided. Our world is today very far from this ideal. Over the period from 1988 to 2005, the income share of the top five percent has grown by about 3.5 percent of global household income, and the shares of all the other groups have diminished. The Bretton Woods Institutions and Other Governance Fora, Inequality of Wealth and Income Distribution, Tables and Charts on Social and Economic Policy. While you talk about half the world's population being in dire straits, they typically speak in upbeat terms of the progress made in alleviating poverty. So you can think of the HIF as a mechanism that would keep the benefits and burdens of pharmaceutical innovation for the affluent roughly as they are while massively reducing the burdens presently imposed upon the poor. "Thomas Pogge argues that extreme poverty is unjustly maintained by institutional means, and could be ended at marginal cost. And the rupee amount will buy much more services in India than its PPP "equivalent" will buy in the US. Though often vastly more important, international agreements are not routinely published in draft form or publicly debated, and civil society organizations and ordinary citizens often learn of important global institutional design decisions only after they have already been finalized and adopted. KB: And you have a unique perspective, having come from Germany, due to working peoples' comparative strength and organization there. So poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom—the bottom quarter and also the bottom half—see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share. The bottom half of humanity is living in severe poverty; not all of them are malnourished or severely deprived now, but they are extremely vulnerable to even small upsets in their income or in the prices they face of basic necessities, and when something like this happens, they can be thrown off kilter in terms of a disease of a family member or a change in food prices; anything like that can throw them into destitution. What is really nice about the Health Impact Fund is that it is a win-win, something that without much cost to anyone makes a lot of people better off. The two sides of the problem are closely interdependent: because present procedures by design favor the affluent, the poor are being increasingly marginalized. My estimate of the poors' share of the global product is justified in Pogge, Thomas W, â The First UN Millennium Development Goal: A Cause for Celebration?â Journal of Human Development 5, no. 0000001029 00000 n To make a proper moral appraisal of the prevalence of severe poverty today, we should focus not on comparisons with times past, when the global average income was much lower, but on a comparison with what would be possible in our time, given the current global average income and level of technological and administrative development. 1â2 (January 2001): 6â24. Yet it wouldn't be so obvious based on your positions that you would lead a project to attract and persuade the big pharmaceutical companies that in many ways dominate the global institutional order. 0000089021 00000 n Publications. In the end, the Tutsi resistance managed to overthrow the government—and then the successor government was asked to repay Rwanda's debt! Having received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard, Thomas Pogge is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and founding Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale. Why? And the fact that services are very badly paid in India thus cannot in any way make up for the fact that food prices in India are substantially, over 35 percent, higher than the Bank's PPP would suggest. In this Truthout interview, Pogge probes the causes of world poverty and advocates for his latest initiative to provide the world's poor with better access to medicine. Then, as the poor gain some voice and influence, they can effectively support gradual institutional shifts in their favor which in turn reinforce the trend. We didn't design the rules or actively advance this system. If the Health Impact Fund were to be instituted, a single company would be in charge of a medical product all the way from its conception to the health improvements realized by actual patients. But if the ascendance of dictators like Marcos, Suharto, Sese Seko, Sani Abacha or the Duvaliers is incentivized by what you've just described, then the policy-shapers who defend the current global arrangement are implicated in the very ills that they denounce. Uses distinction between positive and nega-tive duties. These words have been strung together by human beings and are also interpreted and enforced by human beings. Nor does it work for services: though people could, in principle, cross national borders to reach places where their work is more highly rewarded, they are in fact prevented from doing so. KB: This seems like a smart, practical first step. For example, Transparency International puts out a list of the most corrupt states, and it always features easy targets like Chad, Somalia and Sudan. You've taken The Economist to task and dismantled its portrayal of recent economic history. The modern literature on responding to global poverty is over fifty years old and has attracted the attention of some of the most prominent analytical political theorists of the age, including Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, and Peter Singer. Do your arguments marginalize you in this elite sphere? Let me add that the Bank's entire methodology is flawed insofar as purchasing power parities are not a reasonable method for comparing households across countries or currencies. So what do you say to concerned citizens that want to support either the potentially life-saving Health Impact Fund, or more broadly, to those who want to fight on behalf of the half of the planet that lives in poverty? Talk about the logical and empirical problems with this view, as you see them. KB: You've written that at a cost of two-thirds of the US military's expenditures, we could largely eradicate poverty. edited by Thomas Pogge (Book--2007) "Collected here in one volume are fifteen cutting-edge essays by leading academics which together clarify and defend the claim that freedom from poverty is a human right with corresponding binding obligations on the more affluent to practice effective poverty avoidance. We need to build support. It wouldn't make much sense for a ruler to store in his basement large quantities of stolen cash in his own country's currency. (In the average poor country, this amount is even lower, about 83 cents.) So, rather than add my own voice to the chorus, I have developed a different argument, and this argument—counterintuitive as it may be—really consists of very simple and pretty intuitive steps. Such reforms would bring opportunity costs for the affluent, which might be larger or smaller than the sought $507 billion gain in the incomes of the poor. So there needs to be a successively worse undercounting over time for your point to apply to their assertion of poverty reduction. KB: You're an atypical voice among high-profile Ivy League academics. A dramatic example is Rwanda, which borrowed a lot of money. To be sure, the whole army changes direction occasionally: for example, whenever it becomes too painfully obvious that a widely hailed approach that was supposed to decimate poverty has failed to do so. So India seems to be going the route that China went a few years ago and that developing countries all over the world seem to want to follow, namely, to rely on these personal vehicles, which is just an irrational way of organizing transport. Thus, domestic power structures are shaped in good part by global arrangements. You never see Switzerland in the top ten. We have to find ways of addressing the very clear moral problems arising from the WTO Treaty and the TRIPS agreement in particular. KB: To conclude, what practical advice do you have for a large majority of people that don't resemble Ayn Rand's paragon, the sociopathic homo economicus? They won't accept the policies that were rammed down their throats. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty. Launched in 2008 by Thomas Pogge, the Global Justice Program unites an interdisciplinary group of scholars with the aim of taking morality seriously in shaping foreign policy and in negotiating transnational institutional arrangements. Feudalism is another example. Institutional analysis is needed also for understanding what goes on in supranational institutional design. Bureaucratic organizations, by contrast, are notoriously bad at this sort of optimizing. Both of these injustices could have been—and were!—defended by pointing out, quite correctly, that this situation of slaves and women had been improving throughout the preceding century. You may know that in India now the Tata car is becoming all the rage; you can buy it for one lakh—$2000 dollars—it's very, very cheap. You can easily buy such services at one-fiftieth the price you would pay in London, Hamburg or Manhattan. Here, the cruel injustice of preventing the poor from buying at cost—evidenced by today's suppression of the trade in generic versions of patented medicines—would no longer be needed. Thomas Pogge (æ¶æ æâ¢åæ ¼) Yale Philosophy Department P.O. And so, we have much less of it than we did during the Vietnam era, where there was very critical reporting on the Vietnam War and a lot of disagreement among the media. It allows banks to accept funds gained from tax evasion and other crimes and thereby facilitates and encourages embezzlement by public officials, especially in developing countries, as well as tax evasion and tax avoidance by multinational corporations. That way you cut out the privatization and monopoly rents on the end results of basic, taxpayer-subsidized research. But if your funds derive from trafficking women and children for sexual exploitation, for example, or from illegal arms trafficking or any other illegal activity, then banks in the US are legally free to accept your money and are not required to report your deposit to the authorities. As it happens, the Bank has actually applied its methodology with such a higher poverty line of $2.50 per person per day, in 2005 US dollars converted at PPPs, and found that the number of poor has increased in the 1990 to 2005 period. In exchange, innovators must of course renounce the usual rewards they are otherwise entitled to, namely the patent-protected markup on the price of their product. They don't exist naturally, nor are they God-given. What we should do instead is require or at least permit innovators to license their green innovations free of charge in exchange for public payments based on the impact this innovation has on the environment—emissions averted or something of this sort. Since you're talking about economic matters, the trend is also partly driven by economists. They operate with this image of the homo economicus, the rational economic agent, and while such agents are rare in the wider world, they are common in economics departments. For more information about the Program, people working in and affiliated with the Program, and the Projects that our members and affiliates are engaged in, use the above links. So it is essential to the World Bank's upbeat picture that it chooses an extremely low poverty line. Consider a more distant case where our attachment to the status quo does not cloud our judgment. First, the alternative proposal is not politically realistic in the United States and most other affluent countries with a substantial pharmaceutical industry. Yes, it's getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable. This is so because the relatively few organizations capable of influencing supranational rulemaking through the lobbying of major governments have diverse interests. This is a relatively straightforward point. Thomas PoggeâPolitics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric T1 Notes 1 In Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 104, I described such a monument. But you say that we must scrutinize this and the international legal framework that gives such negotiations blanket approval. Can you explain this controversial position? This will, in some cases, lead to compromises. This $2.50-a-day poverty line is not even typically talked about. TP: We are working hard to win additional support from governments and intergovernmental agencies such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank, and also from pharmaceutical innovators, opinion leaders, and nongovernmental organizations such as the Gates Foundation and Medecins Sans Frontieres. And they wouldn't be fighting so hard over them if they didn't know that the design of these rules makes a difference to their own economic position. THOMAS POGGE, WORLD POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS: COSMOPOLITAN RESPONSIBILITIES AND REFORMS 2 (2002). Many prominent voices on global poverty, like New York University economist William Easterly or the British newsmagazine The Economist, blame kleptocratic regimes, endemic corruption and "bad government" for poverty's persistence in the third world. KB: I've read similarly grim figures on income by Branko Milanovic of the World Bank. You will also find a conversation with Dean Karlan about effective solutions to poverty problems in this week. 0000001793 00000 n To a large extent, the intellectual class that you belong to tends to dismiss such a view as a "conspiracy theory." TP: The fact that oppressive and corrupt regimes can borrow money in the name of the whole country means that the country's future generations will be weighed down by interest and repayment burdens, even if the money has been frittered away in some frivolous way, embezzled or used for weapons to suppress the country's population. And for this, he needs to convert it into a Western currency and store it in a bank abroad, where it can also earn investment returns and be bequeathed to his heirs. But if you bring up Pareto efficiency, why not advocate strongly increasing the $30 billion already spent by the government through the National Institutes of Health and directing it toward drug research and development [R&D] to provide medicine at cost? Another important response should be made to the Panglossians. The dollar amount will buy much more food in the US than its PPP "equivalent" will buy in India. 0000003607 00000 n UPS is another example where they are able to get the parcels to the most remote locations at an incredibly low price. Incumbent politicians love the system because it allows them to raise millions of dollars toward defending their seats. KB: One counterargument they may use is, "Hey, certain goods are relatively cheaper in developing countries, but there are other goods and services that are relatively more expensive, like electronics and fast food. 0000002643 00000 n Countries compete in offering easy working conditions to their banks. 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