Our Supreme Court has lifted the practice of buying legislation to the level of a constitutional principle by repeatedly protecting corporate spending for and against political candidates, as well as promises and threats of such spending to bribe and blackmail such candidates, by appeal to the free-speech clause of the First Amendment.

To make a proper moral appraisal of the prevalence of severe poverty today, we should focus not on comparisons with times past, when the global average income was much lower, but on a comparison with what would be possible in our time, given the current global average income and level of technological and administrative development.

Poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom - the bottom quarter and also the bottom half - see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share.

What we should do is require or at least permit innovators to license their green innovations free of charge in exchange for public payments based on the impact this innovation has on the environment - emissions averted or something of this sort.

The collective income of all these people - the bottom half - is less than three percent of global household income, and so there is a grotesque maldistribution of income and wealth.

It is perfectly consistent - and also true - to say that the world poverty problem today is smaller (relative to world population) than before and yet also a much graver injustice.

Purchasing power parities are not a reasonable method for comparing households across countries or currencies. The reason for this is simply that PPPs are sensitive to the prices of all the commodities, goods and services, that households are consuming worldwide, with each commodity weighted in the calculations according to its share in international household consumption expenditure.