In his recent Time Magazine cover story on poverty (pdf version), Jeff Sachs describes the plight of the "bottom billion", the poorest members of the planet that exist on less than one dollar a day. He describes how two centuries ago, essentially everybody on the planet was comparably poor. Since then, however, economic growth has been distributed very unevenly due to many factors (geography, climate -- even luck). These days wealthy countries have left the "bottom billion" far behind.

This raises a central challenge in combatting poverty: If the rich never come in contact with the very poor, how can one expect them to have sufficient empathy? I have no doubt that if you dropped any American or European into, say, rural Kenya, they would immediate react with "wait, this just isn't right -- with a little money we can help these people help themselves". Unfortunately very few outsiders ever see rural Kenya.

I don't have the answer on how to increase the contact, and therefore the empathy, with the bottom billion. Photo essays and news reports aren't doing their job. Tours? Reality TV? Webcams? We clearly need a way to better empathize with the daily struggles of the poorest on our planet.