In his significantly titled “The Affluent Society” (1958) Professor J. K. Galbraith states that poverty in this country is no longer “a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought.” Dr. Galbraith is a humane critic of the American capitalist system, and he is generously indignant about the continued existence of even this nonmassive and afterthoughtish poverty. But the interesting thing about his pronouncement, aside from the fact that it is inaccurate, is that it was generally accepted as obvious. For a long time now, almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal’s social legislation and—more important—the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.
Dr. Galbraith states that our poor have dwindled to two hard-core categories. One is the “insular poverty” of those who live in the rural South or in depressed areas like West Virginia. The other category is “case poverty,” which he says is “commonly and properly related to [such] characteristics of the individuals so afflicted [as] mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of modern economic life, excessive procreation, alcohol, insufficient education.” He reasons that such poverty must be due to individual defects, since “nearly everyone else has mastered his environment; this proves that it is not intractable.” Without pressing the similarity of this concept to the “Social Darwinism” whose fallacies Dr. Galbraith easily disposes of elsewhere in his book, one may observe that most of these characteristics are as much the result of poverty as its cause.
Dr. Galbraith’s error is understandable, and common. Last April the newspapers reported some exhilarating statistics in a Department of Commerce study: the average family income increased from $2,340 in 1929 to $7,020 in 1961. (These figures are calculated in current dollars, as are all the others I shall cite.) But the papers did not report the fine type, so to speak, which showed that almost all the recent gain was made by families with incomes of over $7,500, and that the rate at which poverty is being eliminated has slowed down alarmingly since 1953. Only the specialists and the statisticians read the fine type, which is why illusions continue to exist about American poverty.
Now Michael Harrington, an alumnus of the Catholic Worker and the Fund for the Republic who is at present a contributing editor of Dissent and the chief editor of the Socialist Party biweekly, New America, has written “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” (Macmillan). In the admirably short space of under two hundred pages, he outlines the problem, describes in imaginative detail what it means to be poor in this country today, summarizes the findings of recent studies by economists and sociologists, and analyzes the reasons for the persistence of mass poverty in the midst of general prosperity. It is an excellent book—and a most important one.
My only serious criticism is that Mr. Harrington has popularized the treatment a bit too much. Not in the writing, which is on a decent level, but in a certain vagueness. There are no index, no bibliography, no reference footnotes. In our overspecialized culture, books like this tend to fall into two categories: Popular (no scholarly “apparatus”) and Academic (too much). I favor something intermediate—why should the academics have all the footnotes? The lack of references means that the book is of limited use to future researchers and writers. A pity, since the author has brought together a great range of material.
I must also object that Mr. Harrington’s treatment of statistics is more than a little impressionistic. His appendix, which he calls a coming to grips with the professional material, doesn’t live up to its billing. “If my interpretation is bleak and grim,” he writes, “and even if it overstates the case slightly, that is intentional. My moral point of departure is a sense of outrage. . . . .In such a discussion it is inevitable that one gets mixed up with dry, graceless, technical matters. That should not conceal the crucial fact that these numbers represent people and that any tendency toward understatement is an intellectual way of acquiescing in suffering.” But a fact is a fact, and Mr. Harrington confuses the issue when he writes that “these numbers represent people.” They do—and one virtue of his book is that he never forgets it—but in dealing with statistics, this truism must be firmly repressed lest one begin to think from the heart rather than from the head, as he seems to do when he charges those statisticians who “understate” the numbers of the poor with having found “an intellectual way of acquiescing in suffering.” This is moral bullying, and it reminds me, toutes proportions gardées, of the habitual confusion in Communist thinking between facts and political inferences from them. “A sense of outrage” is proper for a “moral point of departure,” but statistics are the appropriate factual point of departure, as in the writings of Marx and Engels on the agony of the nineteenth-century English working class—writings that are by no means lacking in a sense of moral outrage, either.
These objections, however, do not affect Mr. Harrington’s two main contentions: that mass poverty still exists in the United States, and that it is disappearing more slowly than is commonly thought. Two recent dry, graceless, and technical reports bear him out. One is that Commerce Department study, already mentioned. More important is “Poverty and Deprivation in the U.S.,” a bulky pamphlet issued by the Conference on Economic Progress, in Washington, whose national committee includes Thurman Arnold, Leon H. Keyserling (said to be the principal author of the pamphlet), and Walter P. Reuther.
In the last year we seem to have suddenly awakened, rubbing our eyes like Rip van Winkle, to the fact that mass poverty persists, and that it is one of our two gravest social problems. (The other is related: While only eleven per cent of our population is non-white, twenty-five per cent of our poor are.) Two other current books confirm Mr. Harrington’s thesis: “Wealth and Power in America” (Praeger), by Dr. Gabriel Kolko, a social historian who has recently been at Harvard and the University of Melbourne, Australia, and “Income and Welfare in the United States” (McGraw-Hill), compiled by an imposing battery of four socio-economists headed by Dr. James N. Morgan, who rejoices in the title of Program Director of the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Kolko’s book resembles Mr. Harrington’s in several ways: It is short, it is based on earlier studies, and it is liberally inclined. It is less readable, because it is written in an academic jargon that is merely a vehicle for the clinching Statistic. Although it is impossible to write seriously about poverty without a copious use of statistics—as this review will demonstrate—it is possible to bring thought and feeling to bear on such raw material. Mr. Harrington does this more successfully than Dr. Kolko, whose prose is afflicted not only with academic blight but also with creeping ideology. Dr. Kolko leans so far to the socialist side that he sometimes falls on his nose, as when he clinches the inequality of wealth in the United States with a statistic: “In 1959, 23% of those earning less than $1,000 [a year] owned a car, compared to 95% of those earning more than $10,000.” The real point is just the opposite, as any citizen of Iran, Ghana, Yemen, or the U.S.S.R. would appreciate—not that the rich have cars but that almost a quarter of the extremely poor do. Similarly, although Dr. Kolko has two chapters on poverty that confirm Mr. Harrington’s argument, his main point is a different and more vulnerable one: “The basic distribution of income and wealth in the United States is essentially the same now as it was in 1939, or even 1910.” This is a half fact. The rich are almost as rich as ever and the poor are even poorer, in the percentage of the national income they receive. Yet, as will become apparent later, there have been major changes in the distribution of wealth, and there has been a general improvement in living standards, so that the poor are much fewer today than they were in 1939. “Most low-income groups live substantially better today,” Dr. Kolko admits. “But even though their real wages have mounted, their percentage of the national income has not changed.” That in the last half century the rich have kept their riches and the poor their poverty is indeed a scandal. But it is theoretically possible, assuming enough general increase in wealth, that the relatively poor might by now have achieved a decent standard of living, no matter how inferior to that of the rich. As the books under consideration show, however, this theoretical possibility has not been realized. Inequality of wealth is not necessarily a major social problem per se. Poverty is. The late French philosopher Charles Pguy remarks, in his classic essay on poverty, “The duty of tearing the destitute from their destitution and the duty of distributing goods equitably are not of the same order. The first is an urgent duty, the second is a duty of convenience. . . . When all men are provided with the necessities what do we care about the distribution of luxury?” What indeed? Envy and emulation are the motives—and not very good ones—for the equalization of wealth. The problem of poverty goes much deeper.
“Income and Welfare in the United States” differs from the other works reviewed here in length (531 big pages) and in being the result of original research; 2,800 families were interviewed “in depth.” I must confess that, aside from a few interesting bits of data, I got almost nothing out of it. I assume the authors think poverty is still an important social problem, else why would they have gone to all this labor, but I’m not at all sure what their general conclusions are; maybe there aren’t supposed to be any, in the best tradition of American scholarship. Their book is one of those behemoths of collective research financed by a foundation (in this case, largely by Ford) that daunt the stoutest-hearted lay reader (in this case, me). Based on “a multi-stage area probability sample that gives equal chance of selection to all non-institutional dwelling units in the conterminous United States [and that] was clustered geographically at each stage and stratified with interlaced controls,” it is a specimen of what Charles Lamb called biblia abiblia—things that have the outward appearance of books but are not books, since they cannot be read. Methodologically, it employs something called the “multivariate analysis,” which is explained in Appendix E. Typographically, Appendix E looks like language, but it turns out to be strewn with booby traps, all doubtless well known in the trade, like “dummy variables,” “F ratios,” “regression coefficients,” “beta coefficients” (and “partial beta coefficients”), and two kinds of “standard deviations”—“of explanatory variable A” and “of the dependent variable.”
My experience with such works may be summarized as follows: (alpha) the coefficient of comprehensibility decreases in direct ratio to the increase in length, or the longer the incomprehensibler, a notion that is illustrated here by the fact that Dr. Kolko’s short work is more understandable than Dr. Morgan et al.’s long one; (beta) the standard deviation from truism is inversely related to the magnitude of the generalization, or the bigger the statement the more obvious. (Beta) is illustrated by the authors’ five general proposals for action (“Implications for Public Policy”). The second of these is: “Fuller employment and the elimination of discrimination based on prejudice would contribute greatly to the independence of non-white persons, women, teenagers, and some of the aged.” That is, if Negroes and the rest had jobs and were not discriminated against, they would be better off—a point that doesn’t need to be argued or, for that matter, stated. The authors have achieved such a mastery of truism that they sometimes achieve the same monumental effect even in non-magnitudinous statements, as: “Table 28-1 shows that the proportion of parents who indicated that their children will attend private colleges is approximately twice as large for those with incomes over $10,000 as for those with incomes under $3,000.” Could be.
What is “poverty”? It is a historically relative concept, first of all. “There are new definitions [in America] of what man can achieve, of what a human standard of life should be,” Mr. Harrington writes. “Those who suffer levels of life well below those that are possible, even though they live better than medieval knights or Asian peasants, are poor. . . . Poverty should be defined in terms of those who are denied the minimal levels of health, housing, food, and education that our present stage of scientific knowledge specifics as necessary for life as it is now lived in the United States.” His dividing line follows that proposed in recent studies by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics: $4,000 a year for a family of four and $2,000 for an individual living alone. (All kinds of income are included, such as food grown and consumed on farms.) This is the cutoff line generally drawn today.
Mr. Harrington estimates that between forty and fifty million Americans, or about a fourth of the population, are now living in poverty. Not just below the level of comfortable living, but real poverty, in the old-fashioned sense of the word—that they are hard put to it to get the mere necessities, beginning with enough to eat. This is difficult to believe in the United States of 1963, but one has to make the effort, and it is now being made. The extent of our poverty has suddenly become visible. The same thing has happened in England, where working-class gains as a result of the Labour Party’s post-1945 welfare state blinded almost everybody to the continued existence of mass poverty. It was not until Professor Richard M. Titmuss, of the London School of Economics, published a series of articles in the New Statesman last fall, based on his new book, “Income Distribution and Social Change” (Allen & Unwin), that even the liberal public in England became aware that the problem still persists on a scale that is “statistically significant,” as the economists put it.
Statistics on poverty are even trickier than most. For example, age and geography make a difference. There is a distinction, which cannot be rendered arithmetically, between poverty and low income. A childless young couple with $3,000 a year is not poor in the way an elderly couple might be with the same income. The young couple’s statistical poverty may be a temporary inconvenience; if the husband is a graduate student or a skilled worker, there are prospects of later affluence or at least comfort. But the old couple can look forward only to diminishing earnings and increasing medical expenses. So also geographically: A family of four in a small town with $4,000 a year may be better off than a like family in a city—lower rent, no bus fares to get to work, fewer occasions (or temptations) to spend money. Even more so with a rural family. Although allowance is made for the value of the vegetables they may raise to feed themselves, it is impossible to calculate how much money they don’t spend on clothes, say, or furniture, because they don’t have to keep up with the Joneses. Lurking in the crevices of a city, like piranha fish in a Brazilian stream, are numerous tempting opportunities for expenditure, small but voracious, which can strip a budget to its bones in a surprisingly short time. The subtlety and complexity of poverty statistics may be discovered by a look at Dr. Kolko’s statement that in 1959 “23% of those earning less than $1,000 owned a car.” Does this include college students, or are they included in their families’ statistics? If the first is true, then Dr. Kolko’s figure loses much of its meaning. If the second is, then it is almost too meaningful, since it says that one-fourth of those earning less than twenty dollars a week are able to afford a car. Which it is, deponent sayeth not.
It is not, therefore, surprising to find that there is some disagreement about just how many millions of Americans are poor. The point is that all these recent studies agree that American poverty is still a mass phenomenon. One of the lowest estimates appears in the University of Michigan’s “Income and Welfare,” which states, “Poor families comprise one-fifth of the nation’s families.” The authors do not develop this large and crucial statement, or even give sources for it, despite their meticulous pedantry in all unimportant matters. So one can only murmur that the other experts put the number of poor much higher. (Though even a fifth is still over 35,000,000 people.) The lowness of the Michigan estimate is especially puzzling since its cutoff figure for poverty is $4,330, which is slightly higher than the commonly accepted one. The tendentious Dr. Kolko is also unconvincing, in the opposite direction. “Since 1947,” he writes, “one-half of the nation’s families and unattached individuals have had an income too small to provide them with a maintenance standard of living,” which he sets at $4,500 a year for a family. He does give a table, with a long supporting footnote that failed to make clear to me how he could have possibly decided that 90,000,000 Americans are now living on less than $4,500 a year; I suspect some confusion between a “maintenance” and a “minimum-comfort” budget.
More persuasive estimates appear in the Conference on Economic Progress pamphlet, “Poverty and Deprivation.” Using the $4,000 cutoff, the authors conclude that 38,000,000 persons are now living in poverty, which is slightly less than Mr. Harrington’s lowest estimate. One reason may be that the pamphlet discriminates, as most studies don’t, between “multiple-person families” and “unattached individuals,” rating the latter as poor only if they have less than $2,000 a year. But there is more to it than that, including a few things I don’t feel competent to judge. Income statistics are never compiled on exactly the same bases and there are all kinds of refinements, which vary from one study to another. Thus the Commerce Department’s April report estimates there are 17,500,000 families and “unattached individuals” with incomes of less than $4,000. How many of the latter are there? “Poverty and Deprivation” puts the number of single persons with under $2,000 at 4,000,000. Let us say that in the 17,500,000 under $4,000 there are 6,500,000 single persons the proportion of unattached individuals tends to go down as income rises. This homemade estimate gives us 11,000,000 families with incomes of under $4,000. Figuring the average American family at three and a half persons—which it is—this makes 38,500,000 individuals in families, or a grand total, if we add in the 4,000,000 “unattached individuals” with under $2,000 a year, of 42,500,000 Americans now living in poverty, which is close to a fourth of the total population.