How Do You Solve Poverty? Make a Toy Block!

This is a marvelous 3-minute video that shows, in bite-size form, how poverty can be addressed and even overcome. The standard Western answer to the problem of poverty today is to throw scads of money at it. That’s well-intentioned and perhaps may have some positive short-term effects. But it seems a far better approach in the long-term to create wealth where there currently is none. That means creating jobs through the ingenuity of the human imagination and the workings of the free market.

No less an authority, and champion sunglasses-wearer, than Bono (who famously campaigned for debt forgiveness) recently acknowledged this. And see this surprising study by Yale University that showed the stunning effects of the free market upon the global populace. Let’s hope the ideas of entrepreneurship and personal enfranchisement catch on afresh thanks to excellent outfits like AEI’s Values & Capitalism project, led by shrewd theorist Arthur Brooks, of whom I am a decided fan (and who you most definitely should be familiar with).