For example, Raghuram G. Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has blamed the ever-widening gulf between the rich and the poor, especially in the US, to be one of the main fault lines which caused the financial institutions to pump money into subprime mortgages—on political behest, as a palliative and not a remedy, for poverty—causing the financial crisis of 2007–2009. In Rajans view the main cause of the increasing gap between high income and low income earners was lack of equal access to higher education for the latter.A data based scientific empirical research, which studied the impact of dynastic politics on the level of poverty of the provinces, found a positive correlation between dynastic politics and poverty; i.e. the higher proportion of dynastic politicians in power in a province leads to higher poverty rate. There is significant evidence that these political dynasties use their political dominance over their respective regions to enrich themselves, using methods such as graft or outright bribery of legislators.Many scholars and public intellectuals argue that, throughout most of human history, extreme poverty was the norm for roughly 90% of the population, with only the emergence of industrial capitalism in the 19th century lifting masses of people out of it. This narrative is advanced by, among others, Martin Ravallion, Nicholas Kristof, and Steven Pinker.
Proponents argue that a basic income is more economically efficient than a minimum wage and unemployment benefits, as the minimum wage effectively imposes a high marginal tax on employers, causing losses in efficiency. In 1968, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce a system of income guarantees. Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, with often diverse political convictions, who support a basic income include Herbert A. Simon, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Solow, Milton Friedman, Jan Tinbergen, James Tobin
and James Meade.Income grants are argued to be vastly more efficient in extending basic needs to the poor than subsidizing supplies whose effectiveness in poverty alleviation is diluted by the non-poor who enjoy the same subsidized prices. With cars and other appliances, the wealthiest 20% of Egypt uses about 93% of the countrys fuel subsidies. In some countries, fuel subsidies are a larger part of the budget than health and education. A 2008 study concluded that the money spent on in-kind transfers in India in a year could lift all Indias poor out of poverty for that year if transferred directly. The primary obstacle argued against direct cash transfers is the impractically for poor countries of such large and direct transfers. In practice, payments determined by complex iris scanning are used by war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan, while India is phasing out its fuel subsidies in favor of direct transfers.