Poverty will always be with us.
There are four reasons poverty will always be with us. First the term is empty. Poverty can be anything anyone uses to define it. Cross cultural and cross national comparisons make poverty evaporate. The poorest homeless black man in Boise, Idaho has more food, available shelter and health care than the richest man living in an Iranian mountain village.
Second, the U.S. Government .....
Second, the U.S. Government definition of poverty is a truism. Does it make sense to say that half of all Americans are below average intelligence? Its true because the median of IQ is the same as the average of IQ with such a large sample … therefore 50% of people have an IQ below 100, the average.
Poverty, that you read about in the newspaper, is defined variously by government agencies as the bottom 10% or 20% of income earners and then, county by county, that income is compared to county living costs for families of different sizes. The resulting number is the percentage of people in each county below the poverty line. This is a truism. Regardless of the income of the society there was always and there will always be a bottom percentile.
Third, I have personally dealt with poverty twice in my life. Most recently in San Francisco between 1995 and 2000 when actual unemployment dropped to a minus number. Really, I was involved with more than a dozen businesses with every level of job; during that period, no one could find employees. The solution was to bring workers into the labor market such as elderly retired parents, retired aunts, grandparents and anyone else who could do a favor and help out. None of my business friends talked about the labor market after the first year. It was a given that workers couldn’t be found.
During that five year period when tens of thousand (that number is correct) jobs went vacant in San Francisco, the homeless population never changed (it is measured every year) and the number of unemployed blacks never changed, even in Oakland which is a 20 minute subway ride from San Francisco.
To understand the market conditions I remember a young cousin of a friend came to me in 1997 about getting a job in a good restaurant kitchen. I told him to pick the restaurant he wanted (he picked #1 Market) put on his chefs shoes, go the restaurant on a Monday morning with his resume (2 prior years experience in a kitchen) and be prepared to start working immediately. He did and he was put to work immediately.
Fourth, back in the days of the Point Foundation, Stewart Brand gave a grant to a man with an obese wife and 5 or 6 children, to drive his old station wagon across the U.S. and back (in the late Fall, because I remember his Thanksgiving experience.) Every city the man and his family came to he was to have the car breakdown at the outskirts and see how the family was treated when they had no money and no relatives.
Don’t guess. Every city, North and South, New York and Waco treated them wonderfully with food, shelter and a cash hand out. That is the reality of America…then and now. We have homeless now we had vagrant hippies then.
I helped set up food kitchens in San Francisco, got food for the poor under a demand from the SLA and provide Thanksgiving and Christmas food bags annually. Free food is so abundant that I never once spent more than an hour getting several tons of food, delivered for the so call “needy.”
The word, the concept and the reality of poverty is dubious.