Poverty

[HydrogenBond]

The term poverty, although usually quantified in terms of income, etc., is actually a subjective state of mind. For example, if one was living in a middle class family 50 years ago, they might have one car, they would not have a colored TV, but may have one black&white TV and maybe a land line phone. They would not have a computer, an IPod, a cell phone, a color TV, designer clothes and sneakers, higher obesity rates due to plenty of food, etc.

 

If this middle class family of 50 years ago, were around today, they would be considered more deprived than many of those currently considered living below the poverty level. In this example, a purely objective comparison, i.e, tit for tat, is not what defines poverty, rather poverty is a subjective comparison.

 

If one was to go to a poor African country where people live in shanty villages with grass huts, and one of these people was fortuneate enough to have 5 pigs and an ox, they would be considered middle class in that culture. They would also be respected by their peers. If we teleported this person to America and put him in one of our middle class subburbs, now all of a sudden he would be considered extremely poor and an object of pity or disrespect. Alternately, if we took one of our poor people and teleported them to that village with their cell phones, color TV, computer and all, that poor person would now become among the wealthiest people in the village and the object of awe and respect. They wouldn't feel as poor due to the subjective relativity.

 

Perception of poverty is a subjective thing based on how one compares themselves to those around them. Even among the poor, which will tend to group to improve subjective perception, some of these poor people consider themselves more fortuneate than others, even with the same levels of objective factors. Alternately a millionare living among billionares would have a hard time counting all their blessings since he would subjectively see himself far worse off than he is, due to his environment and the feedback of pity and disresepct that would try to reinforce his sense of inferiority.

 

This subjective sense of wealth comparision may spark the individual to get more stuff so they can play the game and regain a higher level of self esteem, i.e., per the script. But it can also pull out the heart within others causing their life to stall in despair.

 

For example, if our middleclass person from the African village was left to his own devices in his wooded lot in the subburbs, he may continue to see himself as a respectful middle class man per his former culture. Once the neighbors begin working on his heart with pity and disapproval, they may successfully pull out his heart and cause his subjective perception of himself to lower to their expectations. Now he would be poor, not just in material things, but also poor in the sense of self respect.

 

This subjective element of poverty is where Democrats and Rebulicans differ in their approach with dealing with poverty. The Democrats assume poverty is objective and that pumping in money will make the difference. But all that does, at best is bump one up into the bottom of a different class of subjective poverty. The republican approach is to not give them fish but to teach them how to fish to build up self respect. This approach attempts to addresss the subjective side of poverty.

[Erasmus00]

This subjective element of poverty is where Democrats and Rebulicans differ in their approach with dealing with poverty. The Democrats assume poverty is objective and that pumping in money will make the difference. But all that does, at best is bump one up into the bottom of a different class of subjective poverty. The republican approach is to not give them fish but to teach them how to fish to build up self respect. This approach attempts to addresss the subjective side of poverty.

 

 

I would almost agree that "teaching a man to fish" is the right approach to dealing with poverty. However, please show me a republican initiated program that actually does this. Some programs introduced by democrats, such as head start certainly follow this philosophy and this is why they seem to get results.

-Will

[CraigD]

If one was to go to a poor African country where people live in shanty villages with grass huts, and one of these people was fortuneate enough to have 5 pigs and an ox, they would be considered middle class in that culture. They would also be respected by their peers. If we teleported this person to America and put him in one of our middle class subburbs, now all of a sudden he would be considered extremely poor and an object of pity or disrespect. Alternately, if we took one of our poor people and teleported them to that village with their cell phones, color TV, computer and all, that poor person would now become among the wealthiest people in the village and the object of awe and respect.

An interesting hypothesis.

 

I’m not convinced it’s accurate, however. Among people who don’t hold capital – that is, people who are not able to make money by investing money – their wealth is mostly due to their wages. Assuming language and cultural (and immigration :)) barriers could be overcome, a successful third world “middle-class” farmer/trader teleported to a first-world would likely employ the same skills used to achieve that success in their new surroundings (budgeting, self-promotion, social networking, etc.), rising in short time to relatively high socioeconomic status, while an unsuccessful “poor person” teleported with all their consumer electronics from the first world to the third would likely have the problems there (lack of ability to get more desirable work) and, once their goodies were sold off (for perhaps less than one might imagine, given that much of the value of computers, HDTVs, etc., depend on local internet and cable TV access, which, if available, may be as or more costly than in the first world), would quickly descend into the local equivalent of poverty.

 

Come to think of it, this is less hypothetical than I initially thought. I know several poor Mexicans neighbors who, despite poor educations and marginal English language skills, manage to save and send home to Mexico $10K+/year. I’ve a Cameroonian acquaintance who owns 3 times the property I do, despite, as near as I can tell, no “marketable skills”, getting all of his income, as near as I can tell, from renting rooms in his houses.

 

Though I like to think that, six-figure income technocrat that I am, I’d be a king in a third world country, I realize this is mostly wishful fantasy. Other than liquidating my wealth and moving to the third world with it to set up a local lending bank – an occupation for which I’m poorly trained and personally ill-suited – I suspect I’d do poorly in such a setting, where six-figure tech jobs are hard to find.

[Boerseun]

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot that can be done about poverty. If the scale of wealth runs from those that don't have (the poor) to those that have lots (the rich), and you enrich the poor, all that will happen is that the definition of wealth will shift. If everybody has a million dollars, the value of the dollar will plummet until the balance have been re-established.

 

Besides, wealthy people are only wealthy because there are poor people to be measured against. If there were no poor people, there'd be no rich people, either. I think we should stop bothering about it. It seems natural to the human condition, and any attempts to change it would probably be artifical and short-lived.

 

...Poverty sucks, but hey - that's life, I guess.

[BibleBeliever]

Without sounding partonising to the millions of genuinely poor on this earth (which I believe has a lot to do with the way we exploit them directly or indirectly - [buy FairTrade producys]), Have you concidered this, the guy in Africa who lives in a mud house and has a goat for milk and a couple of chickens for eggs, owns those things, how many of us own our own house / land / car. If the economy collapsed and the bank asked for it's money back, most of us would have less than the African guy in material terms.

 

Our economy is a house of cards, beware :-o

[HydrogenBond]

Let me give an example of progressive poverty. If we look at most colleges and universities, they are essentially welfare organizations, with respect to the students. Most of the welfare does not come from the government but from the parents. The parents save and sacrifice for the welfare of their children, so they can go to college. Very few students go to college at their own expense, although some do. In fact very few students earn enough on their own, while going to college, to generate a liveable wage per annum. Even if their parents give them a porche and a house near campus, they are still a welfare recipient with a deep pocket benefactor.

 

Luckily, culture does not throw the welfare/poverty nature of college in the student's faces, telling them not to be party parasites for 4-? years. And that they need to skip college and go right into the real world so they can gain a more respectable and independant finacial position in culture. With these social pressures nonexistant, these welfare recepients, are able to develop the skills needed to evolve their inner person.

 

In college the primary currency is good grades. This is not something that money can buy (usually). It involves inner strength of character to study and apply onself. It doesn't matter if you have a $500 laptop or a $5000 laptop, good grades require more than that.

 

The whole purpose of college is to develop an inner strength with respect to being able to learn increasingly complex things, even after the training wheels are removed at graduation. It is sort of an inner glow, that the professors help to light, that gradually comes to the surface, which allows the students to shine the way for the future.

 

Picture if culture wanted to play the social welfare/poverty card with respect to college students, before the inner fire was lit. In other words, make the students feel like lower class citizens, with the process of character building seen as worthless, since it doesn't add to dollars and cents for a long time (short term thinking or immediate gratification). Some students would be under pressure to pay their own way and may see the need to drop out. Others would try to work full time jobs while going to school. The net affect is that most of the students would spread themselves to thin that the glow may never occur in the normal time frame allotted by culture (4 years).

 

The poor are sort of put in that position. Things like raising good kids does not require a lot of money. If their inner glow of character is lit, they future is within their grasp. But social pressure overextends the parents and the childlren so they both neglect what is the most important thing for the future, which is the character of the children. Maybe comparing welfare/ poverty to college welfare/poverty might be a good thing, in its own twisted way, since it creates a hopeful point of view for those under the negative social pressure. College kids are resilent and can take a little awkward heat for the subjective welfare of others.

[Freddy]

Sociologists define poverty this way. They describe 'absolute' poverty and 'relative' poverty.

 

Absolute poverty is where the people suffering from it are in a life and death struggle. Millions of people die each year from this category.

 

Relative poverty is where the people who see themselves as impoverished have less wealth than the majority. Death from this type of poverty is rare.

 

From Wikipedia:

"When measured, poverty may be absolute or relative poverty. Absolute poverty refers to a set standard which is consistent over time and between countries. An example of an absolute measurement would be the percentage of the population eating less food than is required to sustain the human body (approximately 2000-2500 kilocalories per day)."

 

"Relative poverty views poverty as socially defined and dependent on social context. In this case, the number of people counted as poor could increase while their income rise. A relative measurement would be to compare the total wealth of the poorest one-third of the population with the total wealth of richest 1% of the population. There are several different income inequality metrics, one example is the Gini coefficient."

 

Poverty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia