Book Review:

The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty, Jeremy Seabrook (New Internationalist) £7, 144 pages.

Talk of the abolition of poverty is just that – talk. ‘there is not the slightest chance that poverty will be abolished’, says Seabrook. On the contrary, the chasm between rich and poor widens. Bill Gates, the Sultan of Brunei and the Waltons (who own Wal-mart) have a combined wealth of some $135 billion. This equals the annual income of 600 million people living in the world’s poorest countries. Half the world still lives on less than $2 a day.

The creation of wealth is not the answer to world poverty, says Seabrook. It’s the problem. We are living with what Seabrook calls ‘a great lie’: that human life is enhanced in direct proportion to the amount of wealth an individual enjoys. A 'World Happiness Survey', conducted by the London School of Economics in 1998 found India to be the fifth happiest country in the world, with Britain at 32 and the US at 46. Ghana, Latvia, Croatia and Estonia all came above the US. Despite higher incomes, better health and much greater opportunity for women, Britons are increasingly depressed, unhappy in their relationships and alienated from civic society.