Introduction
God blessed me with exceptional intellectual abilities and a savvy, determined mother. She never let the constant weight and disappointment of poverty defeat us. Because of her love and presence, I went on to graduate from Harvard and Oxford and to make more money than I ever dreamed possible. We Americans love to tell rags-to-riches stories like mine to placate the masses. If he can do it, why can’t you? American culture over-emphasizes tales of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” as a means of convincing us all that if you’re poor, it’s your fault. Whenever I say the words “End Poverty,” I get eye rolls and skepticism. People will say, “There will always be poverty,” if they’re nice, or I’ll hear, “You must be a special kind of stupid,” from the more aggressive types. “I’ll tell you how to end poverty, get a job!” is another favorite quip, even though the vast majority of poor individuals, even the homeless, do indeed have a job—often more than one. Why does the topic of poverty elicit such strong emotional responses from us? “Life isn’t fair, and it never will be,” or “This isn’t a perfect system, but it’s the best there is,” are common refrains. As a nation, we have a collective sense of defeat when it comes to over a tenth of our citizens living in abject poverty. We’ve had poverty and hardship among us for so long, we can’t even imagine a world without it.
Poverty falls into two types: relative and absolute. Relative poverty is having less than someone else. I may have a place to sleep at night, but it pales in comparison to your mansion, so relative to you, I’m poor. Absolute poverty has nothing to do with comparisons. When you lack the basic necessities for human existence that we all learn about in kindergarten (food, clothing, shelter, and transportation), then you’re suffering from absolute poverty. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only person in the world starving or if everyone on the planet is starving along with you. Starvation is terrible no matter how you slice it. I’m only concerned with absolute poverty in this book. When you reframe the question in this way, asking how we can end poverty simply becomes: How do we make sure that every household has the bare minimum food, clothing, shelter, and transportation they need to survive? Even with this clarification, Americans will usually reject that it’s possible for us to have a capitalist society where everyone is fed, clothed, housed, and able to get to and from work. How on Earth did we get here? To understand how an entire civilization became convinced that someone has to starve for someone else to eat, we have to take a deep dive into our history, cultural narratives, and personal biases. Rest assured, the solution to end poverty is the easy part. I’ll explain in the following pages. The difficult part is that, simply put, we’ve been thoroughly convinced that sharing is a bad thing. We see neither the value nor the obligation to help our neighbors. This begs the question: if we believe sharing and helping one another are bad things, then what’s the point of society? We have gotten so lost in our pursuit of individual wealth that we have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of civilization is to care for one another. People form communities and broader societies because they intuitively know they can be better off together than separate. Our likelihood of survival skyrockets when we work together in collaborative units. Yet somehow, the words ‘cooperation’ and ‘help’ have become triggering for many Americans. We believe so much in individualism that we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars treating the symptoms of poverty each year, rather than directly tackling the root
INTRODUCTION | 5 cause of it. A lack of money. In a modern economy, absolute poverty exists for one simple reason: people don’t have enough money to buy the essentials. In allowing people to live in extreme poverty, we as a society ultimately pay the high price of shelters, jails, foster care, street cleaning, property damage, medical costs, theft, and more. I often hear in response, “I don’t have time to worry about other people’s problems. I’ve got too many of my own.” It’s challenging for many of us to grasp that we don’t live in isolation. When we allow people to go hungry or to live on the streets, their problems quickly become our problems when our streets are covered in filth, crime seems to be everywhere, and taxes continue to rise without any clear benefit to most American families. I hope to show you that making a small, unconditional investment in every American household will pay incredible dividends to us all, not just to the poor. I’ll take you on my own personal journey to show just how much talent and money we allow to waste away. I want you to realize poverty isn’t someone else’s problem, and it’s not unsolvable—so, let’s fix it. A solution is long overdue. When you’re done reading this book, I’m confident you’ll see that we can soon abolish absolute poverty in the United States, and we can make trillions of dollars doing it.