Is growth good for the poor - Essay Example

Economic Growth and Status of the Poor According to Walton and Rockoff, it becomes alarming when the change of time is not bringing forth anything substantial into the life of humankind. When the measure of well-being of a person is worse than as compared to in decades of years ago, the concept of economic growth leaves many questions unanswered. Huge growth disparities between the poor and the rich increase the level of poverty to the poor. According to Clack 1800, the majority of the world’s population was comparably poor than their remote ancestors.

The lucky denizens in the 18th C consisting of the wealthy communities like the Netherlands and the England were the kind of nation, which lived a life compared to be equivalent to that of the Stone Age. In contrary the vast swath of humanity in South and East Asia, especially in Japan and China, eked out living conditions which were comparably significantly poorer than the living conditions of the cavemen (p. 17).The parameters of gauging the quality of life could not withstand the test of time and substantially no improvements were observable from any dimension: when the life expectancy was not higher than that of the hunters and gatherers in1800, just merely 30-35 years of age.

Stature-the measure of how children are exposed to diseases and the quality of diet was gauged to be higher in the Stone Age than as compared to the 1800. In fact, the poor of 18th C, the kind of individuals who lived by providing unskilled labor alone, would be in a better off situation when transferred to the hunter-gatherer band.Even after the robust Industrial revolution prosperity has not been felt by every society. Material consumption in certain nations, especially in the Sub-Saharan Africa, is currently well below the Preindustrial era (Clark 237).

It is believed that countries like Tanzania and Malawi would have been better off materially if the y could have continued with their preindustrial state and had no contact with the world industrialization process.The different nations have of late embraced the spirit of capitalism-the winner gets it all art, and therefore material well-being and social welfare of individuals are not components of the gauging parameters. Rapid growth in population across different nations has resulted to over dependency and exhaustion of the available resources, thus material improvement in quality of life.

Unless justified from another perspective growth has not proved to be good to the poor, or it could be its taking long to prove substantial to the poor.Work citedClark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Print.Walton, Rockoff, History of the American Economy. Mason: Thomson-South-Western, 2005.