How To Not Hurt the Poor With Your Career
4 min read | 4 April, 2024
Many attempts to help the poor actually end up doing more harm than good. That’s one thesis of Brian Fikkert, an economics professor at Covenant College and author of When Helping Hurts - a bestseller on poverty and the ways alleviation efforts go wrong. In our podcast Brian gave career advice for what Christians who want to help the poor should avoid:
Short-term mission trips and ineffective handouts.
A false understanding of poverty.
A lack of economic and biblical awareness.
Check out our podcast with Brian here
1) Why some careers actually hurt the global poor
Your career could hurt the global poor when you’re not addressing what’s going on:
Brian says short term missions are a great example:
“When we go on short term mission trips, we're going to a setting where people have been living in poverty in many instances for generations. And the level of brokenness in the relationships is profound…You can't solve the deep seatedness in those broken relationships through handing out shoes in a week. It doesn't work. And in fact, it makes it worse.”
Why’s this?
“You can actually make it worse. Because the nature of poverty is that it creates a broken relationship with self that manifests itself in a marred identity, a poor self image, a sense that I'm less than human and I can't affect change in the world.”
Doing good for the poor is complicated. Careers dedicated to helping the poor can make things worse.
But this doesn’t mean there aren’t still excellent opportunities!
Thoughtful believers can show God’s heart for the poor effectively and impactfully by working for or giving to high impact charities which are vetted by rigorous evidence.
2) Gain a deeper understanding of what poverty is
How we define global poverty is very important in how we tackle it.
One way to misinterpret poverty when we think of it purely in materialist terms:
“Many of us are coming out of a material framework of what poverty is. And so if I ask the average American what is poverty, they'll define it this way: poverty is about a lack of income, lack of housing, a lack of food, a lack of clothing.”
Poverty is not just material – it’s spiritual, and involves people’s sense of dignity and relationship to God.
You can tell this just by talking to people living in poverty:
“The problem is, if you ask poor people around the world, what is poverty? They'll say something like this: I feel shame. I feel less than human. I feel like I'm not part of society. I feel like trash that everybody wants to get rid of. They define their poverty, yes, in material terms. But in addition, they define it in psychological, social, and even spiritual terms.”
Impact is not only about lifting the poor out of poverty. It’s about improving their wellbeing, bringing about fairness and justice, peace on Earth, the flourishing of all of creation, and deeper faith in Christ.
So, what should Christians study to have the greatest impact on the poor?
3) Study economics, learn the Bible
If you want to help the poor, the best major for many is economics.
Here are three major benefits of an economics major:
1) High Pay
John Wesley famously preached that Christians should “earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.”
Today, Wesley might recommend you study economics. The average starting salary of an economics major in the US is $66,100, one of the highest of any degree. Mid-career salary averages $146,000.
Consider studying economics to earn more and give more to the poor (click here to read our article on the huge impact your generosity can have on missions).
2) Useful Skills
It teaches you a range of useful skills that are transferable to many jobs and careers. Economics is a great major for a wide range of jobs, whether corporate or nonprofit.
(For more on economics careers click here)
3) Relevant Knowledge
Economics teaches how people make decisions and relationships between systems and institutions in the broader world. It also teaches many relevant tools for measuring whether charities work.
Brian studied economics and realized that's how he could help make an impact:
“So when I was in college, I discovered the field of economics, which uses lots of math, but you can ask questions about poverty and its alleviation. And so I really got drawn into this idea of using economics to improve the lives of poor people… Economics is a great major.”
Don’t just study economics: study the Bible, too.
Insights from the Bible are crucial for gaining a more accurate understanding of humanity and the world.
Brian agrees:
“Learn theology… Learn as you go about who you are, and about the world… Fundamentally God has given us empirical tools to try to understand his world, but he's given us other kinds of tools as well, like the Bible for example… So I'm as interested right now in us developing a theory of change, a logic model, if you will, in which the input side is more informed by Scripture than we're often seeing.”
Other majors can help the global poor, too. To get a sense of other possibilities, check out the common degree requirements for these roles for careers tackling global poverty.
To summarize, the 3 main ways you can help tackle global poverty with your career are:
Know how your career could hurt global poverty
Gain a deeper understanding of what global poverty really is (it’s both materialistic and spiritual)
Study an impactful degree (e.g. economics, and study theology and the Bible too)
To read more on economics PhDs click here.
To hear more from Brian, listen to our full episode where we discuss:
Why short-term missions often make things worse for the poor.
How wealthy Americans define “poverty”.
“Relief” vs. “Development” work, and where Christians are most needed.
Balancing insights from the Bible and economic experiments.
