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It is a commonly used argument that the lives of poor people are very hard and unpleasant and that dealing with the hardships sucks out all their energy and bri
by pfedor 15y ago
It is a commonly used argument that the lives of poor people are very hard and unpleasant and that dealing with the hardships sucks out all their energy and brings down their spirits so they can't take advantage of all the opportunities that middle-class people have to improve their situation.
The problem I see with this reasoning is that if you consider the entire range of standards of living which people had throughout history and geography, with maybe middle-age European peasants on one end and say Larry Ellison on the other, then on this scale, the standard of living of contemporary American poor is very close to the standard of living of the reasonably well off. From the point of view say anyone in communist Poland, as well as at least a billion people living today, what you call poverty would seem like mind-blowing opulence. On the other hand, I rather suspect that for anyone featured in The Real Housewives of New York, the lot of doctors and software engineers and struggling janitors alike must seem like horrifying wage slavery.
So, to claim that there exists a standard of living threshold, and that below this threshold life is objectively hard, whereas above this threshold it's easy, and that it so happens that the line lies between the poor and the middle class in contemporary America, you have to believe that we're looking at a very unique time and place. Of all the possible values that the threshold could potentially have, what are the odds that it would actually fall within this narrow range you're looking at? A hundred or maybe even fifty years ago in the US (and much more recently in many countries around the world), almost everyone's standard of living was way below that of contemporary poor. Do you think all these people were equally as incapacitated by the harshness of their lives, unable to make rational decisions and work to improve their lives? If the civilization does not collapse for one reason or another, chances are in fifty years time even the poor will have the standard of living as good as wealthy people have now. Do you think the poor of the future will not suffer from this ten-people-in-a-room-screaming effect?
- yummyfajitas 15y agoSo, to claim that there exists a standard of living threshold, and that below this threshold life is objectively hard, whereas above this threshold it's easy, and that it so happens that the line lies between the poor and the middle class in contemporary America, you have to believe that we're looking at a very unique time and place. Not only that, but you also need to ignore most of the world. Even traders, programmers and executives living in Bandra (a part of Mumbai more expensive than Manhattan) tend to have lifestyles worse than many US poor people. I.e., cramped apartments in poor condition, long commutes and very few luxuries. Given this, the Karelis/bee sting/screaming guy theory would predict Mumbai's corporate lawyers would behave similarly to the US poor - never saving for the future, blowing their money on crappy food and booze rather than education, etc. Strangely, that doesn't happen.
- Joeri 15y agoIt's true that people have a sort of baseline happiness, and that they tend to drift back to that level of happiness when left in a stable situation. So, it's true that being poor doesn't automatically make you unhappy. But let's be honest: being poor doesn't help. I also object to the relative definition of poverty, that if you have less than those surrounding you, you're poor. I've always felt that an objective definition is much more useful. Suppose we objectively define "the poor" as everyone not having access to basic human rights? Can you honestly say there aren't many people that fall into that category even today? To me that's a category worth reducing to zero.
- ckarelis 15y agoFrom Charles Karelis. Surely, as you point out, there is no absolute standard of poverty across different times and places. Nevertheless, the suffering of poor Americans today, some of whose objective circumstances would have qualified them for the middle class back in the U.S. of 1930, is real suffering, and seems to call for a response. In addition, I think it lowers the marginal utility of small improvements in their consumption. The conundrum is, that in a (we hope) super-prosperous future America, there will be poor people (by the standards of that time), who are objectively better off than middle class Americans today, and it is (for many people at least) hard to care a great deal about their plight. So do we absolutize contemporary intuitions about poverty and say these future people won't be "really" poor, or do we say they will be really poor but that that doesn't impose a moral obligation on us today, e.g. to conserve so they will be less "poor"? Neither answer feels totally right.
- ckarelis 15y agoFrom Charles Karelis. Surely, as you point out, there is no absolute standard of poverty across different times and places. Nevertheless, the suffering of poor Americans today, some of whose objective circumstances would have qualified them for the middle class back in the U.S. of 1930, is real suffering, and seems to call for a response. In addition, I think it lowers the marginal utility of small improvements in their consumption. The conundrum is, that in a (we hope) super-prosperous future America, there will be poor people (by the standards of that time), who are objectively better off than middle class Americans today, and it is (for many people at least) hard to care a great deal about their plight. So do we absolutize contemporary intuitions about poverty and say these future people won't be "really" poor, or do we say they will be really poor but that that doesn't impose a moral obligation on us today, e.g. to conserve so they will be less "poor"? Neither answer feels totally right.