Government agencies and departments, filled with people who make great salaries and have expansive benefits, all because their fellow human beings are suffering. In truth, they exploit those people in the most inhumane ways, allowing them to suffer and receive the equivalent of crumbs while they secure their futures. They make little to no commitment to end the suffering, certainly not an adequate amount.

Poverty nonprofit organizations, filled with people who want to feel good about what they do, and who may even work hard, but who have far too little concern for whether or not their work produces outcomes rather than outputs.

Resume padders, including people who participate in programs such as Teach for America, Americorps, and other taxpayer-supported programs that are voyeuristic while being used to bolster graduate school applications or work resumes.

CSR professionals and the CSR industry, itself, characterized by the corporations that make grand gestures instead of actually committing to the people who live in their communities.

Social Justice Committees, also called similar names, such as social concerns committees and community engagement groups. They are organized by faith communities, civic associations, and neighborhood associations, and they are another example of virtue-signaling while also being contributory and NOT invested in outcomes for the people they are supposedly forming to help.

Think tanks, which receive hundreds of millions of your tax dollars in the form of government grants and whose leaders have zero first-hand experience in poverty and make millions in salaries while pontificating on how people in poverty should make their life decisions. No more federal dollars to think tanks. I am not sure we should care what they think. I would rather hear the ideas and strategies that come from people who live in poverty.

Academic institutions, where more than 1,000 classes on poverty are taught, often by people who have never lived in poverty, and whose ideas have not moved the needle yet. We either need to change the teachers or end the classes, and perhaps we should introduce students to real critical thinking: helping them learn how to think instead of what to think.

Philanthropic foundations, which do a lot of good but lack the same critical thinking pervasive in academia. This is a more nuanced aspect of the poverty industrial complex, but it is a shallow and underperforming one, all the same.

Make no mistake, people who are not suffering in poverty will go to sleep with no worries if that suffering continues. And people who get paid to solve it will argue for more pay and greater benefits, whether or not their efforts lead to real progress.