This fall, students in my Georgetown University School of Foreign Service freshman seminar are exploring a deceptively simple question: Ending Poverty? We examine the remarkable progress made against extreme deprivation, but also ask what the measures we commonly use miss, why hardship persists amid abundance, and what it would mean to take the word ending seriously. The seminar starts with efforts to understand how and why poverty and inequality are seen so differently, for example by reading work by Amartya Sen and country narratives about the meaning of poverty documented in the World Bank Voices of the Poor study. We then move on to policies and actions aimed to speed progress in combatting it.
For an early assignment, I asked students to write a blog on an aspect of poverty that concerned them. The blog format was designed to allow them a wide range of creative reflections without the more demanding structures that policy writing requires. Their submissions ranged from our own campus in Northwest Washington, DC, to the metropolitan area to India and Ghana; from environmental hazards and women’s work to mental strain, public benefits, and the indignities that can accompany asking for help. I was impressed by the students’ readiness to make a moral argument, with their strong voices. No one treated poverty as a distant technical problem or one that did not concern them in direct ways.
One student began with a brunch invitation. The unexpectedly large bill at a Dupont Circle restaurant prompted him to ask: “What if that ‘time’ [together] involves an ATM?” His question was not whether friends should stop eating out. It was whether the ordinary price of belonging can quietly exclude students with less money. At a university committed to cura personalis, care for the whole person, this is a question close to home. We can begin by noticing the assumptions embedded in our invitations, club activities, and expectations of campus life.
Another student called poverty a “ghost” at Georgetown: present, but easy to overlook from within a comfortable “bubble.” She wrote, “The Ghost of Poverty isn’t scary because we do not see it. Instead, it becomes concerning when we become so comfortable that we stop caring about it.” Her appeal is to listen beyond our familiar circles. The next step is to ask where hardship is obscured on campus itself—in food insecurity, emergency expenses, or the cost of opportunities that are nominally open to all.
Other writers exposed the limitations of apparently straightforward solutions. A student examining public assistance asked what happens when a small raise puts essential support at risk. His conclusion was bracing: “If earning more is the path to escaping poverty, earning more should actually push you forward, not pull you two steps back.” Another questioned what we celebrate when a person crosses an international poverty line yet remains economically insecure. His challenge was not to dismiss real progress. It was to ask whether our benchmarks capture the life people can actually lead.
The strongest blogs moved clearly between measurement and lived experience. A student who struggled through purchasing-power calculations imagined a parent putting children to bed and immediately thinking about groceries. A writer on environmental poverty observed: “The problem is that environmental disasters do not simply end when the water goes down.” Recovery depends on savings, housing, public services, and political attention—resources distributed unequally long before a flood arrives. A student writing about women’s employment in India challenged an equally tidy equation: education leads to a job, and a job ends poverty. What kind of work? How steady is it? Who controls the earnings? Who bears the unpaid labor at home?
One submission put dignity at the center. “Pity can reduce people to victims; beauty can romanticize hardship,” the student wrote. “What matters is whether people experiencing poverty are represented as agents and not objects of our compassion.” She asked us to consider not only whether assistance reaches people, but how they are treated when it does. This is a question for anyone who may someday design a program, allocate funds, produce an image, or write about another person’s life.
These students are already keenly aware of something that can take professionals years to grasp: poverty is not a single deficit awaiting a single remedy. It involves income and assets, certainly, but also exposure to risk, unequal power, constrained choices, and the experience of being unheard. Their writing has humor, anger, imagination, and a strong moral voice. Those are strengths to cultivate, not polish away.
Our next challenge is to join that conviction to discipline. In my comments, I have urged students to keep their vivid scenes while asking what each scene can—and cannot—establish. One expensive brunch does not, by itself, prove a pattern of discrimination. One account of hardship does not describe an entire country. A statistic needs a date and a definition; a causal claim needs evidence. A benefit threshold must be checked against the particular program and household it concerns. These are not objections to moral urgency. They are ways to make it more trustworthy.
I ask students to carry their arguments one step further. If a blog identifies a hidden cost of campus belonging, what norm might students change? If assistance humiliates applicants, what would a more respectful application process look like? If additional earnings trigger a loss of support, which rule should change, and at what cost? “We should care” is an important beginning. It is not yet a plan.
That is the continuing work of Ending Poverty? We will test claims, encounter perspectives missing from our own accounts, and ask who has the authority to define both the problem and its solution. My hope is that students leave the seminar neither reassured by easy declarations of progress nor defeated by the scale of injustice. The question mark should keep us intellectually honest. The moral force in their writing should keep us from standing still.
