By Oscar Pocasangre
Prominent NYU economist William Easterly argues in his blog Aid Watch that poverty is not a human rights violation. Easterly argues that for there to be a human right's violation, it is necessary to "identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator." He then goes on to say that it has been thus far impossible to clearly identify the violator in the case of poverty and that poverty is an arbitrary concept that varies from country to country and survey to survey.
Although I agree with many of Easterly's arguments, I don't agree with this one. I do believe that poverty is a human right's violation in the sense that every human being is entitled to a dignified life. Poverty interferes with this by preventing people from obtaining basic needs such as food and water, health care, and education. By doing so, poverty puts many people all over the world in unbearable situations that no human being should endure.
Additionally, in response to Easterly's argument that a human right's violation needs a culprit, I believe that there are many identifiable culprits of poverty. From an economic perspective, market failures are many times responsible for the situation of the poor - when a market is not able to satisfy the demand for basic goods that the world's poor need it is obvious that there is some sort of market failure that needs to be addressed. There are also political and sociological explanations to poverty. Poverty, however, is a complex problem and there is not one single culprit. Rather, there is a collection of factors that contribute to this problem and they should all be addressed in order to resolve the problem of over a billion people all over the world.
