[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about how economics treats poverty by looking at it through the wrong lens and the implications for human rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
-If I were a rich man… (Fiddlers on the Roof)
Economics has come to be thought-of as a discipline that is inhospitable to poverty concerns. Today, the studies of poverty alleviation interventions continue to remain intellectually peripheral in economics (Judith Tendler)
1. Research is simply not being done on policy consequences that impoverish households selectively thus violating their members’ human rights (HR). The concept of rigor-in-research, so closely linked to scientific respectability, is very different in each of the disciplines involved; it is different in exact as opposed to in social sciences –and this affects research on HR.
2. It is not an ethically neutral, but rather a value-based premise to say that, in the name of rigorous scientific analysis, HR violations, unemployment*, malnutrition and poverty are transmitted through the ‘impersonal’ mechanisms of economic policy and of the market. (Michel Chossudowsky)
*: Fact: Jobs created by exports are much less visible than those lost through imports –the latter, in reality, generating more poverty. Moreover, by the logic of the $1.90/cap/day poverty threshold, extreme poverty is virtually non-existent in wealthier countries, and yet this is manifestly scientifically untrue. We see hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and the United Kingdom struggling with homelessness or queueing for food banks. (Kate Donald et al, A Rights-Based Economy: Putting People and Planet First, CESR, 2020)
It is an all-pervasive feeling of helplessness that leads people rendered poor to accept political realities they might otherwise dismiss and fight
3. If poverty is a function of powerlessness, how can extreme poverty at the base of so much of ill-health, malnutrition and so many other HR violations be attacked? Whatever the response, one thing is clear: One does not have to wait until big ‘enabling’ changes are in place; otherwise, the process would never start. Those rendered poor can begin to empower themselves and act, in groups and in their own minds, even while the government is still saying ‘no’ to political changes… and this is where we HR activists can play a catalyst role.
4. Because of this, all existing grassroots organized groups we come across matter –their voices and potential influence matter. Unions matter; self-help projects matter, women’s and youth organizations matter… since they all raise the level of people’s pride and courage. The fact is that alternative political organizations and community groups speaking out do have the legitimacy to do so (a legitimacy that emanates from international HR law and that many of us may wrongly think we/they do not have). Working with and through these organizations increases our legitimacy and effectiveness as HR activists.
5. The take home message here still is that some things can happen while the state still says no. We thus need to build a wider consensus on a new, more militant ‘global ethics’ built on the principles of equity, HR, accountability and international grassroots solidarity.
Poverty is being looked-at through the wrong lens
6. Poverty and inequalities are too frequently viewed through the lens of race and ethnicity –not the lens of gender and/or class. Poverty, for instance, is often seen as a ‘black and Latino problem’ in the US rather than as an ‘American problem’. Race has been used to divide poor blacks, browns and whites from seeing their common economic and political class interests and thus their strategic enemies. (The Guardian)
7. Moreover, the pipe dream of an ascending social mobility –and the much less attractive truth that it is the class boundary that invariably determines that this dream is, in reality, unreachable permeates all of society. Millions of individuals, scattered all over the world, risk staying ‘mister and miss nobodies’ with a human face, i.e., human beings with no identity, with no rights, stripped of class, and still necessary/indispensable to the economy. …And always being disposable. (Sergio Ferrari)
And then, there is targeting
8. As a poverty alleviation policy, targeting is a poor and minimal response that external funding packages provide for the most vulnerable people. (Global Social Justice)
9. Targeting takes poverty as a fait accompli and misses implementing remedies that reduce disparity permanently. In a way, individual targeting says: “Go for the worst cases, fix them, and improve the statistics”. But where are the sustainable changes to avoid the recurrence of the same HR problems being addressed? Unfortunately, individual targeting is seen as central among the alternatives being proposed by the World Bank and other major funding agencies.
10. To combat the ongoing process of immiseration, welfare states choose to transfer/target payments and handouts.** But what is needed is a transfer of assets and power –and for this to happen, those rendered poor will have to fight for it by themselves(!).
**: You know?, in welfare terms, numbers matter more than percentages or rates(!). The analysis of poverty must thus, by necessity, yes, focus on numbers –but not to make it into a ‘numbers game’ as is too often being done by academicians, bureaucrats and politicians. (M. Shepperdson)
So?
11. Since we normally look at the effects of underdevelopment on just two broad income groups –‘the poor’ and the ‘non-poor’– a more operationally relevant poverty line absolutely needs to be defined, not as a mere cut-off point, but specifically to set progressive and measurable Disparity Redressal-Objectives over time.
12. This is an area where, as activists and to start with, we can concretely contribute by helping define a Critical Consumption Level that will sustain at least good health and nutrition (not forgetting housing, leisure and other ‘basics’). Such an indicator needs then to be expressed as a fraction of the per-capita income. (Note that the list of today’s basic needs is so extensive that very little of a poor man’s income is likely to be spent on non-basic needs…). Persons below this Critical Consumption Level will be potentially eligible for consumption subsidies, and persons above this line, potentially targeted for higher, progressive taxes. Such disparity redressal measures can perfectly well still promote economic development and need not be administered as welfare measures. (A. Ray) [“To die, to sleep — perchance to dream –ay, there’s the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come…” (Hamlet)].
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-Civilized society is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)