Non Fiction Reading Response on "The End of Extreme Poverty?"

            In the December 9^th edition of Upfront Magazine, there was an article called The End of Extreme Poverty? by Nicholas D. Kristof.  Basically, the article states that the majority of extreme poverty in the world is fading away.  The author shows that vaccines to deadly diseases are becoming more available in poverty-stricken places around the world, schools are being built in areas of countries that lack free education, there is now more technology to identify certain diseases, and there is more clean water and sanitation programs to prevent illness.  With these new actions being taken, people can now focus on getting ahead in life, instead of focusing on how to keep their starving families alive.

            The author is trying to convince the reader that the battle with extreme life-threatening poverty is coming to an end.  The author states that, “The goal is to end extreme poverty by 2030– and we’re close.”  This means that we have a fair shot at making this world healthier, more educated, and happier on the whole.  One section of the article shows that the cases of polio worldwide went from 350,000 in 20 countries in 1988, to 123 in 3 countries in 2012.  This is a humungous change, and if we can do that in only 24 years, then who knows how far we’ll get by 2030.  

            I think that this article is biased in a way that the author supports the cause, but besides that, the author sticks to the facts.  Anyway, whoever doesn’t feel positively about this is a bit strange to me.  The author makes sure to quote relevant sources, such as the World Bank, which in this article states that, “the share of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty has been reduced from 1 in 2 in 1980 to 1 in 5 today.”  This contributes to the Upfront article by showing the reader that this statistic is real and it emphasizes how much we have changed in the past 33 years.  I don’t think that anyone’s perspective is missing in this text because the author makes a point to include the story of a mother that has to choose which of her children can go underneath the family’s one mosquito net every night to protect them from insects that could possibly carry diseases like malaria.  Overall, the author does a good job to include every perspective that is relevant to the text, and to be unbiased.

            After reading this article, I have realized that people are getting the things they need in other countries and I used to think that people were just getting poorer.  It really makes me happy that things are getting better and I hope that by 2030 the problem of extreme poverty will go away.