Thinking About the Poor

...As every economist from Adam Smith to Lester Thurow has understood, poverty is relative—time-bound, place-bound, culture-bound—and when a society's wealth increases the line demarcating its impoverished rises...

...In the end, The Idea of Poverty turns out to be a disappointment...

...Her subject has been swallowed up by other concerns...

...k^^^ne is left with the feeling that Himmelfarb has allowed her book to be shaped less by the dictates of her theme than by a desire to have her say on a variety of much-hashed-over subjects...

...Her portrait is convincing...

...Besides questioning Mayhew's originality and accuracy, she insists that his reports on London's street people fail to achieve the effect Mayhew wanted: "The more passionate he was in their defense, the more indignant at the society that tolerated such vice and degradation, the more vicious and degraded they appeared...

...There are two things wrong here...

...A straight line runs from the schema of the Poor Law to the reforms of the contemporary welfare state, a line Himmelfarb promises to trace in her second volume...

...Well, yes, and then again, no...

...That America's Rightwing numbers him among its progenitors must surely be one of the more remarkable instances of intellectual robbery on record...

...Any measure passed in favor of workers, he said, "is always just and equitable" because the scales were tipped so heavily in favor of the employers...

...Are the undeserving unemployed because they simply are not willing to work, or because they cannot find decent j obs...

...The most destitute of us would be considered rich in rural China...

...The tendentious, polemical quality evident in her discussion of Malthus emerges again and again, in arguments with other historians over interpretation, and even with their sources...

...Passed by Parliament in 1834, the measure was a harsh retrenchment from two centuries of social protections, establishing workhouses that were little more than prisons for the poor...

...A disproportionate one-fifth of the study is devoted to the fiction of the period, although these sections add little or nothing to what has already been said...

...Thus, a reader is surprised to come upon a chapter on Thomas Carlyle following the discussion of the Poor Law, especially after Himmelfarb says that "neither 'pauper' nor 'poor' figured prominently in his writings...

...Moved to take up the quest for this elusive yet indispensable concept, she discovered an abundance of riches...

...He was the first thinker to offer a reasoned justification for high wages, stating: "The wages of labor are the encouragement of industry which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives...

...Steps might be —and were—taken to relieve its worst manifestations, but no thought could be entertained about wiping it out...

...Second, she offers no evidence that Mayhew's contemporaries reacted as she did...

...In many parts of the Third World he remains more relevant than Smith...

...And one of the severest indictments of the present Administration is that it has allowed the number of families living below the poverty line to increase...

...But for the most part, the book deteriorates into an unfocused series of commentaries whose topics seem chosen almost at random...

...Lamenting his influence, she apostrophizes: "If only Smith, instead of Malthus, had been the parent stem from which 19th-century social history proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be today...

...Quite the contrary: She notes that Mayhew's reviewers repeatedly expressed "wonder and guilt" at his revelations...

...Though he applauded the invisible hand, he did not fetishize the market...

...Some dark passages in The Wealth of Nations notwithstanding, he belongs among mankind's great optimists...

...What level of support is adequate for the truly needy...

...Measured in terms of climate control, indoor plumbing and other creature comforts, all except the very poorest Americans enjoy a standard of living higher than wealthy families of the Middle Ages...

...More than 200 years later we are still applying the same yardstick...

...It was this last group, she explains, for whom the full severity of the workhouse was intended...

...First, others examining the passages she quotes may not share her response...

...Thompson...

...Should the incomes of the working poor be supplemented, and by how much...

...If Smith is the hero of The Idea of Poverty, its villain is Thomas Malthus, the mild and benevolent clergyman whose grim analyses of population growth made him the true dismal scientist...

...Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious than where they are low...

...Smith and Malthus represent two focal points of the book...

...Himmelfarb, it is clear, does not like him...

...More bewildering is the inclusion of Chartism, the heterogeneous political movement united only in its goal of extending the suffrage, and an entire chapter on Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, a work, Himmelfarb informs us, that was not translated into English until 1887...

...Visions of emaciated, hollow-eyed children will send people scurrying to the ramparts as quickly as any foreign foe...

...so is her effort to rescue Smith from his modern conservative friends...

...A second is on the way...

...Poverty is a deeply emotional issue...

...His primary shortcoming was not foreseeing the development of birth control...

...Indeed, the same President who gave us the war in Vietnam launched a war against poverty...

...A third is the New Poor Law, which brought the debate over poverty to a head and translated ideas into policy...

...The person who declared a sea change from the gloom of history was Adam Smith...

...This bill has been thoroughly analyzed over the past century and a half...

...Himmelfarb's approach is to emphasize the divisions it introduced among the working poor, the truly needy and the undeserving—that is, those who were able but unwilling to work...

...His putative disciples employed his doctrines to justify the most callous policies toward the poor...

...As Himmelfarb indicates, it is a mistake to label Smith the father of the "dismal science...

...Her reading of him appears forced, and eventually the real point of the essay becomes clear...

...It has been calculated, for example, that a modest and inexpensive birth control program could double per capita growth rates within 15 years in several less-developed countries...

...He was no ideologue, and certainly no advocate of laissez-faire...

...Let us hope her second course proves more appetizing than her first...

...Jesus' still more famous "ye have the poor always with you," cited by Himmelfarb as well, might have introduced her Prologue, a brief survey that brings her study down to the mid-18th century, for the observation sums up practically all that need be said until the era of the Industrial Revolution...

...I, for one, did not...

...From these divisions, certain questions naturally issue...

...The genuine target of Himmelfarb's criticisms is not so much Mayhew as the "culture of poverty" idea popularized by modern writers like Oscar Lewis and E.P...

...By arguing that human reproduction would inevitably overtake food production, condemning us to repeated cycles of hunger and wretchedness, he denied the possibility of progress...

...But she has produced a lumpy pudding of a book...

...Smith even called for progressive taxation...

...Johnson's much-quoted remark serves as an epigraph to the book's Introduction...

...Her basic objection seems to be to Malthus' pessimism, and this does not give him his due...

...Her investigations have now resulted in a large volume, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (Knopf, 595 pp., $25.00...

...Only an occasional fanatic attempts to pin down the idea to an absolute (and he is soon immersed in the hopeless task of totting up exactly how many potatoes a person can eat in a year...

...In the remainder of The Idea of Poverty she pursues the Poor Law's divisions into such finer distinctions as "the ragged classes" and "the dangerous classes" (an echo of our recently rediscovered "underclass"), in addition to tracing the earliest glimmerings of the working poor's response to the deal doled out to them...

...Tell me who you think is poor and I will tell you who you are: That, or some thought like it, must have come to Gertrude Himmelfarb as she pondered what 19th-century Englishmen had to say about poverty...

...Poverty (however defined) was a fact of life, no less a part of the landscape than grass and trees, and therefore a reproach neither to the individual who endured it nor to the society that condoned it...

...Famines, diseases, epidemics, wars, and other calamities of what Fernand Braudel has called the biological regime kept the vast majority of mankind in an unrelievedly precarious state...

...An extreme of sorts is reached in her treatment of Henry Mayhew, the journalist whose articles and four-volume expose, London Labor and the London Poor, caused a sensation in Victorian England...

...It is more a polemic, clouded by her own preferences—and, unfortunately, a portent for what goes wrong through much of the rest of the volume...

...Himmelfarb's presentation of Malthus is scarcely a well-rounded picture...

...Technology, not Smithian optimism, supplied the one convincing answer to the Malthusian dilemma, and even today his views are not outdated...

...Yet poverty is also a notoriously slippery notion...

...Directing attention to the potential for growth, he held out a truly revolutionary prospect for the world's poor: Their condition could be altered, their lot was not inevitable...

...The topic is an excellent one, and Himmelfarb, an expert on 19th-century England, would seem the right person for the job...

...Government had an active function to perform in his scheme of things, regulating banks, financing public works, supporting education, protecting the poor...