Poverty is not an academic problem. It's a human problem. There will always be poverty. It can't be solved. To solve poverty you must solve human greed.
This I think is the wisest comment I've read here. We live in an age where many people earnestly believe they can reengineer society. They identify aspects of human nature which they don't like and think it's open to reeducation. There is such a thing as human nature. Tabula rasa is a myth.
Society has been re-engineered any number of times, to good and bad effect. If you think that how it is where you are right now is how it is, has been, and always will be everywhere, you're wrong. Society is made of people, including visionaries and others who are captivated by their visions and have the ability to implement them. Contemplating human society is not the same as contemplating the stars.
Society isn't engineered, it evolves. If you try to engineer society it'll never come out quite the same way you intended; there are always unintended consequences because people are so messy and complicated.
Primary example: society is continually engineered to eliminate poverty, and yet poverty persists.
Society evolves. Society is often engineered. The attempts often turn out badly, or well. Many societies are engineered to reduce poverty, and many societies have.
It's not a greed problem. Some people are driven to achieve. If that's greed, fine, call it greed. But others are satisfied to just get by, or subsist. They don't actively try to change anything about their situation. That's not caused by the "greed" of others. It's just their nature. So I agree, there will always be poverty because there will always be people who are satisfied to live in it. And by "satisfied" I don't mean happy, I mean not sufficiently motivated to change.
