CHRONOLOGY OF POVERTY IN THE WORLD

• 10th century B.C.E.: The first use of the word poverty surfaces in the biblical world, referring to landowners who forced peasants to sell land.
• 495–429 B.C.E.: Under the rule of Pericles, Athens undertakes large-scale public works projects as a means of providing employment for the poor.
• 550 C.E.: Pope Gregory I of the Roman Catholic Church establishes the world’s first orphanage in the city of Milan, Italy.
• 1349: King Edward III of England issues the Statute of Labourers, giving greater power to feudal lords and prohibiting begging and giving, except for senior citizens and the physically disabled. Edward made a distinction between the “worthy poor,” which included widows, dependent children, and the disabled, and the “unworthy poor,” which included able-bodied adults.
• 1351: Pedro the Cruel of Castile orders all able-bodied, unemployed men in his kingdom to be flogged.
• 1381: Wat Tyler leads a peasant revolt against King Richard II of England. Following the invasion of the city of Canterbury, where Tyler’s mob murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, England’s leading religious figure, King Richard was forced to abolish feudal serfdom. The decision was later reversed.
• 1500–1600: The population of Europe nearly doubles in size, from 30 million to 60 million people.
• 1526: Juan Luis Vives publishes De Subventione Pauperum, in which he provides a theoretical justification for state-run poverty relief.
• 1529: The city-state of Venice (Italy) enacts a law requiring impoverished people to perform community service in order to receive a license for relief.
• 1531: England passes a law requiring local officials to interview people to determine whether they are suitable applicants for poverty relief. Emperor Charles V bans begging in the territories of Spain, Austria, Mexico, and Peru.
• 1534: The French city of Lyons creates a comprehensive system of relief for the worthy poor and banning begging by those deemed unworthy.
• 1536: King François I of France bans begging throughout the whole of France.
• 1596: The first workhouse for the poor is built in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
• 1601: British legislators pass the Poor Law Act, providing financial relief to children and the physically handicapped. The act would later be updated in 1795.
• 1623: Philosopher William Petty, who would lay the basis for modern census-taking, is born in Hampshire, England, as the son of a clothier.
• 1642: The newly settled Plymouth Colony creates the first poor law in the English-speaking New World.
• 1651: Philosopher Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan, the book for which he is most known. In the book, Hobbes adopts a pessimistic view of the state of human nature, writing that life is nothing more than “nasty, brutish, and short.”
• 1750: One of the first almshouses, or ramshackle living spaces designed to house the extremely poor, is built in the United States.
• 1789: Six thousand French women march on the palace of King Louis XVI in Versailles, demanding bread.
• 1795: British legislators update the 1601 Poor Law Act, extending relief eligibility to the physically able. One of the first poverty lines is created in the English city of Speenhamland. When a worker’s wage fell below this line, which was based on both the price of bread and the number of dependents, or children, the worker is required to support, a worker would be eligible to receive relief.
• 1818: Karl Marx, considered the father of communism, is born in Trier, Germany, to a wealthy Jewish family.
• 1820: Friedrich Engels, who would cowrite with Karl Marx six books on the subject of communism, is born in Wuppertal, Germany, to a successful textile industrialist. Sent to work at a cotton factory in Manchester, England, as a young man, Engels’s discovery of the working conditions inspires his social consciousness.
• 1833: French author Frédéric Ozanam founds the Conference of Charity, later known as the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
• 1848: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto, which is summed up by its opening line: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”
• 1851: The first American chapter of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), an organization devoted to providing relief to young people despite religious affiliation, is founded in the city of Boston.
• 1853: The Children’s Aid Society of New York, which would eventually serve over 120,000 needy children annually at a cost of $70 million, is founded by Protestant minister the Reverend Charles Loring Brace.
• 1859: Charles Darwin publishes the first edition of Origin of Species. While credited as being a significant contribution to evolutionary science, the book has been criticized for its influence on the theory of “economic survival of the fittest.”
• 1861: Upon the election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, an opponent of slavery, seven southern states officially secede to spark the Civil War in which 500,000 Americans were killed, the most of any conflict in American history. The war leads to the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments, which granted political and economic rights to a class of people who were previously powerless.
• 1864: Author Karl Marx, Italian revolutionary Joseph Mazzini, and English Carpenter’s Union secretary Robert Applegarth found the International Working Men’s Association in Saint Martin’s Hall in London, England.
• 1865–70: The South American nation of Paraguay loses over two-thirds of its male population in the War of the Triple Alliance.
• 1866: The first congress of the International Working Men’s Association is held in Geneva, Switzerland. The adoption of an eight-hour workday is voted as one of the primary goals of the association.
• 1870–1901: The world’s working-class population grows from approximately 20 percent to 33 percent.
• 1873: The first chapter of the charitable organization United Way is founded in Liverpool, England.
• 1879: American economist Henry George publishes Progress and Poverty, in which he advocates a socialist society based on high taxes for the wealthy. The book would go on to sell more than three million copies.
• 1882: The U.S. Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting poor Chinese immigrants from entering the country.
• 1884: The Fabian Society, a socialist organization emphasizing gradualism and legislation as a means of achieving reform, is founded in Great Britain by such noted intellectuals as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
• 1889: Industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie publishes The Gospel of Wealth, largely considered the most influential of his some 70 essays.
• 1890: Alfred Marshall publishes his magnum opus, Principles of Economics, in which he advocates a classless society.
• 1892: Anticapitalist Ignatius Donnelly is nominated by the American People’s Party for vice president of the United States.
• 1897: The first chapter of the Catholic Caritas charitable organization is founded in Freiburg, Germany. The organization would later expand to Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Austria.
• 1899: Seebohm Rowntree publishes Poverty: A Study of Town Life, in which he coins the term secondary poverty, meaning poverty resulting from a failure of character rather than from a lack of financial resources.
• 1900–70: American agricultural production increases at an average rate of 42 percent per year.
• 1912: Massachusetts becomes the first U.S. state to voluntarily institute a minimum wage.
• 1913: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act into law. The act curbed the cost of living for Americans by lowering average tariff rates from 40 percent to 26 percent.
• 1914–18: Nearly 10 million people worldwide are killed in combat during World War I. Russia’s and Germany’s casualties, which both amounted to approximately five million, created unstable conditions that led to the rise of communism in Russia and Nazism in Germany.
• 1915: British Army chaplain the Revered Philip Clayton founds one of the largest World War I refugee centers, the Talbot House, in the bordertown of Poperinge, Belgium.
• 1916: The U.S. Congress passes the Adamson Act, establishing a required eight-hour workday for railroad workers.
• 1917: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs the Vocational Education Act into law, providing job training for thousands of low-income Americans. The American Friends Service Committee, an organization devoted to providing conscientious objectors with alternatives to joining World War I, is founded. Russia’s army grows to 15 million men and the countryside is left devoid of farmers needed to feed the populace. An ever-increasing communist movement that had arisen at the turn of the century capitalizes on the discontent and Russia plunges into its first revolution since the Romanov monarchy took power in 1613.
• 1919: Western European nations institute a food blockade against Germany and Austria as a punishment for instigating World War I. In response, journalist Eglantyne Jebb founds the Fight the Famine Council, later known as the Save the Children organization, to feed hungry children in central Europe. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles creates the League of Nations’ International Labour Organization, which sought to improve working conditions and quality of life. After becoming one of the few surviving League of Nations agencies to be included in the United Nations in 1944, the ILO would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969. A group of U.S. Catholic bishops meet at the National Catholic Welfare Conference, where the organization’s Social Action Department, later known as the Department of Social Development and World Peace, is created. Representatives from the Red Cross chapters of Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States assemble to create the League of Red Cross Societies. Within five years, the five nations had raised a sum of 685 million Swiss francs.
• 1921: Edgar Allen founds the National Society for Crippled Children, later known as the Easter Seals Society. The 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party is held in the capital of Moscow. Premier Vladimir Lenin disbands the policy of War Communism, which enabled officials to forcibly seize agricultural surpluses and divide estates and thus had the result of reducing output to pre-World War I levels. War Communism is replaced with the New Economic Policy, granting farmers compensation for surplus seizures.
• 1922: Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins, who would become elder statesman of the NAACP, founds the Center for Human Relations and Social Justice.
• 1929: On October 24, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the leading U.S. stock market index, falls by 50 percent, creating an economic tailspin that would last for over a decade. The day would come to be known as “Black Tuesday.”
• 1929–32: The unemployment rate in the United States rises from 3.2 percent to 23.6 percent.
• 1930: Great Britain officially bans workhouses, or houses where the poor are forced to work for long hours with little pay.
• 1930–31: Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, the unemployment rate in the United States rises from 8.9 percent to 15.9 percent, an increase of nearly 50 percent.
• 1932: Just two days after being inaugurated as president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt issues an executive order requiring all U.S. banks to close for four days until an emergency session of Congress is held. Four days later, Congress passes the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which provided for federal inspectors able to declare the banks financially secure. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Economy Act, which alleviated the U.S. federal budget deficit by reducing government salaries and veteran pensions by as much as 15 percent.
• 1933: The U.S. Congress passes the Agricultural Adjustment Act, creating the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which sought to raise the price of crops by paying U.S. farmers to reduce the production of certain ones, including corn, cotton, dairy products, hogs, rice, tobacco, and wheat.
• 1934: The U.S. Congress creates the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulatory body of the stock market which provided insurance deposits to investors. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appoints Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future President John F. Kennedy, as the first chairman of the commission.
• 1935: Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law, providing many programs for relief to needy families, one of which was the Aid to Dependent Children organization, which required potential benefactors to pass a “morally worthy” examination to receive benefits.
• 1937: President Franklin D. Roosevelt estimates in a speech that one-third of his countrymen are “illhoused, ill-nourished, and ill-clad.”
• 1938: The U.S. Congress passes the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing a federal minimum wage, guaranteeing overtime pay, and prohibiting most forms of exploitative child labor. Franklin D. Roosevelt founds the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later known as the March of Dimes.
• 1940: Bishop Herbert Welch founds the Methodist Committee for Overseas Relief (MCOR).
• 1940–42: As Pearl Harbor is bombed and the United States switches from a peacetime to a wartime economy, the unemployment rate drops from 14.6 to 4.7 percent, a reduction of nearly 68 percent.
• 1940–46: An estimated 30,000 Spaniards die from starvation, prompting President/General Francisco Franco to issue ration cards.
• 1940–80: The amount of substandard housing in the United States decreases by approximately 50 percent.
• 1944: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, later known as the World Bank, is created. Delegates from 44 nations meet in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to create the International Monetary Fund, an international fiscal aid organization designed to circumvent the debt problems that greatly contributed to the Great Depression.
• 1946: The United Kingdom becomes the first nation besides Soviet Russia to implement a universal healthcare system with the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS). Based on a proposal by British economist William Beveridge, the NHS was completely taxpayer-funded and provided healthcare to all Britons regardless of income or class.
• 1947–73: The amount of income earned by American families doubles.
• 1948: The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Described by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as a “Magna Carta for all mankind,” the work would become the world’s most translated document, with 321 foreign-language editions.
• 1948–51: The U.S. sends approximately $13.3 billion in aid to European countries devastated by the ravages of World War II.
• 1950–2000: The urban population of underdeveloped Third World nations increases from approximately 14 percent to 50 percent.
• 1952: Jonas Salk develops the first polio vaccine.
• 1953: U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower establishes the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which would later merge into the Department of Health and Human Services.
• 1953: Robert Louis Heilbroner publishes The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, in which he discusses the economic differences between advanced, modernized societies and primitive ones.
• 1954: U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower approves the expansion of Social Security to cover an additional 10 million Americans.
• 1955: Dr. Wilbert Saunders founds Medicine for Missions, a private organization dedicated to providing medical supplies for missionaries working overseas.
• 1959: Twenty nations from North and South America assemble to form the multibillion-dollar Inter-American Development Bank, of which the United States is the principal shareholder with over 30 percent of the total assets.
• 1960: Following the implementation of certain social programs, the infant mortality rate in Algeria drops by 42 percent.
• 1961: Amnesty International is founded by British lawyer Peter Benenson after he reads an article describing two Portuguese students who were unjustly imprisoned. The organization’s goals are to free political prisoners and to increase international awareness of human rights abuses. The United Nations creates the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to help centralize foreign aid efforts.
• 1962: American socialist Michael Harrington publishes The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Personally read by presidents, the book would become a driving inspiration behind the War on Poverty, and antipoverty programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Food Stamps.
• 1963: E. Goffman publishes Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, largely considered to be the foremost resource on the economic concept of stigmatization.
• 1964: In his first State of the Union address since being sworn in as president following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson says, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” The results of Johnson’s proposal are marginal. While poverty for children and senior citizens has fallen sharply since 1964, the percentage of average Americans in poverty fell by only 0.4 percent in 40 years, from 10.5 percent to 10.1 percent. The U.S. Congress creates the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which would be replaced by the Community Services Administration (CSA) 10 years later. The Nation of Islam creates the Three Year Economic Savings Program, designed to correct the problems of poverty, unemployment, hunger, and housing problems for needy African Americans living in the United States.
• 1965: U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signs the Social Security Act into law. The act created two of the largest government social service programs, Medicare, which provided healthcare for retirees, and Medicaid, which provided healthcare for low-income workers. The U.S. government adopts the Mollie Orshansky Method, which defines poverty as any income below three times the cost of minimal nutrition, as its official formula for determining the poverty line. The number of participants in the United States’ Food Stamp Program, created by Congress a year earlier, reaches 561,261 people. The United Nations General Assembly merges the United Nations Special Fund and the Program for Technical Assistance to create the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
• 1968–72: American Social Security benefits rise by 51 percent under the first term of Richard Nixon.
• 1970: A group of American Catholic bishops founds the poverty relief organization Campaign for Human Development, which would later be changed to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development in 1998 at the request of certain bishops.
• 1970–95: The amount of income per person in Sweden falls from a world ranking of fourth to a world ranking of sixteenth.
• 1970–2005: The infant mortality rate for the Middle Eastern nation of Syria decreases from 90 deaths per 1000 births to 23 deaths per 1,000 births, a 74 percent reduction.
• 1971: Dr. Larry Ward establishes Food for the Hungry International, a 1,000-member organization with an annual budget of dozens of millions of dollars, in Geneva, Switzerland. The Swiss philanthropist Klaus Schwab founds the not-for-profit World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland.
• 1973–2000: The income of poor American households grows 12 percent, as compared to a growth of 76 percent for wealthy American households.
• 1973–2004: The poverty rate for Hispanic Americans increases from 10.3 percent to 24.7 percent.
• 1974: The U.S. Congress creates the Supplemental Security Income program, providing funds not included in Social Security for permanently disabled individuals. U.S. President Richard Nixon creates the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, one of the last efforts by the U.S. government to address urban poverty.
• 1974–76: The cost of living in Argentina rises by 355 percent.
• 1976: Linda and Millard Fuller found Habitat for Humanity International, a nonprofit organization devoted to constructing houses for those with substandard dwellings. By 2005, Habitat had constructed over 50,000 houses in the U.S. and 150,000 houses worldwide.
• 1978: Still reeling from postwar debts, Vietnam signs an agreement with the Soviet Union, allowing the southeast Asian communist nation membership in the Soviet Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.
• 1979: The organization Second Harvest, a group of 13 food banks with the collective ability to distribute 2.5 million pounds of food annually, is founded. The Save the Refugees Fund, later known as the Mercy Corps, is founded to assist Cambodian refugees fleeing their country from the ravages of war, famine, and hunger.
• 1980: The U.S. Congress establishes the African Development Foundation, an independent federal agency that distributes small grants of $50,000 to African economic development programs. Feed the Children, a Christian organization that ships millions of pounds of food to needy children every year, is founded in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
• 1980–90: China experiences an average 10 percent annual growth rate in both agricultural and industrial production, making it one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies.
• 1980–2002: Primary school completion for students in the African nation of Tunisia increases from approximately 80 to 100 percent.
• 1980–2003: The infant mortality rate of the sub-Saharan African nation of Togo decreases from 128 deaths per 1,000 births to 66.61 deaths per 1,000 births.
• 1980–2004: The life expectancy for citizens of the Middle Eastern nation of Syria rises from 60 years to 68.75 years, an increase of 12.72 percent.
• 1980–2005: The illiteracy rate for the Central American nation of Honduras falls from 38.1 to 23.9 percent for males and from 42 to 23.7 percent for females.
• 1980–2005: The life expectancy for citizens of the South American nation of Suriname increases from 64 years to 68.96 years, an increase of 1.5 percent.
• 1980–2005: The infant mortality rate of the African nation of Sudan falls from 104 deaths per 1,000 births to 62.5 deaths per 1,000 births, a 39 percent reduction. The illiteracy rate of the Middle Eastern nation of Syria drops from 27 to 19.3 percent for males, a 28.5 percent reduction, and from 66.2 to 36 percent for females, a 45.6 percent reduction.
• 1981–90: The Squared Poverty Gap Index, a measurement calculating both the prevalence and depth of poverty in a given country, falls from 6.4 percent to 3.6 percent for developing countries, a 43.75 percent reduction.
• 1982: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter founds the Carter Center. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, the Carter Center devoted itself to overseeing foreign elections and providing mediation in international disputes. Carter would win a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his efforts.
• 1983–2005: Some two million citizens of the African nation of Sudan, or 5 percent of the overall population, flee their homeland due to widespread famine.
• 1985: Spain’s unemployment rate increases to an unprecedented 21.6 percent. The United Kingdom-based charitable organization Comic Relief is founded in a refugee camp in Sudan in response to the ongoing African famine.
• 1987: On October 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the leading U.S. stock market index, loses 22 percent of its value, ending a five-year period of positive gains. The day would come to be known as “Black Monday.” The U.S. Congress passes the McKinney Act, the first piece of federal legislation to address rising levels of homelessness.
• 1989: Sociology Professors Melvin Oliver and Jim Johnson of the University of California found the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty.
• 1989–2004: The Gross Domestic Product of the central Asian nation of Tajikistan decreases by approximately 60 percent.
• 1990: The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank advocating, among other things, supply-side economics, is founded.
• 1990–95: As the former Soviet Union attempts to switch to a more capitalistic economy after nearly 80 years of communism, its Gross Domestic Product decreases by approximately 50 percent.
• 1990–2000: Male illiteracy in the African nation of Sudan drops from 40 percent to 30.8 percent, while female illiteracy drops from 68.3 percent to 53.8 percent.
• 1990–2002: The spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic increases the infant mortality rate in the small sub-Saharan African nation of Swaziland from 77 deaths per 1,000 births to 106 deaths per 1,000 births, an increase of 27 percent.
• 1990–2003: The infant mortality rate for the South Pacific island nation of Tonga decreases from 25 deaths per 1,000 births to 15 deaths per 1,000 births, a 40 percent reduction.
• 1991: The Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit research organization specializing in employment growth, is founded in Washington, D.C. American philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein founds the Feinstein Foundation, a charitable organization whose goals are to end world hunger and improve education.
• 1992: The 14th session of the Chinese Communist Party Congress is held in the capital of Beijing. Party members agree to institute a “socialist market economy” in China, reversing revolutionary pledges made 50 years ago of a completely communist state. As civil war in the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan results in the loss of 50,000 lives, the country’s Gross Domestic Product decreases by an estimated 30 percent.
• 1992: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization creates the Comparative Research Program on Poverty.
• 1992–2003: The infant immunization rate for the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago rises from 80 percent to 90 percent, an 11 percent increase.
• 1993: The U.S. Congress abolishes the House Select Committee on Hunger. In response, Representative Tony Hall of Ohio, the chairman of the committee, fasts for 22 days in protest. Congress capitulates and the Congressional Hunger Center is created. The research facility, Institute on Race and Poverty, is founded at the University of Minnesota by law Professor John A. Powell.
• 1994: The value of the Russian ruble on foreign exchange markets falls by 27 percent in one day.
• 1995–2005: The amount of people in the world living in extreme poverty reaches approximately 1.2 billion, and those living in general poverty reaches some 2 billion.
• 1996: U.S. President Bill Clinton signs the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a welfare reform bill. Among the bill’s provisions, no American can receive welfare payments for more than a total of five years.
• 1996–2004: The percentage of American women in poverty falls from 16.3 percent to 13.9 percent, while the percentage of impoverished men falls from 13.0 to 11.5 percent.
• 1998: The sub-Saharan African nation of Mozambique receives from the U.S. $1.4 billion in debt relief. Delegates from over 30 educational institutions meet in New York City to form the Students Against Sweatshops organization.
• 1998: The International Labour Organization estimates there are 150 million unemployed people in the world, of which only 25 percent receive any unemployment insurance.
• 2000: Officials of the small, poor South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu greatly increase their country’s revenue revenue by leasing the internet domain suffix “.tv” to private business interests. Lawyers Without Borders, a group of legal experts dedicated to correcting human rights abuses pro bono, or without pay, is founded.
• 2003–04: The number of millionaires in the world increases by 8 percent, while at the same time the international poverty rate rises from 12.5 percent to 12.7 percent.
• 2003–05: As the AIDS epidemic ravages the small sub-Saharan African nation of Swaziland, the country’s life expectancy drops from 43 years to 35.65 years, a 17 percent reduction. Due to the AIDS epidemic, the infant mortality rate in South Africa rises from 53 deaths per 1,000 births to 61.81 deaths per 1,000 births, an increase of 14 percent. The rate of increase for blacks is four times greater than the rate of increase for whites.
• 2005: The United Nations reports the central African nation of Burundi is officially the world’s poorest country with over 68 percent of the population below the poverty line and an estimated Gross Domestic Product per capita of $106. The United Nations releases its Human Development  Index, ranking each country according to a formula encompassing life expectancy, education, and Gross Domestic Product. The African country of Niger is ranked as the nation with the lowest Human Development. Index, while the European nation of Norway is ranked as the highest. The United States, the world’s most economically advanced nation, is ranked 10th behind such countries as Canada and Ireland.

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In: 'Encyclopedia of World Poverty'  3 v. General Editor Mehmet Odekon- Skidmore College, Sage Publication, Thousand Oaks USA, 2006, Introduction  p. xix-xxvi, Adapted/edited  by Leopoldo Costa.