In the Midst of Plenty
LAMPMAN, ROBERT J.
In the Midst of Plenty WEALTH AND POWER IN AMERICA By Gabriel Kolko Praeger. 178 pp. $4.85. THE OTHER AMERICA By Michael Harrington Macmillan. 191 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by ROBERT J....
...The overall tax system "has not mitigated the fundamentally unequal distribution of income...
...Instead of providing a plan, the book is aimed at arousing the wish to act...
...It is both the strength and the weakness of Harrington's book that it is based upon a close-up view of the problem of poverty...
...His outlook for the future is similarly bleak...
...Harrington's method is to take a "close-up" look at eight different kinds of poor people...
...They are different because of their crippling environment, because the fact of poverty destroys not only the ability but even the will to rise...
...As a declarative statement, The Other America has power...
...There are those who declare that the experience of the United States shows not only that Marx's prophecy remains unfulfilled, but that he was wrong about even the direction of change...
...They call attention to the multitude of "facts" involved in a description of society, and urge a certain skepticism toward any easy generalization about such a complex matter as changes in the distribution of wealth and income...
...Kolko scornfully declines to recommend any "partial laws or reforms," but he seems to believe that a planned economy would bring about Jeffersonian democracy...
...The predominantly prosperous middle-class society is only an image in the minds of isolated academicians...
...Kolko reaches the following conclusions...
...Harrington recommends that "massive action against the culture of poverty" be led by the Federal Government...
...The theme throughout The Other America is that the poor are "different...
...Both claim there has been no recent change in inequality or in the locus of power in the U.S., and assert that poverty has not been reduced and may even be increasing...
...Marx shared Malthus' dismal view of the future, but identified the cause as the capitalist system...
...The author has looked into the faces of the poor, smelled their wretchedness, and sensed their despair...
...And there is the ultimate irony that we now have the material ability to solve the problem of the minority poor, but lack the will to do so...
...Negroes...
...Gabriel Kolko's Wealth and Power in America and Michael Harrington's The Other America are spirited attacks upon this enthusiastic school of counter-generalization...
...Vast differences in "life-styles" still obtain among income classes...
...Yet this is a book that well serves its author's intention of alerting the general reader to the existence of the "Other America" and presenting a graphic rebuttal of the contention that the U.S...
...He sees no reason to believe that the dimensions of poverty will automatically or naturally decrease in time...
...But how long, he queries, will we have to wait...
...According to this school of thought, income and wealth are becoming less concentrated and poverty has been nearly banished: Our society has become classless and our economy has been changed into a "people's capitalism...
...He singles out housing as a key to the complex, but includes mention of Social Security, minimum wage laws, medical care and civil rights...
...the 50 million poor are invisible to the rest of the nation...
...urban hillbillies...
...subsistence farmers...
...migrant farm workers...
...Harrington depicts the nature of contemporary American poverty and the environment in which it breeds, and offers a policy to abolish it...
...Reviewed by ROBERT J. LAMPMAN Author, "The Share of Top WealthHolders in National Wealth," "The Low-Income Population and Economic Growth" In 1798, Malthus stated in his first Essay on Population that "the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forward with accelerated velocity towards illimitable and hitherto unconceived improvement...
...His faith in the efficacy of planning is matched by his belief in the power of the corporate elite...
...This irony is only one of several pointed out by Harrington...
...there is no detailed or quantitative statement about policies...
...is obviously quite impossible...
...Indeed, we even lack the social conscience to recognize the existence of the problem...
...The poor remain and will likely increase in number in the near future...
...There is also the irony that some poverty is created by "progress," and the further irony that unionism and welfare statism do not benefit the really poor people...
...In short, he sets out to destroy myths by appealing to facts...
...A "radically unequal distribution of income" has been characteristic of the U.S...
...The poor are poor because they are poor...
...Few people now believe that the predictions of either Malthus or Marx were right...
...He finds that "the poor have a worse relative position in American society today than they did a decade and a half ago...
...Harrington gives varying estimates of the number of poor, ranging from 3650 million, but rejects the suggestion that poverty is a relative matter...
...Poverty," he remarks, "should be defined absolutely, in terms of what men and society could be...
...and the aged...
...Moreover, "to talk of a separation between management and major stockholders in the U.S...
...by which I mean any great and decided amelioration of the condition of the lower classes of mankind...
...Unfortunately, his book is shot through with errors and misleading interpretations of secondary as well as primary sources...
...Beatniks...
...They remain the "Other America," seldom seen or understood by the affluent majority...
...He concludes that we will conquer poverty only when people give the right response...
...Such redeeming qualities, however, are to be found in The Other America...
...Both books serve the useful purpose of casting doubt upon illfounded but widely accepted judgments about contemporary America...
...While there is an authentic ring to the author's confrontation with the various types of poverty, there is less authority to his attempts to set the problem in historical perspective...
...So long as capitalism prevailed, he predicted, there would be progressive concentration of income, wealth and power in the hands of a few and increasing misery for the proletariat...
...Concentration of stock ownership and of business wealth shows no appreciable change since 1929...
...He concluded that the answer was negative, that there was no reason to expect "any very marked and striking change for the better in the form and structure of general society...
...Harrington largely denies that we have been making progress in the postwar years...
...Both believe there is more than academic interest in establishing the accuracy of these generalizations, since they are often the basis for social policy...
...After one reads the facts," he writes, "either there are anger and shame, or there are not...
...their participation in recession and misery has increased...
...they are virtually one and the same...
...has solved the "quantitative" economic problem, leaving only the "qualitative" problem of, as Harrington puts it, "learning to live decently amid luxury...
...These are: workers in the low-wage, high-unemployment occupations...
...And since it is largely a synthetic work based upon the studies of others, these faults of scholarship are unredeemed by original insights or direct observations...
...His listing of steps to be taken ends here...
...since at least 1910, and there has been no significant trend toward equality...
...But Kolko's book should not be judged by his prescription, which is only marginal comment...
...The concentration of economic power in a very small elite is an indisputable fact...
...alcoholics...
...It should be judged by his main effort, which is description...
...Thus, he asserts that "The low economic status of the Negroes could be radically changed in short order if the 2,000 or so men who control the major American corporations really desired such changes...
...This does not mean, however, that there is complete agreement about recent and future developments...
...As technology has boomed, their share in prosperity has decreased...
...If anything it has perpetuated inequality...
...Hopefully, they may lead to an improved effort to achieve what Malthus doubted would ever occur: "marked and striking change for the better in the form and structure of general society...
...The book's mood is one of impatience and quiet rage...
...He then looks at two characteristics of the life of the poor-slum environment and the high incidence of emotional disturbance and mental illness in poverty-stricken groups...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 26
