the pope misses the point

I see the pope is calling for an end to poverty. Gee, wouldn't that be nice?

At a time of world food shortage, of financial turmoil, of old and new forms of poverty, of disturbing climate change, of violence and deprivation which force many to leave their homelands in search of a less precarious form of existence, of the ever present threat of terrorism, of growing fears over the future, it is urgent to rediscover grounds for hope.

I wonder if the pope has ever given any thought to why people are poor in the first place? And to what would actually have to happen for people to become richer?

Because it isn't a secret. The basic equation was figured out 200 years ago by Thomas Malthus: for people to become richer, economic growth has to be faster than population growth. Without some kind of limit on population growth, the geometric increase in population will always overwhelm any conceivable increase in the total wealth of the society. This is what has happened in the parts of the world that are still desperately poor. Africa received a huge economic boost in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of new agricultural techniques and foreign investment in mines and oil wells, and the total economic output of the continent doubled. But so did the population, and so most Africans are just as poor now as they were in 1950. In the rich parts of the world, population growth has been kept low, certainly much lower than we could theoretically sustain. So we keep getting richer.

If the pope is serious about ending poverty, he should be out promoting birth control, because in the long run only a society with a modest rate of population growth can lift its people out of poverty. By opposing birth control, the Catholic church has made itself the most important force in the world working to keep poor people poor.