We've all seen the scenes of bony-looking children in some desert surrounded by makeshift huts that we wouldn't dream of living in, accompanied by some announcer's appeal to our sense of guilt. "For just $1 a day you can sponsor a child like this," they say. While such philanthropy may give us peace of mind with the sense that we're doing something about the problem, such gestures of kindness do little to address the wider causes of poverty and hunger. This individual child you sponsor may gain a competitive advantage over his peers, but he will still live in a poverty-stricken area, and his peers will be no better off.
So what is the cause of poverty? In the conservative mindset, poverty is the fault of those living in it. Many a cynic has implored that these poor hungry people might have a chance for success if only they would stop having so many children. In our own country, they claim that they are "lazy" and simply don't want to work. Sometimes they will claim that our welfare system has made them dependent and given them a disincentive to work. Without completely discounting all of these explanations, suffice to say they do not explain sufficiently the extent of poverty that exists in the world, nor its distribution.
