Tragically, utopian dreams went out of style just at the time in history when science and technology had reached a level where the elimination of physical poverty had become a real possibility. Ours is an age of cynicism, if not despair. There is precious little optimism or confidence for the future. Most people today no longer consider a world without material need to be a practical goal.

Unfortunately, the current pessimism seems well founded, especially in regards to the future of the world's poor. The 1974 United Nations World Food Conference produced no information to support optimistic predictions. In fact, the main report of the United Nations World Food and Agriculture Organization said, "It is doubtful whether such a critical food situation has ever been so worldwide."¹

Manifestly, we are not yet close to eliminating poverty by any definition. In fact, due to the rapid population growth in the developing nations, there are probably more poor people in the world today than ever before. If, as has been suggested, the elimination of poverty is technically feasible, then the persistence of poverty on such a massive scale is a phenomenon that requires explanation. How could we have so seriously mismanaged our resources that almost one-half of the world's population suffers from malnutrition, and tens of millions of Americans are officially classified as poor, unless the situation is beyond human remedy?

Many people feel that the cause of poverty is fundamentally rooted in human nature or at least in human society. The conventional wisdom is that the poor are different from other members of society and that this difference is the basic cause of their poverty. In other words, the fault is generally believed to lie with the poor themselves. Most people will admit that, at least to some extent, the poor are victims of their environment. Poor people are often deprived of important advantages. They frequently are excluded from opportunities available to the non-poor, but in the final analysis, most observers–whether laymen or sociologists, from liberal or conservative backgrounds–have ascribed the blame for poverty to the personal deficiencies of the poor themselves.

This basic analysis of the cause for poverty has formed the philosophical foundation of public relief and welfare programs in Western countries since their earliest inception in the sixteenth century.² It certainly has been the guiding principle of the American welfare system from the New Deal through the Great Society. Books like Galbraith's THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY and Harrington's THE OTHER AMERICA that provided the rationale for the 1960's war on poverty were carefully reasoned and documented essays on the cultural deprivation of the poor. The poor were pictured as isolated, ignorant, and prevented by their own impotence from breaking out of the vicious circle of poverty. This traditional view of the poor has so completely dominated sociological thinking in America that throughout the entire course of the "war on poverty" the question of income distribution went virtually unnoticed. Occasionally someone raised the possibility that the basic cause of poverty was that poor people had no money, but such suggestions were almost unanimously rejected as hopelessly naive and simplistic. Harrington relates the famous exchange between Hemingway and Fitzgerald where Fitzgerald is reported to have remarked, "The rich are different," to which Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have money." Harrington rejects the Hemingway comment as culturally biased. He goes on to argue throughout his entire book that the poor are different, that "everything about them, from the condition of their teeth to the way they make love is suffused and permeated by the fact of their poverty."³

It is, of course, rather easy to demonstrate that the poor are different and that they lack things besides money. It is often difficult, however, to establish the directionality of the cause-effect relationship between cultural deprivation and lack of income. The traditional view, exemplified by Harrington and Galbraith, is that cultural deprivation is the cause and lack of the income the effect. Logically, however, it is just as reasonable to conclude that lack of income is the cause and cultural deprivation the effect. In other words, it makes just as much sense to argue that the reason the poor are different is because they have no money, as it is to argue that they have no money because they are different.

Assuming that lack of income is the basic cause of poverty would drastically alter the strategy of any future war on poverty. If lack of income is the root cause and cultural deprivation merely a by-product, then the entire social welfare program of the United States over the past forty years has been misdirected! Instead of concentrating on education, job training, and neighborhood development, the emphasis should have been on broadening the basic structure of the nation's income distribution system.

Recent studies of anti-poverty progress during the 1960's seem to suggest that the attempt to relieve poverty by cultural enrichment programs has been spectacularly unsuccessful. For example, Bennet Harrison, an MIT economist has found only minimal benefits from manpower training programs for blacks. He suggests "instead of concentrating government money on so-cal'ed 'defects' in the poor people, it would be more profitable to focus first on defects in the labor market."⁴ Bradley Schiller, a University of Maryland economist, states that "public anti-poverty activity has, for the most part, been a bread-and-circus kind of affair. Anti-poverty education programs such as Head Start, compensatory education, and manpower training have all failed under scrutiny to demonstrate any significant positive results."⁵ Christopher Jenks and associates at Harvard have shown that there is little if any correlation between differences in school spending and differences in performance of students in the basic skills. Jenks claims that there is little to suggest that cognitive skills have much to do with economic success. He has shown that there is as much economic inequality among persons who score high on standardized tests as in the general population. He speculates that "equalizing everyone's reading scores would not appreciably reduce the number of economic failures," and suggests that the only way to deal realistically with poverty is to change the income distribution system so as to narrow the extremes of income inequality.⁶

The entire notion that poverty stems from the cultural deficiencies of the poor themselves has come under serious question as sociological evaluations of Great Society programs have become available. The results, as summed up by Grieden and Kotz, seem to indicate that "Poor people are more or less like the rest of us. The only important difference is that they have less money. The cause of their poverty is not primarily the particular handicaps of the poor people, but the lopsided way in which income is distributed in America."⁷ Leonard Goodwin of the Brookings Institute cites studies showing that the attitudes of welfare recipients are "remarkably like those of the middle-class suburban housewives and their aspirations for their children's careers are remarkably high, considering their own low estate."⁸ Shiller states that 70 percent of poor adults are workers and among families headed by men the figure is 84 percent. Most of the poor families where no one works are elderly or headed by a woman, although almost half of these women work. More than one third of poor families have two or more working members.5 Lampman says, "The poor are like other Americans, only more so."⁹

Evidence from recent studies by Lampman on the changing population of those classified as poor strongly supports the newly emerging notion that poverty is more a matter of income distribution than cultural deprivation. Lampman observed that in just one year, from 1962 to 1963, about one-fourth of the people in poverty got out.¹⁰ However, in that same interval, an almost equal number of people became newly poor. This kind of mobility suggests that the poor are not trapped at all, or even peculiarly isolated. Many escapees from poverty are alive and well today.¹¹ In fact, one reason why persons from poor backgrounds so often have voiced strong skepticism concerning government programs designed to assist persons "locked" in poverty is that they themselves are poverty escapees. They know it can be done and frequently without government help. This is not to deny that there exist some persons who are genuinely locked into poverty by age or particularly unfortunate circumstances. But certainly not all, or even most, of the poor are trapped. Escape can be made by gaining access to the traditional sources of income. Unfortunately, while some are escaping from poverty, the ranks of the poor are replenished by others moving in the opposite direction. For millions of Americans living just above the poverty line, a plunge into destitution is merely a matter of a few months sickness, an accident, a family breakup, or in some cases simply the loss of a job.

This strongly suggests that poverty has its roots not in cultural deprivation, but in an income distribution system that is not broad enough to include everyone at the same time. The existing system habitually excludes a sizeable percentage of the population and maintains an even larger number of persons only marginally above the poverty line, ready to become poor at the briefest misfortune.¹²

The existing income distribution system might be likened unto a crowded raft afloat in a sea full of struggling swimmers. Once there is no more room on the raft, someone must fall off for every new person who manages to climb aboard. Of course, in such situations there are usually persons of goodwill who give encouragement and assistance to those in the water. Some might even help particularly courageous swimmers to climb aboard. Unfortunately, so long as the raft is too small, such acts of mercy only result in someone else, perhaps on the other side, being crowded off.

During the 1960's, a great deal of self-congratulatory enthusiasm among poverty warriors was generated by an apparent steady decline in the poverty index. Statistics showed that the number of poor people fell from 22 percent of the population in 1960 to only 12 percent in 1970. However, in retrospect this decline appears to be little more than a "statistical slight of hand" attributable almost wholly to inadequate accounting for inflation. During the 60's,the definition of poverty was increased approximately 25 percent, but the consumer price index rose almost 35 percent in the same period. What little real decrease in poverty that did occur during the '60's appears more attributable to declines in unemployment than to specific Great Society anti-poverty measures.13 As unemployment fell, less people were excluded from sources of income and therefore, naturally, less people were poor. Beginning in 1969, even the appearance of a decline in poverty vanished. Unemployment began to rise and along with it poverty.

There are few social problems in America today that are not related in one way or another to poverty, and there are few issues that are as politically divisive. For most of us who have been spared the grief and frustration of poverty, it is emotionally comfortable to believe that the poor have only themselves to blame. But the facts indicate otherwise. The facts indicate that the poor are not very different from the non-poor in their needs, aspirations, or goals. In general, they work just as hard as other Americans, if not harder. The main difference is that they are paid very little, if anything, for what they do.¹²

Poverty is much more closely correlated with the availability of income than with any other social factor. If a person is excluded from a source of income, he or she is almost certain to be poor. This seems an obvious thing to say, but its implications are far-reaching. For unless it can be demonstrated that the poor are personally deficient in some fundamental sense, the only conclusion left is that the income distribution system is itself defective. If that is true, then poverty is merely a symptom of a much broader and more fundamental problem.

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