Will the Poor Always be with Us

Becky Blank has presented a valuable meditation on the nature of poverty. She offers the voice of a genuinely caring economist. The notion of a "caring economist" was not an oxymoron for me, at least not when I first came to economics as an undergraduate at Brown University in 1970. I have grown more cynical over the years, which makes me even more appreciative of the sentiment and ethics implied in the title of Professor Blank's talk. I want to pose a rhetorical question at the start of my remarks that will suggest the frame and motivation for my commentary: Can everyone escape poverty while we maintain the class differentiated system in which we now live (locally or globally)? The entry point for me as an economist was the question of poverty. As a child, I viewed people as being born into poverty: therefore, being poor was a matter of bad luck in the draw. Hence it was inherently unfair to be poor, and, so, something should be done about it. As I grew a bit older, I recognized that this form of unfairness was visited more frequently upon some groups of people than others. Since I never assumed that some groups were innately inferior to others, this reinforced my perception of unfairness and reinforced my belief that something should be done to eradicate poverty. I also assumed as a naive college freshman at Brown that economics necessarily is the field that will illuminate why poverty occurs and how it can be eliminated. I soon discovered that the answers I received were wholly unsatisfactory and the issues given greatest emphasis in some early economics courses were far removed from concerns about social inequality. Economics of the particular type I was taught--and I believe my experience was not (and is not) unique--was (is) geared toward explaining poverty based upon the individual defects of the poor themselves. In a different way the policy-poverty conjuncture that is the focus of Blank's analysis also narrows the way in which we look at poverty. A policy orientation sets boundaries on the discussion of poverty, limiting the exchange to the terrain of legitimate or safe discourse. Hence the very nature of the social system is not called into question. Solutions that are intrinsically non-revolutionary or non-radical are the only ones given consideration. There are strong echos here of political scientists' Bachrach and Baratz's concept of "nondecisionmaking," the process of systematic exclusion of certain ideas and options from the arena of serious discussion. A policy orientation necessarily circumscribed by prevailing norms and rhetoric of legitimacy proposes ameliorative changes that leave the fundamental characteristics of the social tournament unaltered. Winners and losers are produced and reproduced--with the poor numbering among the losers. During disruption by major social transformations that are not managed effectively by the policymakers, the deep structure remains intact, with more or less rigidity. Unlike most economists and unlike those constrained by the terms of credible policymaking, sociologists who focus on social stratification are led to decidedly less safe answers. A useful distinction for me is the following: structuralist versus individualist explanations of poverty. The structuralist approach, drawn from the sociology of stratification, presumes there is a hierarchy of slots forming a social ladder (a "deep structure"). People then are fit, via processes that can include racism, sexism, casteism, inherited advantage or disadvantage, into the slots. The social system is seen as an engine for producing relative winners and losers. At the extreme among the losers, as noted above, are the poor. The individualist approach, represented well by conventional economics, posits that the hierarchy of slots is self-generated continuously by individual decisions ("choices") and actions. Everyone potentially can be a winner if they acquire the right stuff by making the right choices. …