On poverty: should we all just pack up and go home?

Last updated on: November 25, 2013 at 8:54 am by Jane the Actuary

On poverty: should we all just pack up and go home? 2013-11-25T08:54:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So apparently this article on poverty has now gone viral — appearing on friends’ facebook feeds, at the Atlantic and at Huffington Post. The basic gist of it is that poor people are so beaten down by their circumstances that they simply can’t be expected to make efforts on their own to get out of poverty. And the author, Linda Tirado, fills it with illustrations from her own life. I wasn’t going to comment on this because it seemed too personal and I didn’t want to end up being perceived of as attacking the author on a personal basis, but, the more I think about it, the more I think there are real issues here:

In the first place, I don’t entirely buy her story. She says poor people don’t try to save for the future, don’t try to improve their lives because fundamentally they don’t believe that there’s any future ahead of them but a replay of their current life, day after day, so they seek small pleasures instead, even if, in the end, they may even be destructive, like getting pregnant by a man unsuited for fatherhood, because of the desire for companionship, however temporary.

But at the same time, she details her life full of woe: two jobs, 3 hours of sleep a night, — and a full load of college classes. In other words, she contradicts herself at the beginning of her second paragraph. Her biography at the Huffington Post also says her night job is a cook, but her day job is a “voting rights activist for a disability nonprofit.” Now maybe she really meant to be showing us the mindset of the people she knows who aren’t as ambitious as she is — and she now has written a follow-up piece giving more of her background.

But her argument isn’t new — it’s just not usually expressed in first-person terms.

Fundamentally the argument is that you can’t expect poor people to try to better themselves, because everything they endure in their daily lives, and everything they have endured, has taken from them this ability. They can’t budget, they can’t cook, they can’t quit smoking, they can’t stop having sex with losers, or make a determined effort to use extremely highly-effective contraception — they can’t do any of that because: poverty.

And yet if this is true, then there are two choices:

If you’re fundamentally a wide-eyed optimist about human behavior, you’ll say that this shows that we need to shower the poor with no end of services, and in-kind benefits, and just plain cash to take away the stress and hardship, and then, their burden lifted, they’ll educate themselves, get a job, read to their children every night and become upstanding citizens (even when, all hardship lifted, there’s no material need for this any longer).

If you’re not so optimistic, then there’s no point to anything — you might as well bring back the workhouse to warehouse these people, and maybe bring back forced sterilization for good measure, if not doing so means a guarantee of successive generations, of increasing size, of similarly incapable poor.

At the same time — we know there are people who climb out of poverty and people who don’t. Poor people who insist on home-cooked meals and people who go to McDonalds. Poor people who hide some money under the mattress for when the car breaks down, and those who end up at the payday lender, or getting the heat or electric shut off. Poor people who make sure their children stay on the straight and narrow and poor people who end up at court hearings saying, “my Johnny’s a good boy.”

Rather than getting stuck in a dead end, I’d like to see a paper, an article, something that tells us why some succeed and some don’t.

(Tangentially: apparently tons of people were moved by this article. I wasn’t — neither the first nor the second; they were both defensive and angry, which seems to be a popular way of writing, especially on the internet, but not a particularly skilled way to write.

And also tangentially — remember mincome, from a few weeks back? Mincome simply doesn’t work, because the 10K per person isn’t enough for a single mother, and no one who did any calculations in articles or comments recognized that it’d require a big chunk more for children.)

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