Poverty is surely a relative concept.
I wouldn't agree with that, entirely. Absolute poverty is an inability to get the basic necessities of life, whereas relative poverty is the gap between the poorest members of a society and the wealthiest. However, what we consider to be "the basic necessities of life" do shift over time with rising living standards. Food, water, and shelter are always on the list, but I think that most people would agree that access to basic education, basic health care, and some reasonable level of electrical power can be considered basic necessities of life in 2008, where they wouldn't have been 150 years ago.
In that way, you're right, our concept of absolute poverty isn't really absolute, but it shifts on a much slower scale and is looking at a different question: "Are all basic needs being met?" as opposed to "What share of the overall wealth of society does this person have?" or "How much more money does person X make than person y?"
The questions as I see them are:
1) How are we defining basic necessities? Food, water, clothing, shelter, obviously, but is there anything else on the list?
2) What level of each necessity is to be considered the baseline? At what point do we say that someone has adequate food, or shelter? How healthy does the food have to be before we consider the basic need for food met? What condition does the housing have to be in, and how much square footage per person? Etc etc.
3) Based on that definition, to what degree are basic necessities not being met in the developed world/West/Global North/whatever you want to call it?
4) To what degree, if at all, is relative poverty a contributing factor to absolute poverty?
5) To what degree, if at all, is relative poverty an issue in and of itself, outside of any relationship to the questions above? In other words, to what degree if at all is it a problem that an investment banker makes 20 times the salary of a waitress, if we assume for the sake of argument that the waitress has all basic necessities?
6) To what degree, if at all, are individuals with the means to do so morally obligated to contribute to the alleviation of poverty?
7) Is any such responsibility affected by severity of the poverty on the absolute scale, on the relative scale, by geographical and cultural proximity, etc? If we are obligated to help the poor, are we more obligated to help the poor in our own area than people who are poorer but farther away (like, say, in Africa?), or vice versa?
Personally, I'm inclined to include the following things in any list of basic necessities:
* Food, consistently available to the level that no one is starving to death rates of suffering from nutrient deficiencies are extremely low
* Potable water that's not infested with parasites
* Very basic medical care, particularly things like immunizations
* Reliable sanitation infrastructure
* Clothing that is clean and free of holes
* Shelter that provides protection from the elements
* Education to the degree that literacy and basic arithmetic are universal
* Access to a reliable electrical grid or generator
* Functional social and political infrastructure that allows for reasonable expectation of personal security. No warlords, no banditry, no rape gangs, etc.
I would argue that most people in the developed world are able to meet those needs on a regular basis. Surely, this is not true for everyone: in the US, the biggest standouts are Appalachia, Cajun and African-American communities in the rural South, indigenous peoples on reservations, and the homeless. Other areas like urban ghettos, areas in the Rust Belt and collapsed farm communities aren't far behind. However, even there, some of those needs are consistently met - warlordism is not a problem in Appalachia, immunizations are widely available, and even poor communities have some form of incredibly craptacular public education available, and so in those respects, the poor parts of the developed world are fabulously wealthy compared to Somalia.
I do think that we do have a responsibility to do something to alleviate those sorts of situations, both our own local situations and more global ones. However, I'm skeptical of the overall efficacy of mid-20th century-style welfare state direct intervention, especially when any unintended side effects are weighed in. My general bias is that it's generally better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing.
Overall, I think the evidence is pretty strong at this point that the most effective way to take a community out of poverty is to enhance their ability to participate in the wealth-generating machine that is global capitalism. That generally means lowering trade barriers. It also means developing solid infrastructure, including an educational system that provides useful skills and knowledge, reliable and efficent transportation networks, a judiciary that is relatively low-corruption and has enough teeth to enforce contracts and things like that, and basic financial accountability and regulation and a stable currency, and those are areas where state funding and intervention is both desirable and necessary. Access to basic medical care and reproductive control is also important.
I don't think it's effective in most cases, most of the time, for government to flat-out guarantee that these basic standards are being met, and I don't think government agencies in general actually administrate many of these sorts of things well, nor am I a big Keynesian.
Also, while I recognize that income inequality in and of itself does cause social tensions and other issues, I don't think that that reality outweighs the benefits of freer markets. In principle, I don't think the fact that an individual CEO makes many times the amount of money that the janitor who works in the same building makes is an injustice in and of itself, or a problem that needs remedying, unless the janitor is consistently unable to meet basic needs. I do think that some people's contributions are more valuable than others', I think that the market values those different contributions accurately more often than not, and I think that income inequality does incentivize individual achievement in a way that's beneficial to society overall.
Where it becomes an issue for me is the difference in opportunity between the janitor's kids and the CEO's kids. Obviously, we are clever monkeys and we will always look for and find ways to provide advantages to our genetic offspring, and that provides incentives, too, to be frank. Someone may be willing to do something which provides a long-term benefit at the expense of a short-term sacrifice in the interests of providing an advantage to their children. This happens a lot with successful immigrant families, where the first generation works insanely long hours or opens a business and devotes considerable resources to it, often without seeing rewards proportional to their effort within their own lifetimes, because they're motivated by providing more opportunities for their kids, and the net effect of that tends to be a successful small business in the community.
I also think we do want to have realistic expectations of our ability to narrow the opportunity gap, and we should acknowledge that it's a multigenerational process. We should be looking at the opportunity gap on a scale of three to four generations.
All that said, it's in everyone's best interests to make sure that everyone is a stakeholder and that there's as high a degree of class fluidity as possible, and government can have a role in levelling the playing field, but usually not by the direct redistribution of wealth.
IMHO, of course. |
