W, maybe I am missing something, but about 40 years ago Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon proposed a perfectly good instant technocratic fix that would make poverty (at least in the US) go away pretty much "poof"-ishly. This was the negative income tax aka the guaranteed annual income. If anyone (or any head of household, details matter but not here) below the poverty line received from the government the money to make up the difference between his or her income and poverty line + one cent, there would be no poverty.
[WS:] This solution is nothing more than state sponsored charity that does nothing to address the social structural causes of poverty which boils down of the subpopulation that is unemployable due to the lack of basic skills, culture of poverty etc. It tells you volumes that the US business depends on illegal immigration to meet their demand for labor, nut not on the domestic supplies of the "unemployable."
The Third world poverty has similar roots - their economies have very little to offer for sale to global capitalism, and they do so mainly because they lack the necessary human capital. This can be demonstrated by countries like Thailand where those segments of society supplying cheap goods for global capitalism fare far better than the true poor there.
In other words, the main structural cause of extreme poverty both in the Us and developing countries is the unemployability - due to the lack of human capital and investments - of large segments of the population. Government handouts will not solve those structural problems, only perpetuate them.
I understand that this view is very unpopular on the left, but we have to agree to disagree on this.
Wojtek