The reason most people stay poor has nothing to do with the absence of resources. It has everything to do with what happens to the resources that are already present.

Referrals that go uncompensated. Deals that are passed over because the timing feels wrong. Commissions waved away as too small. Messages that go unanswered. Free resources that are used without acknowledgment.

Individually, each of these looks like a small thing. A lapse in manners. A missed opportunity. A communication failure.

Collectively, they are the reason money is always being sought from outside — through loans, handouts, remittances, funding — rather than generated from within through the exchanges that are already possible between the people already present.

My new book, The Tired Receiver, names this pattern and traces it from the scale of a single ignored message to the scale of global poverty. The argument is uncomfortable: people are not poor because value doesn't exist. They are poor because the people who receive value have quietly made not reciprocating the path of least resistance.

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