‘The very poor are unthinkable’, said the novelist EM Forster, ‘only to be approached by the statistician or the poet’. Making the poor ‘thinkable’, says Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale, is the key to ending global poverty. And in the new edition of World Poverty and Human Rights he offers a ‘modest proposal’ to help – a global resources dividend.
Think about this. 2,533 million people account for 1.67 per cent of all household consumption expenditure, while 1,004 million people account for 81 percent. While poverty kills one-third of human beings, a shift of just one-seventieth of the resources of the 1,004 million to the 2,533 million would end severe poverty.
The global resources dividend (GRD) proposes to remove full property rights with respect to natural resources from states and their governments, and to require those governments to share ‘a small part of the value of any resources they decide to use or sell’ with the global poor. It proposes we accept this compulsion as legitimate because the global poor have ‘an inalienable stake in all limited natural resources’. The GRD would confer no right of participation in decisions over the use of natural resources as the dividend would be akin to preferred stock and would not challenge eminent domain. The global economy would be left basically the same. The global poor would not.
The proposal begs a host of questions. Who is to limit the sovereignty rights of states? Pogge thinks it should be supranational institutions and organisations. Others, me for one, would favour a concert of democracies forging an agreement while working with non-democratic states and supranational bodies. What level should the dividend be set at? ‘Quite a small GRD may be sufficient’, says Pogge, perhaps 0.67 percent of the 2005 global product. As he puts it, we would still recognise ourselves at the end, perhaps even recognise our true selves for the first time. How will we ensure the dividend reaches the poor rather than their corrupt or authoritarian rulers?
‘Corruption’ is one of the longer entries in Pogge’s index.
Is the GRD politically feasible? Pogge reminds us of other eccentric and utopian causes that have ended up being exemplars of what justice demands. And, in truth, the GRD is far from being an eccentric policy. It would chime with the sensibility of the Live Aid/Make Poverty History generation, with a global popular culture, and with a security environment in which our relevant ‘street-corner’ is the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And the GRD would shift global consumption in ways that benefit the environment to boot.
Pogge also addresses the philosophical question of how we should think of global poverty as a moral challenge to us. In brief, he establishes that whichever of the three major grounds for injustice we invoke – the effects of shared social institutions, the uncompensated exclusion from the use of natural resources, or the effects of a common and violent history – we end up defining poverty as unjust and its maintenance as a violation of negative duty. His conclusion: each of the major strands of Western political thought can unite in support of a Global Resources Dividend or GRD.
If the practical obstacles can be resolved, the GRD, or something like it, might help deliver three great benefits.
First, a feasible reform of the global economic order that would go a long way ‘toward ensuring that all human beings can meet their own basic needs with dignity’. For as Woody Allen says, money is better than poverty ‘if only for financial reasons’. Second, the transformation of the relation of the West to the rest. Pogge’s proposal is designed to make talk of ‘our common values’ a reality, and to ‘undermine the popular support that aggressive political movements of all kinds’ derive from the perception that ‘we will not give a damn about their misery until they have the economic and military power to do us serious harm’. Third, the GRD would be a democracy-promotion tool of tremendous power.
Could Ed Miliband find a way to bring Pogge’s proposal, or something like it, into Labour’s manifesto? Could we build on the achievements of DFID and Gleneagles by making symbolic steps of our own towards a unilateral GRD while calling for a global movement for a global GRD?
In a world of nation-states at war, Labour’s great Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin said, ‘Do not worry about what it costs … You can easily rebuild wealth, but you cannot create liberty when it has gone’. In today’s dangerous global village in which, as Barack Obama points out, we have ‘a direct national security interest in dramatically reducing global poverty’, perhaps we should adopt Bevin’s maxim as our own.