Global Income Inequality

Everyone starts off poor by birth, we get richer as we progress through life. You may be born to a rich family but you only benefit "indirectly" through the decisions that your parents made for you. Children being awarded money as soon as they are born is very rare.

Even in an extreme situation where you allocate money to the child before it was even born this still stays true. The child benefits as soon as it is born and being handed the money, again it became richer because it progressed through life. If it wasn't born it wouldn't get richer.

Now that we have established the baseline. It's time to think of what truly creates poverty.

First of all, giving birth to more humans can create poverty if the parents have to divide their preexisting wealth over more children. A lot of preexisting wealth is based on the availability of resources and thus they are physically bounded. Some people might insist that the planet can support 10 billion people but they make no statement about the quality of life. There won't be 10 billion Bill Gates on this planet, some of them will have to cut back on their quality of life, some of them a lot.

Fundamental progress and research is very difficult. There are people who can pull themselves up but it would be fruitless, for say the entirety of India, to go through the last 200 years of technological progress alone because it refused to accept help from richer nations. Existing wealth is not something to despise, it's something to take advantage of. Lots of Indians move to Europe or USA and earn far more than in their home country. Some of them send part paychecks back home and thus take advantage of that wealth.

Public infrastructure provides a baseline of progress through life. The availability of roads ensures that people can transport goods like water and food. It is very easy to get stuck on a wet dirt road in Cameroon. Some people live extremely far away from water. I can't explain why they would possibly walk an hour or two just to fetch water but I am 100% certain that road infrastructure would turn this into a non issue even if the water truck had to drive 500km away from a desalination plant. The availability of training and education ensures that people can get a high income job and so on. Infrastructure tends to benefit everyone equally.

$1 in Niger buys you quite a lot in Niger (the first African country I randomly clicked in the interactive chart at the bottom).

$1 in USA doesn't buy you shit in USA.