Thomas Pogge, professor in philosophy and international affairs at Yale University, spoke about how poverty is not being addressed in the current global political climate yesterday at a lecture titled "Human Rights and Global Justice."

Pogge's first main contention was poverty is a human rights violation as defined by article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, which starts out by saying "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family."

Joseph Savage, sophomore in philosophy, said he enjoyed the human rights focus at the beginning of the lecture because he felt it related to him as a philosophy major.

"It was good to hear the human rights part, and the obligations that we have to the rest of the world," Savage said.

Supportive figures were then brought up to uphold the assertion that poverty is a human rights violation.

Pogge mentioned that 18 million people die every year from a poverty related cause, which is equivalent to 50,000 people every day. Then, he pointed out that three billion people live on less then $2.50 a day. The shortfall between actual wealth and that figure is equivalent to $507 billion which is about two thirds of the U.S. defense budget, he said.

"The world poverty problem is a joke compared to the recent financial crisis," Pogge said, emphasizing how treatable poverty is.

Global institutional arrangements were blamed for much of the poverty crisis, and Pogge emphasized the moral obligation of the institutions to be fair toward poorer countries. Examples of unfair practices that were cited include protectionism, permissive environmental rules, sustaining human rights violating regimes and allowing illicit financial flows out of poor countries.

Human rights violating regimes include the practices of allowing the elite of these governments to remain in control by letting them borrow, sell off national resources, buy firearms and maintain despicable labor standards.

Pogge said that unfortunately, none of these unfair practices can be dealt with effectively by the citizens of these smaller countries because, unlike corporations and citizen groups in the rich countries, they cannot gain representation when international agreements are brokered.

The last part of Pogge's lecture addressed the world's attempts to formulate a response to the poverty problems. At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, the world promised to halve the number of people in poverty by 2015. The current agreement though, which was revised in 2000 with the Millennium Development goals, backdated the goal so the new promise was to halve the proportion of poor people starting in 1990.

Pogge said that this practice is taking into account a lot of growth in East Asia that took place in the early 1990s when China started growing a middle class.

Thomas Summers, sophomore in economics, said that he enjoyed the practical applications of the lecture.

"I liked his discussion about ending subsidies," Summers said. "I thought what he said about how it distorts comparative advantage was very insightful."