Anthony Bencomo
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
A definition of poverty usually involves looking at the absence of money and/or material goods. Poverty has been somewhat difficult to define, especially as there is a quantitative component linked to the term. Even the census, the main measuring tool of the state, has faced criticism for their definition. Currently they measure various forms of income (earnings, rents, survivor benefits) and weigh that in consideration of the measure of need, which includes the size of the family and the ages of the children. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services presently lists, for a family of four, that the poverty guideline is $25,750 a year (U.S. Federal). The numbers of families that are at or fall underneath this number help determine money for federal assistance programs such as Head Start and food stamps, meaning the poverty rate has real consequences for budgets and for the everyday lives of individuals. There are other factors that are tossed around such as crime in the neighborhood and access to food are cited as being ignored when income is the sole measure (Uchitelle 2001).
Furthermore, should poverty in the United States only be compared to richer countries? Many are quick to cite that poverty in the United States is generally much better than some of the poorest nations in the world. In the United States the poverty rate translates to around $16 a day. Typically, $2 a day is the norm as the poverty line in poorer nations. It was found that there are people living in the United States who fall below this $2 a day marker; about 1 to 5% of families are included in this statistic (Rosen 2014).
Some definitions are removed from strictly numbers to a more holistic approach. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in Economics defined poverty as “the lack of freedom to have or do basic things that you value.” with political scientists Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons stating “A person deprived of things that everyone around him has is likely to suffer a sense of inadequacy, a loss of dignity and self-respect.” establish that it is a person being blocked from meeting their material needs and human dignity could be looked upon as poverty (Uchitelle 2001). These explanations also illustrate how difficult it can be to label poverty with so many contested meaning, each with its own particular insight.
Obviously, there are numerous negative consequences to living in poverty that encompass health, education, and relations with the criminal justice system. Poverty also has a large hand in shaping cities, where people live and how resources are allocated in those areas. It is one of the biggest factors in determining life outcomes. Fresno serves as a prime example of this as newer development and richer people tend to continuously move to the northern parts of the city. This geography also reflects health trends and life outcomes as residents living in the richer part of the city live to an average age of 90 with people in the poorer parts of Fresno living around 20 years less (Thebault 2018). In the United States, women and minorities tend to live in these poorer areas and tend to be subject to these negative consequences on a more frequent basis. It was identified that, rather than looking to build up their neighborhood, many poor people are looking to escape their surroundings, showing the brain drain and economic flight that able residents carry out (Desmond and Travis 2018, 874).
On a political level, politicians fear adjusting the poverty level due to their anxiety that the percentage of impoverished Americans would formally increase as new people fell underneath the adjusted poverty line. At face value, without the qualifier noting that the poverty level was adjusted, politicians would be burdened with this increased number during reelection (Uchitelle 2001). Refusal to adjust the number also means some continue to struggle but do not qualify for federal programs as they do not meet or fall underneath $16 a day. It would be assumed that individuals blocked from resources and material wealth, especially in wealthy nations, would lash out against the system in multiple ways. Instead what has been found is that these groups living in poverty in the United States tend to be less engaged politically. Rather than blaming the system, individuals frequently look solely at their own faults when faced with problems that stem from their own poverty like evictions. Residents do have a level of social support, but this rarely becomes political action (Desmond and Travis 2018, 873-890).
While we tend to think of poverty as a national problem, the global community does have an effect in creating and enforcing poverty. Residents of East St. Louis witnessed business owners move factories to poorer nations, leaving the city’s black residents without the main employers, causing 35% of residents to be considered under the poverty line (Hamer 2011, 79). However, their story is the story of survival and shows how some communities have managed to push back against poverty; one particular outgrowth has been the development of the underground economy. While of course this underground economy encompasses drug dealing, it also consists of people catering out of their homes, gardening neighbor’s yards or cutting hair (Hamer 2011, 79-80). This is not to discount the effects that neoliberalism and deindustrialization had on this area but instead an acknowledgement of the residents for their ability to find ways of survival, and their resilience in an ever-growing globalized neoliberal economy.
Bibliography
Desmond, Matthew, and Adam Travis. “Political Consequences of Survival Strategies among the Urban Poor.” American Sociological Review 83, no. 5 (2018): 869–896.
Hamer, Jennifer. Abandoned in the Heartland: Work, Family, and Living in East St. Louis. University of California Press, 2011.
Rosen, Rebecca J. “The Bottom 1%.” The Atlantic, August 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/the-bottom-1-percent/379400/.
Thebault, Reis. “Fresno’s Mason-Dixon Line.” The Atlantic, August 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/fresnos-segregation/567299/.
Uchitelle, Louis. “How to Define Poverty? Let Us Count the Ways.” The New York Times, 26 May 2001.
“U.S. Federal Poverty Guidelines Used to Determine Financial Eligibility for Certain Federal Programs.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 11 Jan. 2019. https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines.