[ptaipale]

Your comment however leads me to ponder the rhetoric: poverty is indeed not a disease, but like diseases, in modern societies it is contagious. Patterns and behaviours that make poverty deeper and more destructive are spreading from person to person and family to family, in neighbourhoods and communities.

Here I mean things like appreciation of education, work, stability of families, etc.

What could we do to change these patterns? (Apart from the usual recipes like making schools better. FWIW I'm from a country which has one of the most equal distributions of both income and wealth, but even this does leave a lot of people quite unhappy.)

[oblio]

My guess is that the best investments are in education and social welfare. Basically try to get people who are down up and keep people who are up from falling down during their worst moments (temporary loss of income, depression due to loss of loved ones, etc.).

Besides this, I guess the next best investment is in refining democracy and its safeguards, as well as the actual government, so that:

a) lobbying by corporations and very rich and powerful individuals doesn't corrupt the system

b) the system is as efficient as possible (there's always going to be inefficiencies but you'd want most of the tax money to actually be used for what they're meant instead of administrative overhead)

More than that, there's not much we can do. After all, at some point we have to rely on free will :)

[wolfgke]

Exactly my kind of reasoning. To add a point: Since we don't know the exact kind of pathogen(s) leading to poverty, but we know that poverty of parents is a strong predictor of poverty of children, this delivers a way to at least partly quarantine the poverty disease.

[ptaipale]

Yes, poverty of parents is predictor of poverty of children, but for a large part, it isn't about money. It's about those contagious factors - for instance, how much the parents want their children to do well in school, how much they care about it. So fixing the poverty metric isn't going to change this, something else might.

At least what I read about the number of poor black American kids growing without a father: it's shocking. There seems to be a widespread collapse of culture of having a stable kernel family. What could be done about it?