Global Poverty

Prof. Cuz Potter

Division of International Studies
Korea University
Fall 2014

2 Introduction

Imagine that each member of your family had only 800 won (=1 USD at PPP) to spend each day on shelter, food, clothing, and other expenses. For one in every six people on our planet this is their daily reality. This course seeks first and foremost to elucidate the lives of the world’s poorest people, examining their strategies for surviving another day, another week. To help these individuals improve their lives, however, requires that we situate them in their broader political economic context. Being poor is not simply about having enough money. We will explore alternative approaches to conceiving of and measuring poverty and then investigate some of the different policies implied by each of these approaches.

3 Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be knowledgeable on:

1. Diverse measurements and definitional debates of poverty and the rationales behind such measures and debates.
2. The conditions with which the poorest of humanity must cope everyday and the strategies they employ to do so.
3. Different responses to poverty and attempts at poverty alleviation from different actor groups, including governments, the poor themselves, international institutions, and private sector non-profits.

4 Course Requirements

• A one-page Reaction Paper (RP) is due electronically by 9am TUESDAY morning each week for 7 out of the 13 weeks for which there are readings. This allows you to choose which weeks to write a reflection paper. The papers will not be graded with a letter grade, but will be allocated from zero to five points depending on how actively your paper engages the material. The paper should usually be 350–500 words (about one page single-spaced). These brief papers are intended to facilitate class discussion in seminar. You can use the Reaction Paper (RP) to ask for clarification about any aspect of the readings you did not fully understand and/or to express an opinion about one or more of the readings. In general, I would advise you to focus the RP on only one of the readings assigned for each week. RPs should be clearly written, spell-checked, stylistically polished, and grammatically correct.
• In groups of three of four you will conduct and reflect upon a household budgeting exercise. This project will entail first preparing a household budget for a fictitious Korean family. On the basis of your experience preparing their budget, your group will write a short paper (1,000 to 1,500 words) explaining how your household budget relates to the readings through Week 5.
• Class attendance is not mandatory, but content unique to the lectures will appear on the final exam, so attendance is advised.
• A group research paper will be required. A list of acceptable topics will be provided. Your group of three is free to choose any one of these topics. The paper must be 3,000–4,000 words long (not including cover pages and bibliographies). Late papers will lose ten points (one letter grade) per day. See the section on the paper for full details.
• You will be individually responsible for editing another team’s draft paper in a double-blind peer review process. This exercise provides an opportunity to apply your analytical and writing skills to another topic, thereby strengthening those skills in both yourself and your colleagues. See the section on the paper for full details.
• There will brief final exam.

5 Grading

6 Plagiarism

Plagiarism is absolutely unacceptable. If plagiarism is detected, you will receive an F for the course. There will be no exceptions. Please note that plagiarism is much broader than many students realize. You are encouraged to look at this excellent summary of plagiarism from Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml), and you will be held to its standards.

7 Important dates

8 Required texts

The following books are available through Kyobo Books or . They will also be on reserve at the central library (in both Korean and English if available).

• Dambisa Moyo. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009.
• Ananya Roy. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Routledge, New York, 2010.

All other materials will be available electronically through the class website and as a small reader.

9 Schedule of Topics and Reading

All the readings below will be available electronically and a reader. In addition, further readings may be assigned to compliment and integrate current events into the course discussions.

Module 1: What does it mean to be poor?

Week 1 (Sept. 2 and 4): Introduction

Week 2 (Sept. 11): Measuring and creating poverty

1. John Iceland. Poverty in America: A Handbook. University of California Press, second edition, 2006, chapters 2 and 3.

Week 3 (Sept. 16 and 18): Freedom and capabilities

1. Martha Craven Nussbaum. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press, Cambridge, 2011, chapters 1, 2, and 3.

Week 4 (Sept. 23 and 25): Shelter poverty and the working poor
Household budgeting exercise issued.

1. Michael Stone. Shelter Poverty: New Ideas on Housing Affordability. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1993, chapters 1 and pages 32–36 of chapter 2.
2. David K. Shipler. The Working Poor. Vintage Books, New York, 2005, introduction and chapter 2.

Week 5 (Sept. 30 and Oct. 2): Inequality

1. Nancy Birdsall. Inequality matters: Why globalization doesn’t lift all boats. Boston Review, March/April 2007.
2. OECD. OECD Economic Surveys: Korea, chapter Promoting social cohesion in Korea, pages 111–145. OECD, 2012.

Suggested readings:

1. Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire. New ways of looking at old issues: inequality and growth. Journal of Development Economics, 57:259–287, 1998.

Module 2: What’s wrong with capital?

Week 6 (Oct. 7): Debt
Household budgeting paper due.

1. Michael Hudson. The archaeology of money: Debt versus barter theories of money’s origins. In L. Randall Wray, editor, Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes, chapter 5, pages 99–127. Edward Elgar, Northampton, 2004.

Related reading:

1. David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House Publishing, 2011.

Week 7 (Oct. 14 and 16): Dead Capital Group paper topic due Thursday.

1. Hernando de Soto. The mystery of capital : why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else. Basic Books, New York, 2000, chapters 3 and 6.

Week 8 (Oct. 21 and 23): Midterm exam period. No classes.

Week 9 (Oct. 28 and 30): Dead Aid I

1. Moyo, chapters 1–4.

Week 10 (Nov. 4 and 6): Dead Aid II

1. Moyo, chapters 5–10.

Module 3: Poverty managers

Week 11 (Nov. 11 and 13): Democratization of capital and development

1. Roy, chapter 1.

Week 12 (Nov. 18 and 20): Circuits of capital and truth

1. Roy, chapter 2.

Week 13 (Nov. 25 and 27): Dissent
Draft of group paper due in class Tuesday.

1. Roy, chapter 3.

Week 14 (Dec. 2 and 4): Debt, discipline, and dependence
Group paper edits due Tuesday.

1. Roy, chapter 4.

Week 15 (Dec. 9 and 11): Making poverty capital

1. Roy, chapter 5.

Week 16 (Dec. 11): Exam Group paper due before the exam starts.

10 Group paper

Length: 3,000–4,000 words

This paper is modeled on the early stages of writing an academic paper. In groups of three, you will select one the following questions:

1. Are conditional cash transfers effective in reducing poverty?
2. What is the impact of mining developments on local communities?
3. Does poverty deconcentration improve economic outcomes for poor households?
4. How does limited water access impact the lives of poor households?
5. Does for-profit microcredit produce better or worse results than non-profit micro-credit?
6. Does secondary school education improve the life chances of slum households?
7. What is the most important factor in improving rural primary school education: teachers, materials, buildings, or income?
8. Does slum upgrading lead to displacement?

You will then assemble a literature review of scholarly articles that address your question of interest. The literature review should cover at least six pertinent articles per student. Google Scholar and JSTOR, among others, are excellent resources for finding appropriate resources.

10.1 Draft: November 25

A draft of your literature review is due on November 25. You must submit one copy for each member of your group. These will be redistributed to your colleagues for editing and comments.

10.1.1 Formatting

You should turn in a stapled, hard copy. Though you should include a title, your name and any other identifying information (e.g., student ID number) should NOT appear anywhere in the document. These precautions are being put in place to ensure privacy in editing. Though I generally like Chicago author-date format for bibliographies and citations, I do not care what format you use as long as you are consistent and the format includes all relevant bibliographic information.

10.2 Editing: December 2

You will receive an anonymous paper written by one of your colleagues in class on November 25. In class on December 4th, we will return them to their rightful owners. In the meantime, you are required to provide editorial and critical assistance to help your colleague improve his or her paper. To do so successfully, there are four primary requirements:

1. Write a summary of the paper that does not exceed 100 words.
2. Rewrite at least one paragraph of 150 words or more. In rewriting the paragraph, your aim should be to make the paragraph clearer and better organized. Though less important for your grade, you should also strive to improve the paragraph stylistically to make the prose more engaging, e.g., replacing passive with active verbs. (I recognize that this will not be easy if English is your second language, but you should try nonetheless.)
3. Throughout the text, you should identify sentences or ideas that are unclear and confusing.
4. Consider the overall organization of the paper’s argument. Does it follow a logical progression? Make suggestions for how the paper might more effectively make its argument.

On this date, you will hand in the hard copy you originally received (with your written edits) with a separate sheet (or two) stapled on top with only your student ID, the paper’s title, your 100-word summary, the original paragraph you chose to edit, your edited paragraph, and your general comments on the paper. Your name should not appear on the document.

10.3 Final draft: December 11, prior to the final exam

After receiving your colleagues’ edits, you will have a short period to incorporate or ignore them. On this date, you will hand in a hard copy of your paper as well as the original drafts with your colleague’s edits.