I'm writing this post while sitting in the Main Reading Room of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. If you haven't been, Google it. It's probably the most glorious indoor space in the entire country.
The trouble with beginning a blog is that one must balance the divergent goals of writing something narrow enough that more remains to be written in future posts, but broad enough that it will make sense given the audience's unfamiliarity with his way of thinking. I've decided to stray toward the broad end of the spectrum; I hope you'll forgive me.
Alexander Berger and I are engaged in a long-standing debate as to whether the United States ought to seek to alleviate poverty on an international level. I'm sure I will discuss that debate and its slew of nuances in future posts, but the musings expounded in this particular post concern a more basic matter: why one (the state or any non-state actor) would seek to alleviate poverty anywhere, at all. To put it differently, why the pursuit of equality between individuals is a worthy goal. Early on in our discussion, Alexander and I realized that we had both accepted that premise intuitively; as a result, it's something I've not yet had the opportunity to discuss.
"Alleviating poverty" sounds good and Christian; "pursuing equality" may sound like socialism-lite to acolytes of the latest right-wing hysteria phenomenon (and a handful of more thoughtful people). The basic difference for me is that "pursuing equality" is intrinsically bidirectional; that is to say, the pursuit of equality between individuals will almost always necessitate the movement of both to some hybrid state. "Alleviating poverty," meanwhile, connotes itself with the promotion of economic gains for some people (those deemed "impoverished") without necessarily implying the economic losses of others.
Of course, different societies define "impoverished" differently, and "poverty" exists everywhere, though the term implies a different level of underdevelopment in different communities. In a way, these distinctions vindicate Jesus' famous prophecy in Mark 14:7 ("The poor you will always have with you"; included in Matthew's Gospel at Matthew 26:11): the poor remain with us because inequality persists. As one might expect, a person living just below the poverty line in the United States finds herself with many more possessions and opportunities than the average citizen of a very poor country, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Why, then, should we work to alleviate poverty at all? If we don't aim to create a society in which everyone's possessions are identical (even most Communists don't advocate redistribution to that extent), then wealth disparities will necessarily arise. When they do, some people will be labeled "rich" and some "poor," and poverty will survive. The mission is impossible.
(Note that accepting the last paragraph would also equate the rhetoric of "alleviating poverty" with that of "pursuing equality," which solves the semantic quandary I had noted earlier).
My initial response (and the only one I'll have time to include in this post, which is entirely my fault for having chosen to stray toward the broad end of the aforementioned spectrum) relates to the notion of responsibility. Most Americans (including myself) don't believe in the pursuit of complete equality (instead, many of us choose to celebrate our differences), but we do support the equality of opportunities between individuals. It's righteously seen as bigoted to believe that women or African-Americans don't deserve civil liberties like the right to vote, and in fifty years (twenty, if one's really optimistic), it will be righteously seen as bigoted to believe that homosexual couples don't deserve the same benefits of "marriage" or "civil unions" (select the terminology of your choice for now, I promise to have a post on this later and very soon) as heterosexual couples.
My response suggests that money works the same way.
Another future post will examine the relationship between wealth and happiness, but I'll stick with the obvious part here: as much as individuals like me try to separate money and personal fulfillment, there are certain opportunities that wealthy individuals can seize and impoverished individuals cannot. Some of these are obviously important (a college education), others are singularly insignificant over the long term but enormously important when considered as a group (going to see a movie in a theater on Friday night; purchasing a membership at the local gym; the Chipotle burrito I'm going to purchase and devour when the Library closes in thirty-four minutes).
To the average American, it would be ludicrous to deprive me of the burrito I'm going to eat because the homeless person who sits outside Chipotle hasn't experienced its succulent goodness in the last eighteen months (for those keeping score at home, Chipotle is a Colorado company founded just two blocks away from the University of Denver campus). Some might rationalize their position by guessing that I had worked to earn the money with which to purchase my burrito while the homeless individual had either not done so or had already squandered the fruits of their labors. Others would simply say that it's wrong to deprive me of my property.
I could spend the next three hours writing material to counter the first view. The second is far more persuasive - but might I note the following?:
I've done nothing to merit my burrito. I've worked several jobs through which I've accumulated a modest savings, but not nearly enough to financially support myself and the things that I do. I'm a college student, which means that someone is paying close to $40,000 every year just to cover the cost of my classes. In my case, that money comes from a foundation that issues very generous scholarships, and my parents don't absorb any of the costs.
My friends know about my scholarship, so when I've had this discussion with them, they (and by "they" I mean Kirsten Cangilla, in this particular case) will be quick to point out that I worked hard in high school to earn my scholarship, and thus my situation is a result of my perseverance rather than my privilege. And while I did work hard in high school, my situation is a result of my privilege.
Consider not only the family I was born into (my father, though not from a particularly wealthy family, makes a six-figure salary as an engineer, thus allowing my mother to be extra-supportive of my sister and me as we grew up), but also the random genetic gifts I was given (I'm smart), the good luck that has followed me over the course of my life (I've never been extremely sick or grievously injured), and the people I've just happened to be around (who are amazing and have contributed enormously to my personal development).
My relative wealth comes from sheer fortune (no pun intended), not from any disproportionately large amount of effort I've exerted to deserve it. Since my good fortune has left me with a higher degree of opportunity than the average individual, I have a responsibility to share what I have in order to preserve the benefits of a society in which equality of opportunity exists (and I've already established that the pursuit of equality of opportunity, as opposed to the equality of possessions, is the egalitarian principle in American society).
This reasoning obviously has implications outside of its relevance to me as an individual, as you'll partially see expounded in later posts. As I implied before, however, the simple responsibility of the more fortunate to assist the less fortunate isn't the only answer to the question of why equality ought be pursued. My debate with Alexander, for instance, has played out on an entirely different level.
Two things.
ReplyDelete1. We need to think about abandoning the term "privilege." I feel that we've gotten to a point at which it has gained an incredibly negative connotation in the context of discussions about development, poverty and other social issues, implying that the "privileged" are elitist and ungrateful and should feel guilty. Instead, I suggest that we move to using a more appropriate term, one unladen with such connotations. I might suggest another term that you made reference to a number of times: luck.
2. In discussing the pursuit of equality, the issue of happiness inevitably arises. Essentially, the argument is that because people who are less well-off financially are often as happy as or happier than those in more developed economies, to pursue equality doesn't make sense. However, if I had a blog, the point that I would choose to discuss is this: why should our ultimate goal be happiness?
Interesting post. I just want to point out that I would not say that I think that the pursuit of (income or wealth) equality between individuals is necessarily or inherently a worthwhile project. I tend to think that greater socioeconomic equality than we currently have in the U.S. would be good, but it's for more instrumental (and poverty-relief related) than intrinsic reasons.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, it seems to me that your post is trying to come up with the (or some) conditions on which poverty can be eradicated without achieving perfect equality of income or wealth. You seem to think that the notion of responsibility is the key here, but it's sort of unclear to me why you think that.
You talk about equality of opportunity, and argue that we do or should condemn discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, but I don't understand what these have to do with responsibility. You then go on to talk about a homeless person outside a Chipotle, and how one justification for you having a burrito and her not is (more or less) that she is responsible for her lack of a burrito, and a second justification is that (because you are responsible for having your own burrito) it is wrong to deprive you of it. These are effectively two sides of the same coin, and boil down to the idea that because of your past actions, and hers, you deserve the burrito more than she does.
You correctly point out that you have done little to be able to claim responsibility for the money in your pocket, so it is difficult to say that you deserve the burrito more than the person who has greater need for it. This seems like a convenient point to interject something that Warren Buffet always likes to point out, which is that his set of skills, which are responsible for his extraordinary wealth, are only valuable in a particular societal context where his talents are allowed to develop and his wealth is allowed to accumulate. Had he been born somewhere else, his fate could have been much different.
I think you're conflating a couple different discussions, which makes it tough to do any of them justice. The one you actually talk about for most of your post is the income equality - responsibility - equality of opportunity discussion. I'm not totally sure what you're saying there, but I think it's something I agree with, namely that the importance of responsibility ensures that income equality is not necessarily a good thing. Some people do work a lot harder than others (who may have had all the same opportunities) and compensating them equally seems to be an injustice rather than a form of justice; we think there is something important about being responsible for one's fate, and that responsibility can justify private gains or losses. The person outside Chipotle's case for your burrito (on this view) is stronger if she is not responsible for being there than if, in full knowledge of the risks, she took a gamble that had poverty as the downside (and some potentially large upside). Your assumption is that she could not have had the opportunities you have, and it's probably a good one, but it's worth considering what the ideology of equality of opportunity would say if she had the same opportunities: you have no need to help her. Elizabeth Anderson has written an interesting critique of what's known as "luck egalitarianism" on these grounds, and I'll send that your way (sorry readers!). Based on the assumption that you aren't responsible for your wealth and she's not responsible for her poverty, then she may be entitled to your burrito.
The second discussion is the one that comes first in your post, and it is about poverty and equality. I may just be missing it, but it's hard for me to see the link between that one and the equality of opportunity one. As I point out above, getting equality of opportunity does not entail that there will be no poverty. There would probably be less, but it is not the same thing. I think the better explanation of how to eradicate poverty without achieving perfect equality of income is to reject your claim that any inequality generates poverty. There are different kinds of deprivation experienced by homeless Americans and middle class DRCans, but both are features of poverty that can be captured by something like Sen and Nussbaum's capabilities approach, David Miller's needs approach to rights, or Rawls' theory of justice. We (and each of the philosophers just listed) can all agree that the DRCans experiences an absolute deprivation; their poverty would be poverty anywhere, and it's based on not getting enough to eat or a basic shelter, not some social needs. The poverty a typical impoverished American, however, is not absolute poverty. In the capabilities approach, a poor American's poverty is manifested as the absence of "the ability to appear in public without shame," while under Miller's needs approach, it appears as the failure to meet the societal need for a secure home. Rawls would refer to it, in many cases, as a failure to achieve the "social bases of self-respect." Anyway, the point is that mere inequality does not ensure poverty. Only certain forms of absolute or relative deprivation should be considered impoverishing.
ReplyDeleteSorry to hijack your comments - you know you've written too much when it has to be broken into two comments! Looking forward to talking about this stuff when you get back.
I've put off answering these points for far too long - my apologies.
ReplyDeleteI'll begin with Kevin's comments and then move on to Alexander's - which I hope I can get through tonight!
1. You're absolutely right: "privilege" is now a term as loaded as any other, and "luck" is a substitute with fewer negative connotations. At the same time, and perhaps because of the academic groupthink that you and I discuss so frequently, I tend to agree that people who are "privileged" are "elitist (or perhaps just elite) and ungrateful and should feel guilty," provided that they're not taking the steps to distribute the fruits of their luck to the unlucky. When I encounter another DU student who admits she's earning her degree so that she can find a well-paying job and retire early, I think that she's taking advantage of her "luck" or her "privilege" - call it what you will - in a way that hurts the unlucky/underprivileged.
But for the sake of evading yet another overused term, I'll do my best to abandon privilege for the rest of my authorship of this blog.
2. The question of money and happiness merits a second post entirely, but I'll give you a taste of my thinking here. In short, I used to frame the question exactly as you have, and I still do to some extent. I have, however, become more sympathetic to the "development as freedom" position espoused by Amartya Sen - even though many of us would be happier living more simply, the fact that the rich can choose to live simple lives while the poor cannot choose to live commodity-rich lives results in an unfair level of unfreedom for poor people. Equality doesn't necessarily maximize happiness for all, because different things make different people happier. It does, however, maximize everyone's ability to pursue whatever makes them happy.
Now, to address Alexander:
ReplyDeleteYour criticisms of the logos employed here are well-warranted: the purpose of this post was to introduce readers to my way of thinking about issues of equality and inequality. As I began writing, I realized the extent to which our preexisting relationship drives my conversations with you, or with Kevin, or with anyone else. This post attempted (and probably failed) to confront the challenging task of explaining my position to someone without that prior knowledge; as a result, I simply ran out of space and time to provide a well-articulated answer to my own questions. As you rightly note, the discussion of "responsibility" here leaves much to be desired.
My point is essentially this: the pursuit of equality is a virtuous endeavor that ought be carried out by a fortunate person so that she might ensure that the opportunities presented by her fortune (which, of course, was bestowed upon her entirely by chance) are fairly distributed among individuals who lack those privileges. I suggest "responsibility" as a rationale for why she should the fruits of her fortune - just as you'd be responsible for the distribution of cookies baked by the neighbors if you were to find them on your family's doorstep during the holiday season.
Even when concise I still manage to be wordy.
You allude to your view of equality as being instrumental in the alleviation of poverty - we have, of course, discussed this before. I'd again suggest that poverty is defined comparatively; therefore, any project of poverty alleviation will necessarily tumble down the slippery slope to become a project aimed at promoting progressively higher degrees of equality. I'll address the points you make in your second comment, which are highly relevant here, in just a moment.
You said that you were confused as to why I brought up issues of race or sexual orientation - my point was simply that it is wrong and should be seen as wrong to deprive someone of an opportunity because of circumstances outside of her control. To use race as a determinant in suffrage or sexual orientation as a determinant in the right to marry is discriminatory because it is arbitrary - likewise, a society which uses birthright as a determinant in economic opportunities is discriminatory and unjustly organized.
You slogged through the Chipotle parable to arrive at the conclusion I intended: despite what some might assume or desire, capitalism (as presently constituted) is not meritocratic. Thanks for bringing Warren Buffet into the discussion; I wasn't aware that he felt that way. Anderson's point seems to be that a capitalist system would be just if it were meritocratic. But as the three of us agree that it is not...
As with Kevin, the points you make in your second comment demand much more attention than I will be able to provide here. I'm skeptical of any hard-and-fast, good-for-all-time-zones interpretation of poverty because I strongly believe that poverty is a social condition that comes about through wealth comparisons that can only take place in an unequal society.
ReplyDeleteImagine a society in which life expectancy hovers around thirty or forty years. Artificial shelters are unreliable and sometimes altogether nonexistent, and communities band together out of the necessity posed by violent external threats. A person's likely profession is subsistence farming, but her actual likelihood of subsisting is dictated by factors entirely outside of her control, like environmental conditions and perhaps war.
Does a resident of that society consider herself impoverished? If she lives in the contemporary DRC, the answer is probably yes. If she's a neolithic settler, the answer is definitely no. The neolithic woman lives in exactly the same conditions as everyone else she's ever encountered.
Extreme poverty in the DRC can't be excused by pointing out that life there is better than it was for the average stone ager. But the fact that such a rationalization would be insufficient is exactly my point: you won't be able to tell a resident of the year 2400 who's doomed to live to a paltry 80 years of age because she's susceptible to ancient maladies like cancer and heart disease that she'd have had it great in the stone age, either.
Alleviating extreme poverty is more important than rectifying relatively slight social inequalities that arise in wealthy communities like the United States. But ultimately, I predict that poverty alleviation will be seen as an outstanding assignment for as long as inequalities of any measurable depth persevere.