Poverty issue and solving this problem

Ok, so it shouldn't be a shock to anyone to find out that there are a lot of homeless people living in pretty much all parts of the world. There is a particularly large amount of homeless people on the west coast, including Vancouver; presumably one of the bigger reasons for that is that the climate here is warmer.

In my discussion below I will treat poverty and homelessness together and use the two terms interchangeably.

So the main questions we should be asking ourselves are 1) What's the problem? 2) Why it exists? and 3) How do we solve it?


What's the poverty problem?
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There are a lot of people, about 1.3 billion, who live in poverty around the world. These are people who do not earn enough money to pay for the expenses that they incur as the result of their basic needs. A subset of these people are the homeless, who can't afford the most expensive of these needs: shelter!

More so, there are additional consequences of this situation; we don't seem to recognize people living in poverty as human beings; this is most evident by how we, people not in poverty, seem to treat them and in the case of the homeless how we tend to avoid them on the streets as if they were rats. This behavior seems to vary with the extent of their appearance.

Additionally, we seem to be fearful of them; we tend to associate them with drug use, violence and unstable behavior. Movies and other society institutions that tend to generalize extreme cases are probably at least partially responsible for our perception in this case.

The problem then is to find a way to provide these basic needs to those living in poverty, recognize them as human beings and to give them an opportunity to participate in all processes that all other human beings have the opportunity to participate in today.


Why does the problem exist?
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At the high level (ie coutries), wealth is distributed unevenly around the world. There is a select few countries around the world that are wealthy and accumulate a huge ratio of wealth/population. At the same time there is a far greater number of countries that are poor and don't have much wealth; therefore they have less wealth to share with the people.
At the level of a country; the country does not distribute wealth to the people evenly and therefore some people are wealthier than others and the degree of this difference of wealth between the residents varies. Hence there form different classes, in the country, one of which is the class of the poor. According to this year's international independent study by a body of the UN, USA - the richest of the industrial nations - was found to have the worst poverty problem of all the industrial nations; how can this be?

Now, this unequal sharing of wealth is clearly seen when you realize that someone working in USA/Canada, earning $15/hour, in 1 hour of work can buy 100 hrs of work of another person working in another country, for example, in Asia or Africa. What are the consequences of this?

I should point out that there is a fixed number of resources on earth: this includes natural resources, human working hours, etc.
Therefore given a fixed number of supply of some product (eg. bread) determined by the economy; the more of this product I get, the less will be left for you and the other people. Hence if the world produced 6 billion loathes of bread and 3 billion of them sit in supermarkets in North America and Europe then the rest of the world would have to share the other 3 billion loathes and consequently there will be people who will not get bread since the population of that portion of the world is larger than 3 billion.
Therefore it would follow that someone very rich who has purchased a big portion of land, building material, appliances, etc to build his huge castle sized home with these resources and consequently taken more than a fair share - a quantity which is determined by the number of people and the available quantity of a particular resource - and thus either directly (ie by insufficient supply) or indirectly(ie causing the prices to go up) has caused someone to be left without land, home, etc. Some would say that he has stolen that portion of resources from someone poor; however this theft is totally legal under this economic system and is not recognized as theft. And therefore the problem is not so much with the people under a particular system, because the people are just doing the best they can under that system, but its a problem with the system itself. Even during slavery, all slave owners weren't evil or bad, many of them were good people who were doing evil under that system wich did not recognize those acts as evil and neither did they, because they were blinded by the system! Consider, if all land is privatized where would those without land live?

One problem is the way our economic systems, capitalism, works is by producing enough quantity of the product based on the number of units that could be purchased and not necessarily the number of units that are needed by the people (ie some people can't afford to buy the product). And the more wealthy your country is the more likely the people will be of purchasing the product and therefore more people, even from other countries, will be trying to sell you this product; hence you would often see a larger selection, some imported, in a wealthier country than in a less wealthier one. Often enough your own country would prefer to sell to another country because it is offering a higher price for the product/resource than a person from your country could afford and possibly leave people from your country without this resource.

Additionally, in every country there is a certain percentage of people unemployed: in some this value is very high and may reach 50% and higher. These people do not earn money and therefore may not be able to afford anything, including shelter and food; sure some governments provide social benefits and programs, however, those are rarely adequate and usually not spread enough; these certainly vary from country to country and depend on how conservative your government system is.
Lets not kid ourselves not everyone is given an equal opportunity for success; often people exploit their connections in the industry to get a job, there is discrimination of various kind, etc. But consider a case of a child born to a poor family and one born to a rich one. The poor child will probably have significant amount of extra worries compared to the other kid; for example in addition to school work he may have to work to help out his family, possibly babysit other kids in the family while the parents are working hard (probably holding several jobs), do some chores around the house to help out, may lack the school supplies, will not be able to afford any tutors, may not be able to afford to go to university or the marks will not be good enough, and in some cases the situation may not allow him to go to school. Therefore with a lack of education this child will not be able to compete with others in the industry. So where is the promised equal opportunity to compete?

Another problem with the capitalist system is that its premise is competition and this is seen from early age in education: as kids compete for grades. This encourages selfishness and to look at classmates as competitors, instead of fellow human beings working together towards an improvement in our society and progression of our human race. This mind-set is what later pushes people to disregard the poor and the homeless as human and accept our selfish behavior towards them.

To summarize, at the most general level, problem primarily exists due to the economic system in place, which encourages inequality and inevitably produces it and encourages selfishness through constantly pushing for competition instead of teamwork. Therefore in the end it produces injustice; where some people are forced to live on the streets and have no access and means of getting resources such as land and food.


How to fix the problem
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One aparent solution is to change the economic system to a better one; no matter the amount of charity under the current system, it doesn't seem that the problem will ever be solved.

The system must provide equal opportunity to everyone without discrimination, it must promote sharing of resources (eg. land) rather than owning pieces of it. It must encourage people to work hard for the better of the community (not selfishness) and recognize other people in the world as human beings deserving of every bit the same as you!

We can work together to solve this problem by approaching it from different fields and different perspectives and considering it at various levels of detail: as a whole and as a set of subproblems. Who knows, if we work together we may be able to find a solution even in a capitalist system.

Please post some ideas and thoughts!