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Poverty goals? No, it’s extreme wealth we

should be targetingZoe WilliamsIf we had focused on the real causes of poverty over the past 30 years we probably wouldn’t need the

United Nations’ sustainable development goals now

Monday 19 October 2015 07.00 BST

The sustainable development goals – 17 in all, starting with “end poverty, in all its

forms, everywhere” – were officially adopted at the UN in New York last month.Celebrities approved immediately, experiencing the goals as a kind of moral brand-

 building exercise, choosing their favourite and inviting fans to favourite it too.

The pope was a little more reserved, issuing the thought-provoking, slightly wordycritique: “We must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism whichwould assuage our consciences.” But the mood overall was triumphant – the millenniumdevelopment goals had worked, repaying the ambition of the international community lastime around, so why not think even bigger?

If the pope and a few rogue academics expressed unease, it took a whimsical Swedishelectro band to get to the root of the problem. The Knife produced a graphic novellaannouncing a new millennium goal: end extreme wealth. “As we all know,” says a UNofficial with a forbidding fringe, “extreme wealth is a huge problem in this world.”

“Sometimes I felt overwhelmed with hopelessness,” adds a UN researcher. “Many of thesepeople live in a very limited environment … their lives are restricted by old traditions andcultural ideas about how to live. For example, Ben, a 45-year-old, very wealthy man: hislife revolves around very trivial things. He collects antiques similar to how the squirrelcollects nuts.”

Here, rushing towards your face like the ground after a pratfall, is everything that’s wrongwith sustainable development goals – the reason their hopeful language sounds so tinnyand unconvincing, the reason dyed-in-the-wool atheists find themselves siding with thepope, even when he isn’t entirely explicit about his objections.

The international community, having first established that it speaks for everyone (TheFuture We Want was the title of the foundational document from Rio – as though challengor dissent, if it came, would be from those opposed to modernity), proceeded to lookthrough the wrong end of the telescope. It is impossible to fixate on an income problem –

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whether a low income or a high one – without finding implicit fault in the people who areon that income.

Furthermore, as Martin Kirk from the activist network the Rules pointed out, all thelanguage of sustainable goals frames poverty as a disease: eradicable, no match for theingenuity of mankind, but fundamentally nobody’s fault. It is a landscape whereeveryone’s a hero and nobody’s a villain; one in which unfair trade agreements, land grabs

structural debt relations, privatisation of publicly owned utilities and tax evasion neverhappened.

Poverty is not a naturally occurring germ or virus; it is anthropogenically created thoughwealth extraction. Any goal that fails to recognise this is not only unlikely to succeed, butcan only be understood as a deliberate act of diversion, drawing attention away from whatmight work; in its place, the anodyne, fairytale language of hope, in a post-ideologicalworld where all politicians just want what’s best and a billionaire is just a benefactor youhaven’t met yet.

Joe Brewer, also for the Rules, undertook an analysis of the language of growth in thesustainable goals. GDP, perpetually growing by no obvious means beyond enthusiasm, isthe principle, indeed the only driver of poverty eradication – as well it might be, once it hasobliquely been established that you’re not going to do anything about wealth extraction,either by governments or by corporations.

Corporations don’t feature at all in the report, even while many have more wealth andgreater reach than governments and indeed an ever more important “partnership” role inthe UN. The glaring contradiction is between relying on endless growth to end povertywhile at the same time taking “urgent action to combat climate change” (goal 13), and

vowing to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems” (goal15).

The incompatibility was pointed out in trenchant and unarguable language by theeconomist David Woodward, one of the UN’s own senior advisers. And yet Incrementum aAbsurdum (as Woodward’s paper was called) does indeed appear to be the plan: grow yourway out of poverty while simultaneously shrinking your way to sustainability.

These basic assumptions – poverty is the problem, growth is the answer, climate changecan be tackled separately to consumption, and corporate behaviour is neither here nor

there – extend far beyond the UN, into political cultures everywhere.

One is constantly told, on the progressive side, that social democracy has had its day because people generally have become meaner; attitudes to poverty have hardened, andgenerosity has withered, the man on the street is actually very judgmental about peoplewho can’t support themselves or their families. But how would attitudes look if we hadspent the past 30 years asking questions about the rich: their characters, their honesty,their industriousness, their contribution to society? If the problem facing the Britisheconomy had been identified as the destabilising effects of extreme wealth, how longwould it have been before the wealthy themselves came to be scrutinised?

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“He and his family,” the Knife’s researcher continues, of the High Net Worth IndividualBen, “are caught in a vicious circle of wanting more and more crap. They have very little orno concept of what democracy is.”

Asking questions about the rich has been portrayed since the dawn of wealth as envy;asking questions about the poor is considered practical and sympathetic, moral andproblem-solving. But no problem can be solved while political institutions won’t recognise

that poverty has a cause.