[chinesemedicine]

Originally posted by Barnabas
You can eliminate poverty without touching income distribution

Chile until 2 decades ago was a quite poor country, nowadays, after 2 decades of economic growth, only 17% of Chileans are poor.

Income distribution has not improved, what happened is that instead of giving the poor of bigger piece of the cake, they have made the cake bigger.


edit: BTW, poverty is relative.

I imagine many poor americans own their own house, have cable tv, internet and a car. Thats not poor in my book, maybe working class. There is a big difference between Chile and the US. In the US many efforts have been made to enlarge the pie by giving advantages to the most well off. The result has largely been only to benefit those who are wealthy and not the poor. Except as has been mentioned that some lower income groups can afford some cheap model electronics now. Still there are plenty very poor who don't have any of those.