"A grad student from a wealthy family with a lot of possessions and family assistance who's earning a below poverty level stipend for a year isn't poor, despite being over the poverty line"
I'm 135.44237% sure that you mean "despite being under the poverty line."
How do public assistance formulae take assets into account? It can't be strictly income based, can it?
Basically what you're saying is that Brock Landers has a tiny little peabrain, right? I guess I can go along with that.
you posted this immediately after the post on penis size for a reason, right?
Also, in the fourth paragraph, last sentence, I think "does" s/b "due".
Good post, by the way, well deserving of at least five comments.
I do think conservatives understand this. They just think the "poverty line" overestimates actual poverty due to the sweet-assed dvd players.
I hate the "gotcha" moment when you're using a word in what you're calling the natural sense and some jerk argues with you for 45 minutes before saying "aha, but you're not using it right, because what it *really* means is. . ." and then gives you some precise, aka narrowly-defined usage. Makes me want to smash people with a hammer.
So bitch, what you're saying is you like your definitions girthy?
LB, you haven't been funning us about being a lawyer, have you? Better to use words naturally than throw defined terms around with reckless abandon? That can't be right.
7: Yeah. The thing is, though, it's not just a tactic (although it can be used as one). Precision's seductive, and reasonable people arguing in good will get drawn in by the appeal of the precise term, even where it's misleading.
Another example that I didn't want to use in the post, was your run in with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. That whole bit about what, exactly, 'spoofing' meant was exactly this sort of thing. 'Spoofing,' in the relevant sense, means doing something technical to misrepresent your identity or location on the Internet: the fact that someone may have a tighter definition than that doesn't make loose usage inaccurate or (if you happen to be insane) defamatory.
9: But that's exactly it -- if you're going to use defined terms at all, they have to be tightly controlled. The defined term is defined within the four corners of a particular document.
Once you let a defined term start gallivanting around the language and accumulating connotations from related natural-language words, the whole process goes straight to hell.
11: No, you're absolutely right. And even tightly-defined terms have a tendency to go postal when there's money to be made, as demonstrated by the tax shelter industry. I'm just pulling your leg.
BTW, I missed the party (gathering? no-fun discussion?) over the weekend, but FWIW I think you're right about Y.
I think people get frustrated with the use of well-defined terms because one of the sets of connotations being borrowed applies strictly to that well-defined term. It's less of a problem in a discussion than a one-off argument.
yeah, I completely agree that for most purposes (esp. arguing over politics), the ordinary sense of words is what matters, not some tarted-up, precisified, version of the word.
I don't think that distinction is always going to map onto the accurate vs. precise distinction, though. Nor do I think as a general rule that "accuracy is more important"--some contexts yes, some contexts no. (The shooter with the tight cluster may well be the better marksman, for instance, who just needs to adjust his scope slightly).
I suspect there are actually a lot of different complaints lurking in your thread. The abuse of language you are complaining about is also related to the problem of spurious quantification, isn't it? I.e. the putting of numbers onto things that are not necessarily best measured numerically?
If you think that e.g. well-being, dental pain, taste in art, etc. is not susceptible to numerical quantification, then you will probably think that assigning numbers to people's well-being etc. is a deep mistake that cuts across the accurate/precise distinction. Somebody says "I'm feeling 6.4 pain quanta". The right response, I'd think, is not "you should have striven for accuracy rather than precision", because that would suggest that there is some number that *is* accurate (if perhaps less precise). And the problem may just be that going numerical is the wrong way altogether.
And a variation on this: going numerical, plus using dollars as your metric. Whatever can be measured can be measured in dollars is a deeper mistake than prioritizing precision over accuracy.
Anyhow--these are minor cavils attached to a general strong expression of agreement. Good post.
Here is an article about the "poverty line" and poverty:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060403fa_fact
13 looks interesting, but I didn't quite get what you were saying.
Just for fun, might one suggest that part of the problem migh be that the conservative view of the liberal definition of "poor" is as to the centrists view of the conservative definition of "liberal?"
For me, though, poverty can be no number: It is th e line at which dignity cannot be protected.
8/13: Unless everyone involved in a discussion is a specialist, I think one should pretty much assume that language isn't being used in technical ways. And if it is so, the speaker needs to say that right at the outset.
19 to 17, although it works for 18 as well.
Makes me want to smash people with a hammer.
See, there goes one of the ladies, flying off the handle again.
I missed the party (gathering? no-fun discussion?)
Rancorous threads like that should henceforth be described as "y-fun."
It is th e line at which dignity cannot be protected.
I dunno. I have to go to the fucking grocery store today, but that hardly makes me poor.
17: This is an excellent definition. The biggest problem with poverty is that it's humiliating.
RE 17:
Yeah, dignity -- I'm sure we can all agree on what that is.
No, I'm gonna argue with 23, too. The biggest problem with poverty is not being able to afford food or shelter. The humiliation thing is a huge problem, but I think that's less a problem of poverty than a problem of our equating wealth with status with character. Being always in a supplicant, dependent position would truly suck, but I think that "humiliation" covers both that and the other sense, in which one is ashamed of (say) wearing the wrong shoes. (I'm thinking of middle school here--the problem of not being able to afford to dress according to peer standards isn't one I'm making fun of.)
B, I take your point, but you know, I wonder if that is not the defining symptom of our malaise. The people who founded our social welfare systems didnt have to argue about where dignity lies.
24: We could argue over a definition for days, I'm sure, but I'd bet that anyone who spends/has spent much time really agonizing over where the next month's money is going to come from (and what might happen if it doesn't come) knows exactly what it means.
So I guess 26 puts me right in there with the non-technocrats.
"It is the line at which dignity cannot be protected."
the trouble with this strategy, though, is that there is a long tradition of moralizing about the unimportance of "material" poverty on the grounds that a sufficiently saintly/stoic/strong-willed person can preserve their dignity in any material circumstances.
You start with the observation that some exceptional people really are able to keep their dignity, self-esteem, and even sense of humor in horrendous physical conditions.
Then you draw the (completely stupid) conclusion that the difference between this destitute-but-noble person and the vast majority of destitute-but-wretched people is that the second group are just lazy and shiftless.
Then you draw the further (completely stupid) conclusion that what destitute people really need is not any sort of material assistance, but stern, improving lectures. Or evangelism.
SO, yeah, I completely agree that one of the worst things about poverty is that it makes most of us far more vulnerable to assaults on our dignity. (There's a line of Juvenal that says this: "poverty has nothing harder in it than that it makes people subject to ridicule". Don't ask me "Juvenal what?" I don't remember which satire it's from. It's just something like 'infelix paupertas habet nihil durius in se quam quod ridiculos homines facit', only that doesn't scan).
But I would not want to elevate that into the *essence* of poverty. Because if you say that the essence is *not* found in actual, material deprivation, then some people will take that as license to ignore the material needs, and avoid addressing them.
23: Well, there's also the whole malnutrition thing. And the lack of medical treatment. And . . .
Anyway, I hear what you're saying, and the humiliation aspect does completely suck, but I don't think it's actually the biggest thing.
16: I think what you're describing is "needlessly pedantic" behavior. But the work there is done by "needlessly." It does sometimes seem that people pushing for strict definitions have some sort of cargo cult-y sense of the area of discussion, as if once all the formalities are observed, the answer will appear like magic. (Cf. w-lfs-n.)
But often there are overlapping fields of meaning. To use your example, when I see discussions of people in "poverty" on the News Hour, they're probably using it strictly. And because I see that discussion, I associate "poverty"-- not always consciously--with issues and even my emotional responses to such issues that are more properly confined to people who meet that definition.
The obvious group who have insisted on clear and accurate language in the recent past is a subset of feminists, who demanded that women neither be read out or only inferred by various pronouns. I think some of that has gone away, I think a lot of that was annoying, but I also suspect that at the time it was pretty useful to make that point, despite the fact that others could rightly say, "You know what I mean." Because we did, but there were other things being imported by the imprecise language.
(I hope the last doesn't come off as some sort of cheap shot; it's not meant at all that way.)
30 reminds me that "deprivation" is another fine, stand-up word to keep in the arsenal for talking about these things.
27 gets it exactly right. Even allowing for the quips about the repossesed DVD players. It is the dignity of being able to feed educate and house our children in an environment that is not likely to kill them AND to be able to protect that dignity from threat... but hey we know this, right? We don't argue about the definition of "stone". Curious.
34
you should see some of the other fine, stand-up things in my arsenal.
(oops--wrong thread).
When I was on welfare as a teenager (living on my own, having left a violent domestic situation), I was given $100 for food every month. I in fact spent about $60 a month so that I could spend that extra $40 on clothes, so that I didn't seem poor to other people. To have other people think I was poor was worse to me than being hungry.
Can't speak for anyone else. Just my two cents.
I thought you were supposed to be claiming that your stand-up things were thick and coarse, these days.
To have other people think I was poor was worse to me than being hungry.
Yeah, that totally sucks. There's an incredible amount of poor-shaming that goes on in this country, with predictable effects.
girthy, baby, girthy
but enough about me--how's that poverty thing coming along?
Can I troll now? Please.
We all know that poor people should stop bellyaching and get a hedge fund. I mean, imagine not having equity, darling, how humiliating?
Poverty is getting girthier every year in the US. It's sticking up further into the solar plexus of the middle class, too.
And to address kid bitzer's 30: there's a problem though in assuming that if people's bare material needs are taken care of, everything's good. If you can only have your material needs satisfied by jumping through a number of humiliating bureaucratic hoops that deprive you of privacy or that force you to signal your poverty to the rest of the world (welfare housing, eg.)...I don't think that's quite acceptable.
ps--
32--thanks, Clownae.
can you write all my classical footnotes for me? I hate looking that stuff up.
If you can only have your material needs satisfied by jumping through a number of humiliating bureaucratic hoops that deprive you of privacy or that force you to signal your poverty to the rest of the world (welfare housing, eg.)...I don't think that's quite acceptable.
Good point. Still, getting everyone decent food, housing and medical care is doable and would be a giant step forward. But trying to minimize humiliation while doing it should also be a top priority.
43--
agreed.
Look at it this way: the vast majority of non-poor people would like to ignore the poor. They are just looking for the excuse to say "I've done enough; shut up, you're whining".
I agree that material sufficiency without societal respect can be rough in some ways, though not as rough as material deprivation (oooh--that word!).
What I worry about, though, is people who say "if you just had more backbone, your lack of money wouldn't matter, so I'm not going to give you any state aid: shut up, you're whining."
If, on the other hand, we give people adequate housing, adequate food, a whole range of material sufficiency, etc., and then they still don't get enough respect? Well, at that point even I have some sympathy with a public that says "I've done enough; shut up, you're whining".
There *is* some point at which the non-poor public has done enough; I just want to make sure that this point comes after the provision of material needs, not merely after a stern lecture.
(I mean, it depends on how punitive the bureaucratic hoops are, and of course I'm not talking about making poor people wear special clothing; a society that *inflicts* humiliations has not done enough. But I do think my duty to help others is primarily satisfied by my provision of *material* aid, even if it does not fully make the other people's sense of *dignity* feel better).
I mean, imagine not having equity, darling, how humiliating?
Not too far from the truth: remember when Linda Lay went on national TV after the Enron collapse and wept about how she and Ken were fighting for liquidity, despite having sheltered millions from creditors in the event of their personal bankruptcy? Made me feel like a lucky ducky.
43/46: See? We can't even begin to discuss lifting people out of poverty unless we can agree on what poverty is, and what being "out of it" would mean.
QED I am right and LB is wrong.
39 -- in this country
thot da grew up in Canada.
Shaming the poor is pretty universal.
Just saying "provide material aid" is almost meaningless. When providing "shelter" means "shitty, rundown, high-rise rat-infested, violent, unmaintained public housing in pit of crime", it can't much be said to meet any need. It creates as many problems as it solves.
46: I guess I don't really see the conflict between giving material aid and not being a jerk about it or making it unnecessarily difficult/intrusive/etc.
Now there's also a wider societal issue of treating being poor as something to be ashamed of, but trying to get people not to poor-shame doesn't require them to open their wallets.
It's similar to enforcing voting rights not being in conflict with making public use of racial epithets taboo. Someone could say, "I've done enough! I've allowed them to vote, but now they want me to stop calling them niggers? They're just whining!", but that person doesn't deserve sympathy.
49: I didn't mean it was exclusively a US problem, but you're right, I should have phrased it better.
The conflict as presented is in controlling the flow of aid -- humilating and burdensome regulation is necessary to make sure both that aid goes only to the genuinely poor and to provide sufficient incentives to become non-poor.
I think MM just called Bitzer racist.
55: Not if we're using that term as strictly defined.
57: not if we're using that term as *accurately* defined.
I've got no argument with people who protest against the needless infliction of emotional distress on the poor. Nor with people who say that some attempts to provide, e.g., shelter, have turned out to be worse than useless. I didn't say "throw money at it; actual results don't matter." Only cartoon liberals are supposed to say that, and I don't star in any cartoons.
My point was simply this: 17 proposed that we could define the poverty line in terms of dignity and its protection. I think that this sort of "spiritualizing" poverty misses out an important aspect (sc. the material facts), and also encourages a certain attitude towards the poor that is long on moralizing and short on concrete aid. (Not that the author of 17 intended that).
So: my point is that material aid is *necessary* to address poverty. Not that it is sufficient.
And that's really about all I've been saying. I mean, aside from calling people racial epithets and all.
And I think you're right. What struck me as worthwhile about Austro's definition was using it as a diagnosis, rather than a method of remedy. You're poor if economic hardship has deprived you of your dignity -- but this doesn't mean we should fix it by giving you therapy rather than money.
yeah, even as diagnosis it seems dodgy to me--see 47 above for someone deprived of dignity by economic hardship, but not poor. If we measure Linda Lay's condition by her humiliation, then she's going to come out poor, but I'm going to say "you're not poor, you're just whining". And that's what some people say about the working poor who make 10 grand a year. I want to *reduce* the extent to which people are able to say that about cases of genuine poverty. And that means defining it, and thinking about it, in non-dignity-based terms.
Again--there's no doubt that the social aspects (indignities, shame, etc.) of poverty suck. A lot. But I think there are a lot of dangers in putting the emphasis there; it makes the poverty-line look too subjective, and it makes it depend too much on individual emotional resilience (e.g. resistance to shaming).
The bad thing about being poor is: not having resources.
And that leads to a lot of bad things, among them an increased vulnerability to social slights of all sorts.
Eh, I can't actually disagree with you about its practical usefulness as a diagnostic tool in individual cases. (Although for Linda Lay to have been deprived of dignity by hardship, she would have had to have had some to begin with.) It still hits something useful for me as a description of a level of economic hardship across a class.
But you're completely right that it's very vulnerable to attack as loosey-goosey bleeding heart liberal bullshit.
Despite kid bitzer's blatant racism, I agree with 61.
you know, M/lls, you're messing with my sense of dignity.
Now fork over the money!
And round it goes. One of the reasons European unemployment protection is often based on a (high) percentage of the last gross income that a claimant had, is to protect a given standard up to a given point.
This naturally takes into account the fact that the defintion of "dignity" might be a moveable feast.
It is what i meant though.
There is such a thing as intrisic dignity in my value system. It is different from extrinsic dignity and the people responsible for your declaration of human rights and constitution knew about that too. As did the founders of the European Social Security Systems. But I note I ve made this point already. The trouble with this, and I acknowledge its weakness, is that once one is asked to define the term, one is reduced to exhaustive lists of debatable symptoms.
Only, the people who are being deprived of their dignity probably dont get the education to help you debate the point.
64: You're trying to mug me? I guess that stereotypes about the criminality of bitzers are true!
*sigh again*.. it is NOT what I meant though...
The bad thing about being poor is: not having resources.
This made me smile. But that would be trolling...
The bad thing about 61 is that it's trying for some absolute, objective definition of "poverty" that doesn't take into account the reality of status inconsistency or relative context. A grad student living on ramen in the States isn't poor by world standards, Linda Lay isn't poor by the standards of working-class America, and so on. But pointing that kind of thing out can be kinda jerky. The real issue is whether the grad student's poverty, or Linda Lay's humiliation, is something that they see as uniquely theirs, or whether they can use it to think in solidarity with other people who are as badly off, or worse.
"The real issue is"
swap that for "one important issue among others is" and we can definitely do business.
But, I mean--the *only* real issue? In this whole morass of issues?
I was speaking naturally, not precisely. Pedant.
oops. I can't believe I made that mistake.
And on *this* thread, of all places.
Still--I'm concerned you may not be using "pedant" in its precise sense.
Periphrastically perpertrating putrid pedantry... or,
never knowingly natural.
hmm time for bed perhaps.
But pointing that kind of thing out can be kinda jerky.
What does this mean, exactly? That calling Linda Lay to tell her that she's just whiny and still has it better off than almost everyone else is kind of jerky? She was genuinely distraught, so I guess that's right, but I don't think anyone's proposing that. If you mean it's "kinda jerky" to deny her government aid even though she's genuinely distraught, or to insist that whatever kind of economic hardship she's enduring is not the kind we as a society need to be particularly concerned about, well, then I completely disagree.
I think that B's following point about solidarity has that covered. Which point, for WIW, gets it exactly right.
Perhaps I don't understand her point about solidarity then, because I don't see how it has that covered.
The question is always context. The meaning of a word will vary with context. If you're talking about labor department statistics, or leading economic indicators, you should probably know that the technical definitions will be assumed. The problem arises when participants in a discussion are assuming different contexts, and therefor different meanings.
The remedy is obviously to do what's done in insurance contracts. Use a BOLD voice when one intends a term in its precisely defined meaning. Speak boldly and there should be no confusion.
So if we're trying to define 'poverty' we really need to ask 'for what purpose, or in what context, do we need this definition?'
Humiliation is a slippery standard. I'm not poor (by any standard) but I've recently begun dressing better. This means I've actually hemmed the cuffs of several pairs of flea market/thrift store jeans, rather than chopping them with whatever semi-sharp instrument is handiest and letting them ravel. Yesterday, at the flea market, someone I've never met told me I looked like a lawyer. I was humiliated. It was worse than that day on Queens Blvd when I was taken for a homeless psychotic Viet-Nam vet.
What's the problem with being taken for a homeless psychotic Vietnam vet?
Okay, I've wanted to find some time to post a reasonable and thought-out response to this all day, because I feel like I owe it in some way, but I haven't found any and won't, so instead here's the two-minute version: I think LB is completely correct on the general idea here but wrong on the specific applications. I don't think "poverty" is equal to the government statistic term of art; I don't even think that's a particularly good measure of poverty. We could come up with a much better one just by updating the damn thing. But "poverty" in my dictionary means "lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts". This is not a limitless definition, and I think it's really misusing the word to say, as LB did, that "insecurity itself constitutes poverty" [in some circumstances]. This risks stripping the word of any useful meaning, and slipping into endless arguments about whether a lack of dignity constitutes poverty, and whether Linda Lay is in poverty, and so on. Insecurity is --we can all agree -- an very important element in overall economic well-being, and someone with more insecurity will will be worse off in a very real sense than someone with less insecurity. But that doesn't mean they're living in poverty. (In contrast, I'm perfectly 100% willing to say that someone *is* in poverty if they are struggling to provide basic necessities, even though they're technically above the "official" poverty line, because they live in an expensive city or have medical expenses or whatever else.) I'm not trying to use some jargonistic 'defined term', I'm trying to limit the term to its commonly accepted meaning. Because otherwise it becomes too slippery to be useful.
A very similar thing happened in the economy/GDP discussion, but I don't have time right now to refresh my mind or pull quotes and explanations.
I will also repeat a version of what I said in a previous thread.
The gist of it is that "security" is like "assets" rather than like "income". A pension or a secure job is like money in the bank tied up so you can't spend it at the moment, or like land that you don't earn money on but can't sell right now.
So I'd say that someone with no assets can be poor even if they're getting by day to day.
This is especially convincing in comparisons. For example, someone with a secure $20,000/year trust fund is less poor than someone earning $20,000/year as a day laborer. I'd even say that someone earning $30,000/year at an insecure job, ceteris paribus, might be poorer than someone earning $20,000 a year (plus pension) on a secure, union-protected job in a solid company.
I'd say the same for dignity. Lack or inadequacy of food and shelter certainly is poverty, but of two people equally poor that way, the one who is not being humiliated is less poor.
At the bottom of the pile is the one with nothing: no assets or security, no dignity, no food and shelter. And someone really without food and shelter will presumably won't have assets or dignity for long either. But as you move away from absolute zero, I think that food and shelter, assets and security, and dignity are all important.
Imagine someone who's flat broke and has no assets who's living in a hotel with free room service, for as long as some other person feels like taking care of them. I'd call that person poor even if it were a top hotel.
40 odd years ago a sociologist named David Caplovitz (IIRC) wrote a book titled "The Poor Pay More." They pay more in part because of insecurity. A person with a spotty, variable income record won't get a good mortgage rate. Someone who isn't sure about that next paycheck won't go to Costco and get the cheap but immense pack of toilet paper, they'll buy the two pack at the corner store and pay a lot more. Nowadays a poor person with a short term cash flow embarrassment will get a payday load at 500% rather than putting debt on a good credit card at 9%.
I think Hacker made the point that a person facing income insecurity will be less willing to make the sorts of investments - buying a house, getting education, etc. - that can improve income simply because of the very real risk that the investment will be lost before it can pay off.
In other words, insecurity can, by itself, lead directly to " struggling to provide basic necessities" even if the dollar amount of income is no less.
What's the problem with being taken for a homeless psychotic Vietnam vet?
Nothing. Some of my best friends, etc. The problem was trying to give the guy back his dollar bill, because I didn't want to take it under false pretenses. And at least I could honestly deny being a homeless vet.
Emerson's got it (as does Schneider). Another way to put it is that someone in an insecure situation needs a larger income to buy themselves security. If you need to be able to pay your bills through a likely future interruption in income, you can consume less out of your current income than someone who could treat their income as reliable. That need to provide a cushion against income interruption is going to make an insecure person poorer than someone with the same, or even a somewhat lesser, secure income.
You're absolutely right that words can be stretched to uselessness, and that some of that was happening in the discussion of Linda Lay in this thread. But the security stuff can have a real, direct effect on someone's ability to consume, and that's a more fundamental measure of poverty than money income.
83 is pretty huge. How much does a healthy 40-year-old need to save this year to be confident that they're on track to be able to cover their living and healthcare expenses in retirement? You can find lots of calculators that purport to tell you--most provided by folks who want your investment dollars--but the uncertainties are so great that it's hard to say much more than "as much as you can" with any confidence at all. And then you worry about it.
This is somewhat off the main topic, but your statement about GDP as proxy for the economy caught my attention. The Primacy of Economic Growth + Comparative Advantage are almost religious tenets for macro-economists, and I found a decent article and quote by Tyler Cowen at Crooked Timber that explains why, or at least is an example of their thinking:
"Growth laggards fall behind. If we compare a one percentage point differential in the growth rate, and start at real income parity, we need a time horizon of 110.4 years to establish a 3:1 ratio of superiority of per capita income. If we are comparing a two percentage point boost in the growth rate we need a time horizon of only 55.5 years to establish a 3:1 superiority in per capita national income.
Nobel Laureate economist Robert E. Lucas put it succinctly: “…the consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are staggering: once one starts to think about [exponential growth], it is hard to think about anything else.” ...TC
Sorry if a distraction.
Lack or inadequacy of food and shelter certainly is poverty, but of two people equally poor that way, the one who is not being humiliated is less poor.
What of two people equally very rich, one of whom is being humiliated? Is that person more "poor" than the other as well? Why would you want to try and stretch the word "poor" to cover this? Why not just say of your two men: both are equally poor, but one is both poor and humiliated, which makes him worse off than the other.
86: Because humiliation is pretty much an intrinsic part of poverty. People who have been poor don't just remember going without, they remember the searing humiliations of what they had to do without and what they had to do to get what they had.
74: I meant "kinda jerky" mostly to cover the grad student on ramen criticism, but it applies to the Lay situation too. At the risk of sounding like a complete asshole, I'm sure that the filthy rich have "expenses" that are unimaginable to, say, me, just as my own "expenses" for things like $40 bottles of moisturizer are unimaginable to some of my friends. And yet, when I go through a patch where my income doesn't allow me to spend money on shit like that in good conscience, and I have to use the cheapo grocery store brand, I feel a genuine sense of loss and deprivation. It's silly, but there it is. I don't find it difficult to believe that if, say, one owned three houses on three different continents and a private jet and were used to just taking off wherever, whenever, and then one suddenly had to (say) start making plane reservations like everyone else, one would feel "poor."
Michael McKeon makes a similar and, I think, convincing argument about the relative sense of deprivation of the landed aristocracy when Britain was turning into a capitalist system, which is where I first started thinking of this stuff. It seems to me that at least *acknowledging* that sense of loss is a useful thing to do, w/r/t the humiliation/emotional aspect of poverty. I mean, human emotions are human emotions: the rich have 'em too.
Haven't read the whole thread. Will completely cop to preferring precise definitions of terms. It's a philosopher's trait, and I get antsy when people are talking technically and don't use words properly.
Fair cop.
But.
Here's the thing. Whatever connotations 'poverty' generally has, and I'll grant that it has many beyond the 2006 federal guidelines, its natural-language sense probably does not extend as far as we need it to if it's going to do the work required in the insecurity-equality debate. Simply because the problem is that some of the traditional problems of poverty -- instability, uncertainty, inability to plan for the future -- are creeping up into the middle class.
Meaning that the word 'poverty' will bloat to the point of meaninglessness. I'm worried if my mom's neighbor, making $45K a year, owning two aging cars and owning his own home, doesn't have a good pension, can't rely on social security, and doesn't qualify for health insurance due to a pre-existing condition. But it's not like the examples in the post, of $20K vs. $30K. And he's the guy we're worried about, if I understood the post correctly.
He isn't poor. In fact, he's built the American dream. It's just resting on a foundation of sand.
So I vote for a new word that captures it. 'Poverty' just won't do.
Plus, politically, it's easier to say, 'we're concerned about the middle-class American's sense of peace and economic stability' rather than saying 'we are worried about poor people who make $50K a year, no, see, but when I say poor, I'm using it in a broad sense waffle waffle flip-flop.'
I don't find it difficult to believe that if, say, one owned three houses on three different continents and a private jet and were used to just taking off wherever, whenever, and then one suddenly had to (say) start making plane reservations like everyone else, one would feel "poor."
I don't doubt this at all. I'm quite sure it's correct. But I don't think it's something we as a society ought to anything to try and remedy, or even worry very much about. Not until we've solved a lot of other, more-pressing problems at least.
87: Yes, and for that reason a lot of the formerly poor are *adamantly* opposed to any form of state assistance, more so than the liberal professional class. It's an interesting conundrum.
It seems to me that at least *acknowledging* that sense of loss is a useful thing to do, w/r/t the humiliation/emotional aspect of poverty. I mean, human emotions are human emotions: the rich have 'em too.
Unless you mean that once we acknowledge their emotions and recognize them, our taunts will be all the more effective, I'm not seeing your point. Lay wasn't simply rich, she was rich through corruption. Ripping that bit out of the story so as to set it aside those of people who, for example, saw their pensions emptied because of her huband's corruption, is obscene.
89: Economically insecure, or economically vulnerable, or one paycheck away from poverty seems to be the going terminology.
90: Oh, I'm not saying we need to "worry" about it--just that I don't know how much is to be gained by poo-pooing it.
Brock, I'm not going to stretch the word "poor" to cover rich people. Duh. I'm distinguishing between two poor people. Poverty has several aspects, not just one.
I don't see what your point is.
No one is saying that rich people or middle class people are poor if they have insecurity or humiliation. But insecurity and humiliation are part of poverty, and in comparing the poverty of comparable people, humiliation and insecurity are part of the comparison.
I do not have B's sympathy for the embittered ex-rich. Humiliation isn't a sufficient condition of poverty, but it can be an essential aspect of poverty. Mrs. Lay was humiliated because she was an accessory to her criminal husband, not because she was poor. She wasn't even poor, she was still rich, but less filthy rich than she had been.
Take a guy earning $50,000 a year with no net worth who will lose his job in six months, knows that he can never get a job in his field, and has no other job skills. I'd call him borderline poor. He might save enough from his next $25,000 to cover retraining, but probably not.
How much does a healthy 40-year-old need to save this year to be confident that they're on track to be able to cover their living and healthcare expenses in retirement?
Living expenses...that you could calculate.
Healthcare expenses...that would be an infinite amount of money.
All my life I've just assumed that if people with no health insurance get seriously ill, they instantly become bankrupt. (thus meaning that you ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE as one of the bills that you always pay). It's amazing to me that in other countries this is not the case.
Mrs. Lay as "poor" is stretching the term beyond all imagining. Sure, she may feel poor, but when she was aiding and abetting crime she felt honest too.
Whatever connotations 'poverty' generally has, and I'll grant that it has many beyond the 2006 federal guidelines, its natural-language sense probably does not extend as far as we need it to if it's going to do the work required in the insecurity-equality debate. Simply because the problem is that some of the traditional problems of poverty -- instability, uncertainty, inability to plan for the future -- are creeping up into the middle class.
See, that's a point I'm trying to make by describing poverty in terms of insecurity -- that some people with middle class incomes now suffer from the economic problems that used to affect only those below the federal poverty line. Call it what you want, but the point is that they're in the same boat.
No one's denying that they're in the same boat. Or that insecurity is a useful yardstick. Just that's it's a stretch to call it poverty, which is what I take it the point of this post admonishing us about natural language.
92: Well, corruption is a separate issue. I don't know if Mrs. Lay, though, was responsible for the corruption: if we say charitably that she was also a victim of her husband's assholishness, then it seems (as a matter of pragmatic politics, if nothing else) that condemning him while expressing sympathy for her at least has the merit of not seeming like sour grapes.
I'm not sure that anyone is calling middle-class insecurity "poverty".
This whole argument comes from the way the job market has changed so that people are making just as much money or even more, but are really worse off. So a new way of describing the situation has to be devised. Supporters of the present system use the same old criteria, proving that things haven't gotten worse, when they have.
People switched for real jobs to fictional "private contracting" might actually have more money in their pockets while being much worse off. Our way of talking about these things has to recognize this.
And the point of the post is that natural language is flexible, and that stretches can be illuminating. You don't have to use the word poverty in a manner that unambiguously sorts people into two groups, the poor and the non-poor; in fact, any such usage is going to be inaccurate -- people at the edges are always going to be misidentified.
Once you have ambiguity at the edges, it can be informative to refer to someone who is in the same economic situation in many ways as someone who is unambiguously poor as, themselves, poor. Where, in context, it's not misleading, there's no good reason to object to the usage.
Can't do it, B. She was still rich by all normal standards. I can't see her as a victim of her husband, either. She was playing her game, and it started off wonderfully, and then went just slightly bad.
After her husband died, she got to keep everything anyway. Dozens or hundreds, maybe thousands of people lost their pensions so she can live in style and whine too. Though I'd imagine she has replaced her pout with a shit eating grin by now.
91: Somehow I suspect that your dad might remind me of my dad.
95: Living expenses...that you could calculate.
But you really can't. You can come up with a number that's likely to be sufficient by using conservative assumptions for longevity, investment returns, and future costs of living, but when your time horizon is out around fifty years being conservative means it's extremely likely that you'll end up tucking away more than you'll actually need, which means that you're reducing your current standard of living unnecessarily. We treat that as an admirable thing to do, but it's not necessarily economically rational to be self-insuring most of the economic uncertainties of old age.
Maybe I want to back off my last comment a little -- the 'poverty' point isn't actually something I meant to go to the mat over when I wrote the post, which was on language usage.
The bits I want to stick by are (1) which I think is non-controversial, using tight technical definitions of terms is likely to be confusing and inaccurate outside of the specific context the terms were defined for. The problem of poverty in America cannot be properly reduced to the problem of those below the federal poverty line. So far, I don't think there's much disagreement here. (2) is more controversial, and less well thought out on my part, but I think I want to say that it's not helpful, or particularly intellectually defensible, to refer to a word usage as 'wrong' where it's being used intentionally to make a comprehensible point. All of the talking back and forth about what poverty is in this thread hasn't confused anyone as to what we're referring to; no one thinks Mrs. Lay is eating baked beans cold out of a can because the gas has been turned off.
107- exactly right, even upper-middle class people often have a very difficult time planning their retirement savings to maintain their current living standards, given the great uncertainties surrounding longevity, returns, inflation, etc. I therefore propose that we hereafter refer to all such people as "impoverished".
What I would say is that wherever the poverty line is drawn, spendable income is not the only factor to consider. Security is another one, and I think that humiliation is a third.
I'm living near the speandable-income poverty line myself now, but my security is excellent and the humiliation is slight to none.
I'm living near the speandable-income poverty line myself now, but my security is excellent and the humiliation is slight to none.
I believe, in fact, that this is the classic poor/broke distinction.
As the one who introduced Linda Lay to this thread, I'd be happy to kick her sorry ass out the door. She whined about impending poverty after taking advantage of tax loopholes to hide the kind of wealth that most of us can barely imagine, and her husband's death turned out to be pretty convenient. Had her fears of impoverishment driven her truly insane, it would have been poetic justice.
81-83 get it right. At the very least we should be able to factor in short-term insecurity into a reasonable, workable standard on which to base public policy. That is, if the people in charge of formulating and enacting policy really gave a shit.
110: Now you're just being tendentious.
106: I was only going with her as a *hypothetical*, for god's sake. An example. My investment in sympathy for the Delays is in the low negative six figures, at least.
LB, I'm on board with 1, but not 2. Not that I think that speaking of economic insecurity as a 'kind of poverty' is a hanging offense or incomprehensible in this narrow context.
But I do think that part of what makes the study interesting and worrisome is that it's precisely the non-poor by most natural language standards who now face the same problems as the natural language standards poor. And to the extent that it's easily caricatured ('Democrats are so out of touch they think a man who owns his own home and sent his kids to college is poor! Elitist idiots!'), it's probably best avoided politically.
it's not helpful, or particularly intellectually defensible, to refer to a word usage as 'wrong' where it's being used intentionally to make a comprehensible point.
Not intellectually defensible? I'm not sure I know what exactly you mean by that (lord knows I've no reason to think you're using it in any strict sense), but I think I'm offended.
If accusations of "wrong" were being thrown around in order to derail a conversation, or intentionally deflect attention from more important points, then maybe. But I (and I presume your comment is referring to me) think it's a stretch to imply that's what I was doing. I took pains in your original posts to say that I agreed with your broader point.
And to the extent that it's easily caricatured ('Democrats are so out of touch they think a man who owns his own home and sent his kids to college is poor! Elitist idiots!'), it's probably best avoided politically.
There's something to that. There was a recent post somewhere that suggested that part of the problem that people thought that Dems were for "the poor," that they weren't poor, but that they were still having trouble making ends meet. (I think the income level was somewhere around $65K.) Dems worried them because increased taxes could really hurt them. I'm not sure those people would appreciate being classed as poor.
My own feeling is that philosophers, in their present state, should be kept out of politics entirely. There's always the chance that the "other minds" problem will pop up suddenly, or the brain-in-the-bottle, or the runaway trolley car, and boom! the next five years are lost while the political world goes its merry way.
118 is right. People's sense of 'poor' often doesn't include themselves (what's the percentage of the people that think they're in the top 1% of income?). Hearing 'help the poor' just doesn't register as '...like me' for most people. Hearing 'the taxes only affect the top 1%' registers as '...I'm going to get there and then they'll take my money!'
Drat, I'm being more argumentative than I mean to -- I didn't mean to take offense at your use of 'wrong', or to characterize it as a bad, rather than in my view a mistaken, thing to say. What I mean by intellectually defensible is that, even putting aside the 'defined term' thing, you (and Cala, as well) have a tendency to say things of the form 'X is a correct usage of the word 'poor'; Y is incorrect.' In the realm of intentional uses of the word that successfully communicate an intended meaning, I don't think talking about the correctness or incorrectness of usage can be defended, or is helpful (Hrm. This is broader than I mean it to be. I have a point, but I'm not saying it very well.) Saying that it will confuse people to refer to insecurity as itself a type of poverty is a reasonable criticism; saying that using the word poverty in that manner will open us to political attack is also a reasonable criticism. Appealing to the abstract correctness of what the word really means, on the other hand, doesn't stand up, I think, as a mode of criticism.
118: Which brings us to the same kind of stuff that leads to harshing on the mentally ill, etc.: nobody wants to believe that there but for the grace of God go I. Better to believe that that sorry SOB goes there because he by God deserves it. Such things couldn't happen to me; I'm virtuous.
That's a political problem, but in other times and places people have been able to see that having a safety net is good for everyone who could fall into it, not just those who actually do. Equating insecurity with poverty may or may not be the right way to work toward rebuilding that understanding. But whatever the politics, insecurity and poverty are certainly related issues for a goodly chunk of the population.
Appealing to the abstract correctness of what the word really means, on the other hand, doesn't stand up, I think, as a mode of criticism.
How fortunate that I didn't do that.
But I think I've been told to go take my brain-in-a-vat and play in traffic, so we're going to do that while wondering if we have hands, whether we could know it if someone told us, and calculating the marginal utility if we should get run over whilst playing in traffic and a) prevent the death of five innocent children or b) interrupt the orgasms of a bunch of screeching mice.
122: I've read that Americans have intuitions about income mobility that are both wildly unrealistic and globally almost unique. I think this, combined with plain ol' innumeracy, is why I've started hearing liberal politicians talk less about percentages and start saying things like "millionaires" and "the $100,000 a year crowd" (which sounds particularly clanging and artless to me).
C'mon, folks. There's got to be a term for this. Surely one of you who (unlike me) didn't flunk English can name it.
'Poverty' embraces a bunch of attributes. Income. Vulnerability. Resources. Assets.
Because of policy and political shifts, some of those attributes are becoming more frequently associated with a group ('middle-class') which formerly didn't exhibit them.
Because some of the middle class now exhibit attributes which we formerly associated only with 'poverty', we extend the term 'poverty' to include those non-poor persons.
That is, we emphasize *one* of the defining characteristics of 'poverty' by redefining the referents to include all examples which exhibit that characteristic.
What is that? Metaphorical extension? Synecdoche? Tourbillion? Dibble? Igneous extrusive?
Once more, with examples.
Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I A Woman?". John Kennedy, "I am a Berliner". Shylock, "Am I not a man?" (I hope I have the Shylock reference right).
In each case, the literal answer is "No". The category 'woman' excludes slaves. The category 'man' excludes Jews. Kennedy was a Bostonian.
But in each case the speaker is arguing that in a larger sense, perhaps a metaphorical sense, the answer is 'yes'. Similarly,y one can say that someone earning $35k in an insecure position is poor. For someone to say 'ain't I poor?' because she can't, at this moment, afford the expensive face cream may be lousy rhetoric, but it's not exactly wrong.
128: Jean Sheperd termed it "Creeping meatballism" back in the fifties. It was an extension of his observation that the smallest tube of toothpaste available was labeled "large".
Anyway, your examples also illustrate why accuracy without precision has little meaning unless we're talking about William Tell's one shot.
125: Sorry, I was talking to Brock on the 'wrong' bit more than you; I addressed you as well as having (to the best of my understanding) agreed with him. Schneider is saying what I mean, pretty much, but I should drop this because I'm being insufficiently clear in my thinking, and through that lack of clarity am (I get the impression) being annoying rather than convincing or informative.
Don't go play in traffic -- vats stand up very poorly to impact.
The fault may be mine, I may have been unclear. I wasn't trying to say "bad LB!" so much as "bad idea, LB", and even that was said tentatively. From 123, I guess I was more or less saying it will confuse people (although I think it will do so in a more fundamental sense than I suspect you mean), not appealing to abstract correctness of certain meanings. Words don't have abstract meanings; they mean whatever people think they mean.
I agree for the practical and political reasons. There is no Form of Poverty. (Why? It's a privation. Haha, philosophers ain't funny.)
I have an über-reinforced vat.
Also, yayyyyy Halloween!
Booooo, being sick on Hallowe'en!
(And booooo, having been sufficiently out of it last night to leave one's ATM card in a cash machine, discovering it this morning, calling one's bank to find that subsequent to the withdrawal in question, the card was used to purchase $59 worth of merch at CVS!) (Why $59? This is bugging me. Also, that the bandit was able to use the card in this manner implies that s/he knew the associated PIN. But how does that fit in with one's carelessly leaving the card in the machine and an opportunistic thief coming along a bit later to find it? It does not, is how.)
Is it a debit card? Maybe the thief used it like a credit card.
Your ATM card can't also be used as a credit card (VISA or Mastercard logo)? Almost all of them can, and that's more likely than that someone knew your pin. Unless you have evil friends.
Halloween is, all things considered, good. Yet more Halloween like things would be bad. Hence, temperance in all things.
Damn those philosophers and their quick minds!
hmph. Here I am again, talking to myself after everyone else has moved on. Maybe it's not to wonder why I'm taken for a homeless psychotic guy. Anyway, I had another thought. This event is so unusual that I thought I'd celebrate by sharing.
Maybe poverty is like race or gender.
There's poverty:the-economic-category. And poverty:the-social-category. As a social category poverty is generally thought to be tied to economics,just the way gender is tied to sex, and race to biology. However, as a social category it's *not* just economic.
As a social category it's both arbitrary and defined in social terms. Its definition can include suth things as 'how many friends will lend you money in a pinch? Do you have relatives nearby who provide free child care?' These are things that have economic value, but are not strictly economic relations.
As a social category, it's contested and changing, just like race and gender. And because it's tied to identity (like race and gender) its definition can get a bit personal
Wow, that sucks, Clown. You might consider contacting Equifax or another one of the credit bureaus to put a fraud alert on your file. Chances are the thief did not gain access any personal info, but it's a possibility, and it only takes a few minutes to contact the bureau.
Thanks Brock/Cala (if you two got together, everybody could call you Broccoli), that must be it. Thanks Stanley (nice non-explosive polenta BTW), I will look into that. Furthermore, I demand pity WRT being sick. Pity Clownæ, foolish mortals! Pity Clownæ NOOOOOWWWWW!
Oooh, a sad Clown. Poor Clown. Drink lots of fluids.
I happen to have a Smokey Robinson CD at my desk. "The Tears of a Clown" currently playing, in solidarity.
But which of these sad clowns is the worst?
Hey quit dissin my peeps.
There is one true sad clown, all the rest are mere shadows on a cave wall.
This clown is suddenly a little less sad, because his wife brought him some ginger tea, and a confection of sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, condensed skim milk, cocoa, whey, soya lecithin, and flavors. (It's the flavors that really bring the whole piece together.)
LB gets commendations from The Editors.