Poverty

Abstract

Despite all the achievements by the human race, we still cannot figure out how to beat poverty, defined as freedom from poor health, the wealth of knowledge from education, decent work, and a clean and livable environment. Attacking poverty successfully requires something new. This book focuses on one such element—a shift in human consciousness, a global community psychology. The UN Millennium Development Goals are a step in the right direction. They were the most comprehensive, ambitious, and integrated grand plan for human development. Yet in practice they fell short on everyday human dynamics, the nuts and bolts for enabling capability. Global community psychology is a cross-level, interdisciplinary approach to poverty reduction. It stresses interactions between individuals, groups, and macro structures. At its heart, the act of organization matches individual talent to social purposes. Now aid workers meet community expectations; banks have the confidence in people to enable business loans for promising entrepreneurs; and corporations have the moral compass to provide decent work for motivated communities of workers. At its heart, global community psychology is not a servant of power but the development of freedom. If poverty is about lack of opportunity and prosperity, the chance to realize all that we can be then anti-poverty psychology is not about “fixing the person” but enabling the context. Psychology has valuable and so far overlooked contributions to make to this overarching goal, and the book provides concrete examples of ‘how’ global community psychology can be made to work for a greater human good.

Co-authored with Emeritus Professor Anthony J. Marsella.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel (17 October 1988).