Michael Matheson Miller directed an award-winning documentary on poverty in the developing world. Now he’s turning his camera lens to the United States.
Poverty, Inc., released in 2014, played in more than sixty film festivals, won a number of awards—including the prestigious Templeton Freedom Award—and has had a successful run on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. His next film on poverty in the U.S. will come out in 2025.
Problems of international and domestic poverty are generally quite different, explains Miller, who serves as the Acton Institute’s Chief of Strategic Initiatives and as director for Acton’s new Center for Social Flourishing. He highlights a major similarity, though: good intentions do not always lead to good results.
Meeting material needs can be important in emergency situations, but they often leave unaddressed the underlying, chronic problems that are the source of poverty. Sometimes, giving away material help can even exacerbate those underlying problems.
“In our desire to help, we’ve tended to treat poor people like objects of our charity, objects of our pity, or objects of our compassion,” Miller says.
“We don’t treat them like the subject and protagonist of their own story of development. Too often, we have focused on providing goods. That’s appropriate if there’s an emergency need, but the problem is we’ve treated chronic problems like an emergency situation.”
Poverty, Inc. showed how expansive bureaucracies and labyrinthine regulatory regimes perpetuate poverty in the developing world—a dynamic that holds true in the United States as well. “When an economy gets highly regulated, who do you think writes the regulations? Powerful interest groups, big corporations, and entrenched bureaucracies,” Miller says. “The poorest people—and even lower-middle-class people—don’t have the contacts to navigate this complex system.”
Poverty is a complex issue with many variables and contributing factors. There is no single solution to poverty anywhere, much less everywhere, Miller says.
This principle is at the core of the Acton Institute’s new Center for Social Flourishing. The Center’s goal is to reframe the discussion from combating poverty to establishing conditions of justice and social flourishing that enable people to create prosperity in their own families and communities.
Besides offering educational programming—such as the biennial PovertyCure Summit that brings together thousands of people internationally to partner on sustainable solutions to poverty—another major project for the Center for Social Flourishing is Miller’s follow-up documentary to Poverty, Inc. This film will show how different forms of poverty—material, spiritual, social, and moral—are interrelated, how they are connected to centralization and the breakdown of social connections, and what people in the U.S. are doing to heal their communities.
Other exciting initiatives of the Center for Social Flourishing this year include the launching of a new website, re-energizing Acton’s PovertyCure initiative, and three Free and Virtuous Society conferences on themes related to domestic poverty and social flourishing.
“In many ways, poverty is our normal condition throughout our history and in many places around the world,” Miller explains. “But when people are given the opportunity to create prosperity, they do.”
