There’s a sense in which our narrative intuitions about poverty are almost completely wrong. 

According to the old model – the classical model, the medieval model, the Victorian model, the model that shapes all our stories – poverty is basically about grunge, and about a sort of grinding day-to-day experience of material deprivation.  Poor people have shitty stuff, in a way that makes them sort of constantly low-grade sad.  Their clothes are rough and dirty.  Their food is coarse and bland.  Their homes are small and unkempt.  They don’t get to own cool toys and conveniences and luxuries.  This inspires our pity, because we’re not Ebenezer Scrooge, and so we give them little tidbits of non-shitty stuff (or money suitable for buying little tidbits of non-shitty stuff) and expect gratitude for it. 

In a modern first-world society, of course, this is all total nonsense.  Stuff is ridiculously cheap, so cheap that even poor people can afford it.  On the relevant axes, they’re basically indistinguishable from…well, not from the fanciest rich people, but from pretty much everyone else.  (Middle-class folk, young elites with non-upscale tastes, etc.)  They wear the same t-shirts and jeans and sneakers as everyone else.  They eat the same 4-for-$4 fast food as everyone else, which is extremely tasty even if it’s nutritional crap.  They have the same smartphones and game consoles and flat-screen TVs as everyone else, because those things are ridiculously good investments in terms of entertainment-per-dollar.  Hell, they often live in dwellings that are more spacious than the cramped coffin-homes of the “affluent people” trying to make it in Manhattan or the Bay Area. 

…which is not to say that being first-world-poor isn’t a giant crushing burden.  But the burden mostly doesn’t manifest as a lack of nice stuff.  It manifests as reduced access to health care and good education, the two giant expensive intangibles that define the strata of our civilization.  It manifests as horrible stressful humiliation-filled working conditions, or alternatively the shame of unemployment, either of which will fuck up every aspect of your life.  It manifests as debt and insecurity and constant fear, the kind that comes with being one paycheck away from living on the street. 

These are not things that can be perceived by someone who’s just casually looking at you, or interacting with you in a normal day-to-day arm’s-length kind of way.   

(The burden can also manifest as the absence of decent transportation options.  Which is a lack of nice stuff, in a real sense.  Cars are expensive goods, yo.  But they’re not the sort of goods whose absence, or whose poor quality, you notice on casual observation of a person.  And in big cities, where a lot of our social/political discourse gets generated, this is much less of an issue regardless; rich and poor people mostly take the same subways.) 

So what you end up with is a poverty that doesn’t have any of the signals of poverty.  A poverty that doesn’t communicate “I am deprived and you should pity me,” even though it is supremely wretched to endure.  How poor can that guy really be?  He and I are eating in the same Wendy’s, wearing pretty much the same clothes, texting away on the same Samsung Android phones.  I think his apartment is actually bigger than mine.  Hell, he’s wearing fucking gold jewelry.  Why the hell is the government taking away my hard-earned money to give it to his lazy ass?

*****

This is a pretty well-understood dynamic, in the abstract, but I do think that grokking it fully is key to engaging with poverty-intervention debates. 

People aren’t heartless, but mostly they do care a lot about positional status.  Charity is fine, but it’s important that the recipient of your charity remains discernibly worse-off than you yourself are – otherwise, you’re not so much “charitable” as “a sucker,” letting yourself be guilted/bamboozled into giving precious resources away to a rival.  Ideally, the relationship that you want with the recipient of your largesse is a patron-client relationship, where he acknowledges his dependence with service or at least socially-validating self-abasement. 

(NOTE: I am not endorsing this line of reasoning, which is not really even reasoning so much as “instinctive emotional response.”  I am merely describing it, because I believe it is extremely common.) 

As things stand, for a culturally-normal person, the process of giving money to poor people – especially when you do it through the government – is unrewarding in just about every way it can be.  You don’t get to see the money being used to alleviate deprivation, or to introduce picturesque little luxuries; it disappears into a bottomless void of “maybe now it won’t be a catastrophe when this person gets sick or something.”  You don’t get to feel like a member of a superior class, because those poor people don’t seem so very much worse off than you are.  You don’t even get the warm glow of appreciation, because the poor people are likely to be proud and culturally-distant and not inclined towards shows of gratitude. 

And so you get resistance.  It doesn’t (usually) come from anyone hating the poor, or wanting poor people to die of treatable diseases, or anything like that.  It just comes from a vague sense that the poor ought to feel a little lowlier, somehow, if we’re going to be making sacrifices on their behalf.

Maybe it’s time to bring back sumptuary laws or something.