Poverty goals?

No, its extreme wealth we

should be targeting
Zoe Williams
If we had focused on the real causes of poverty over the past 30 years we probably wouldnt need the
United Nations sustainable development goals now
Monday 19 October 2015 07.00BST

he sustainable development goals 17inall, starting with end poverty, in all its
forms, everywhere were officially adopted at the UN in New York last month.
Celebrities approved immediately, experiencing the goals as a kind of moral brandbuilding exercise, choosing their favourite and inviting fans to favourite it too.
The pope was a little more reserved, issuing the thought-provoking, slightly wordy
critique: We must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism which
would assuage our consciences. But the mood overall was triumphant the millennium
development goals had worked, repaying the ambition of the international community last
time around, so why not think even bigger?
If the pope and a few rogue academics expressed unease, it took a whimsical Swedish
electro band to get to the root of the problem. The Knife produced a graphic novella
announcing a new millennium goal: end extreme wealth. As we all know, says a UN
official with a forbidding fringe, extreme wealth is a huge problem in this world.
Sometimes I felt overwhelmed with hopelessness, adds a UN researcher. Many of these
people live in a very limited environment their lives are restricted by old traditions and
cultural ideas about how to live. For example, Ben, a 45-year-old, very wealthy man: his
life revolves around very trivial things. He collects antiques similar to how the squirrel
collects nuts.
Here, rushing towards your face like the ground after a pratfall, is everything thats wrong
with sustainable development goals the reason their hopeful language sounds so tinny
and unconvincing, the reason dyed-in-the-wool atheists find themselves siding with the
pope, even when he isnt entirely explicit about his objections.
The international community, havingfirst established that it speaks for everyone (The
Future We Want was the title of the foundational document from Rio as though challenge
or dissent, if it came, would be from those opposed to modernity), proceeded to look
through the wrong end of the telescope. It is impossible to fixate on an income problem

whether a low income or a high one without finding implicit fault in the people who are
on that income.
Furthermore, as Martin Kirk from the activist network the Rules pointed out, all the
language of sustainable goals frames poverty as a disease: eradicable, no match for the
ingenuity of mankind, but fundamentally nobodys fault. It is a landscape where
everyones a hero and nobodys a villain; one in which unfair trade agreements, land grabs,
structural debt relations, privatisation of publicly owned utilities and tax evasion never
happened.
Poverty is not a naturally occurring germ or virus; it is anthropogenically created though
wealth extraction. Any goal that fails to recognise this is not only unlikely to succeed, but
can only be understood as a deliberate act of diversion, drawing attention away from what
might work; in its place, the anodyne, fairytale language of hope, in a post-ideological
world where all politicians just want whats best and a billionaire is just a benefactor you
havent met yet.
Joe Brewer, also for the Rules, undertook an analysis of the language of growth in the
sustainable goals. GDP, perpetually growing by no obvious means beyond enthusiasm, is
the principle, indeed the only driver of poverty eradication as well it might be, once it has
obliquely been established that youre not going to do anything about wealth extraction,
either by governments or by corporations.
Corporations dont feature at all in the report, even while many have more wealth and
greater reach than governments and indeed an ever more important partnership role in
the UN. The glaring contradiction is between relying on endless growth to end poverty
while at the same time taking urgent action to combat climate change (goal 13), and
vowing to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems (goal
15).
The incompatibility was pointed out in trenchant and unarguable language by the
economist David Woodward, one of the UNs own senior advisers. And yet Incrementum ad
Absurdum (as Woodwards paper was called) does indeed appear to be the plan: grow your
way out of poverty while simultaneously shrinking your way to sustainability.
These basic assumptions poverty is the problem, growth is the answer, climate change
can be tackled separatelyto consumption, and corporate behaviour is neither here nor
there extend far beyond the UN, into political cultures everywhere.
One is constantly told, on the progressive side, that social democracy has had its day
because people generally have become meaner; attitudes to poverty have hardened, and
generosity has withered, the man on the street is actually very judgmental about people
who cant support themselves or their families. But how would attitudes look if we had
spent the past 30 years asking questions about the rich: their characters, their honesty,
their industriousness, their contribution to society? If the problem facing the British
economy had been identified as the destabilising effects of extreme wealth, how long
would it have been before the wealthy themselves came to be scrutinised?

He and his family, the Knifes researcher continues, of the High Net Worth Individual
Ben, are caught in avicious circle of wanting more and more crap. They have very little or
no concept of what democracy is.
Asking questions about the rich has been portrayed since the dawn of wealth as envy;
asking questions about the poor is considered practical and sympathetic, moral and
problem-solving. But no problem can be solved while political institutions wont recognise
that poverty has a cause.
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Topics
Sustainable development goals
Poverty
Economic policy
Social exclusion

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