Adapted from When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor…and Ourselves.
Defining poverty is not simply an academic exercise. The ways we define poverty—either implicitly or explicitly—play a major role in determining the solutions we use in our attempts to alleviate that poverty.
When a sick person goes to the doctor, the doctor could make two crucial mistakes: (1) Treating symptoms instead of the underlying illness; (2) Misdiagnosing the underlying illness and prescribing the wrong medicine. Either one of these mistakes might result in the patient not getting better and possibly getting worse.
Similarly, when it comes to addressing poverty, those who seek to help need to be mindful of root causes. If those seeking to help people in poverty treat only the visible symptoms or if they misunderstand underlying problems, those struggling with poverty will not improve their situation, and their lives may actually get worse.
A Case Study
Near the end of World War II, allied nations established an organization, known as the World Bank, with a special mission to help fix the countries in Europe that were shattered by the war. Loans from the World Bank and other aid from the U.S. government (The Marshall Plan) did a good job with this task, and the countries in Europe that had been destroyed by the war began to experience faster economic growth than they ever had before.
