Billionaires and Poverty Destruction

Any culture which has millionaires or billionaires has strongly enforced laws on private property and the right to capital accumulation. Any culture which encourages capital accumulation has low poverty rates. 

This is not a coincidence.

People are not created equal in ability. In any given skill area, some people are more skilled than others.  Cultures that encourage everyone to accumulate wealth will therefore always see wealth inequality due to the skill inequality between citizens. If the rules are the same for everyone, some people will do magnificently better than others. Thus, we see Olympic athlets, master violinists, amazing actors, and millionaires and billionaires. 

No one talks about a "talent inequalities" that must be "remedied" by infusing less capable artists with more artistic ability. Yet people talk about "income inequalities" as if the ability to accumulate and maintain massive income and wealth (two separate things, btw) was not a talent. 

The point here is simple: if your culture has millionaires and billionaires, it has very low or non-existent poverty. A country whose laws allow everyone to accumulate wealth will naturally produce people whose skill level allows them to do this to a superlative degree, but will also allow everyone in the culture to do it to at least some degree. Everyone who wants to get out of poverty can.

If your culture has no millionaires or billionaires, then your cultural rules guarantee poverty. No one, not even the most highly skilled persons, can get out of poverty because the rules won't allow it.

The answer is not to pour money into such a situation. By definition, the cultural rules will make sure virtually no one can maintain or use the wealth that enters. The answer is to change the cultural rule set. You will know you have changed the rules towards poverty obliteration when you start seeing a dramatic difference in wealth accumulation between large segments of the population.

This isn't "trickle-down economics", the idea that the wealth of the rich will somehow "leak" down to those who are poor. It is, instead, just the recognition that different skill levels will result in different outcomes. The outcomes don't matter - the rules and skill levels of the players determine the outcomes.

If you want to eliminate poverty, you have to allow people to use their talents to better themselves. Everyone who can do so, will do so. 

What of those who cannot? In a Christian society, the wealthy will care for them as part of their Christian identity. This is true, to a lesser extent, in Judeo-Muslim societies as well. Karmic societies, such as cultures based on Hinduism or Buddhism, won't take care of their poor, because they see the poor as people who are destined to be poor, they must be poor to "burn off" their bad karma.