Blog Post

AEIdeas

Free trade and global investment aren’t just economic priorities, they’re moral ones. It’s an important aspect missing from the current American political debate on trade and globalization.

Simply put: Free enterprise reduces human misery like nothing else. Over the past 30 years, the share of our fellow humans living in extreme poverty has decreased to 21% from 52%. That’s a billion fewer people in extreme poverty. An extraordinary achievement. The Economist magazine correctly says that “the biggest poverty-reduction measure of all is liberalizing markets to let poor people get richer. That means freeing trade between countries (Africa is still cruelly punished by tariffs) and within them (China’s real great leap forward occurred because it allowed private business to grow).”

Disappointingly, many Americans are unaware of this massive reduction in poverty, and how it happened. A report from the Barna Group — a research firm that focuses on the intersections of politics and culture, often with a faith-based angle — finds that 84% of Americans were unaware that poverty is way down, while 67% thought it was on the rise.

And this is just as distressing: Despite that two-thirds majority thinking poverty is going up, fewer and fewer Americans cite global poverty as something worth worrying about, falling to 16% in 2013. Moreover:

21% say poverty can never be eradicated;

20% assume not enough people care;

17% see the global effort as too weak to work;

17% think the problem is too big to tackle well; and

14% mistrust governments in impoverished nations.

Even those who do realize poverty eradication is near and getting nearer, fifty to sixty percent of respondents cite corruption, needs within the US, and lack of knowledge of where to donate effectively as major barriers to contributing.

An important note: True to the organization’s faith-based interest, it asked whether Christians specifically differed in their perceptions of the global poverty problem. They do. Whereas 32% of the general population think it’s possible to end poverty in the next quarter-century, that rises to 48% of practicing millennial and under-40 Christians and 37% of practicing Christians as a whole. And when asked whether or not the possibility of poverty-eradication would change their behavior, 45% of the general public said, yes it would, opposed to two-thirds of Christians.

Check out the report, which includes a number of cool graphics, one of which is above and another which we’ve included below.

If Americans, living in the richest and arguably one of the most (if not the most) information-rich, creative, and entrepreneurial nations in the world, grasp the information presented here (or in the World Bank’s most recent report), who knows how much faster we can progress?