Free Money

By Jake Bennett, in The Boston Globe

There are all sorts of things very poor people living in poor countries don’t have. They lack secondary-school educations, usually, and good medical care. They lack steady work and life insurance, bank accounts and competent legal representation, adequate fertilizer for their crops, adequate protein in their diets, reliable electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, low-interest loans, incubators for their premature babies, vaccinations and good schools for their children.

But the central thing they lack is money. That is what makes them, by definition, poor: International aid organizations define the “very poor” as those who live on less than a dollar a day.

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