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Europe wide, there were Humanist driven policy responses to poverty in the 16th century, which we have covered in some detail. These were essentially all failures.
There was one successful poverty program which, despite many flaws, solved the problem of famine among the poor. Just one? How could this possibly be?
If we brutally summarize Proust we would say, first of all, most areas did not rationalize their agricultural production. They had too many inefficient small holdings, and/or they established price controls which lowered production or distorted production. Inefficient small holdings come from cultural preference, and is usually reinforced by legal and bureaucratic institutions, often based on little more than dumb preference.
Second, in the brutal summarization, price controls distorting production, is a simple corruption by elites, who tend to be terrible. Terrible in the way I usually refer to as being against human flourishing. There is even a weak version of this in England relating to the corn laws.
Third, is the use of high status people to use the money, in the context of a seriously hierarchical society where the high status people cannot be questioned or audited as they were in England in the Bording Administrative History episodes. In other words, scummy elites who are corrupt.
A poorly structured economy, and terrible elites is just the human normal, which is everywhere all the time, and these things tend to work against the poverty programs run all over Europe. Another problem was simple inefficiency, a wasting of resources used to fight poverty. The flow of money they were able to raise to help the poor was inadequate, partially because the vast majority of the money was spent on administration. Examples we had was that the monastery at St Deny only gave 3% of the revenue they raised directly to the poor in the form of food, clothing or money.
St Deny is not considered a great outlier, but institutions spending 90% on their own people and priorities, are common through history, right down to today. Efforts start with prestige and high status people working on solving a problem, but generally devolve into corrupt people doing what they want. That’s just how institutions work.
When so much is wasted, there is just not enough money.
And yet, there was a successful poverty program, that also was born with Humanist roots, but evolved and changed into a more 'empirical' and less 'critical' approach, that actually solved the problem of famine for the poor.
