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On Understanding

"I'm not poor, I'm broke. Poor means you can't pay your bills. I pay my bills but then I have no money left."

"I'm happy to be alive. God lets me live. I'm not saying I'm not stressed. I used to cry myself to sleep every night. I'm not used to asking for help. I've been on my own since I was 18 years old."

"You say you are poor every day. Get out of it. It's a mentality."

(Quotes from fieldnotes and interviews with participants in antipoverty programs)

Poverty is thought to be a cause of many social problems. It is considered both a cause and effect of violence. It is believed to undermine public education and is associated with a variety of negative health outcomes as well as plain, old-fashioned despair. In the United States, a wealthy and powerful nation, poverty marks the lives of millions. Child poverty rates are particularly high. Such high poverty rates shape how people develop psychologically, emotionally, and socially. Poverty is the curse that keeps on cursing.

Given this, how do we understand the experiences of people in poverty, this already stigmatized state? Are individuals in poverty best perceived as their own worst enemies? As victims? As heroes? What are the best ways to help people in poverty? And how do we understand poverty without further stigmatizing "the poor"? This book is an effort to guide our answers to these questions using what I refer to as the relational approach, and with the United States as the focus.

How we think about people in poverty matters for the sorts of relations formed in society, from national social policies to everyday encounters between primary school teachers and low-income families. How the public and key gatekeepers think about people in poverty helps form the structure and culture that all people must navigate as they try to make a life for themselves. There is a potential paradox here: Can we recognize that, while poverty itself is damaging, the people who have been, and continue to struggle, in poverty are not necessarily damaged? Yes, because the damage is not just to the individual, nor is it primarily a feature of individuals. The damage is to social relations. Whether that damage becomes a semi-permanent feature of an individual is always an open question. While we can recognize that some individuals are severely hurt by poverty, it does not follow that all individuals in poverty are affected in the same way. The trick is to shift the focus from the individual as the problem to seeing the individual in the context of social relations.

We pay real costs - moral, social, and economic - for allowing poverty to encroach on so many lives. The amount and severity of suffering are enormous. Yet this suffering is easily prevented socially when concerns about preventing fraud and idleness among the least powerful are not dominant. People in poverty put up with treatment that many of us could not imagine putting up with ourselves. In the United States, we address poverty through such fragmented halfway measures, with so many stipulations and bureaucratic requirements, that it typically becomes more effort to rely on the safety net than it would to have a(nother) job. I have repeatedly seen this for myself in agencies that serve the low-income community or people in crisis. The need to justify helping someone out and to demonstrate that clients are not taking undue advantage becomes a major stumbling block for anyone who wants to assist, and certainly for clients themselves looking for a safety net before they become stripped of any dignified recourse. We sometimes never do find out what happens to those who fall outside the safety nets. But why do so many people fall in the first place?

Reader, I say "we" throughout this book not because I assume you have no knowledge about poverty or that you only entertain bad thoughts about people in poverty. In fact, there is a very high likelihood that you have experienced poverty yourself and/or have close interactions with people in poverty. Social scientists believe that there are important implications for understanding people depending on how close the observer is to the situation of the observed. Too far away, and there is a tendency to see the characteristics of the observed as natural and unvarying. Too close, and there is a tendency to see characteristics as ingrained and unchangeable, and to miss the larger picture. It is thus important to be attentive to such tendencies and attempt to correct for them. In addition, I purposefully address not only the "deserving poor," as they are sometimes referred to, but also the "undeserving poor" - the ones we - myself included - tend to categorize, even if only for a second, as less deserving of our full consideration. I want to go even further and explore our notions of what poverty is, what it involves, and who it involves. By necessity, this is very much a "we" endeavor. I hope you are willing to take this journey with me.

In our attempts to understand poverty, we are confronted by difficult questions about human value and worth; issues of race, class, and gender; and whether inequality is beneficial in stratifying people by ability and will. We have to take into account how people benefit from poverty, particularly the wealthy. Studying the most disadvantaged people in society tells us much about the human experience. For one thing, we learn about the role of human agency under severe constraints. Human agency is the capacity to take action in the world out of one's own free will, as opposed to having those actions determined by circumstances and other people. It is important to recognize that people - even those in poverty - are not helpless. Often, they do not need our help so much as the same respect and basic rights that the nonpoor have. And in many ways, despite surface appearances and markedly different circumstances, we are not so different across social classes. It can be difficult sometimes to see our similarities when we are socially distant. But if we were actually placed in similar circumstances, how would we act?

Poverty in the USA

Poverty is the lack of the basic requirements to live a decent life in a given society - that is, the inability to acquire that which one needs to live a decent life in society. Although what is considered "decent" is partially subjective, we can identify certain needs as fundamental: reliable shelter, food, and healthcare. Some definitions of poverty go further than this, but let us begin with the official poverty measure, which is aimed at identifying those who cannot afford the necessities. In the next chapter, I identify some of the many ways researchers and policy experts define and measure poverty, but for now, here are some basic figures. The US government measures poverty by multiplying by three the estimated minimum cost of food for a given family size. That is the threshold for poverty by family size, and any household with a total income below that threshold is considered in poverty. In 2020, the annual income threshold for a family of three was $20,244. For 2019, around 34 million Americans were identified by the Census as living in poverty (US Census Bureau 2020c). This was 10.5% of the population, the lowest percentage since such data were provided, beginning in 1959. Poverty increased as the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the economy in 2020, rising to 11.4% of the population (Shrider et al. 2021).

Poverty rates in the USA are higher than those in nearly all other affluent countries. One measure of poverty used by the World Bank calculates the percentage of people who live on $1.90 or less per day (using 2011 US dollar equivalents). The World Bank (2022) found that the poverty rate by this measure is higher in the USA (at 1% for 2019) than it is for 69 other countries out of 171 total countries for which they had these data. An alternative used by the World Bank measures the percentage of people whose income is half the median income for that country, or lower. By this relative poverty indicator, the World Bank ranked the United States in 55th place out of 159 countries (17.8% in poverty) (World Population Review 2022). Thus, at extreme poverty levels ($1.90 per day) and relative poverty levels (half median income), the USA fares significantly worse than many other nations. Of course, many countries have much higher rates of extreme poverty than the USA - as high as 78.8% for the $1.90 per day level. However, given our very high levels of productivity and income, the USA tolerates an excessive amount of poverty compared to many other countries.

It is important to recognize, however, that these one-point-in-time measurements of poverty do not take into account how many people live through poverty throughout their lives. Rank et al. (2021) estimate that around 58% of Americans experience poverty for at least a year of their lives. The majority of Americans are at risk of experiencing poverty at some point in their lives. A quarter of Americans are at a particularly high risk, often bouncing in and out of poverty over the years.

Younger ages are associated with greater risk for poverty. Typically, about one-fifth of American children are living in poverty at any given time. One in ten (nearly 9 million) US children grow up in poverty for more than half of their childhood (Ratcliffe and Kalish 2017). A majority of these children are African American (56%), followed by Whites (36%) (Ratcliffe and Kalish 2017). However,...