How to make global poverty history

There are two schools of thought on this question--and the chasm that divides them is deep and wide.

One group of people believe the answer lies in spending a whole lot of money on schools, clinics, and new drugs in poor countries. What keeps poor people poor is that--well, they are too poor to help themselves. So the best thing that we can do is increase the resources they have command over.

But then there are those who think that poverty is caused by not inadequate resources--which is after all sort of tautological--but with inadequate opportunities. People do not invest in education or in health, or save enough, because they do not see enough (private) returns to doing so. So the way to get them to climb from poverty is to enhance the incentives that they face to help themselves and their community...more>>