0150: Savings
I had a little insight while reading a bit of Jeffrey Sach’s book, The End of Poverty, last night. Sachs was discussing the importance of savings in moving onto the bottom wrong of the economic ladder, and he included some World Bank data detailing the gross savings for different economies. Rates for Least-Developed Countries in 2004 was at 10% and Low-Income Countries was at 19%.
Today I went to the World Bank data to see the United States savings rate at that time. Our gross savings was at 13%. For comparison, the rising economies of China and India had a rates of 47% and 32% respectively. And both have increased since.
This validated my thoughts of the previous night that we aren’t doing as we should in this nation. Around a billion people are barely surviving and a lot of us are worried that our computers or cars aren’t fast and new enough (myself included).
CNN reported an interesting story today:
Jude Ndambuki teaches high school chemistry, but when he’s not in class, you might find him Dumpster diving for discarded computers.
For the past eight years, the Kenya native has been refurbishing computers, printers and other electronic educational resources otherwise headed for landfills, then sending them to grateful students back home.
“The children in Kenya have very few resources; even a pencil is very hard to get,” said Ndambuki, 51, who lives in the New York City suburb of Dobbs Ferry. “Being one of the kids who actually experienced very dire poverty in Kenya, I feel any part that I can play to make the life of kids better, I better do it.”
I understand the isolationists points of view in trade disputes that we need to take care of our own first. But we have, and now we don’t even save “another man’s treasure” to help out the rest of the world. If there is a plan for peace, it will probably have much more to do with lifting up economically than talking to diplomatically or breaking down through aggression.
