Poverty in America-Five Articles: PAUL JACOBS/A. H. RASKIN/HERMAN P. MILLER/MICHAEL HARRINGTON/IRVING KRISTOL
ARTICLE
Poverty in America - Five Articles Our Permanent Paupers By Paul Jacobs So many investigations of poverty are being carried on now that often, when I am at the U.S. Employment Office...
...Inevitably, as adolescents and young adults, we reflected the dormant middle-class value system in which we were brought up as children-a value system which equated unemployment with unworthiness and laziness, poverty with mediocrity and shame...
...To the high school students we say, 'Stay in school...
...Where will they get them and from whom...
...that the causes of their poverty are both diverse and complicated...
...Thus, Kristol reasons, all this talk of building schools, working with dropouts, expanding health programs and the rest is a cynical evasion or just plain politics...
...Overexposure to propaganda about "the war on poverty" had simply ruined his perspective...
...Finally, the poor stand in line far more than we do...
...The unemployed believe they are dependent on those behind the counter so they are afraid to invoke their rights...
...According to these standards, a non-farm family of four would have been classified as poor in 1962 under the "low-cost" diet criterion with an income of less than $3,955...
...These figures are consistent with others which show that the amount of goods and services considered necessary for minimum or adequate levels of living in the United States has a tendency to rise at an annual rate of roughly 1 or 2 per cent...
...In fact, new tabulations from the 1960 Census indicate that the use of a single poverty line does tend to overstate the amount of poverty somewhat...
...For those who insist upon numbers, it can be reported that two-fifths of all aged couples have assets (excluding home ownership) of less than $1,000...
...If we are to avoid converting an increasing portion of the population into permanent paupers-either psychologically or materially, or both-it will be necessary to find an adequate substitute for work as the means for earning income and achieving identity...
...Of the 117 who completed retraining programs, 47 got jobs directly related to their training and 44 others got miscellaneous jobs...
...The union, as policeman for the preservation of its own contract standards, is thrust into the role of enforcer for the machine...
...Indeed, is it not Kristol himself who is the chief victim of statistic-itis in this case...
...This is done in order to determine subsistence or sub-subsistence levels of life in the society under its present standards...
...When automation eliminates a job at Kaiser, the man who used to hold that job stays on the Kaiser payroll, even if it means holding him in an idle labor reserve until another job opens up somewhere else in the plant...
...They are citizens who have been exhorted to wage war against poverty...
...and almost one out of every 10 has a court record...
...In balance, then, it appears that the number of poor families would not be changed much if the income figures were adjusted for under-reporting and if the value of noncash receipts were included in the income measure...
...The experience of a joint committee at Armour & Co., however, has indicated the limitations of even the best-conceived private plans for retraining and placing workers jolted out of their jobs by technological innovation...
...Two other factors, though, are far more important in explaining my very distasteful reactions: Living as an unemployed worker triggers off for me a set of remembrances I have buried, while simultaneously placing me in a position where I feel sharply that I am considered inferior by society...
...But the poverty line actually used in 1962 was $3,000-an increase of about 20 per cent in 13 years...
...What adjustments were made in the Census data for the under-reporting of income and the exclusion of noncash income, such as food produced and consumed on farms and "free" housing...
...If they prefer a color television set to an indoor toilet, that's their business...
...Those evicted from jobs on the railroads or in factories start a similar slide into lower-paid jobs or no jobs at all, but with little upset to the serenity of their more affluent neighbors...
...You have seen these young people on buses and subways, clutching their little transistor radios as if somehow the rock-'n'-roll music blaring out is their only tie to the world...
...Sleeping in a dingy furnished room, eating starchy meals in ugly surroundings, and spending the days sitting in uncomfortable employment offices, is not a very pleasant physical experience, yet I encounter worse conditions when I have occasion to do some work overseas for the Peace Corps without suffering the psychological malaise I suffer when I am pretending to be unemployed...
...The union leaders at Kaiser were very frank about this limitation of their approach when I talked to them a few weeks ago in Fontana...
...None of this is really surprising (or ought to be...
...When Studebaker ended its 122-year history in South Bend, Indiana, President Johnson set up a special interagency committee to coordinate Federal efforts to equip the Company's 8,800 workers for other jobs and to help find the jobs...
...Yet President Johnson, in his recent speech to officials of the Internal Revenue Service, declared that, in order to reduce the number of those below the poverty level by one-half, a long, intense and arduous campaign would be necessary...
...Among the youth, the response to unemployment and relative poverty is one of much more active alienation, a much more aggressive rejection of the adult world...
...Nor does the idea violate any sound economic principles: If one wants to spur on the economy, it surely makes sense to allocate purchasing power to those who, having the greatest obvious need, will most obviously spend their money rather than save it...
...Their earnings were in the $100-a-week range, and with overtime or even moonlighting sometimes a good deal higher...
...They are entitled to have every possible opportunity to move upward on our socio-economic scale, if they wish to...
...Improved vocational education and direct increases in payments to the aged are two other equally important measures on the long list of what is needed...
...four out of five never finished high school...
...In the recent Economic Report of the President...
...Kristol neither drives a car nor sees any need to learn how to drive as long as there are taxis to be haled and subways available for dire emergencies...
...Its youth branch saved my life, and there must be millions of Americans who are in the same position...
...One out of every two Selective Service registrants now called for examination is rejected...
...The retraining, re-education and rehabilitation programs they set so much store by will break this vicious circle for some...
...Presumably, this very point will constitute the basis of the conservative attack on the Johnson Administration's war against poverty...
...The proportion without assets or with insignificant amounts is much higher for aged with low incomes...
...Their health situation would remain about the same as it has been, since Blue Cross is not designed for the $3,000-a-year family...
...Some justification for this view is provided by an earlier study prepared by Professor Robert Lampman for the Joint Economic Committee...
...In California, more and more bus drivers are frightened by the sight of groups of young men getting on the bus who are neither going to work nor going to school...
...And had Kristol pursued his researches beyond his own naive assumptions about how poverty is defined, he would have discovered that there are even more objective definitions...
...While a certain historical relativity still obviously clings to these levels, they are clearly considerably more "objective" than simply taking all those who fall within the bottom fifth of the income scale and calling them poor...
...He goes on to document this accusation (of this, more later) by some scholastic bookishness of his own...
...On what are they based...
...it is only that I object to the shallow, casual and uninformed way in which he presented it...
...In 1949, when the Joint Economic Committee made the first Congressional investigation of low-income families, the poverty line was set at $2,000 for a family of two or more persons...
...But nine out of 10 of the workers were under 45-years old and had an eighth-grade or better education...
...So long as there is more, people will demand more...
...one-fourth of the parents who are employed hold unskilled jobs...
...The more refined procedure produces many more children and many fewer oldsters among the poor...
...Somehow, all the old moral and political certainties had lost their truth and their power...
...In its first six months the plan sweetened the pay envelopes of 4,000 Fontana workers by more than $2 million in extra earnings...
...Three months later, only 450 workers are enrolled in retraining courses ranging from "chef training" to computer operation...
...I regard this as a considerable accomplishment, and one that the American polity has every right to take pride in...
...Obviously," Kristol says, breaking out in italics, "if one defines the poverty line as that which places one-fifth of the nation below it, then one-fifth of the nation will always be below the poverty line...
...John Kenneth Galbraith has been much maligned by those who, having read the title, seem to think his The Affluent Society denies the existence of poverty in the United States...
...But we do not yet understand enough about the nature of this conflict because most of us can hardly understand even those others in the world who are like ourselves, much less those who are different...
...Dorothy S. Brady of the University of Pennsylvania has wisely stated that "when faced directly with the problem of determining [poverty] for a given time and place, the theorist will deny the possibility of a unique answer and the propagandist will settle for one of many solutions if the result suits his purposes.' But most people who raise questions about poverty today are neither theorists nor propagandists...
...Wouldn't they have bought second-hand cars if they were really living in "abject poverty...
...Among other things, the use of a flat $3,000 poverty line tends to overstate the number of aged among the poor, since the aged have smaller than average families, fewer than average earners, and lower than average incomes...
...It means he cannot be thrown on the slag pile because his employer has become more efficient and no longer needs his skill or sinew...
...The New Poor By A. H. Raskin Automation is creating a new class of poor, a class whose members may prove much less docile in their poverty than those who were born into the slums and never left them...
...The other is how to make sure that there will be enough new jobs to accommodate the vast number of youngsters who want, need and must have a creative outlet for their energies, aspirations and the freshness of thought they can infuse into our jaded society...
...Yes, the poor are with us...
...If they grow up in a home where their parents lose their authority because they are on relief or unemployed, if the children skip school because they have no clothes to wear, what kind of values should they have...
...under this standard, the poverty Une would range from $1,800 for a young couple to $4,200 for a couple with four or more children...
...She was right, too...
...We look at the contents of the mailbox as a tangible sign that we are esteemed...
...Poverty and Pecksniff By Irving Kristol In order to appreciate just how odd an enterprise the Johnson Administration's "war on poverty" is, let us consider the following two facts: 1. While the Administration has expressed the profoundest concern for those with incomes under the poverty level of $3,000 a year, it is simultaneously engaged in taking money out of their pockets...
...It is an incontestable fact that families with incomes under $4,000 a year-in fixed, 1962 dollars, i.e., taking into account the intervening rise in prices (some of my correspondents seem not to have understood that all of my figures made allowances for the decreased purchasing power of the dollar)-fell from 60 per cent of the population in 1929 to 23 per cent today...
...One is to protect the man or woman who already has a job and who worries about being nudged out of it by a robot...
...Those who are primarily concerned with mental health, therefore, must begin to turn their attention to the basic economic and political issues of the society...
...and a truth of a kind it is, but what it has to do with human misery of the poor other than helping the society to ignore them is hard to see...
...One moral that Dean George P. Schultz of the University of Chicago, a co-chairman of the Armour Committee, has drawn from its experience is that the Federal government ought to reorient its job retraining program to give more attention to older and less educated workers-those who are hardest to place when their old jobs disappear...
...nine out of 10 non-white mental rejectees say they want some kind of job training...
...This also tells a good deal about the forces that underlie the current drive against poverty...
...But they are also entitled not to be hectored, badgered, sermonized, psychoanalyzed, fingerprinted, Rohrschached, and generally bossed around by a self-appointed body of self-anointed redeemers-who are, in any case, less interested in helping poor people than in satisfying some particular ideological passion...
...The public recognizes that there are no perfect answers to these questions...
...the poverty level was defined as a cash income of less than $3,000 a year for a family of two or more persons, and an income under $1,500 a year for individuals living alone...
...Most Americans would agree that a family is poor if its income is below the amount needed to qualify for public assistance...
...Too many others merely drift into apathy as the activity of seeking work becomes fruitless...
...The fruits of retraining were much sourer in Oklahoma City, where a plant closing coincided with a general rise in local joblessness...
...But why is it a sign of callousness to mention this fact, and a sign of keen moral sensitivity to fudge it, distort it, or disbelieve it...
...The answer, quite simply, is "none...
...It is impossible to deal with the problem of poverty in the United States today without understanding that this dominant view of America as being potentially affluent for all those who warrant affluence distorts both the image the poor have of themselves and the one we have of them...
...Some of them retreat into fantasies, conjuring up past jobs in which they earned enormous sums of money and supervised many people...
...I find myself looking for every excuse to avoid making the switch from Paul Jacobs, writer, to Paul Jacobs, unemployed worker...
...Indeed, there are moments when one wonders whether we are witnessing a war against poverty or a war against the poor...
...but their material possessions, though low by American standards, would be the envy of the great majority of mankind in the world today...
...But their base pay was down a third from what it had been at Armour, with the average dropping from $2.40 an hour to $1.60...
...This would make them all members of the upper-poor class, but it would still leave them poor...
...and they stand, or perhaps sit, in line at the clinics where they take their children...
...It is true that those of us who entered the work world during the Depression were able, at least partially, to rationalize our reactions to unemployment by asserting that we were the victims of a social crisis...
...Our perceptions are further distorted by the fact that we do not confront the poor physically every day...
...Twenty per cent of them are from families which received public assistance in the past five years...
...Tunica County, Mississippi, is the poorest county in our poorest state: about eight out of every 10 of its families are poor by national standards...
...they stand in line at the unemployment insurance office...
...Clearly, failure to use a rigorously defined poverty line, to adjust for size of family, and to allow for regional differences in costs and needs, casts a shadow on the results...
...The new average put them right at the border line of poverty under the government's current definition of $3,000 a year as the great divide between being poor and being not so poor...
...And I think I have gotten a sense of how society genuinely feels about unemployment and poverty by observing my own reactions to living as an unemployed worker...
...What is said for and about the poor comes from "behalfers," from those who speak on behalf of the poor, but who are not poor themselves...
...And let us not fall victim to the curious myopia of a Paul Jacobs, who was sent out to explore poorest America by a highminded foundation, and who returned with the horrifying news (solemnly quoted in Newsweek) that "they eat meat, and potatoes, and gravy-whoever heard of a fruit or a salad...
...Price increases since that time should have made the equivalent about $2,500 in 1962...
...What do you think the state of the parents' mental health is today...
...The shakeout of workers in coal and the speed of their descent into poverty is more easily noticed than is the downhill progress of workers in other industries...
...Mainly they do it by blandly confusing the question of poverty with the question of the distribution of wealth-i.e., by defining as "poor" all those who are in the lower fifth, or fourth, or third of the income pyramid...
...But the importance of this defect can easily be exaggerated...
...Today there are just as many, if not more, unmet social needs as existed then...
...But once it becomes possible for all to have these "luxuries,' they will be demanded and will quickly assume the status of "needs.' For this reason, in an expanding democratic society it is unrealistic to think in terms of a fixed poverty line...
...There are plenty of poor who manage-some routinely, some heroically-to lead dignified, decent and humanly satisfying lives...
...In that onemillionth of a second when I suddenly awaken in my dingy, unfamiliar furnished room and am not instantaneously certain of who I am, I become again the teen-ager who graduated from high school in the middle of the Hopeless Depression...
...The number of farm families among the poor is undoubtedly overstated because of the exclusion of noncash income, though the precise amount of overstatement is difficult to estimate...
...In his February 17 New Leader article, Kristol, who has the courage to say what many others believe but are fearful to admit, attacks the idea that the poor in America represent more of a problem today than in the past...
...For many of these men no one day has any more meaning than another...
...He believes that the poverty analysts, or at least some of them, have been taken in by "arithmetic tautologies...
...Their union cooperated in mechanizing the mines, squeezing out the marginal producers and fostering the consolidation of companies into larger and more efficient unitsall in the belief that this was the only way to save the industry...
...The son-in-law works in the truck mine because the family had gotten into heavy debt while he was in jail for eight months...
...Lampman's study suggested that the use of a single poverty line for all families-without regard to size-produced the same number of low-income families as a variable poverty line adjusted for size of family...
...Kristol's trouble in understanding the problem of poverty in America stems from the fact that he, like so many other writers, is an urban man, a familiar of New York and London...
...Those who are in the lowest fifth income group suffer mental illness at a (qualitatively) higher rate than the members of any other group...
...they could be seen, just as during the Depression the country could not avoid seeing them...
...Ultimately, though, it may be necessary to break completely with the function work has performed for man and develop new ways for him to gain income and achieve identity...
...More than four out of five mental rejectees say they want more education...
...But it is no help in an industry like coal, where the number of jobs has shrunk so fast that no process of attrition could keep pace with the decline...
...With the restraints gone, when some kid suggests that his gang raid the downtown department stores the gang very quickly converts itself into an angry pillaging mob...
...Poor people, for example, get little or no mail...
...I don't know the answer to that question...
...But it was not enough of an explanation...
...About 70 per cent of the 8,000 workers who completed vocational courses in the first year of the program established under the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 found jobs...
...The University of Michigan Survey Research Center study indicated that in 1959, for example, 20 per cent of all American families had incomes that were less than nine-tenths of the amounts needed to meet the budgets prepared for public assistance recipients by the Community Council of Greater New York (and if the same measure were applied to adult units rather than to families, the figure would be 28 per cent...
...But I do not question his good faith...
...Many of the young people in the town-the 20and 25-year-olds, the vanguard of the postwar generation-had pretty much the same defeatist view of their futures...
...Neither of these poverties lend themselves easily to ideological crusades for the reformation of the social order...
...In the 1960 Census tabulation, 32 per cent of the poor family heads were aged using the flat $3,000 poverty line as compared with 21 per cent obtained with a variable poverty line...
...At the present time, the Burear of Labor Statistics considers an annual income of around $6,000 "adequate"' for a hypothetical family of four living in an American city...
...A Glib Fallacy By Michael Harrington Taken by itself, Irving Kristol's waspish and callous article, "The Lower Fifth," is without value...
...Two were old enough to qualify for Social Security and United Mine Workers (UMW) pensions...
...They are still capable of response, but if the frustration is not alleviated they will certainly soon become part of the social disaster their parents represent...
...Her husband was a "techy," suspicious, hostile, surly and angry man, unable to understand what had happened to him...
...No union has had a more unreserved record of welcoming increased efficiency than the UMW, but W. A. (Tony) Boyle, its president, last year expressed the fear that mechanization might have been carried past the point of safety...
...The most imaginative of the private plans for dealing with this human impact of technological change is the long-range formula for sharing the fruits of industrial progress worked out by the Kaiser Steel Corporation and the United Steelworkers of America...
...It has also been observed that apathy and hopelessness are aspects of the culture of the poor, a fact that the hand-out approach hardly meets head on...
...There are lots of rats scurrying behind the walls of the vertical slum tenements of Harlem, and thousands of farm workers are forced to live in squalid trailer camps, the horizontal slum tenements of California and Texas...
...This new class is made up of workers dispossessed by the machine: their skills, security and status all washed into nothingness by the onsurge of technology...
...But each month of idleness means more difficulty in keeping up the payments on the mortgage, or the kitchen range or the car...
...But I am disturbed by Kristol's inability to comprehend that while the misery quotient of poverty, its specific content of wretchedness, may vary from country to country and may change within countries, its psychological effect upon those who live in it remains constant...
...Erik Erikson has described, with extraordinary clarity, the conflicts that develop in young people who are unable "to settle on an occupational identity," and in adults who suffer "any loss of a sense of identity" from such experiences as losing their jobs...
...When I am acting as an unemployed worker, I see those myths reflected in the eyes of the clerks in the employment offices, I feel it in the suspicious attitude of my landlady on the day my $5 weekly rent is due but has not yet been paid, and I hear undertones of it in the talk that goes on incessantly among the unemployed themselves...
...The inevitable inadequacy of all such attempts when workers are thrown on an oversaturated job market made Ralph Helstein, president of the United Packinghouse Workers, so discouraged at one point that he denounced the whole plan as a worthless "gimmick...
...The one element that has always been singularly lacking in the "war on poverty" is a sense of humanity, as contrasted to mere humanitarianism...
...Our understanding is also handicapped by some symbols found among the poor which we associate with affluence...
...Kristol's basic idea is so bizarre that it can be refuted at the level of simple common sense...
...Thus mental health today has become a political and economic problem, and even with a gigantic increase in the number of psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and social workers, there never will be available more than a minute fraction of the number needed...
...Seeing so many older men awaiting rehire and so few prospects for recall, they decided to give up the struggle...
...Otherwise, one must assume that he knew of the condition of these poor people and wished, intellectually and ideologically at least, to keep American society from rushing out to help them...
...Let us not indulge in polemical sophistry, as Leon Keyserling does when he blithely assumes that all the houses owned, and all the apartments rented, by families below the $3,000 income level are shacks or slums (it is not so), or when he tries to explain away the fact that one such family out of seven bought a new car by the hypothesis that their old cars must have been utterly decrepit...
...I'm just waiting till I can get lucky like these two fellows here and draw my old-age,' he said...
...Statistics and Reality By Herman P Miller Samuel Gompers, when once asked what labor wanted, answered: "More, more, and more, now...
...The number of persons in urban low-income families, for example, is reduced by 11 per cent when the poverty line is changed from a flat $3,000 for all families of two or more persons to a variable standard centered on $3,000 for a four-person family headed by a middleaged person...
...As a consequence, it has confused the issues, and itself...
...Deep down, he must have known this was false even as he wrote it: Nothing like a fifth of our citizens are poor by British standards...
...They bought their own homes, automobiles, refrigerators, washer-dryers-usually on the installment plan...
...In any society in which income and wealth are unequally distributed," Kristol writes, "those who receive the least are going to be 'the poor.'" Within his own frame of reference this too is true...
...And what restraints can exist for these kids...
...And clearly, he does not understand the theory of repossession, that ubiquitous formula whereby the poor are exhorted to buy new cars, by making a small down payment, because the car dealer cannot lose his investment: When no more payments are made, the car is repossessed by the dealer who then sells it again, and perhaps even a third time...
...a couple with one child pays $140...
...For too long now, it has been the economists and statisticians who have been regarded as the people most capable of dealing with unemployment and poverty...
...And even where the pace of change is moderate enough to make attrition a tenable solution for the internal problem of manpower dislodgment, it is certainly no help to the man outside the gates looking for a job that is never going to be there...
...Indeed, it can only be defended on the grounds that adequate data on the needs and incomes of families classified by size of family and other characteristics were not available...
...Of the remaining half, disqualified for medical reasons, more than 12 per cent would be suffering from such severe overt psychiatric disorders that they would have to be rejected...
...The only point I am making here is that the identification of the problems of unemployment and poverty is sterile and misleading...
...They had little education themselves, but they were determined to see that their children got through high school and on into college...
...At a somewhat more sophisticated level, even so perceptive an observer as my friend Irving Kristol falls into the trap of confusing the symbols with reality...
...These are men and women who pushed their way well up into the middle class and developed a sense of belonging...
...almost a third come from broken families...
...Since people like Mike Harrington and Ben Seligman seem determined to misunderstand me-nothing personal, I'm sure: they misunderstand everyone who has the temerity to disagree with them-I suppose I had better say, in so many words, that I am against technological unemployment, that I have no desire to minimize its hardships and its terrors, and that I believe it to be a problem of the first magnitude for American society...
...To make the situation even more alarming, in the case of the millions of young rejectees classified as "products of poverty" there is ample evidence to suggest that "unless the cycle is broken, they will almost surely transmit it to their children...
...The work-oriented concept of the country, with its great stress on the material rewards which must accrue to sustained effort is, I believe, the source of grave personality distress among the poor because the realities of the American economic structure do not correspond with the myths which we all accept...
...But I prefer to believe that this hucksterism is a surface affair, the usual political froth, and that the reason the Administration is behaving so oddly is that it has been led-I should say, misled-into trying to encompass a most complicated reality with the aid of a few simple cliches and slogans...
...Harrington quotes this, and refers to my "main thesis that the American poor are a product of mathematical juggling rather than social reality...
...Youth crime is more violent and better organized today, say police officers...
...So, even though Kristol's is not a pioneering effort (his central point, that poverty is a statistical illusion since there will always be an income bottom and top, was discovered by Senator Goldwater some time ago), it is worth examining as one of the first resolute calls for a return to moral indifference...
...The President's idea for a ccc that will enroll unemployed dropouts is a good idea...
...three out of four of those employed work in unskilled, semi-skilled or service jobs...
...He was in jail for eight months because he had been convicted of breaking into a company store and stealing food for his hungry children...
...The procedure currently used obviously does not make much sense from a statistical point of view...
...It is demonstrably confused and ill-informed, as arch and cruel as a piece by Evelyn Waugh but without the Englishman's sense of humor...
...But although the people in the valley hear the cars all the time, it is impossible for someone driving along that superhighway to see the shacks and privies of the displaced miners who for 10 years have been eking out a marginal existence by digging up ginseng roots that are bought, ultimately, by Chinese coolies in far-off Hong Kong...
...I don't know, and I don't really much care...
...There is, however, one segment of the poor about whom we do have reliable hard data: They are found in great number among the youth who are rejected by Selective Service as unfit for the Armed Forces, and their characteristics have been recorded in "One-Third of a Nation: A Report on Young Men Found Unqualified for Military Service," The President's Task Force on Manpower Conservation, Washington, D.C., January 1964...
...That value system is still the most pervasive one in America, still the most characteristic of our middleclass society...
...Yet despite the obvious need for such a program now, any discussion of it inevitably evokes a disgruntled harrumph, accompanied by a nasty reference to "What, another WPA...
...So far as I am concerned it is their money, and they are free to spend it as they see fit...
...Lunch for the poor is often just french fries drowned in ketchup...
...The determination of what is or is not "adequate" usually contains a progressive factor on the assumption that if the general wealth of the society is advancing, so should the living standards of the people...
...If, as the economists maintain, the private sector cannot create jobs, then we must accept the need for government to do it...
...If they continue to be regarded this way, our failure will certainly be far worse...
...The great majority of the aged who have low incomes also have low assets...
...As A. H. Raskin points out (and as I have argued too, in previous columns) the question of technological unemployment is as serious as it is perplexing...
...The Fort Worth experiment in retraining was conducted against a backdrop of expanding local employment...
...A few weeks ago, one of the best of the British correspondents in this country began a long dispatch from Washington as follows: "This is the richest country in the world...
...And with the job has gone the protection of the union-management welfare fund-the hospitalization, the life insurance, the medical and surgical benefits, the pension equity...
...The jobless, the undereducated and the others with no share in the affluence of our colporate society may eventually decide that all the protective devices built up to shield those inside the work place are in reality walls intended to shut them out permanently...
...No evidence exists that private industry is capable of creating the 26 million new jobs the country will need in the next 10 years if we are merely to maintain our present high level of unemployment...
...In the science-fiction world without work, elegantly attired men and women move gracefully through sun bright streets, discoursing with each other about the nature of philosophy...
...In fact, the current definitions of poverty are almost all made in relation to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "adequate" budget for a family of four...
...Will they spend this money wisely...
...Then they sit dully in their rooms all day, staring vacantly at the children's cartoon programs on TV, afraid even to venture out on the street where they will have to deal with reality...
...If we can cheerfully approve spending billions to send one man to the moon, surely we can spend billions to employ many more here on earth...
...But technological unemployment is one problem, and poverty is another...
...Not having the money for private schools, they would continue to study in crowded, understaffed and ill-equipped schools...
...These families may be deprived of hope and poor in spirit...
...Nor can I follow Seligman's kind advice to "drive off the turnpikes" the next time I take a trip, as I neither own a car nor know how to drive one...
...The Armour Committee was established to ease the hardships attendant on the closing of packinghouses and other changes in meat distribution...
...On one of my expeditions into life among the poor, when I spent some time in a small West Virginia valley characteristic of Appalachia, I was struck by one physical fact: A throughway runs parallel to the valley and only 200 feet above it...
...There must be millions like him in the United States today...
...They have lost their sense of identity, and along with it their sense of worth...
...Collective bargaining concerns itself almost exclusively with the first half of the problem: what to do to keep the ejector button from hurling the man with a job out of his livelihood, his seniority, his accumulated pension rights and all the other benefits that make attachment to a payroll more than just a way to pay the week's bills...
...Quite a few had gone off to the steel mills and found jobs, but their low seniority and the declining total manpower needs of the industry shook them out in the 1959-60 recession...
...One sign of this pauperdom is that, unlike other minorities, the poor have no articulate spokesmen of their own-except in the case of the Negroes, whose poverty is directly associated with their color...
...The poor eat differently, too...
...While on the subject of misunderstanding, I should like to report my astonishment at the number of people who have taken moral umbrage at my statement that "the poor in America are not an oppressed social class but a statistical segment...
...The dimensions of the problem were aggravated by the fact that many of the workers in need of new jobs had to combat all the handicaps of age, scanty education, racial discrimination and lack of any transferrable skills...
...For a while, the ideology of Foreign Aid seemed an adequate substitute-we were going to abolish world poverty and create a world democracy by offering our money and our "know-how" to the underdeveloped nations...
...But, for most of us, "let them eat meat" is not exactly the slogan we associate with a heartless ancien régime...
...I only wish he were a little more respectful to the poor-the undeserving poor as well as the deserving, re-educable, retrainable, rehabilitatable poor...
...For instance, there is a constant (and, in Harrington's case, a willful) confusion between the problem of unemploymentespecially technological unemployment-and the problem of poverty...
...Now most of the displaced are reduced to dependence on public relief and commodities (Federal surplus food for the surplus people of Appalachia...
...The son-in-law was working in a truck mine, a mine three feet wide and 24 inches high, where the miners chop coal 10 hours a day flat on their stomachs or on their sides to earn $10...
...and "island poverty" (depressed areas...
...In addition, very few white people ever get inside the Negro ghetto in any role that permits the development of a free relationship...
...The miners are huddled in impoverished hamlets, where everyone from barber to undertaker shares their privation...
...This is a fine arrangement for the man inside the plant gate...
...Farm families represent about one-sixth of the poor...
...I am convinced the majority of my generation suffered to some extent from these traumas...
...The procedure used to prepare this estimate takes into account region and size of family, for the figures were computed separately for each size of family group within each state...
...Of this one-third, one-half would fail to qualify on the mental test and most of these youths "can be expected to lack many of the qualities needed to lead self-sufficient lives in the civilian economy...
...The standards of poverty are culturally determined...
...His charge is simple enough: "It has been calculated that, in order to give every American family at least $3,000 a year, a mere $13 billion a year would be needed for distribution among the lower fifth...
...My italics...
...Being "busted" by the cops means nothing to them or, if anything, it is a mark of status...
...The poor also sleep later than we do, for there is no reason to get up and one can skip a meal more easily in bed than out of it...
...We will have to expand total employment by 25,000 new jobs a week every week in this decade just to make a place for these newcomers...
...It's the Yids," cry the Negroes...
...The necessity is to create enough jobs so that white and Negro-and especially the young white and the young Negro-will both have an outlet for their talents without having to elbow one another aside...
...But it is fairly clear by now, as indicated by the experience of the past couple of years, that these will constitute a minority...
...This is the gravest challenge of the diamond-studded depression automation is leading us into...
...I am once more the kid who was convinced, for years, he would never get a decent job...
...I do not doubt the genuineness of Mike Harrington's hatred of poverty...
...In my original New Leader article I recommended that, under the present circumstances, the most meaningful gesture would be simply to give poor people more moneyeither through increased Social Security and allied payments, or through some such scheme as Milton Friedman's "negative income tax.' (Those with annual incomes under $3,000 would receive "refunds" to bring them above that level...
...Concern for production should not outweigh the industry's protection of the precious human lives in its custody," Boyle said after 37 miners had died in a Pennsylvania explosion...
...his assertion that the concept of poverty is so relative that it can be applied to any society with income inequity...
...and 2.) those that spend over one-third of their income for an adequate "economy" diet, which is four-fifths of the cost of the "low-cost" diet...
...They have no hope...
...Role-playing as a device for making observations is a very old technique, of course...
...But how realistic is it to use the same poverty line ($3,000) for families of different sizes and needs...
...The 1960 Census data show that at least 23.5 million people-one person out of eight in the United States-lives in a family with an annual income that is less than the amount needed to qualify for aid under the public assistance laws of each State...
...He maintains "that 'the poor' in America are not an oppressed social class but a statistical segment...
...They are, in my opinion, entitled to more money than they have...
...In other words, one family out of every five was counted as poor...
...Today we have two very distinct problems in trying to make sure that everyone will have a useful place in our work life...
...Moreover, the WPA projects not only gave work to men and women without jobs but were socially useful as well...
...Go to college...
...Probably not...
...does not, except in certain specific cases, manifest itself in children with starvation-bloated bellies or hordes of adult beggars clamoring for a crust of bread...
...many were devoid of formal schooling...
...there is no such thing as a right to be smug...
...It provides insurance for the insider in a contracting job situation...
...Well, that whole movement has dribbled away into an interminable series of quarrels over the scope of such aid, the specific utility or disutility of such aid, the management of such aid, etc...
...Nevertheless, it is very crude and the number cited may be a gross understatement of poverty for several reasons...
...The reason why this large transfer payment is not being made directly to the poor, he maintains, is that America's puritan ethos will not stand for such a dole...
...Assuming some of these rejectees answered the questions put to them with replies they believed the questioner wanted to hear, it is nevertheless clear that these children of poverty want to get out of their relatively poor status...
...In many other industries where long and bitter strikes were once the rule, steps are being taken to remove the countdown atmosphere from contract negotiations...
...the overwhelming majority want to combine job training and education...
...We have developed a distorted perception of those who, like the poor, are different...
...Their rate of unemployment is four times that of young men in the same age group...
...Entitled Children of the Poor, it classifies a family as poor if its annual income is less than three times the cost of an inexpensive, adequate diet...
...Fear of taking, and possibly failing, a test keeps many from even applying for retraining...
...Try to think of a day in recent years that you did not receive at least one letter, some kind of a letter...
...The third, a strapping man in his early '40s, had a quick answer when I asked him what he saw ahead for himself...
...In any case, what is the relevance of all this pseudo-sociological talk about the vicious circle of poverty for the aged, the physically and mentally sick, the widowed, the abandoned...
...Occasionally, for example, an administrative mixup will cause a delay in the assembly-line operation at the unemployment insurance office and the applicants will have to stand and wait for lengthy periods, without any explanation...
...Yet at least a fifth of its citizens are poor by any standards...
...The hard-core problem in South Bend consists of 2,000 men past their 50th birthday-men most employers consider too old to work and too young to die...
...Even were we, by some miracle, to abolish technological (or any other kind of) unemployment, we should have made little dent in the problem of poverty...
...Yet, why was $3,000 used as the poverty line...
...They don't need re-education, nor can they possibly benefit from it...
...Indeed, Kristol's statistical games are about as profound as one might expect from a writer who has replaced a youthful dogmatism for public property with a middle-aged dogmatism for corporate property...
...they are not getting a "fair share" of the affluent society...
...Not surreptitiously, and not accidentally, but by means of the Federal income tax...
...In any case, if he will visit the areas that the "arithmetic tautologies" point to as pockets of proverty, he will find there the poor-and without quotation marks...
...Without a doubt, the United States has the richest poor in the world...
...they are sick more often, stay sick longer, and therefore have an even greater sensitivity to new illnesses...
...In Mike Harrington's America, there are 40 to 50 million people who are "maimed in body and spirit"-all because they have incomes under $4,000 a year...
...Perhaps the Council also felt that a simple definition of poverty had the virtue of being readily understood by the general public without seriously distorting the results...
...Ever since the end of the New Deal, and the close of World War II, the United States has been a land of festering and frustrated idealism...
...Obviously, he also does not realize that in most of the United States, a car is an absolute necessity for either working or seeking work...
...Others torment themselves with "if only": If only they had gotten to the employment office a little earlier or stayed a little longer...
...together these groups total about 35 million people...
...half were Negroes and Mexican-Americans...
...it is a more comprehensive matter, a problem involving every aspect of the lives of those who live in the most squalid areas of America...
...I do not want to belabor Irving Kristol's position...
...The mailbox is one of our connections to our fellows, a connection the poor don't have...
...There is, after all, no objective definition of a poor man...
...Nevertheless, none of the government officials who are designing ingenious schemes (and issuing eloquent press releases) for the alleviation of poverty has breathed the faintest suggestion that this state of affairs is in any way paradoxical...
...I have enough trouble trying, without much success, to figure out what will make a happy life for me...
...It is a new kind of phenomenon even for our split-level economy, and one that will take a highly sophisticated war against poverty to counteract...
...The favorite cushioning device under collective bargaining is the one embodied in the Kaiser formula of not firing anyone but letting the work force shrink through the normal processes of attrition-death, retirement and voluntary quits...
...When I went to talk with the son-in-law, his wife warned me that he was "a mite techy so don't pay him no heed if he kinda loses his temper at you...
...The hours hang heavily in a boring vacuum...
...But don't we, as a progressive society, wish to raise our standard of poverty as the general standard of living rises...
...In short, poverty is not simply a matter of income...
...What kind of values do you think those eight children have now...
...Now, I should have thought it clear enough that a "statistical segment" is not the same thing as a "statistical illusion...
...They either found it impossible to put much aside during their working years, or they used up retirement savings for emergencies, for educating their children, or to help out when their children established homes and started their own families...
...Instead, what we have, mainly, are "case poverty" (the old, the sick, etc...
...As for the Johnson Administration's declared "war on poverty," Kristol sees it as simply a way of filling the need for some forceful rhetoric...
...For the majority of the population, it was reinforced by the prosperity which accompanied World War II and continued into the postwar period...
...Still, there is one less job at Kaiser...
...Who are the poor...
...This is already the reality for tens of thousands of coal miners rotting in the sere hollows of West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and other coal states...
...They protect the worker who is in but do nothing for the worker who is outside wanting to get in...
...In such places, as well as in Appalachia, the migrant camps of the West Coast or the depressed towns of New England, he would have seen with his own two eyes "statistical segments" who are obviously miserable, hungry and sick, and who live chaotic and largely hopeless lives...
...And although he never says so explicitly, it is clear that Kristol's notion of poverty centers on the existence of physical misery, which he says is disappearing as the entire society gets wealthier...
...It is certainly possible that the world of the future simply will not have enough jobs to employ all who are able and willing to work...
...If the number of dispossessed gets large enough and their desperation extreme enough, rebellion is inevitable-a rebellion that could be far more extensive and far harder to contain than the racial upsurge of recent months...
...Out of charity, one should probably assume that Kristol was being befuddled by numbers rather than deliberately cruel...
...In West Virginia, I visited with one family where the grandfather, an unemployed miner, lived with his wife in a shack just below the house of his daughter and son-in-law, who had eight children...
...They stand in line to get the surplus food packages...
...Nor is it any help to the Negro and the other minorities who hope that the passage of a civil rights bill will level the walls of prejudice that historically shut them away from equal job opportunity...
...The resulting economies protected coal against the inroads of oil and natural gas...
...True, the combination of state unemployment insurance benefits and industry-financed supplemental payments provides a helpful layer of insulation against too drastic a reduction of income for six months or a year after the job disappears...
...Now automation is tossing these people onto the junk pile in increasing numbers in manufacturing, mining, transportation and other fields...
...In older times, it was the rich who were hidden from view behind the high hedges of their country houses and their draped windows in the cities...
...It is not even a very expensive proposition: The windfall which employers and workers have just received as a result of the tax cut would finance a truly whopping raise in such payments...
...A basic aim of all these committees is to enhance the security of the existing work force, and it is quite proper that it should be...
...And this is a good thing, too...
...The Economic Report states that various market-basket studies "provide support for using as a boundary a family whose annual money income from all sources was $3,000...
...one less answer to the total employment needs of a swiftly expanding work force...
...At Christmas, we send out hundreds of cards to prove to ourselves that we are connected with bonds of love and affection to hundreds of other people, and we receive their cards as the proof that we are loved by them...
...If the price of displaced manpower had been made a charge on the industry, the cost would have become so gigantic that coal would have lost its market to oil and natural gas and there would not even be jobs for the 125,000 survivors in the coal pits...
...Kristol's thesis is that although we might be legitimately concerned with redistributing the wealth of the country, we need to distinguish between this and the idea that anyone with a family income under $3,000 is living in poverty...
...Many would also count as poor some families with incomes well above this level, but let us omit them for the sake of argument...
...For these, and for many other reasons, not only the Administration but many independent and critical thinkers-among them Leon Keyserling, Gunnar Myrdal and the late Pope John XXIII- have concluded that it is in the best interests of morality and public policy to seek to create an environment in which these people can stand up on their own feet...
...And I have noted that often hidden in their attitude is an unconscious scorn for the poor manifested, for example, by the personnel in the employment offices (private and government) who regard their clients either as chiselers seeking unemployment insurance or incompetents unable to hold a job...
...What I am suggesting is that public policy must reflect government responsibility...
...almost all are willing to live in camps while being trained...
...And that is why, I suspect, the ideologists of the "war on poverty" are so eager to blur distinctions, ignore obvious facts, and exaggerate the implications of their statistical findings...
...Something tells me I had better not leave this paragraph without stating explicitly that I have nothing against rehabilitation, retraining, re-education, etc., for those who can benefit from such programs...
...Because the great majority of them have cash incomes under $2,000, they would probably retain their "poverty status" even if a generous allowance were made for noncash income...
...No allowance was made for the fact that the cost of this diet would have been less for smaller families and more for larger ones...
...this is a difficulty I have encountered before...
...If all the young men in the country turning 18 were examined for induction into the Armed Forces, one-third of them would be rejected...
...The world of the Negro poor, therefore, remains unknown to us even when we try to explore it...
...This encompasses new discoveries in medicine, technology, etc...
...I do not doubt that the poor are with us...
...They stand in line to buy money orders because, unlike us, they have no checking accounts...
...and only 10 per cent had skills that were at all usable in the general labor market...
...And fudge, distort and disbelieve it the ideologists of poverty do, most promiscuously...
...they have inferior education, unhealthy diets, dilapidated housing, higher rates of infant mortality, and so on...
...a couple with two children pays $20...
...Moreover, one-third of all the money the Company saves through increased efficiency goes into a pool to be divided among the Kaiser workers...
...And, as a result of the growing gap between myth and reality, the poor are being drained of hope while being continually tormented by the sight of what they are told they can aspire to and achieve...
...Many of the unemployed are so unsure of themselves that they are unwilling to assert their rights even when they know those rights are being violated...
...2. Though the statistics make it clear that just about one-half of those below the $3,000 poverty level are elderly people or are families with no male head, the government has made no movement whatsoever-and the ideologists of the "war on poverty" are themselves not even demanding it-to raise Social Security benefits, widows' pensions, and aid to dependent children...
...Here I think it is the ideologists of the "war on poverty" who are guilty of statistical juggling...
...Every study of workers' responses to longterm unemployment is a study of neuroses on a mass scale...
...But the number 23.5 million is cited only to show that mass poverty exists even when this very minimum standard is used...
...This, of course, assumes that the retrained workers hold their new posts on a fulltime basis all year, an assumption for which there is still no evidence...
...Both sides recognize that the problems raised by automation are too intricate to be solved in a few days of frenzied discussion under the club of a strike deadline...
...The right to compete on even terms for nonexistent jobs is an empty right...
...and neither do they...
...There aren't going to be any jobs for the unskilled in tomorrow's technology.'" This is a challenge not only to our youth but to all of us...
...Its main thrust is that in the affluent society "poverty" is simply an overly-dramatic word to describe the modest fact that some people have more than others...
...Paul Jacobs is, I happen to know, an admirable connoisseur of salads...
...Thinking about the underlying reasons for my backing away from the field work, I understand it is not so much the physical conditions in which I live that I unconsciously reject, but the psychological ones...
...Everything that contributes to cutting the cost of making steel builds up the sharing fund...
...The television set is still a middle-class symbol, so when we see TV aerials sprouting from the roofs of run-down houses, we are likely to either assume the people inside are not poor or, if they are, they are profligate...
...On the basis of that definition, over 9 million families and 5 million persons living alone were classified as poor...
...Then, without ever having let his eye wander from the printed page-and even here his researches are admittedly less than profound-to the social reality, he tells us: "Little facts such as these suggest that 'the poor' in America are not an oppressed social class but a statistical segment...
...They scratch out a hazardous existence in "dog holes," where wages are half the union scale, welfare royalties go unpaid and safety regulations are ignored...
...The United Auto Workers, the Company and community agencies have provided counselors, and the government is ready to help with movement allowances to assist in the transfer of workers who can be placed outside South Bend...
...but not all of them are poor in the conventional dictionary sense ("having little or nothing in the way of wealth, goods, or means of subsistence"), and only a minority are poor in comparison with the average American of 30 years ago...
...Already several voices have been heard to say that the way to handle the young dropouts is to shove them into the armed forces-where, presumably, a tough sergeant will accomplish what teacher could not...
...To quote Erikson once again, "The suppressed, excluded and exploited unconsciously believe in the evil image which they are made to represent by those who are dominant...
...But let us not then promptly forget that we have given a new meaning to the term "poverty...
...That, at any rate, is the only kind explanation one can offer for his curious views...
...Employment Office playing my role of an unemployed worker, I suspect that all the unemployed workers sitting in the room with me are really other Ford Foundation agents in disguise...
...and more than one-half of the fathers never completed grade school...
...It also takes into account the fact that if people are living longer they objectively need more and this affects savings, investments, insurance and a good many other things...
...A major portion of the rejectees have been accurately described as "the products of poverty," who have "inherited their situation from their parents": Forty per cent of them never went beyond grammar school...
...They are so bewildered by the situation in which they find themselves that they do not know how to get whatever help is available to them and, worst of all, they become passive...
...This plan takes care of the people who have jobs, not the people who want them," was their straightforward explanation...
...I do not know how many of the estimated 20 per cent of the population who live in either poverty or deprivation agree with the picture of themselves held by the 80 per cent who have made it...
...Not long ago, I talked with three men on the red clay street that ran between the tumbledown shacks in one of the ghost towns of the mine regions...
...Today, the coal companies are enjoying unparalleled profits and the 125,000 miners who still have jobs receive better than $3 an hour, wages comparable to the best in any basic industry...
...Only an officious know-it-all can presume to decide what will make a happy life for everyone else...
...AT the same time, one requirement of any campaign to decrease unemployment is a massive public works program...
...To that question my answer would be "Yes, of course," and "what was wrong with the WPA anyway...
...Somehow, all the large ideological questions seemed to get converted into a thousand intricate, thorny, and intractable little technical questions...
...And a few months ago he told his colleagues in the President's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy that the misery caused by technological displacement had made the union so unpopular in many mine communities he could not enter them without fear of physical attack...
...How, my correspondents angrily asked, would cash payments help break "the vicious circle of poverty...
...Soon the story will be the same in many branches of office and whitecollar work, as the computer becomes more omnivorous in eating up jobs now done by clerical and even executive personnel...
...Two out of five dropped out of school to support their families or themselves...
...The great danger in our present planless stumbling toward solutions that too often are evasions of the real problems of human waste is that the people on the other side of the walls of exclusion will finally get tired of waiting...
...From the opprobrium that was directed against me, as a result of making this suggestion, one would have thought I had urged that money be taken from the poor...
...that there is no single, radical "solution" to their difficulties...
...For me, one of the most striking features of his book is the rhetoric of slander that he unwittingly lapses into when he talks of poor people...
...Even the union is beginning to wonder whether it is not time to put the brakes on mechanization...
...This suggests that there may be substantial under-reporting of income by poor families...
...I revert to the young man who tried to get on relief the morning after he got married...
...To begin with, I have noted how fiercely I resist playing the role of an unemployed worker once I start actually living in poverty...
...But generally, the poverty I have seen has been somewhat less physically repulsive than I expected, for the poor in America are not so much physical as they are psychological paupers...
...What I intended to say-what, in fact, I did say-was that the American poor are a heterogeneous group...
...They are fearful of being identified by the authorities on the other side of the counter as possible troublemakers...
...Most current definitions of poverty place its upper limits at one half of adequacy, or an annual income of $3,000...
...Thus, when Armour closed its Fort Worth packinghouse, the average age of the 1,000 stranded workers was 46, and only eight were under 30...
...if only they had been a year younger when they applied for the job in the laundry...
...In many sections miners have taken up guns to fight the very union they once helped to build...
...In all fairness to the President's Council of Economic Advisers, it should be pointed out that they were fully aware of the limitations of an arbitrary poverty line and of the failure to consider family size, the age of the head of the family, geographic location, and other factors that influence needs and costs...
...if only they hadn't gotten married and been tied down then how different life would be...
...In making his point about the $13 billion, Kristol apparently did not notice that this transfer payment scheme would only raise those in the lowest fifth group up to the poverty line-i.e., to $3,000 family incomes...
...They represent an unprecedented mental health problem...
...It guarantees that no worker at the giant Kaiser mill in Fontana, California, will be fired because new technology erases his job...
...They do overlap, of course-but not so much as one might think...
...It is conceivable that the existence of this frustrated idealism may yet be a more serious social and political problem for democracy in the United States than the existence of poverty itself...
...Perhaps the pretense aspect of what I am doing is part of what disturbs me...
...A society whose average family income, adjusted for price changes, grows at the rate of 2.5 per cent per year would soon run out of domestic markets if the "needs" of the bottom income groups were fixed...
...The Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), which is the basis for most of the figures on poverty in the Economic Report, tends to miss about 13 per cent of the comparable aggregate income reported in the national income accounts...
...In an increasing variety of industries, employers and unions have attempted through collective bargaining to build shields against this deterioration in estate...
...We need thousands of new schools, billions of feet of new housing space and hundreds of new transit systems, to name a few of the places where the expenditure of public funds would fulfill the double purpose of creating jobs and needed physical facilities...
...and his claim that there is a quick and easy way to end poverty through $13 billion of transfer payments...
...But not all the DP's of the mine patches are taking their displacement with comparable resignation...
...The resulting battles have occasionally bordered on civil war...
...Unfortunately, it is irrelevant Finally, having finishing arguing that poverty in the United States is something of a statistical delusion, Kristol makes a sharp turn to the left and chides President Johnson for not being serious enough in his war against this phantom...
...In today's real world without work, sullen men and women ask no questions of each other lest they be questioned in turn and be forced to see themselves as failures...
...Yet his discussion has a symptomatic value, for its ignorance is the form a certain kind of "realism" will take...
...and since I happen to uve on New York's West Side, I do not need-as Mike Harrington so dashingly recommends -to take a subway ride, in order to discover them...
...A typical bit of evidence he cites for his position is a 1960 study by the Michigan Survey Research Center which shows that 14 per cent of the families with incomes under $3,000 purchased new cars that year...
...Appalachia is a human slag heap, and most of the rural South is made up of subsistence counties...
...that they are not a permanent body, but one which is constantly recruiting new members and losing old ones...
...In general, public funds must be viewed as the most important weapon in the war against poverty...
...How realistic are the figures on poverty...
...Now, with the unemployment insurance offices tucked away from view, with the poor at least hidden-if not invisible, as Michael Harrington has suggested-it is especially difficult for the majority of the population to understand them...
...who are separated from us in small but significant ways...
...Because the grandfather's electricity had been cut off, he had run an illegal tap line from his house to his son-in-law's...
...Insofar as the Administration's "war on poverty" boils down to this sort of thing, it is commendable enoughbut it is not anything like a war against poverty...
...Now the ideology of Poverty has come along as a suitable vehicle for the constellation of petty resentments, glib righteousness, and selfless enthusiasm that have always characterized American reform movements...
...Kristol's second point-that poverty is so relative a concept it can be applied wherever there is an inequitable distribution of income-is a little more respectable, though hardly more telling than his first...
...But these 125,000 are the survivors of a halfmillion men who worked in the mines at the end of World War II and built their standards of living-and of expectation-on the wage increases and fringe benefits John L. Lewis won for them...
...But the discouraging aspect of the choice open to these skilled workers is that one of their rays of hope is the jobs available in the kitchens of Notre Dame University...
...The questions being asked are: How much poverty is there...
...Probably never...
...The mass production of cheap clothing disguises the poor from us, too, and no one can tell merely looking whether a lady's lipstick cost her a dime or a dollar...
...Nevertheless, even the most concentrated mobilization of government activity provides little aid where the over-all problem is one of too few jobs and too little adaptability...
...If Kristol had bothered to take a subway ride to Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, South Bronx, the West Side of Manhattan, or some other remote outpost requiring an expenditure of 15 cents, he would have realized that what he was writing was nonsense...
...It goes without saying that one has no right to be smug about it...
...The Council felt that a beginning had to be made, and even though a case could be made for using an income limit that was above or below $3,000, "the analysis of the sources of poverty, and of the programs needed to cope with it, would remain substantially unchanged...
...This applies not only to what the Company saves through introducing automated equipment, but also to savings in material and supplies, employes' working harder, better management and anything else that makes it cheaper to produce a ton of steel...
...and that this is the kind of problem that does not automatically succumb to a sweeping declaration of war by politicians and publicists...
...Today's unemployed adults respond to their status in a variety of ways...
...But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that there is no evidence to demonstrate that tens of millions of people have incomes that are insufficient to provide minimum levels of living for this society...
...and even among those who are working, there is an overwhelming majority who would like to return to school to study reading, writing and arithmetic...
...Three aspects of Kristol's meditations on poverty are particularly worthy of comment: his main thesis that the American poor are a product of mathematical juggling rather than social reality...
...Whether the poor will always be with us, and just how large a proportion of the population they do and will constitute, are other matters...
...and it would have been called poor under the "economy" diet criterion with an income under $3,165...
...It is true that poverty in the U.S...
...First let me give some of the brutal, ugly facts about the general condition of our youth revealed by this report...
...Consequently, it is the government's responsibility to open up employment by the expenditure of public funds...
...Exasperation with the poor for being of so little help in solving the problem of poverty is gradually replacing abstract compassion...
...This, I suspect, will take something more than merely transfer payments...
...A greater effort is now being made to reach those who have least to offer and thus need help most...
...But from my own responses and from those I hear among the unemployed workers, I suspect that a high percentage of the poor also believe the worst about themselves...
...The heart of Kristol's argument is contained in one sentence which he italicized: "Obviously, if one defines the poverty Une as that which places one-fifth of the nation below it, then one-fifth of the nation will always be below it...
...The attrition formula is, by its very nature, a system for protecting the older worker at the expense of the newcomer...
...nevertheless, it expects reasonable answers...
...Only onesixteenth of all poor families (i.e., with incomes under $3,000) are headed by an unemployed person...
...When does poverty end in a society that has such flexible standards...
...Things change, and today the poverty line in America shows distinct upward mobility...
...I do not know of a single commentator or editorial writer who pointed out that he was in error-that, in fact, this particular operation could be successfully completed in practically no time at all, and without much real inconvenience to anyone...
...Take up a profession or learn a skill...
...Their kids don't drink malted milks...
...More specifically, such an approach would not build houses-people with $3,000-a-year incomes, Kristol might be surprised to learn, are not at an advantage on the free market, since they have not been subsidized by the Federal government the way the middle- and upper-classes haveand the poor would continue to live in slums...
...It is not that I am against his proposal...
...if only Latent prejudices about other races and religions also become active among others seeking for some reason to explain their situation: "You need a black face to get a job in Detroit now," the unemployed white painter says...
...but they vary from place to place and they differ from time to time for a given place...
...They know that something is wrong, but none of them will demand or even ask the cause of the delay, or how long it will continue...
...Since he is not part of the car culture of America, he doesn't know the heavy weight the auto represents on the psychological scales, and he is surprised that the poor purchase new cars...
...In the face of such facts, Kristol has his precious statistical truth...
...Instead, year-round exchanges of all relevant information are conducted through the medium of joint committees, with reason substituted for economic muscle in formulating decisions...
...Well, that's not my America, and I don't believe it's the America of most of the 40 to 50 million, either...
...They don't eat salads, since salads are not as filling as spaghetti or mashed potatoes...
...This is, of course, absolutely true...
...For another, the standards vary markedly from state to state and in many places are acknowledged to be seriously inadequate, especially for families with young children...
...How do these young people respond to the fate which their parents have made for them...
...others are deterred by doubt that they will ever be able to use their new skills...
...The drivers have good cause to be frightened, too, for these young people are lashing out in a much more organized way than they have done before...
...We project ourselves into the Negro ghetto as welfare workers, policemen or doctors, and what we get back is a projection by the Negroes of how they think we want to see them, which is usually not the way they are...
...Now, I do not think that the Administration's "war on poverty" is merely a hypocritical and callous publicity stunt...
...Why not $4,000, the figure used by Leon Keyserling in Poverty and Deprivation in the U.S., or some other number...
...In fact, his thesis was that poverty had changed its social character, that the category of "the poor" is no longer (as it used to be) identical with the category "working class...
...This confusion is evident in practically all the journalism devoted to the "war on poverty," in such tracts as Michael Harrington's The Other America, and in many of the letters that The New Leader has received after my last article appeared...
...Yet, 52 per cent own television sets, 46 per cent own automobiles, and 37 per cent own washing machines...
...Michael Harrington complains that "one-third of the aged in the United States have no phone in their place of residence...
...It appears therefore that most of the missing income in the CPS is in the top income groups and that under-reporting at the bottom may not be serious...
...Let us not take advantage of unnoticed ambiguities in the word to strike moral postures and grab headlines with resounding accusations against our American democracy for being nothing but an affluent superstructure on a base of mass misery...
...There is, to be sure, a strong odor of hucksterism about it: One might recall that, simultaneous with its declaration of war against poverty, the Administration set up a new commission to recommend action by the Federal government that would reduce the incidence of heart disease, cancer and strokes...
...Using their own rough and ready standards, they know that poverty exists...
...From a social standpoint, however, such solutionsgratifying as they are as expressions of industrial maturity-have an obvious incompleteness...
...The poor were out in the open, nursing their babies in the streets, hollering at each other across shaftways, sitting on the porches of shacks at the edges of rural towns...
...it is also absolutely irrelevant since no one, either implicitly or explicitly, has defined poverty in this fashion...
...one-fifth of the rejectees' fathers are unemployed...
...This is, after all, a simple matter: One need only pass a law...
...Since the poverty estimates are based only on current income, would the picture change much-particularly for the aged-if assets were included...
...A recent report by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare sums up the matter in the following way: "The vast majority of the aged have only modest holdings...
...two-thirds are willing to leave home to get trained...
...Yet this identification is now the common coin of American journalism: Witness the way practically every writer on the subject slides from the subject of poverty to such topics as rehabilitation, retraining, re-education-as if the latter represented a solution to the former...
...They can arbitrarily be defined for a given time and place...
...All they need is money...
...At the same time, however, the 1960 Census, which showed the same number of poor families as the CPS, missed only 5 per cent of the aggregate...
...If Kristol thinks this a relativist, statistically tricky definition, I suggest he go have less than nine-tenths of a welfare meal for dinner and then rewrite his original article...
...But at least such responses, useless or hostile as they are, indicate signs of life...
...In part, the notion of "adequacy" is historically conditioned...
...The only study actually cited is a report by Mollie Orshansky of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...They are literally cut off from the rest of America.' When I grew up on New York City's Lower East Side practically no one had a phone in his residence, but no one felt poor or deprived on that account...
...The youth seem to have much less fear of getting arrested...
...But, I would be happy to join Irving Kristol in advocating an immediate increase in all social services in the United States...
...Even after one takes the recent tax reduction into account, a childless couple earning $2,800 a year (and assuming the standard deductions) pays $264 in tax...
...All of these people are indisputably poorer than the rest of their fellow Americans...
...Now they are back home, vegetating along with their parents and bringing up their own children in an environment of despair...
...This study recognizes two different classes of poverty: 1.) families that spend over one-third of their income for an adequate "lowcost" diet...
...Poverty is an emotionally charged word that can trap a person if he is not careful...
...And a forthcoming Twentieth Century Fund study on "Poverty in the Affluent Society" will suggest that welfare payments be made contingent on the recipient's willingness to go back to school, or relocate, or do whatever the social worker in charge thinks is in the national interest...
...nearly half come from families with six or more children...
...Yes, of course we do...
...It is precisely a crusade for the reformation of the social order, and no mere alleviation of poverty or misery, that they most deeply hunger for...
...There are already a few signs that the crusade against poverty is turning unpleasantly sour, as the complexities of the problem slowly unman the ideological simplicities of the reformers...
...Old-timers may harken back to the "good old days" when people were happy without electricity, flush toilets, automobiles and television sets...
...Here is an eclectic methodology I have not encountered since high school debating-club days...
...For one thing, the welfare budgets used were applicable to families receiving aid to dependent children, while the needs for husbandand-wife families are typically greater than those of parent-child groups...
...Since the Depression there has been no literature of poverty, and even now what is being written comes almost always from observers rather than from those who are poor...
...What can be done to help them...
...How much better off will the Negro be if we open one door through legislation only to confront him with the cruel realization that there is yet another door behind it, with its padlock still frozen shut...
...Perhaps the major shortcoming of the procedure used in the Economic Report is that it distorts the characteristics of the poor...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 7
