Galbraith the position of poverty

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

The Position of Poverty

jOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (1908-2006) was born in Canada but became an American citizen in 1937. He grew up on a farm in Ontario and received his first university degree in agricul­ tural science. This background may have contributed to the success of his many books on subjects such as economics, the State Depart­ ment, Indian art, and government, which have always explained complex concepts with a clarity easily grasped by laypeople. Some­ times he has been criticized for oversimplifying issues, but on the whole, he has made a brilliant success of writing with wit and humor about perplexing and sometimes troubling issues.

Galbraith was professor of economics at Harvard University for many years. During the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, he assisted the Democrats as a speechwriter and eco­ nomics adviser. He performed the same tasks for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Kennedy appointed Galbraith ambassador to India, a post that he maintained for a little over two years, including the period during which India and China fought a border war. His experiences in India resulted in Ambassador's journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years (1969). Kennedy called Galbraith his finest ambassadorial appointment.

Galbraith's involvement with politics was somewhat unusual for an academic economist at that time. It seems to have stemmed from strongly held personal views on the social issues of his time. One of the most important contributions of his best-known and probably most significant book, The Affluent Society (1958; rev. eds. 1969, 1976, 1998), was its analysis of America's economic ambitions. He pointed out that at that time the economy was entirely focused on the

From The Affluent Society.

405

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measurement and growth of the gross national product. Economists and government officials concentrated on boosting output, a goal that he felt was misdirected because it would result in products that people really did not need and that would not benefit them. Creating artificial needs for things that had no ultimate value, and building in a "planned obsolescence," seemed to him to be wasteful and ulti­ mately destructive.

Galbraith suggested that America concentrate on genuine needs and satisfy them immediately. He was deeply concerned about the environment and suggested that clean air was a priority that should take precedence over industry. He supported develop­ ment of the arts and stressed the importance of improving housing across the nation. His effort was directed at trying to help Ameri­ cans change certain basic values by giving up the pursuit of useless consumer novelties and substituting a program of genuine social development. The commitment to consumer products as the basis of the economy naturally argued against a redirection of effort toward the solution of social problems.

Galbraith is so exceptionally clear in his essay that little com­ mentary is needed to establish its importance. He is insightful in clarifying two kinds of poverty: case poverty and insular poverty. Case poverty is restricted to an individual and his or her family and often seems to be caused by alcoholism, ignorance, mental defi­ ciency, discrimination, or specific disabilities. It is an individual, not a group, disorder. Insular poverty affects a group in a given area-an "island" within the larger society. He points to poverty in Appalachia and in the slums of major cities, where most of the people in those "islands" are at or below the poverty level. Insular poverty is linked to the environment, and its causes are somehow derived from that environment.

Galbraith's analysis is perceptive and influential, and although little or no progress has been made in solving the problem of pov­ erty since 1959, he assures us that there are steps that can be taken to help eradicate it. Such steps demand the nation's will, however, and he warns that the nation may lack the will. He also reasons that because the poor are a minority, few politicians make their plight a campaign issue. Actually, in this belief he is wrong. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Jimmy Carter in 1976 made programs for the poor central among their govern­ mental concerns. Because of the war in Vietnam and other governmental policies, however, the 1960s and early 1970s were a time of staggering inflation, wiping out any of the advances the poor had made.

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Galbraith's Rhetoric

The most important rhetorical achievement of the piece is its style. This is an example of the elevated plain style: a clear, direct, and basically simple approach to language that only occasionally admits a somewhat learned vocabulary-as in the use of a very few words such as opulent, unremunerative, and ineluctable. Most of the words he uses are ordinary ones.

He breaks the essay into five carefully numbered sections. In this way he highlights its basic structure and informs us that he has clearly separated its elements into related groups so that he can speak directly to aspects of his subject rather than to the entire topic. This rhetorical technique of division contributes to clarity and confers a sense of authority on the writer.

Galbraith relies on statistical information that the reader can examine if necessary. This information is treated in the early stages of the piece as a prologue. Once such information has been given, Galbraith proceeds in the manner of a logician establishing premises and deriving the necessary conclusions. The subject is sober and sobering, involving issues that are complex, uncertain, and difficult, but the style is direct, confident, and essentially simple. This is the secret of the success of the book from which this selection comes. The Affluent Society has been translated into well over a dozen languages and has been a best-seller around the globe, and fifty years after its first publication it remains an influ­ ential book. Its fundamental insights are such that it is likely to be relevant to the economy of the United States for generations to come.

PREREADING QUESTIONS: WHAT TO READ FOR

The following prereading questions may help you anticipate key issues in the discussion of john Kenneth Galbraith's "The Position of Poverty." Keeping them in mind during your first reading of the selection should help focus your attention.

• Why is modern poverty different from that of a century ago?

• What is case poverty?

• What is insular poverty?

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The Position of Poverty

"The study of the causes of poverty," Alfred Marshall observed at 1 the turn of the century, "is the study of the causes of the degradation of a large part of mankind." He spoke of contemporary England as well as of the world beyond. A vast number of people both in town and country, he noted, had insufficient food, clothing, and house­ room; they were: "Overworked and undertaught, weary and care­ worn, without quiet and without leisure." The chance of their succor, he concluded, gave to economic studies "their chief and their highest interest." 1

No contemporary economist would be likely to make such an 2 observation about the United States. Conventional economic dis­ course makes obeisance to the continued existence of some poverty. "We must remember that we still have a great many poor people." In the nineteen-sixties, poverty promised, for a time, to become a sub­ ject of serious political concern. Then the Vietnam war came and the concern evaporated or was displaced. For economists of conven­ tional mood, the reminders that the poor still exist are a useful way of allaying uneasiness about the relevance of conventional economic goals. For some people, wants must be synthesized. Hence, the importance of the goods to them is not per se very high. So much may be conceded. But others are far closer to physical need. And hence we must not be cavalier about the urgency of providing them with the most for the least. The sales tax may have merit for the opulent, but it still bears heavily on the poor. The poor get jobs more easily when the economy is expanding. Thus poverty survives in economic discourse partly as a buttress to the conventional eco­ nomic wisdom.

The privation of which Marshall spoke was, going on to a cen- 3 tury ago, the common lot at least of all who worked without special skill. As a general affliction, it was ended by increased output which, however imperfectly it may have been distributed, nevertheless accrued in substantial amount to those who worked for a living. The result was to reduce poverty from the problem of a majority to that of a minority. It ceased to be a general case and became a special case. It is this which has put the problem of poverty into its peculiar modern form.

1 Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1927), pp. 2-4. [Galbraith's note] Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was an English economist whose Principles of Economics (1890) was long a standard text and is still relied on by some economists for its theories of costs, values, and distribution.

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II

For poverty does survive. In part, it is a physical matter; those 4 afflicted have such limited and insufficient food, such poor clothing, such crowded, cold, and dirty shelter that life is painful as well as com­ paratively brief. But just as it is far too tempting to say that, in matters of living standards, everything is relative, so it is wrong to rest every­ thing on absolutes. People are poverty-stricken when their income, even if adequate for survival, falls radically behind that of the commu­ nity. Then they cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the judgment of the larger community that they are indecent. They are degraded for, in the literal sense, they live outside the grades or categories which the community regards as acceptable.

Since the first edition of this book appeared, and one hopes s however slightly as a consequence, the character and dimension of this degradation have become better understood. There have also been fulsome promises that poverty would be eliminated. The per­ formance on these promises has been less eloquent.

The degree of privation depends on the size of the family, the 6 place of residence-it will be less with given income in rural areas than in the cities-and will, of course, be affected by changes in liv­ ing costs. One can usefully think of deprivation as falling into two broad categories. First, there is what may be called case poverty. This one encounters in every community, rural or urban, however prosperous that community or the times. Case poverty is the poor farm family with the junk-filled yard and the dirty children playing in the bare dirt. Or it is the gray-black hovel beside the railroad tracks. Or it is the basement dwelling in the alley.

Case poverty is commonly and properly related to some charac- 7 teristic of the individuals so afflicted. Nearly everyone else has mas­ tered his or her environment; this proves that it is not intractable. But some quality peculiar to the individual or family involved­ mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of industrial life, uncontrollable procreation, alcohol, discrimination involving a very limited minority, some educational handicap unre­ lated to community shortcoming, or perhaps a combination of several of these handicaps-has kept these individuals from partici­ pating in the general well-being.

Second, there is what may be called insular poverty-that which s manifests itself as an "island" of poverty. In the island, everyone or nearly everyone is poor. Here, evidently, it is not easy to explain mat­ ters by individual inadequacy. We may mark individuals down as intrinsically deficient in social performance; it is not proper or even

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wise so to characterize an entire community. The people of the island have been frustrated by some factor common to their environment.

Case poverty exists. It has also been useful to those who have 9 needed a formula for keeping the suffering of others from causing suffering to themselves. Since this poverty is the result of the defi­ ciencies, including the moral shortcomings, of the persons con­ cerned, it is possible to shift the responsibility to them. They are worthless and, as a simple manifestation of social justice, they suffer for it. Or, at a somewhat higher level of social perception and com­ passion, it means that the problem of poverty is sufficiently solved by private and public charity. This rescues those afflicted from the worst consequences of their inadequacy or misfortune; no larger social change or reorganization is suggested. Except as it may be insufficient in its generosity, the society is not at fault.