Poverty and its Traps: A Macro Perspective As of 2013, about half of the world – three billion people – lived on less than $2.50 a day, nearly one billion people went into the 21st century still being illiterate (which also means that technology would deem useless to them), and one of two children in the world – about one billion – lived in poverty: 640 million without adequate shelter, 400 million with no access to safe water, and 270 million with no access to health care.[1] As of 2015 (according to 2011 statistics), the World Bank estimated that there are about one billion impoverished people in developing countries who live on $1.25 a day or less.[2] Once again, this affects areas such as hunger, education, diseases, and development in …show more content…
showed that temporal orientation was also shaped by an individual’s childhood environment, leading those who grew up in a resource-scarce environment to see the short-term present as important, while those who grew up in a resource-plentiful environment saw the long-term future as important, thus influencing economic behaviors in general.[16] The former was especially true when the individual was exposed to mortality cues; for example, as found in Griskevicius, et al.’s studies, an individual named Ray Otero was raised in a poor neighborhood in Puerto Rico and immigrated to the United States to work as a mechanic in New York. After the attack of September 11 in 2001, Otero decided to spend his savings on the lottery, spending over $30,000 of his earnings every year for a chance to win. This study shows that life course and temporal orientation in regular, well-off individuals, whether that is fast and riskier (short-term oriented) versus slow and more secure (LTO), are shaped and predicted by childhood environments. In essence, childhood environments that are surrounded by factors that correlate directly with poverty, such as harshness, unpredictability, and resource scarcity, influence short-term oriented behavior in the future (page