What's so bad about being poor?

National Review, Oct 28, 1988 by Charles Murray

So FAR, I have limited the discussion to a narrow point: in deciding how to enhance the ability of people to pursue happiness, solutions that increase material resources beyond subsistence independently of other considerations are bound to fail. Money per se is not very important. It quickly becomes trivial. Depending on other non-monetary conditions, poor people can have a rich assortment of ways of pursuing happiness, or affluent people can have very few.

The thought experiments were stratagems intended not to convince you of any particular policy implications, but rather to induce you to entertain this possibility: When a policy trade-off involves (for example) imposing material hardship in return for some other policy good, it is possible (I ask no more than that for the time being) that imposing the material hardship is the right choice. For example, regarding the "orphaned child" scenario: If a policy leads to a society in which there are more of the first kind of parents and fewer of the second, the sacrifices in material resources available to the children involved might conceivably be worth it.

The discussion, with its steady use of the concept of "near-subsistence" as "enough material resources to pursue happiness," has also been intended to point up how little our concept of poverty has to do with subsistence. Thus, for example, if one simply looks at the end result of how people live, a natural observation concerning contemporary America might be that we have large numbers of people who are living at a subsistence or subsubsistence level. But I have been using "subsistence" in its original sense: enough food to be adequately nourished, plus the most basic shelter and clothing. The traditional Salvation Army shelter provides subsistence, for example. In Western countries, and perhaps especially the United States, two problems tend to confuse the issue. One is that we have forgotten what subsistence means, so that an apartment with cockroaches, broken windows, and graffiti on the walls may be thought of as barely "subsistence level," even if it also has running water, electricity, heat, a television, and a pile of discarded fast-food cartons in the corner. It might be an awful place to live (for the reasons that the South Bronx can be an awful place to live), but it bears very little resemblance to what "subsistence" means to most of the world. Secondly, we tend to confuse the way in which some poor people use their resources (which indeed can often leave them in a near-subsistence state) with the raw purchasing power of the resources at their disposal. Take, for example, the apartment I just described and move a middle-class person with middle-class habits and knowledge into it, given exactly the same resources. Within days it would be still shabby but a different place. All of which is precisely the point of the thought experiments about Thailand and the South Bronx: money has very little to do with living a poverty-stricken life. Similarly, "a subsistence income" has very little to do with what Americans think of as poverty.