The current appropriation of wealth from our planet is highly uneven. Affluent people use vastly more of the world's resources, and they do so unilaterally, without giving any compensation to the global poor for their disproportionate consumption. Invoking three different grounds of injustice - the effects of shared social institutions, the uncompensated exclusion from the use of natural resources, and the effects of a common and violent history - the author's goal is to show that it may be possible to gather adherents of the dominant strands of Western normative political thought into a coalition focused on eradicating world poverty through the introduction of a Global Resources Dividend or GRD. A previous version of Thomas Pogge, "Eradicating Systemic Poverty: brief for a global resources dividend", was published in the Journal of Human Development (Volume 2, Number 1/January 1, 2001, pages 59-77, published by Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group). The Sur Journal would like to thank Taylor & Francis Ltd. for the permission to reprint this article (permission's reference number: MW/CJHD/N503).
Systemic world poverty; Natural resources; Economic inequality; Global institutional order