Poverty in Context
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By Manvi Goel ‘10
You can literally travel across the world and find some hint of poverty in every place you go. I realized this at one of our late-night GPI map-making sessions during the past couple of weekends leading up to Poverty Week. What I am referring to is the gigantic world display that has been decorating the windows of Anna’s Taqueria this week. You can’t really miss it; it’s the first thing you see when you sit at the couches on the first floor of the student center in your break between classes. And if you look closely at those pictures, they’re all quite different. By that I mean, a struggled life in sub-Saharan Africa is not quite the same as a life in the slums of Calcutta or a life among the homeless in downtown Boston, but yet, all these are examples of poverty.
Exactly what does it mean to “live in poverty”? There is the more concrete World Bank definition of living in “extreme poverty” – those living on less than $1/day, calculated by purchasing power parity, or moderate poverty, less than $2/day. But for me, this is one of those loaded questions that has a lot to do with context. According to Mollie Orshansky, who developed the poverty measurements used by the United States government in 1964 shortly after President Johnson declared his “war on poverty”, “to be poor”, according to her, “is to be deprived of those goods and services and pleasures which others around us take for granted.” I take for granted my home, my breakfast, and sometimes my cellphone or laptop; does that mean those around me who do not have cellphones are poor? Or perhaps my neighbors back home who do not own a car, even though they live in the suburbs of DC? In other words, doesn’t everyone live in a state of poverty with respect to some one else or in frequent cases, some basic norm? The fact that income inequalities exist virtually everywhere, in various forms and dimensions, goes to show that poverty has a lot to do with the relative disparity between the rich and the poor. Thus, when we think about “eradicating poverty”, we’re not simply talking about air-lifting food to children in India and Africa so that they don’t die of malnutrition before the age of 6. We are referring to the more complicated goal of reducing economic disparities worldwide. We are looking not at simply giving the poor what they need but enabling all individuals to have a fair chance to obtain the goods and services necessary to live a decent life.
What are some examples of poverty in the relative sense that you have come across? How do you think Poverty in America is handled differently from poverty in Europe or Asia?
No definitions of poverty can apprehend the complexity of this social phenomenon. It seems so true that poverty becomes a matter of comparing with a benchmark be it a quantifiable measure or a subjective criterion. The first kind of benchmark is quite dangerous because “the poor” can be statistically-eliminated when moving the norm that defines the border that determines whether you are under poverty conditions or not. But this pragmatic measurability is fundamental to diagnose the strategy of further plans for action.
I think Orshansky’s definition of poverty relativizes the phenomenon to an extreme where any approach becomes impractical. It leads to such reflections as the ones you give example of. The concept of poverty needs to keep on depuration until programs for integration and improvement of poor communities demonstrate with positive results that their theoretical approach is sufficiently accurate.
Amartya Sen has not only criticized measurement of poverty through income but has also proposed that it has to be understood as the incapability to satisfy elemental and essential needs. The problem is how can “capability needs” be quantified and then how to establish which needs are really necessary. It is hard to do so since “needs” vary between generations, regions and individuals.
I am convinced that fundamental needs are those that fundamental for an individual’s to develop her/his potentialities until its maximum. A society without poverty would be one where each individual can have access to minimum material and humanitarian support necessary to be self-realized in an ethical way. It might be extremely complex to assign measurable variables to this concept but it places empowerment as core idea leaving behind bold economic focus, paternalistic assistance and entails coordinated action of society as a whole.
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