Posted on April 15, 2009

The Trouble with Poverty (The Autonomy Myth, Chapter 1)

Fineman begins this chapter making a common mistake. “We live in the richest country in the history of the world,” she writes, “yet at least one out of every five children lives in poverty.” She continues, “Over 10 percent of Americans aged sixty-five and older are classified as poor, as are one-third of adults with disabilities.” {Fineman 2004@8} Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt on the statistics. Does this mean, then, that America, “at least in its political rhetoric and imagination, is seriously incapacitated in dealing with some of the most important social welfare problems facing its citizens today?”

Not necessarily. Poverty is measured in relative terms. For purposes of argument, assume that the poverty line is defined as the lowest quintile of earners. This tells us nothing about how much people in the lowest quintile actually earn or what their quality of life is. For example, if the average salary in the United States might be $50,000/year. The people in the lowest quintile might earn only $10,000/year. And, at these levels, it might be true that one in five children is in a family earning $10,000/year and, thus, are poor. But if incomes tripled—if suddenly everyone in the US could purchase three times as much quality of life as they could before—there would still be a bottom quintile and one-fifth of children would be in it.

What matters, then, is not relative poverty but absolute poverty. To say that one in five children in the United States is poor means something very different for the quality of life of those children than if we were talking about poor kids in Somalia. In fact, almost no “poor” person in the United States would willingly trade his poverty here for a middle class lifestyle in Somalia.

In a sense, Fineman is failing to understand Garrison Keillor’s about joke Lake Wobegon: “All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In any even distribution, someone will be at the bottom. We should be concerned with the absolute standard of lifestyle being at the bottom entails, and not point out the mere existence of a bottom as a failure of “political rhetoric and imagination.”