How is poverty created?

There is an assumption buried deep in the logic of the SDGs that mass poverty is essentially a natural condition that occurs in the absence of any action to overcome it (you can check our assessment of this in our linguistic analysis). But this assumption isn’t accurate at all. It simply takes what feels like intuitive common sense about poverty at the individual level and presumes it works for countries and, indeed, the whole world, over time. But is that right? Is it true that everyone is born with equal access to the means of ensuring they never live in poverty? Do power dynamics between countries have any part to play in who is impoverished and who is enriched?
Consider this: there has been a globalized economy for at least 400 years (depending on how you define it, by some measures it would be considerably longer). In that time, some parts of the world have increased their wealth exponentially, notably those who have created and run systems of control and domination stretching around the world in the form of empires, slavery, and colonialism and, in more years, trade deals and structural adjustment programs.
It’s hardly a strange idea, that those with the money make the rules, and this is a truth that is writ large in the global economy today, and has been for practically all of the last 400 years.
In light of this reality, if it seems to you that there is a lot more to mass poverty than what the individual has control over, then you might want to question why the SDG framework denies this. And what this denial says about their promise to end poverty by 2030?