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Articles

World Poverty and the Duty of Assistance

Our intrepid philosophical investigator Grant Bartley files a conference report.

The London School of Economics (LSE) is a complex of buildings hidden in the heart of London, sandwiched between Covent Garden, the lawyers’ hive of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the Strand (at the other end of which is Trafalgar Square). The LSE was Karl Popper’s university, and in June it played host to a one-day UNESCO-sponsored conference on poverty put together by the Forum for European Philosophy.

The chairwoman started with these statistics: the richest 15% of the world’s population control 80% of the world’s product, while the poorest 17% together control 0.3%. She then pointed out that the top fifth of the world’s population is 300 times richer than the bottom fifth.

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