How the Other Half Lives

There’s an old statistician joke about the statistician who drowned wading a river with an average depth of six inches. It comes to mind when comparing the  “average” American’s wealth against that of citizens of other countries . A 2013 comparison of per capita wealth in 20 “advanced” economies showed Americans had an “average” net worth of $301,000, good enough for fourth internationally.  Switzerland was first on that scale – not all Swiss bank accounts are held by foreigners. But America was 19^th on the median net worth scale, at $45,000. Only Israel was lower, and its average net worth was also low. Interestingly, Australia was first in median net worth and second in average net worth. They are doing something right there.

Average net worth just counts wealth, and is influenced heavily by the wealth of people like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and, I suppose, Donald Trump. Median net worth is literally the egalitarian standard. It measures the half-way point at which as many people make less as there are people who make more. In this case, it means about 157 million Americans have less than $45,000 in net worth. The difference between $301,000 and $45,000 says a lot about the American economy. For one thing, it says something about how well those baby-boomers reaching retirement age are really prepared to retire. They aren't. It also says how limited that glittering life style that seems the norm on TV actually is among Americans in general. People with a $45,000 net worth do not buy $45,000 cars or $500,000 houses. For another, the U.S. spread between average and median wealth is by far the largest among “advanced” nations. We are doing something wrong here.

But the actual picture is much worse than that. In a recent analysis of Federal data by CNNMoney of spending patterns by the bottom 30% of the U.S. population, the “poor” –  numbering 92 million in 2010 and almost 100 million now, have average annual incomes of $14,000 (including subsidies)  – less than the typical urban “living income” of $15,000. They spend 182 percent of their incomes just to keep afloat, and consequently have negative savings and high debt loads. They spend on average 72 percent of income on housing, 28 percent on food and 28 percent on transportation. As you will have already noted, that adds up to well over their income, without consideration of things like clothes and medical care. More than 17 percent of Americans –that’s over half of that bottom 30 percent, or about 53 million people – said in the survey they had lacked money to buy food at some time in the previous year. These are the people Kansas wants to prohibit from going to the movies. The legislators shouldn’t worry – the poor can’t afford that any more. The 100 million people treated like dirt by the legislators are more than the entire population of the U.S. when the Constitution was enacted, yet “promoting the general farewell” for them is never part of the legislative agenda. The typical “one-percenter” whose desires set the agenda has never even had a conversation with one of the 30 percent.

Those in the middle of the income picture – the middle class –seem to fare not much better. The survey reveals they earn $54,000 on average but can save only about $6,000 per year after living expenses, not a good basis for planning retirement. Meanwhile the top 30 percent have incomes substantially in excess of living expenses and continue to have an average of one-third their income disposable.

The question remains of how legislators, in Kansas and in Washington, D.C., can remain so oblivious to the state of 100 million Americans. Ideology has blinded them to the situation of the actual people they serve. The top one percent nationwide amount to slightly over 3 million people, yet legislators act as though they are the only ones worth legislating for. For each one “worthy” citizen, there are 24 they ignore.  Then they are shocked, shocked, when the 24 begin to protest. As protests grow, they will have only themselves to blame. Ted Cruz was recently quoted as saying that the first thing one had to lose on going into politics was a sense of shame. His and other’s success at that is obvious.

Seeking the Unexpected

John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole of the Bailey series, commented in an essay that a thing he hated was to enter a room full of people whose words he would know before they opened their mouths. I feel the same way about books. I opened my Internet browser to CNN this morning and found four ads from Sears for items I had viewed the day before on Amazon. Aside from the invasion of privacy implicit in their presence, they offered nothing new, except perhaps price, beyond what I had seen the day before. You can choose whether you want liberal or conservative TV news by picking between Fox and CNBC. A prime goal for Internet publishers these days is to provide you with a personalized news service that presents you only with information they know you are interested in and will enjoy. I am appalled at the idea.

After my father died when I was two years old and my mother worked long hours as a seamstress, my after-school babysitter was the public library.  It was a delight to roam the stacks, constantly encountering new and totally surprising knowledge. There were no categories of what I had been interested in previously, what I would enjoy reading or what would be suitable for me. I tasted a bit of everything from Rabelais to Relativity, from Mein Kampf to Machiavelli, from the Crimson Pirate to science fiction. Some things I hated, but all things taught me at least what to ignore. Later on, browsing in my very good college library for background readings on Renaissance politics, I stumbled on the Memoirs of Casanova. I still chuckle over that. Learning comes from reading the unexpected, not the expected.

The Washington Post this Sunday published a review of a recent book on the future of the public library in the Internet age. Unfortunately, the book reviewed was by the chief librarian of the Harvard Law Library, a lawyer himself. His lament was that libraries were falling behind the technology of the internet, and that nostalgia over the past was an impediment to bringing them up to date by making them more efficient information scavengers. That would be suitable for specialized institutions like law libraries, but it misses the point of the general library entirely. The general library is meant to be an entrance to the hallways of knowledge, not an exhaustive source of knowledge on any particular subject. The good library is at its best when it surprises you.

I have commented before about how our current culture is separating us into tinier and tinier bubbles, where no one really can experience and understand the lives of others outside their own group. The rich and poor used to shop side by side and attend the same schools, except in the segregated South. We had no interaction with far off countries. Now,we do not understand where countries with whom we must deal, such as those in the Middle East, are coming from, just as our police and the angry protesters surrounding them do not understand each other. The wealthy do not understand the lives of the poor. Those things in turn are major contributors to the pervasive empathy gap which creates so many of our social and political problems.

Karen Armstrong, in her recent book, Fields of Blood, points out that the Indian word Moksha, which we often translate as enlightenment, originated in ancient times as the military term for breaking through a hostile encirclement. That to me is in fact what enlightenment is about these days. We are surrounded by technological and social pressures that hem us in to our particular niche in a complex society, that know what interested us yesterday and force us to see only that again today, that deny us knowledge of what the world is about outside our particular niche by deluging us with knowledge “appropriate” to our place. Enlightenment comes from breaking that encirclement to enter the glorious chaos of surprising knowledge. That, not efficiency, should be the goal of our librarians, as it should be our own.

Punishing the Poor

When I was in elementary school, we were living on my mother’s income of 50 cents/hour earned by working in a sweat shop seamstress job after my father’s death when I was two years old. In an otherwise limited and dreary existence, the brightest spot each week was going, in the company of most of my friends, to the double feature cowboy movies, with a cartoon and serial in between, on Saturday afternoons. At a 60th high school reunion I just attended there were numerous references to those Saturday afternoon movies with their preceding yo-yo contests. After the movies – which cost 10 cents - I would spend 15 cents on a chocolate ice cream soda. It made my week!  The 25 cents for my weekly orgy was scavenged by my mother from the $20 total her work brought her. She thought it worthwhile and always found a way. We were never on Welfare, but never far away from it either.

Vincent Van Gogh would have understood. In his youth, Van Gogh was a devout Dutch Reformed Church missionary among abjectly poor coal miners. He felt so passionately about their plight that he sometimes would take clothes off his own back to give to a miner in need. On hearing of this, his Church, which held the stern Calvinist view that the poor were poor because they deserved to be, kicked Van Gogh out, and he became a painter. The great art we admire today was a product of that stern insistence on the unworthiness of the poor. I wish I could say something else good was a product of that attitude, but I can’t.

The Dutch Reformed Church was replaced recently by the State of Kansas, when the Kansas Legislature passed a bill barring people on Welfare from using their money to go to the movies or buy ice cream. Kansas also restricted welfare recipients from withdrawing more than $25/day from their welfare account, even though opponents noted some subsidized rentals were as much as $600/month, which by itself would require $20/day be withdrawn. Going to a swimming pool while on welfare was also prohibited. The expressed goal of legislators was to get poor people to spend more responsibly.

Kansas is not alone. Somewhat similar restrictions are being pushed for by conservatives in Missouri and Yew York. Emily Badger wrote recently in the Washington Post about the double standard that creates, discriminating against the poor. Four times as much is spent by the government on the home mortgage interest deduction as is spent on subsidized housing, but subsidized housing is visible while the deduction appears mostly as a refund regarded as payback of taxes already paid. Welfare payments are visible, but the many subsidies to the wealthy often take the form of items simply not listed as income on the tax return. The result is placing inordinate burdens on the poor. Back when I was looking at the subject some years ago, a $25,000 farm subsidy required a one-paragraph application, while a food stamp application required three pages. Badger calls this the effect of visible versus submerged government spending. We see only the visible, not the invisible.

I have a harsher view. I call it punishing the poor. It is a byproduct of the Protestant Ethic we need to get past, and a direct product of the American Empathy Gap that I’ve mentioned before. In Calvin’s view, being wealthy was a sign that God had blessed you because you were destined for Heaven. By contrast, the poor obviously had moral failings condemning them to Hell and deserved punishment along the way. Our frontier heritage produced the empathy gap with the myth that rugged individuals survive without help from others, and to need help is a sign of weakness not deserving support. We think they are poor because, at the least, they lack good judgment and are incapable of making decisions on their own about when to buy ice cream, and don’t deserve ice cream anyway. The effect of an ice cream cone on the life of a child is not worth considering. The facts belie that. The great majority of the poor become poor because of adverse circumstance, not moral failure, and to think otherwise is simply to demonstrate moral blindness. Somewhere around 50 percent of women who are widowed, like my mother, or divorced have incomes below the poverty level in the years immediately following. We are entering a period as a nation where large numbers of baby boomers will enter retirement without adequate incomes after a lifetime of stagnant wages, the retirement often forced in the form of permanent unemployment. Our needs for community support of the poor will increase drastically and innovative ways of doing it are needed, not harsher punishments. We are a better people than that.

Seeing Beyond

This being poetry month, it’s hard, try as I might, not to think about Shelley. He is not my favorite poet. In fact, in high school the only grade I got less than an A came from an English Teacher who adored him, and who reacted quite negatively when I poked fun at the line in Ode to a Nightingale, “Bird thou never wert.” I called it the worst line of poetry in the English language, and her forbearance snapped. But Shelley was far better at explaining poetry than, in my regard, he was at writing it. His essay, “A Defence of Poetry”, which I highly admire, is the work which best gets at the essence of what poetry is all about.

In his essay, Shelley contrasts poetry with philosophy and poets with philosophers. Specifically, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek Irony, he finds Homer a better philosopher than Plato. It is Shelley's reasoning that gets to the heart of things. He sees that both philosophers and poets seek to find and express the transcendent. But while philosophers seek the transcendent “beyond”, for Plato in a world of Ideals, poets find it in the ordinary. Whitman was speaking to that in titling his work, "Leaves of Grass." You can see explicit expressions of it on my Poetry by Others page in Mark Doty’s poem, “A Green Crab’s Shell” or in Eamon Grennan’s poem, “Wing Road.”

Shelley’s insight goes beyond poetry. A trivial example was on view last night at the NCAA Basketball Championship when a tame eagle was released during the National Anthem, flopped around a bit and settled on his trainer’s shoulder. It was a kind of performance doggerel, illustrating our need, successful or not, to see something “beyond”.  Silly or not, it temporarily elevated vision beyond the event itself. We need that sense of beyond to counter the grinding down we encounter each day from the world around us, and both poetry and religion, in different ways, provide it.  Else we fall prey to seeing all those around us as simply complex heaps of dirt. Seeing only the dirt, we miss what Joseph Campbell called, “the light within the light bulb.” And that kind of devaluation of others is the underlying cause of many of the problems of the world.

That is reason enough to celebrate poetry – that it contributes to making the world a better place. Can you think of any great villain who was also a great poet? One famous critic’s definition of a good poem was that it is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Argentina has found that music, so closely related to poetry, has, as a standard course in school, made the school a calmer place and reduced teenage violence. Who knows what a poetry course might do? But of course, one doesn't write either poetry or music just to achieve a social purpose. A good poem is an end in itself. Write one, and see.

The Premature Demise of War

There’s an old story about a preacher, sermonizing about the evils of hate, who asks rhetorically, “Is there anyone who doesn’t hate someone?” An ancient man sitting at the rear of the congregation rises feebly and says, “Pastor, I don’t hate anyone in the whole wide world.”  The astounded preacher asks him, “What is your secret, sir?” At which the man exclaims joyfully, “I outlived them all!” Reviewing the daily news from the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Asia, it’s hard not to think of that old man. We seem everywhere some days to proceed toward Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios, enjoying every step of the route. The saddest part of the picture is the crowd, including many members of our Congress, cheering along the way.

I wrote a couple of years ago, in “War and Peace and Money”, about how our proclivities for killing each other were very gradually being reduced by the increasing costs of warfare. Armies once totaling in the thousands were now measured in the millions, rifles replaced by million-dollar rockets. All this was to the profit of the military-industrial complex, but strangely enough, also to the profit of peace. Periods of no war had increased by almost 50 percent, the number of wars per century had declined, and the numbers killed were also dropping, all because of the expense of war. Fewer and fewer nations were able to afford it – it had become a luxury item. Even international standards to prevent war were gradually improving. But perhaps the news of war’s demise, like that of Mark Twain’s, was premature.

Alas, some in the complex seem to have seen the handwriting on the wall and have begun correcting the problem.  Their most notable achievement to date has been the development of drones. Devastation can be spread so much more cheaply! It’s an everyman kind of tool, as also, in its own way, is biological warfare. War has been downsized to become more affordable again. Researchers are also talking of such advanced notions as body-enhancement armor, warriors genetically modified to improve their killer abilities, robotic soldiers, etc. Eventually they may succeed in producing the situation where one former-human is left to crow triumphantly, “I’ve done it! They’re all destroyed”, - followed by a very long silence.

A saving grace is the emergence of cyber war. It’s so much cheaper it will likely be the favorite for the international corporations which some predict will soon overwhelm the already declining nation state. And there’s less likelihood with it of large-scale loss of customer base. Even lone terrorists may come to enjoy it. And perhaps the greatest, though distant, grace is the evolution of altruism. Biologists like E. O. Wilson are pointing out that forms of altruism are actually a product of advancing evolution. “Reciprocal cooperation” is also a trait anthropologists note that arises in harsh “prisoner’s dilemma” situations.  The lack of any concerted intelligent response to climate change is pointing toward more and more such harsh conditions as the next few hundred years wear on. Compassion has also been found to be a genetic trait shared at least in limited ways among all species that rear their young. As human “childhood” becomes more and more extended because of the learning and skills required in advanced societies, is it possible that greater compassion will evolve?

So, an emerging prospect, though not yet certain, is of a very grim 21^st century, followed by the as yet faint glimmer of a happier distant future for humanity. But we are creatures of the 21^st century, as likely are our children and grandchildren. In such a long-term future, we are all dead. The situation reminds one of the science fiction story by C.S. Lewis in which an astronaut finds himself stranded on, I think, Venus in what is a veritable Garden of Eden. And the garden includes an Adam and Eve being tempted by a Satan. The despairing astronaut cries out, “God, do something. Don’t let that happen again!” To which God replies, “I did. I put you there.” Perhaps, at this Easter season, with Spring blossoming all around us, and the prospects, with work, of a still possible better future facing us all, that’s a good thing to remember.