Saturday 8 September 2007

Pic of the day: "You fail at life either way." This cryptic statement will make sense, and even more than one sense, before this entry is over.

Poverty?

"It sounds awful to say that 36.5m Americans are living in poverty. But 'poverty' in America, as defined by the Census Bureau, does not mean destitution. A typical poor American lives in a three-bedroom house with a car, air-conditioning and two televisions. His children actually eat more meat than rich kids do. And he receives substantial benefits that the census bizarrely excludes from its calculations."

Or at least that's what The Economist says, in its August 30 article. Usually I consider The Economist one of my most reliable sources of information, but I have to wonder here. It doesn't fit too well with some other information I have. Now bear in mind that I live in Norway, a small and prosperous kingdom in northern Europe, where some people are more prosperous than others but where true poverty takes an exertion of uncommon willpower. So I don't know this from personal experience. But for instance the organization America's Second Harvest, which works with poverty on a daily basis, seems a lot more pessimistic: "In 2005, 35.1 million Americans lived in food insecure (low food security and very low food security) households, 22.7 million adults and 12.4 million children".

It may be a coincidence that the number of "food insecure" people (which has to do with knowing where their next meal is coming from, according to Second Harvest) is so similar to the number of poor. Perhaps it is the rich who don't know how to get food on their table… but somehow, I doubt that. So, the poor have two TVs but not enough food, is that it? I would not be entirely amazed, given the power TV has over people. And air condition is almost as important as food in the south. Still, something is not entirely right with this picture, methinks.

***

One of my online friends, who has the benefit of living in America and watching things more up close, proposed that the poor may have all that stuff, but they borrowed to buy it. This makes a certain amount of sense: Until recently, credit was cheap and easy to come by. And when your bills came due, you could pay them off with another credit card… a miniature of the nation as a whole, so to speak. But this begs the question: What about the food security? If you can borrow, why not borrow for food? I am not sure if this works in America, but here in Norway credit card companies and consumer credit companies are actually encouraging you to withdraw cash from your money, in which case you shouldn't have much worry about finding food. (Although I suspect the "meat" referred to by The Economist actually means burgers, so the quality of the food may be more uncertain.) The only scenario I can see that fits both descriptions is that poor people buy their car and their two TVs and then their credit card is maxed and they start worrying. I think I would have stuck with 1 TV and food, even if I wanted a TV in the first place. But I suppose this kind of thinking is what keeps a number of us from being defined as "poor" in the first place.

Actually, I once wrote about being "poor" by American standards. Even back then I found it amusing, and mocked the crude definitions. For instance, households of different sizes were lumped together. It is true that singles need roughly the same number of fridges and stoves as a medium-sized family, but obviously there are other expenses that vary greatly. For instance my diaper account is not exactly a drain on the household economy, long may it last. On the other extreme, a large enough family may struggle even if they earn twice as much as I. And of course if your household includes anyone with alcohol or substance abuse, it doesn't much help how much you the rest of you earn. It does not really make sense to lump people together by income and say who is poor and who is not.

There are people who are truly "destitute", and it certainly looks like America has its fair share of them. And in some ways, I think they are worse off than they would have been here in Europe. There are among Americans many who think that the poor get what they deserve, or rather better than they deserve: The poor are lazy freeloaders who prefer parasiting on the productive classes instead of working. Lacking all morals, they are little better than criminals, which many of them probably are anyway. Giving them money only encourages them, and it is wasted anyway since they will drink it all up and demand more. Or that's the impression you get from some.

Over on the left side, the picture is quite different, but equally disturbing. There it is the rich who are parasites, and the poor are victims, sucked dry by the predatory capitalists who will use any trick to exploit the unwary, naïve and trusting common people. Society is responsible for making sure everyone gets the same opportunities, regardless of when and where and to whom they are born. This is fine to a point: The Nordic countries, for instance, benefit greatly from giving everyone access to higher education, through tax-paid tuition and slightly subsidized student loans. But we cannot give everyone equal genes, and I hope nobody really thinks it would be a good idea either. We cannot even give equal jobs. You can make your way through college but you are not guaranteed this or that job, or even a job. Still, it certainly helps to use the opportunities you have.

And this is a danger of the left: If people honestly believe that they are victims, that it is not their fault that they are poor, they are not going to work within the system to improve their lot. Either they will sit down and wait for their entitlement, or they will fight for it by trying to break the system. The latter makes for great movies but in practice makes things worse for all involved. Breaking the system is a bad idea when you have only a wild-eyed dream to put in its place. Not to mention that the capitalist system is very robust, so in practice you just break yourself. Thanks to the great idea that the blacks are being exploited by the whites, American prisons are now full of black people who drew the logical conclusion and tried to take back what they thought was theirs. The left-leaning philosophers who lured them into this are of course free and sometimes even tenured.

But most poor people don't do dramatic things. Most poor people do apathy. There is a subtle difference between apathy and contentment. To those passing by, it may seem similar. As long as they don't make a ruckus, it is easy to imagine that things are OK. But are the poor really OK with paying their meager earnings to the credit companies and worrying how to get enough food and clothes? Probably not. Even I find contentment an uneven road to travel, and I don't need to worry about kids, nor do I attempt to keep up with the neighbors. By and large it works fine, but it requires a transformation that begins inside. Those who just give up don't get transformed from within.

There is an irony in this, that there is so much that can be done with little. As I use to say, money is logarithmic. In a very real sense, most people are poor: Not because most people have little money, but because most people want so much more than they can have. Even if you give them more money, the desires grow even faster. The rich world has grown this rich in a few generations: Only a hundred years ago, almost everyone was poor by today's standard. Today, almost no one is poor, except some chemically unbalanced people. But happiness has not increased much in this time, not at all for the last fifty years or so. Apart from the actually destitute, there is hardly any correlation between income and happiness, and little between property and happiness. Other things count much more, like hope and faith and love.

I don't believe in ignoring the poor, but I don't believe in just throwing money at the problem either. Here in Norway we have very little poverty, but we still have the unhappiness. Statistics show that we have a lot of suicide here. I think part of this is that we have so few Catholics, to be honest. Catholics don't report suicide as suicide, and since America has a goodly number of Catholics, they will necessarily under-report suicide. But even so, it is obvious that sharing the wealth has not been enough. We ought to be a paradise, a land of abundant joy, but we are not. Whether here or there, we need to take seriously the other needs that are not primarily about money. We need a revolution of the heart. Only then will we all need less and have more to give. Until then, the poor will always be among us.