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What’s the Difference Between Being Broke and Being Poor?
Street scene in Bambara, Mali.
In my third year of medical school I spent a week with a traveling nurse who would do home visits in the housing projects of Toledo, OH to check on newborns. Someone would give birth in an inner-city hospital, then in a week or so this nurse would show up on the lady’s doorstep to show her how to take care of a baby. Many poor women don’t breastfeed, so she would make sure they were hooked up with WIC and other government programs.
I had never been in an inner-city housing project, and the police who escorted us around made it extremely clear that I should never come back without their assistance. It was horribly fascinating. The apartments were invariably filthy, and always had three to six women of various ages, watching daytime TV on big screens in high def. There were never any men around. The uninitiated might presume that the men were all at work — I don’t think that was the case. They always had nicer electronics than I. They often had old pizza boxes stacked in a corner nearly to the ceiling. I didn’t order pizza — it was too expensive on a student’s budget. Fancy cell phones, expensive tattoos, etc. My point is that I did not see what I expected to see. I did not see a lack of money.
I had a lack of money – I was a student. I was broke, but I was not poor. I drove a rusted-out Cavalier with non-functioning AC that ran fairly well most of the time (I installed a rebuilt Jasper motor in it myself to keep it on the road a little longer). I lived in a crummy cheap apartment (although it was clean). I ate a lot of rice and beans (which I have not eaten since). I lacked money. These housing project apartments revealed squalor, but not a lack of money.
When I visited my future wife in Mali, west Africa (she was in the Peace Corps at the time) it was the third poorest country in the world. They had nothing. But the women used shrub branches to sweep the dirt in front of their huts every day so it would look neat. They would not have stacked old pizza boxes inside their huts. They swept dirt.
It has been observed that you cannot cure poverty by giving money to poor people. If poverty is not a lack of money, then I suppose that makes sense. And our experience with the “War on Poverty” has proven that to be the case. So what are we supposed to do? No one could look at the dead eyes of those women watching daytime TV for the 1000th day in a row, surrounded by filth, and not feel bad for them. It’s only natural to want to help. So if you really wanted to help, what would you do?
We throw money at this problem to demonstrate our compassion. Not only does it not seem to be helping, it seems to be making the problem worse. So I ask, if you really wanted to help, what would you do?
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Why is that? It’s cheaper and better for both mother and baby. I’d expect social workers, SJWs, and assorted other busybodies who are always so eager to instruct everyone on how best to live to be out there insisting on breastfeeding. Isn’t part of the point of WIC that the women should be healthy enough to properly take care of the infants and children?
If you blow what little money you have on the latest iPhone and takeout pizza, you’ll always be poor. We live in a country where the poor people are fatter than the rich people. The leftists explain this by saying that it’s cheaper to buy junk food than to prepare a nutritious meal from ingredients purchased at Whole Foods. I can’t even begin to dissect this but it speaks volumes about where we are now as a country.
This is a great question and a really interesting problem to try and solve!
I’m not sure if you can fix malevolence that is as deeply embedded in the soul as your writing suggests.
I wonder how much you would really want to help them if you found out that the only job they would take was a $50,000 a year one at the DMV, trying to figure out how they could provide the worst possible service today.
I know that my local KFC, where I go to since I’m addicted to the chicken pot pie, has employees who behave in similar ways.
Could you get them a job at Chick-fil-a, which treats their employees well? The problem is that I’m sure Chick-fil-a would laugh at them and never hire them in a million years. Chick-fil-a hires good people. That’s why they can afford to pay them well.
How can you teach people that simple fact of life? Based on some of my recent experiences, it’s horribly difficult, much more so than you could possibly imagine.
I just finished The People of the Abyss by Jack London (1903). My first note from page 24:
Any assistance, be it money, food, or whatever, that comes with the bureaucratic strings (and cut-offs) of a government program is not compassion. The more distant that government, the more true this becomes. Acknowledging this truth is the first step…
Broke is a circumstance. Poor is a mindset.
First of all I’d say that the government has already done much harm with their programs; and I’m afraid that that is a feature not a bug.
I would reinforce the behavior that I wanted. It would appear that government programs for the poor and especially the minority poor do the opposite.
I would argue that you are mistaken. I would argue that the point of WIC is so congressmen who seek reelection can demonstrate compassion. Using other people’s money.
Hard questions.
If we willy nilly stop throwing money in that direction the consequences for both those women and for larger society could be really bad.
If we keep on going down the same road we will exacerbate the problem.
Certainly government is not the problem; government is the problem.
I don’t have the answer. I do believe the solution has to be based upon individuals helping individuals. I know an older couple that has taken in to their home a couple that were sleeping in abandoned cars, obtained professional counselling for them, have managed to get them jobs with people that will be patient with them. This last week I also met an older lady that on her own has set up sort of a halfway house for what might be called ex-cons (mostly related to drugs). She requires them to go to church with her, she is a friend to them, she gets them work and makes sure each and every one gets to their work. I spoke to some of her “people”: Some had the dead eyes you mentioned, but not all. This sort of personal involvement contains what I think would make a difference – if it isn’t too late, merely because of the overall scope of the issue.
I’m not sure that’s true, Simon. I think the government programs for the poor do exactly what those enacting them want.
I think we grew up poor. My father was an enlisted man in the air force, and had 3 growing boys to feed. I never felt poor, but later in life my mother told me we ate a lot of hamburger with bread mixed in. Our jeans had patches on the knees, but that was natural, because they’d always had patches on the knees. My mother sewed a lot of our clothes, but that was natural, too.
Afternoon Dr. Bastiat,
I think we could presume that there are some folks for whom the usual joys of life do not come easily or are not wanted, but for many, the affluent safety net from our government has stripped people of purpose and they cannot imagine how to get to a more engaging and satisfying life. Work, cross generational obligations, obligations to one’s neighbors are the rebar of life. If no one needs you as a teammate, if you are not asked to even contribute to your own income, if the natural obligations to your children or parents are taken over by the state, it is natural that you would think that you would live only for your appetites. Our social support has left the recipients in a culture where they would logically conclude that their efforts are inconsequential, their work has no value, in fact we will pay you more to stay home than you could make on the job, you would be a chump to work. They cannot imagine how to get back to a life connected to others. We need enough work so that paid work will be clearly more economically more attractive. Working men are men more women want to marry. Also we have city school systems which are custodial pens for young folks, the quality of basic education is so poor that graduates do not offer much to employers. That our city schools have for decades been poor is on us, it has not been where our kids went to school so we did not resist. Schools could teach more trades, auto body, mechanics, crown and bridge work, carpentry, or what ever is in short supply in that state. Many folks who are stuck cannot imagine how to get to the average life. Someone trusted from the outside could help, or someone in the neighborhood who has not been trapped by dependence could be a mentor.
I’m absolutely bone-tired of the culture of dependency the government so malignantly foists on “the poor, the elderly, and the disabled” – to borrow a timeworn descriptive trio. Getting out of that structure/mindset is like trying to break free of a python; after awhile, you have no energy left. State and local government seems to have no real interest in positive reinforcement of initiative and/or personal responsibility – let alone the federal version…Sheesh!
I’m mindful here, too, of Mother [now St.] Teresa’s discussion of ‘the spiritual poverty of the “developed” world’…Something we all have a stake in rectifying, imho.
That being said, it’s worth noting that many of the poor choices become self-reinforcing and even coping mechanisms.
Take food. Food stamps aren’t cash, nor do the monthly allowances carry over, so there’s no incentive to spend it on ingredients instead of finished processed foods. If you never cook, you never learn how to cook. You never buy pots and pans and utensils to cook with. You never bother with small appliances like crockpots. And you can never teach your children how to cook. This lets this cycle of “buy expensive food on food stamps” continue.
We got caught in the living hand to mouth cycle for a couple years. It’s hard to break yourself of spending every extra dollar you get just to not feel so impoverished, even if doing so is keeping you from actually becoming less impoverished.
Don’t the leftists spend an awful lot of time and energy bemoaning the “corporate welfare” companies like Walmart receive through their employees being on SNAP, welfare, and Medicaid?
Can we start calculating exactly how much money Apple and Google have made by receiving government money in the form of welfare payments to people who blow it on crap?
I think part of the problem in the modern western world is that the poor live in such close proximity to the relatively rich. Because of schools and mass media, they are constantly being educated to a life of discontent and discouragement. Added to that the constant message from the left that the rich white people hate black and Hispanic people, they don’t think they can move upwardly. The poor think everyone hates them. A wise parent would never impart that message to his or her children.
Another part of the problem is simply capital. It is hard to amass enough capital to improve your circumstances. You can afford a new iPhone but not physical therapy. The economy is out of whack.
Then the drug dealers move in.
I read an interesting story years ago that laid to rest the notion that small local businesses lead to prosperity. These economists demonstrated the opposite, that it was big business that actually created the middle class. Interesting theory.
Schools are terrible. That’s another reason.
Girls don’t have fathers who love, treasure, and protect them. That’s another reason.
The welfare programs insisted that the men leave the home. We should have instead tried to keep poor families together so they could help each other.
There’s a lot of physical and mental disability in the poor neighborhoods, and I believe a certain proportion of those are due to medical errors that no one worries about because we just put people in the dead-end Medicaid pile. We don’t offer rehabilitation there, just stagnation.
The colleges and universities have a monopoly on money so that a nineteen-year-old who wants to open his own local gas station will be unable to borrow enough money to do that and live nearby in a starter apartment. But that same person can borrow $60,000 a year to go to college without the income of a gas station ownership to begin to pay it back. For all of the brains in our colleges, they have been extremely shortsighted while they have been monopolizing investment money.
Not enough police protection in the poorer neighborhoods. Police presence imparts a certain self-respect to the inhabitants who live among them.
[continued]
[continued from note 14]
Affordable housing shortages are going to be the topic of next year. The shortages are reaching a tipping point.
I would start with housing, which would, in and of itself, startle economic growth into existence. I would create neighborhoods with lots of housing of different types and at different costs where people could “shop” and live where and how they want to, depending on public transportation and schools and stores to enable them to lift themselves up. I saw this effect in Raleigh where my daughter lives. The whole city developed almost overnight with new housing because many farms were sold all at once. The effect was to free up land for development, and wow, did the rental housing choices explode and the prices went way down.
The basket of public goods (sidewalks, libraries, and so on) that we built after World War II that enabled people to grow is no longer usable for that purpose. We need to take a fresh look at our communities. What should we keep? What has outlived its usefulness?
The main point is that people do get discouraged. But when people around them start moving optimistically, they will too.
My husband and I love to garden. When we were first married, we twice bought homes in fixer-upper neighborhoods. Just because we enjoy doing it, we fixed up our yard. Like magic, everyone in our neighborhood started fixing up theirs too. And we all talked, became friends, became a friendly neighborhood, and everyone profited.
We human beings inspire each other.
Until recently I have lived in very poor areas, and have known a lot of people on food stamps, so I know the game fairly well. Food stamps are worth around 40 cents on the dollar on the street. So a lot of tatoos etc are bought by the food stamp program, but at greatly inflated prices. My point is that food stamps are cash, but with a lousy exchange rate. The EBT card was an effort to deal with this. With mixed results.
I’d add on this that medical issues can easily turn a middle-class family into a poor one. Unless someone has abnormally generous benefits, the financial hit of a kid needing special care or the double hit of a spouse needing expensive treatment that leaves them unable to work is plenty to knock a family into a hand-to-mouth lifestyle.
WIC seemed to me (a relatively ignorant outsider) as a targeted program that provided reasonable incentives to consume nutritious foods to improve maternal and child health, including encouraging breastfeeding. As government programs go, I thought it wasn’t too bad, hewing to the principle of reinforcing desired behavior.
Yes, and good article. I’ve seen some of this dull inert spiritlessness in refugee camps but not in the poor or poor homes in poor countries where I’ve lived where poor means hunger and no indoor plumbing and if you want to see TV you pay a few pesos to watch the neighborhood tv. You might get mugged or murdered, so outsiders didn’t wander around, but there was spirit, they swept the dirt floor and the little piece of dirt in front. Dependence and lack of meaning jump out among our dependent class who live in our refugee camps we call projects. You want too fix it? dismantle the administrative state. We won’t so we’ll continue to destroy increasing numbers of those who can’t escape the dependence we purposely created.
I’d feel better about it if it didn’t have the effect of convincing even solidly middle-class folks that they can stick out their hands for “free” money. (At least, $45,500 for a family of four is middle class around here.)
Intact, working-poor families either get less/aren’t eligible. Mama and baby/ies living in Grandma’s house are more likely recipients of the largesse.
Used to work with a black nurses aid when I was an ER orderly before medical school. She would be absolutely furious when someone brought in their kid and he/she was dirty. Not, playing outside dirty, the ground in dirt from neglect. She would tear into the moms about it. Rosie would come out of the room and tell me ” I been poor, and there is no excuse for your child being that dirty. Soap is cheap.”
The difference between poverty and hopelessness is nothing more than a mental construct.
How do we fix it?
way off topic — to lighten things (I hope): how many times did Liz Taylor take it on?
I think this goes with Chuckles’ point, but I would expect that people feel more compelled to make the most of the charity they receive from individuals, as opposed to the handouts they get from the government. It’s really obvious when one person is spending his or her time and money to help you out; it’s not that obvious when the costs are spread across everyone, and it’s some government employee’s job to give you money to spend.
I don’t know how you get to a solution from that realization, though. Subsidizing people/entities that provide social services hasn’t noticeably helped, say, homelessness in San Francisco (though I suppose more of that can be attributed to mental health issues that are more common among the homeless).
For me, it’s difficult to come up with ideas that don’t sound fairly illiberal, like requiring that people do menial tasks to get them in the habit of working, and “overpaying” them (in welfare) to do that. I could imagine someone making the comparison to a chain gang, but the chain is the promise of ongoing government assistance. I guess that’s the chain one way or the other.
Outside of the material aspect of it, I don’t know how you cultivate a desire for independence on a large scale, to help all the people whose lives look like what the OP described. (I’m sure if we knew, conservatism would be in better shape.) I certainly don’t wan’t to be dependent, but if that seemed like the only option, it’s not hard to imagine getting used to it.
Really, really good point.
From Jason Riley in “Please Stop Helping Us”, and from Walter Williams in “Race and Economics” we learn that from 1890 to 1940, black marriage rates were higher than whites and black unemployment rates were lower. That unemployment was lower is remarkable in that there were many hurdles to thwart black employment. From “Race and Economics”, “In New York, 1925,…Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.”, in 1880 Philadelphia, “three-quarters of all black families were nuclear”. Consider that in 1847, one in ten blacks had been born in slavery, so by 1880 for the rate of nuclear families in black communities to be slightly higher than that of whites is evidence that slavery did not shatter the family or work ethic.
To show how destructive governmental support has been compare family structure during slavery, from “Race and Economics” during slavery where marriage was forbidden “three-fourths of the children had the same mother and father”. Our current type of Western safety net both here and in Europe is the most destructive force on the family. It is from the family that we learn how to live as adults and citizens, so as we watch marriage become optional in Fishtown, we see an oncoming disaster.
I apparently worked with the same lady in Toledo – this one was an RN. That stuff just made her mad. You couldn’t even talk to her about it.
I used the WIC prescreening tool to check the eligibility threshold for my locality (CA). For a family of three, including a baby, it’s about $37k. For a family of four, $45k.
I bet a lot of families who make that much wouldn’t think they’d be eligible.
I’ll throw in 2 cents here- primarily Better Education.
Get the basics into everyone and they are better prepared to make better decisions. When you are not allowed an education you fight for it. When it is ‘common’ then it is taken for granted.
And when its run by the unions you get- ‘Only 4 percent of Detroit public school eighth graders are proficient or better in math and only 7 percent in reading.’
‘According to estimates by The National Institute for Literacy, roughly 47 percent of adults in Detroit, Michigan — 200,000 total — are “functionally illiterate,” meaning they have trouble with reading, speaking, writing and computational skills. Even more surprisingly, the Detroit Regional Workforce finds half of that illiterate population has obtained a high school degree.’
How can anyone live ‘up to’ any standard when they don’t understand the world they live in?
They are told to ‘be a victim’.
BTW- the phenomenon that is the ‘Millennial Snowflake’ is also a cause of bad education… no critical thinking required… bad at both ends.