Blog Action Day: Poor people show us how to save the world economy

The immense gap between the world’s rich and poor has finally become a topic of serious discussion throughout the developed world, reaching even into G-8 meetings (although not the U.S. presidential campaign). And we can be sure that in poor countries it has always been talked about—a lot.

But this new conversation about global poverty misses some key points. The narrow monetary focus of economists, political leaders, the media, business, and philanthropists overlooks an essential nature of the problem. Yes, it’s a tragedy—and truly a sin according to the moral or religious beliefs of most people around the globe—that half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day while most Europeans and North Americans make exponentially more than that.

It’s also a tragedy to reduce the meaning of life to an economic index.

As my friend Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk and Gandhian activist in India who now edits the UK green magazine Resurgence, once told me: “It’s commonly assumed that the opposite of poor is rich, but actually it’s sufficiency—a sense that there is enough.”

When you think about it that way, the most impoverished people in the world may be the high-rolling speculators on Wall Street and their colleagues in Frankfurt, London, Tokyo and elsewhere whose insatiable drive for money nearly tanked the world economic system last week. For them, there was ever enough.

The overwhelming topic under discussion right now is how to repair our tattered global economy, a crisis that threatens to shove aside concerns about global poverty.

Yet these two crises are inextricably linked. We live on a bountiful planet, not a poverty-stricken one. There is enough for everyone if we follow the simple but sharp wisdom that money isn’t everything. Poor people have always realized this—otherwise they would have no reason to get up each morning. Let’s hope elite bankers, investors and economic policymakers have now understand it.

The great financial upheaval we’re experiencing is no momentary bout of bad luck, it’s the direct consequence of looking at the world as an economic engine that runs on money rather than a living organism nourished by natural and human resources. By learning that lesson, we’ll know everything we need to create a sound global economy that sustains everyone.