Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent. We cannot really have an adequate understanding of the future without some view about how well the lives of the poor can be expected to go. Is there, then, hope for the poor? To answer this question, we need an understanding of who should count as poor. Some types of poverty are easy enough to identify. There is no way of escaping immediate diagnosis when faced with what King Lear called “loop’d and window’d raggedness.” But as Lear also well knew, deprivation can take many different forms. Economic poverty is not the only kind of poverty that impoverishes human lives. In identifying the poor, we must take note, for example, of the deprivation of citizens of authoritarian regimes, from Sudan to North Korea, who are denied political liberty and civil rights. And we must try to understand the predicament of subjugated homemakers in male-dominated societies, common in Asia and Africa, who lead a life of unquestioning docility; of the illiterate children who are offered no opportunity of schooling; of minority groups who have to keep their voices muffled for fear of the tyranny of the majority; and of dissidents who are imprisoned and sometimes tortured by the guardians of “law and order.” Those who like to keep issues straight and narrow tend to resist broadening the definition of poverty. Why not just look at incomes and ask a question like “How many people live on less than, say, $1 or $2 a day?” This narrow analysis then takes the uncomplicated form of predicting trends and counting the poor. It is a cheap way of telling “the future of the poor.” But human lives can be impoverished in many different ways. Politically unfree citizens–whether rich or poor–are deprived of a basic constituent of good living. The same applies to such social deprivations as illiteracy, lack of health care, unequal attention to the elementary interests of women and of young girls and so on. Nor can we ignore the linkages between economic, political and social deprivations. Advocates of authoritarianism ask a misleading question, “Is political freedom conducive to development?,” overlooking the fact that political freedom itself is part of development. In answer to the wrongly asked question, they respond with a wrongly given answer: “Growth rates of GDP are higher in nondemocratic countries than in democratic ones.” There is no confirmation of this oft-repeated belief in extensive empirical studies. Sure, South Korea might have grown fast enough before the re-establishment of democracy, but not so the less democratic North Korea. And democratic Botswana certainly grew much faster than authoritarian Ethiopia or Ghana.
