Jake's View | World is growing richer and poor are slowly benefiting
Comments on wealth polarity often fail to acknowledge that people are living longer, healthier lives and many nations’ fortunes are improving
How good it would be to see a return of the Oxfam I once knew and admired, of village level, muddy-kneed poverty relief work rather than this political advocacy lobby it has become.
But, no, Oxfam is off this week to the world's most pretentious hot air talk shop, the World Economic Forum, an annual get-together of name-droppers in Davos, Switzerland.
There it will lecture others like itself on the need for governments to do something about the way the world is going from bad to worse. These others will then all nod when not absorbed in puffing themselves up about the bigger names they are sitting next to.
Here is an alternative view from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, not a man I much admired when he built his wealth on lifting other people's ideas in software, but who I now think more of for his subsequent work in international poverty relief:
"By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse."
