Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teaming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’ (1883)
(Inscription on the Statue of Liberty, New York)

Introduction

1. There is a manifestation of poverty so extreme that it is associated with insufficiencies of food and water supplies; lack of medical care; very low life expectancy, and extreme misery and deprivation.
This condition applies to about one billion of the world’s inhabitants, typically with annual incomes around 250$ or less, and is known in everyday language as absolute poverty.

2. Other manifestations of poverty are observed at much higher income levels and are associated with high levels of inequality in income distribution. Here the association is with lack of access to education (particularly for females) and with relatively low ages at completion of education; with lack of meaningful impact on political systems; with low expectations and low levels of ambition, and often with high levels of criminal activity, corruption and political repression.
This condition is known in everyday language as relative poverty: it has no single marker level of annual income but is a function of income distribution in particular states and regions: a typical expression of a level of relative poverty would be ‘less than 50% of average income for the region’.

3. Should we so choose (and we not always shown a genuine will to do so), absolute poverty is a problem that could be ended at a cost well within the ability of the developed world to meet. Doing so would at the same time necessarily exacerbate the problem of relative poverty, so that the solution to one problem would bring others in its train, but there can be little doubt that absolute poverty is an issue in the domain of morals, rather than of practicalities, and the failure to address it is a moral issue, not one for the technologists.

4. Relative poverty, the issue of excess of inequality, however, is a quite different class of question. There seems to be little doubt that some degree of inequality in societies is necessary to their efficient functioning: incentives to work seem to be more successful than punishments for not working (the carrot rather than the stick) for instance. However, there equally seems little doubt that, in some areas, absolute equality should be the aim (access to law, for instance). It seems at the least to be a possibility that there should exist some optimum pattern for the distribution of incomes in a society, and much debate has been undertaken around this theme. Indeed, the history of politics can in many respects be read as the history of debate on these quite technical issues of income distribution and equity. It seems then that, unlike absolute poverty, relative poverty offers fruitful ground in which the technologist may work.

5. Views of income distributions have, however, to be tempered by awareness of the existence of an absolute poverty line: a nation in which everybody has the same near-zero income might be seen as remarkably fair – but not as in any way a desirable model. Income distributions in the real world have characteristically different patterns under different social systems: other than in the singularities of revolutions, such patterns change relatively slightly over time. Change can, however, be induced – albeit slowly – and the long term modification of patterns of income distribution is a legitimate policy aim. The questions that arise are, what trajectories of change are desirable? And how are they to be achieved? These are complex questions: the apparent numerical certainties of money income measurement may, for instance, tell us little about the relativities of Quality of Life or of happiness. Similarly, different societal norms in regarding (for example) investment in healthcare for today as more valuable than investment in pensions for tomorrow, offer much scope for discussion without necessarily contributing to understanding.

6. TERRA’s proposition is
The new technologies of the Information Society (ISTs) offer scope to enable economic growth, and to allow a more equitable distribution of wealth, without necessarily increasing consumption, pollution and energy use.
In order to expand on the understanding of this, we must therefore come to some understanding of the relativities of income distribution; and also of the creation of economic growth i.e. the absolute growth of incomes.