Forty Two wrote:Brian Peacock wrote:Forty Two wrote:... The point I was making is that it's really ridiculous to call the US an outlier from the rest of the world in that way, because pretty much, other arguably than a handful of first world, western European, Canada Oz/NZ, being poor in the rest of the world is much worse than in the US.
And the point I was making is that viewing the poverty of the impoverished in absolute or global terms is unhelpful when talking about or addressing the actual poverty of the impoverished of any nation.
Unhelpful? Not sure what you mean by that.
I thought that was pretty clear from my comments. It's unhelpful because it gives the wrong impression about peoples living standards and opportunities in the context of their membership of a society.
The idea is that a nation can have no real poor in it, relatively speaking. There are some who equate income inequality with poverty, which it is not.
I'm not one of those, nor did I forward that point.
If you had a society of millionaires and billionaires, and nobody below the million mark (and all such persons could live in big houses, with plenty of gourmet organic food, transportation, entertainment, intellectual stimulation and disposable income) they wouldn't become poor just because there happen to be billionaires out there who have 80% of the wealth.
I'm wondering who said otherwise?
I.e. - income inequality is one measure and a relevant one, but it is not the definition of poverty, nor is it inherently bad to have unequal distribution of income.
I'm afraid I'm not seeing how this relates either to my comments or the post I was responding to...
In fact, to have a free society where people have economic freedoms, there will inevitably be inequalities due to people's differing life choices. People who opt to focus on work, for example, and eschew a family, will have a better chance at amassing more wealth because they limit expenses and increase income. Making more money than other people is not inherently bad.
If you're of the view that I think otherwise you're mistaken. And besides, criticism of widening or worrisome income inequality is not founded on the premiss that everyone has some moral right to exactly the same amount of money and exactly the same opportunities as everybody else. Personally I feel that characterising criticism of income inequality in that way is a bit of a rouge fish.
Brian Peacock wrote:... Are the hungry and homeless of New Hampshire better off than the hungry and homeless of New Mexico, or the hungry and homeless of the UK or The Democratic Republic of the Congo? Perhaps they are in absolute terms, which is to say by comparison, but they're still hungry and homeless Americans.
The "poor" in the US are not hungry or homeless. Only a very very small number of people in the US are ever homeless, and those that are are most often homeless for a brief period of time, staying with family and such. The percentages are very low. Now, I'm not denying that they are there, and I am not saying that no provision should be made for them in our system. Provision IS in fact made for them. Help is available. But, it's a different group of people to say "the poor" in the US vs. "hungry and homeless" in the US. When an article says so many millions of people are "poor" in America, they are including in that group a lot of people who live in houses they own, have two cars in the driveway, have plenty of food, have computers, tvs, internet, and go to the movies and other entertainment options regularly with some discretionary funds. The hungry and homeless portion represents a tiny fraction.
Fair point. My literary pretensions have clouded the point. For 'homeless and hungry' read something like 'very poor', or 'impoverished'.
Brian Peacock wrote:...
To say that the homeless and hungry of the US are better off than the homeless and hungry of some other nation is just a lazy kind of way to declare that the hungry and homeless are not really hungry or homeless, that the poor are not poor, or at least that they're not that poor - like third-world poor.
It's not saying that, though. To be clear. I haven't said, nor did the articles say, that the "hungry and homeless" are better off here than other "hungry and homeless" people in another country. If a person is hungry and homeless, they are hungry and homeless. It's bad wherever you are.
Sure is. But just taking hunger and homelessness for a moment, at least they are a pretty clear indication of poverty, and the levels of each give a sense of how a nation is doing in relation to those structural features which apply to everyone and which everyone has to navigate as citizens. Are the numbers of very poor and destitute people rising, falling, or staying about the same? Are those numbers too high, too low, or about right? How many people are in long-term nutritional deficit? How many children are homeless or in households that cannot meet basic living costs? That kind of thing.
However, what the data showed is that the bottom 10% of American households live better than the average person in many first world countries, and are only worse off than the bottom 10% in one or two countries. That's according to the OECD's Better Life Index.
OK. To put a human face on that nugget, 10% of America equals c.32 million people - around half the population of the UK, or about six-times the population Norway. A previous post stated that the lowest quintile of the income distribution curve (lowest 20% of the population) had incomes amounting to c.0.01% of GDP - around $1.8bn, or about $30 each pa. I mention this only to point out that rather than simply talking about a number, like 10% of the population, perhaps we should be a little more probing about what that actually means.
For example: What's the income distribution within that 32 million people? Are their incomes rising relative to costs, going down, or staying about the same? Given the structural landscape of the US what's likely to happen to the chances of those 32 million people in the next 12months, in the next 5 or ten years? Of that 10% how many people are in severe poverty; unable to meet basic living costs, in housing crisis, in nutritional deficit, in associated poor health etc? How many are in some form of employment? How many are in receipt of some form of state assistance? How many are children, how many are of working age, and how many are of retirement age? Things like that.
Brian Peacock wrote:...It feels like an aphorism to salve the conscience of those who don't really want to consider matter seriously, or who want to avoid the issue all together - it means poverty is a problem for the poor to solve themselves rather than recognising that the vast majority of poverty is not the consequence of personal action, inaction, or moral failure but a structural consequence and a social, and therefore a political, issue.
I'm not talking about the morality of anyone's actions or the reasons for them being poor. I'm saying - very clearly - that the when an article says that X million Americans are "poor" they are not "hungry and homeless" (except for a very small percentage).
What percentage?
Most of the poor, as the Better Life Index showed, live better than the average person in most European countries. That's the data. Not a value judgment.
OK, I've granted that referring to 'homeless and hungry' was a bit OTT, but how many people have or are accruing debts they cannot service, how many people are working or are supported by the state but cannot cover basic needs like housing, energy, food, or clothing costs, who have to make choices between feeding their kids and feeding themselves, or between sanitary products for mum or diapers? Again, what I'm saying is that poverty is a real issue for any society but in order to examine and address it one has to look at it not just in abstract terms but in real, human terms, because it is a factor in the real lives of real human beings.
Now I know there are government programs and charities that cover some of the shortfall in means that people experience, but do they address the underlying issue or merely meet some of the immediate needs of the worse-cases without doing anything to ameliorate the additional costs of being poor, such as additional transport costs or having limited access to credit at affordable rates, to name but two; do the limits and/or conditionalities of assistance programs themselves carry additional resource costs for poor individual's or families?
The issue is never really looked at in the round by those with the power, and the responsibility, to address such important social quandaries, it seems. The thing here is, if your neighbour is not just poor but embedded in a structure that keeps them impoverished then they are likely to become desperate, and liable to rely on alternative forms of finance, like the black economy or irregular and unregulated work, or crime even. What percentage of desperately poor people are you happy to live alongside?
I'm sure that in the US, as in the UK, most people who are poor are not that kind of desperately poor, and I'm sure most are exceedingly grateful for the help and support they do receive -- if perhaps a little embarrassed about their circumstances -- but the fundamental structural issues persist year-on-year. And with each inevitable turning of the electoral cycle these structural issues not only go unaddressed politically (other than to be reaffirmed as a 'fact of live'), but currently they are actively being upgraded, enhanced, and ever-deeply entrenched (or so it seems to me, with the likes of the so-called 'tax reform and jobs bill' currently being pushed into US law, or the recent revisions of tax and welfare systems in the UK which are actually pushing people in income, food and energy poverty, rent arrears, eviction, destitution, and ill-health - and in some cases suicide).
The claim of many on the right of the political spectrum is that Capitalism could and can solve this structural problem if it's is freed from the restricting hand of bureaucratic regulation and governmental control. However, that a big 'if' isn't it? It presumes that Capitalism has a kind of moral purpose in the form of some obligation to other people and to improving their lot in life. Do you think Capitalism has such an obligation - and if so, how do you think it is doing?