No, seriously, poverty is about more than just a lack of money
Alsson responded to my previous post on poverty and its systemic causes. While I appreicate Alsson’s willingness to dialog, I’m not sure he’s spent enough time grappling with poverty issues to really understand the scope and causes of the problem.
I see where you’re coming from — poverty as “social disease.” I disagree. I’m poor if, because of a lack of money, I can’t reliably meet my basic human needs, which I assume consist of essential nutrition, shelter and medical care. If your definition stopped there, I think it would be a practical, usable tool for addressing a specific human condition.
I disagree. If we restrict our analysis of poverty to a purely financial condition—perhaps by using some multiple of the federal poverty guidelines, we learn nothing about what causes poverty or how anybody might be lifted out of poverty more than temporarily. It oversimplifies the problem. Is it just food, shelter, and medical care? We have SNAP, various forms of public or subsidized housing, and medicaid. Is the problem solved?
Of course not. If we’re serious about poverty, we’ve got to dig a little deeper. Is a graduate student on a minimal stipend poor? Sure. But is that poverty? Not really. Is the family making $40,000 a year that’s about to lose their home because their finances are a wreck and they haven’t the slightest idea what to do about it in poverty? It walks, talks, and quacks like poverty. How about the agorophobic woman with a comfortable bank account but nobody to watch out for her?
Even there, you allow for no category of the poor who are voluntarily without the money required to meet those essentials — people who would rather do without than work. There are more of these people than you may think. That’s not to say that all people who are poor choose to be, but some do.
Plenty of people opt to go without certain luxuries or amenities—for any number of reasons. Low-income legal services, for example, is not the most lucrative thing you can do with a JD, magna cum laude, from a well-ranked law school. But we have different values. If you’re living without but could, any day you felt like it, change your situation, you’re not living in poverty. The kind of poverty I’m concerned about is not optional.
That aside, I think you go off the rails with the “…participate meaningfully in mainstream society…” bit. That element of your definition is a catch-all for just about anything you think is meaningful and mainstream. Such subjectivity makes the “elimination” task impossible. Who will define adequate “participation,” “meaningful,” and “mainstream?” What will we do with all the poor who choose something other than the prescribed participation, meaning and lifestyle?
Again, poverty is about barriers, not about choices. I don’t have a television in my home. This leaves me adrift in most conversations about whatever ad campaign people are talking about. That’s a choice. Nobody is proscribing how people should act—it’s simply a question of access. If you cannot read, open a bank account, get to a courthouse or polling place, safely walk around your neighborhood, or shop at a grocery store there is a barrier between you and full societal participation. If you choose not to do some of these things, that’s fine. But poverty isn’t about the choices you have, it’s about the choices you don’t have.
We have our best chance at addressing poverty if we accept that it isn’t a disease at all. It’s an economic condition. People who can’t afford their essential nutrition, shelter and medical care are poor, whether or not they meet your standards for meaningful, mainstream participation. We need to focus on ways to help such people survive and improve their incomes. That’s a safety net: food stamps, medicaid, unemployment insurance, job training, public education and much more, both private and public.
Want to try an experiment? Take $20,000. Find somebody living in abject poverty. Give it to that person. Check back in five years. See how they’re doing.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t solve the problem. If we could just solve poverty by giving people money, we could have done it a long time ago with a straigh-forward wealth transfer. It would be easier and cheaper.
The programs you list are important. And most of them are more than mere safety nets. Others, not listed, are similarly critical—though you’re less likely to see the effects of things like community development block grants unless you actually spend time in some more vulnerable communities.
Home ownership? That issue has no place in a discussion of poverty. Why do we care if the poor own homes? We have seen the damage resulting from decades of that particular brand of social engineering. Cleaning up neighborhoods? Really? How will that affect a person’s ability to earn a living? Racism? RACISM??!!
Wait—you seriously believe property ownership—and the associated stability, pride, and wealth accumulation have nothing to do with poverty? Even the Bush administration had figured that much out. Or that the sort of discrimination that prevents people from living in certain neighborhoods and leaves others feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome in their own countries doesn’t have serious implications for how we approach poverty? This is why bad things happen when we elect conservatives.
I understand that the subprime collapse was a disaster for the country. As it turns out, that had a whole lot to do with some private lenders engaging in the sort of risky and predatory lending that poverty advocates railed against for years before the collapse. Of course, nobody paid attention. Because it was just the poor getting screwed. And the poor don’t have a lot of political clout.
If you really want to affect poverty, narrow the definition to its essential element — a lack of money, which means lack of or insufficient employment. At least it ought to mean employment, unless you want to carry the chronically “rather-not-work” segment for ever. The social disease thing gets you nowhere fast because it takes you in every direction you can imagine, most of them sociological pipe dreams.
As I said, addressing poverty is hard. Having a few sociologists on the payroll won’t hurt. But look. We can do this the smart way or we can pretend that it’s an easy problem. If your roof-leaks, you can decide that the central element of the problem is that you have too much water in yoru living room. You can focus on removing the water from your living room. Buy some buckets and a mop. Bail away! Except … that’s the sort of approach we take when we’re in denial about the actual problem.
