{"id":646903,"date":"2013-03-14T14:03:06","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T18:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/?p=72942"},"modified":"2013-03-14T18:23:32","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T22:23:32","slug":"what-does-extreme-poverty-look-like-today-some-nuanced-and-insightful-readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/646903","title":{"rendered":"What does extreme poverty look like today? Some nuanced and insightful readings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bono-at-TED2013\"In today\u2019s talk<\/a>, Bono — U2 frontman, founder of the anti-poverty organization ONE<\/a>, and 2005 TED Prize winner<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0reflects on the past decade\u2019s dramatic reduction in extreme poverty worldwide. \u201cExit the rockstar, enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"Bono:Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news)<\/span><\/a>Since 2000, according to Bono\u2019s data, eight million more AIDS patients are getting antiretroviral drugs; eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa have cut their rates of death due to malaria by 75 percent, and the mortality rate for kids under five has fallen by 2.65 million per year\u2014that\u2019s 7,256 lives saved every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis fantastic news didn\u2019t happen by itself. It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. And this great news gives birth to even more great news,\u201d Bono says: the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day has declined from 43 percent in 1990, to 33 percent in 2000, to 21 percent in 2010. \u201cIf you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data,\u201d Bono says. \u201cThis is everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Bono\u2019s calculations, if this trend continues, 2028 will see zero percent of the population living in extreme poverty.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can\u2019t get this done until we accept that we\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0get this done,\u201d says Bono. \u201cInertia is how we screw this up. Momentum is how we bend the arc of history down towards zero.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t miss this inspiring talk<\/a> with a powerful message about the past 3,000 years of history. And for anyone interested in what it means to live in extreme poverty today, here is a series of nuanced essays and interviews that give insight.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In February 2010, John Lee Anderson reported from post-earthquake Haiti<\/a> in The New Yorker<\/i>. The piece follows Nadia Francois, who was deported back to Haiti from the U.S.; through her story, we see a country not only ravaged by poverty, violence and political upheaval, but also \u201calmost uniquely victimized by nature,\u201d Anderson writes.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Until recently, Mali \u201cwas widely viewed as a gentle if very poor democracy,\u201d Joshua Hammer wrote in The New York Review of Books<\/i><\/a> last month. \u201cBut the country has long combined poverty, radical Islam, and tendencies to armed rebellion.\u201d In 2011, he writes, that \u201ccombustible mix\u201d came to a head as northern Mali became a terrorist haven.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. In her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers<\/i><\/a>, Katherine Boo chronicles life in a slum in Mumbai, India, based on three years of research. In this interview in Guernica<\/i><\/a>, Boo discusses her aim to investigate \u201cwhat I didn\u2019t know: how people get out of poverty,\u201d she says. \u201cMumbai, especially, had so many contradictions. You have this manifest prosperity, but then more than half of its citizens lived in slums. The life expectancy in Mumbai is seven years shorter than the country as a whole. How can that be in one of India\u2019s wealthiest cities?\u201d
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. In 2011, Philip Gourevitch wrote for The New Yorker<\/i><\/a> <\/i>about a cycling team in Rwanda through which boys like Gasore, an orphaned street kid, found second chances.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Rio will host the World Cup in 2013 and the Olympics in 2016. Which puts the spotlight on \u201cthe persistent presence of the militias and drug gangs controlling its favelas, these fearfully poor but hardy communities located all across town,\u201d Misha Glenny wrote in FT Magazine <\/i>last fall<\/a>. \u201cThe juxtaposition of opulence and misery in Rio highlights the moral disgrace of Brazil\u2019s historical legacy. At the same time, it forces the authorities to make good on the genuine commitment of President Dilma Rousseff and her two predecessors to banish the scourge of chronic inequality.\u201d
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  6. In 2011, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a decade-later follow-up to her book Nickel and Dimed<\/i><\/a>, in which she went undercover as a minimum-wage employee to report on the extreme hardships Americans in poverty faced.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In today\u2019s talk, Bono — U2 frontman, founder of the anti-poverty organization ONE, and 2005 TED Prize winner\u00a0–\u00a0reflects on the past decade\u2019s dramatic reduction in extreme poverty worldwide. \u201cExit the rockstar, enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist,\u201d he says. Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news)Since 2000, according to Bono\u2019s data, eight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7342,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-646903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7342"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}