Foreword
Material poverty is now also clearly on display in the Western showcase, where the possession of wealth offers no safeguards against spiritual poverty. In Plato’s Symposium, the myth of Penia, goddess of poverty, and Poros, the god personifying a wealth of expedients and the ability to satisfy one’s every desire, is a metaphor for the conflict between that part of mankind which is opulent, yet going through a growth crisis, and the indigent part of mankind in search of affluence and consumption.
The ancient forms of poverty, entrenched in the history of the peoples of the South of the world, now encounter new forms of poverty brought about by poorly distributed affluence and by the imperfect mechanisms of the global system. Different and unequal levels of indigence coagulate around the destinies of nation-states – increasingly interdependent destinies where public powers find it hard to govern specific, critical, territorial processes, originating from unemployment and underemployment. Protected social classes, threatened by decreased purchasing power, are full of misgivings regarding their future as consumers. Their accumulation of wealth and thus their savings are being eroded away, while consumer credit generates illusory income and legions of new, anxious debtors.
In global terms, the number of people in the developing countries living on less than one dollar a day dropped from 1 billion 250 thousand in 1990 to 980 million in 2000, a 19% reduction. This is objective progress, and there is every reason to hope UN Millennium Development Goal No. 1 may be achieved by 2015, though the tendency towards improvement registered over recent years is far from homogeneous. Most of the quantitative progress made in the fight against poverty is attributable to the rapid economic growth of Asia and the Far East, with India acting as the driving force for the subcontinent as well.
The new social equation – more consumption, more imbalance and inequality – generates new parallel and complementary phenomena: welfare with fewer resources, ‘low-cost’ neoconsumers, lowering of the threshold of economic survival, permanent job insecurity and the emergence, from the USA to Europe, of an age of ‘middle-class poverty’. The safeguards that the twentieth century conceived - starting with the Welfare State - no longer seem capable alone of protecting the system of accumulation of wealth and democratic political exchange against the social, political, ethnic and religious pressures of our times.
Looming now on the horizon, with impelling and immediate force, is the need for a new balance between market and democracy, between public service and private enterprise. What is demanded is a new order of prosperity, which far from imagining a utopian egualitarian sharing of resources, sounds the praises of an economic system based on meaningful mutual relations, altruism, and willingness to give in the general interest.
The Pio Manzù Centre calls upon all men and women of good will to chart innovative lines of analysis, but also scenarios of hope and positive planning for overcoming the spectre of the third millennium, namely widespread poverty in the context of unequal development.