Elusive Solutions to Poverty and Inequality: From ‘Trickle Down’ to ‘Solidarity Economy’

The parable about the blind men and the elephant and how, after touch ing different parts of the elephant, each man arrived at different conclu sions about what the elephant looked like best illustrates the different views that are held by analysts regarding poverty and its solutions. Depending on their ideological and political views, theorists’ perspectives range from ‘trickle down’ theories that posit poverty and inequality as a natural phenomenon, a social ‘fact of life’, to arguments about poverty and inequality being an outcome of the conflictual process of accumulation, of the power relations in capitalism. While the former is