I recently came across a reprint of the paper “What’s so bad about being poor?” written in 1988 by social scientist Charles Murray. Mr. Murray has written several books dealing with demographics and social policies put forth by government. If you had to put a political philosophy to him, the closest would be “libertarian.”
In this paper Mr. Murry writes about those who design and legislate assistance and welfare programs for the poor today. He’s not at all against helping the poor, but he is concerned that some of the government programs are poorly designed and create disincentives.
According to Mr. Murray, from our country’s founding until at least the 1950s, substantial portions of new generations of folks moving into academia, business, journalism and government had grown up dirt-poor. These people had experienced being poor first-hand, most recently in the Great Depression.
To my readers: how many of you grew up in the depression? My guess is none of you did. But think about your parents and grandparents who did. Didn’t they have a different outlook on personal finances? On society’s role in the community? On charity? I’ll bet they did. Not that either yours or theirs is bad or good. Just different.
Now, fast forward to the 1990s. Commonly, people in these lofty positions of academia and government had grown up in middle-class or affluent families. Most had gone to college; often to prestigious ivy league schools. These people had not experienced being poor, and only knew what they knew from anecdotal information. It was that knowledge, however imperfect, that was the basis for many modern social welfare programs.
Does this mean that the programs they may have designed were out of step with reality? Not necessarily, but I think we may assume that, had they experienced poverty, certainly the poverty of the great depression, they may have designed their poverty programs differently.
But one could ask, “what does it mean to be poor?”
Poverty is not just economics. Mr. Murry conducts a thought experiment where he asks the reader to place themselves in a community where everyone is poor (by our western standards). He imagines himself in a small village in Thailand. As an academic he didn’t have any useful survival skills, but he figured being an educated man, he might be able to benefit the village, perhaps by teaching the village children. This meant he might be able to become an accepted member of the village and perform enough work and save up enough money to acquire some land and maybe become a subsistence farmer.
Anyway, Murray’s conclusion was that, he wouldn’t have been “poor” relative to the society in which he was living. Eventually he would have food, housing and community, all based on his efforts.
Next, Murray imagines that, instead of a small Thai village, you live in the United States and receive a free apartment, free food, free medical care, and a cash grant, where the total benefit puts you above the poverty line. There is, however, a catch: you are required to live in a particular apartment, and this apartment is located in a public-housing project in one of the burned-out areas of a slum in a modern city. In this case, the one thing missing would be community as you would become a virtual shut-in as you’d risk violence when you walk out your front door.
So, does poverty mean a lack of money? In his first thought experiment he had no money to speak of, but he didn’t think he was poor. He had food, shelter, and became part of his newfound community by using his skills. In his second he had all the benefits given to him but didn’t have the ability to self-actualize.
In which case was he poor?
Now, do you remember the Texas teen Ethan Couch who, it was argued, was infected with “affluenza?” Couch was sentenced to 10 years’ probation for a drunk driving crash that killed four people. His defense was that his family’s wealth triggered an irresponsibility in him which absolved him from the crash. His parents sent him to a treatment center where the center’s director said that Couch “had no structure, no proper role models and definitely no boundaries” when he was growing up.
Tell me, is this family rich or poor?
So, Mr. Murray’s conclusion (to which I agree), is that when we construct social programs, it’s important, perhaps the most important, to consider the psyche of the recipient and not just solely the financial support given. Poverty is not just a lack of money.
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"It's what you learn after you know everything that really counts"
- Harry S. Truman
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How to become an Internet star? Photobomb! Taylor Blake of KnuckleBumpFarms started doing TikTok videos of animals on the family farm. But Emmanuel The Emu just can’t leave Taylor’s iPhone alone and he’s become a TikTok star!
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