Poverty is Relative

Whether one is poor or not is sometimes hard to determine. Not too many years ago, I bought a 50 lbs bag of barley for 8 bucks and change, which could have fed a family for several days in a pinch. At the same time, I paid for a burger, fries and drink about the same.

Normal people can't live on foodstamps, but if you ate a la 19th century you could and bank the rest.

VDH from his Works and Days:

The Great Disconnect

For all the holiday depression with the state of the world, there is great munificence and affluence around the globe, and especially here in the United States that have brought us a long way, for both good and evil, from our primordial existence of even the immediate past.

Part of the pre-January rhetoric of the Democrats is the notion of great inequality. Yet despite the budget deficits, the piling up of national debt, and amid the doom and gloom of the vast amount of US capital held by Chinese, or oil payouts to the Arabs, or a declining standard of education, there are signs of American wealth never seen before among any civilization on earth.

I live in one of the poorest sections of one of the poorer counties in California, but consider: there were near riots to get the latest PlayStation 3 video games nearby. I was looking at a 4-wheel drive truck recently, and passed up all the “extras” offered by the salesman—leather seats, GPS, DVD player, extra chrome, multiplayer CD—but that extravagant Toyota Tundra was snapped up by a family on welfare in the booth next to me. With a zero-interest loan package, and no money down, apparently almost anyone can walk into a showroom and drive out with a $40,000 monster-sized truck.

Then I drove into the local shopping center and walked through Office Max, Wal-Mart, and Food4Less where there were more signs of America’s new encompassing wealth. There were new Camrys and Accords all over the parking lot, nearly everyone was on a cell phone. Nearly everyone was also speaking Spanish and no doubt a first generation immigrant (legal or not from Mexico). But in terms of traditional notions of poverty and the ability to acquire material goods, food, communications gear, transportation, etc. they were hardly poor.

Perhaps this new prosperity that encompasses almost all social classes in America is due to the miracle of science that now gives us such cheap appurtenances, or the addition of 1 billion Indian and Chinese fabricators to the world’s work force that results in endless consumer goods; or the ability of low interest and almost universal instant credit.

We are not talking of European vacations, second homes, or SAT camps for junior, but nonetheless there is something very different from the past that I remember when the poor nearby lacked indoor plumbing and at school in the early 1960s students ate thirds and fourths at our noon meal of barely edible surplus cafeteria food. Surely something has gone right in eliminating elemental poverty that we never hear in the din of constant accusations and complaints about American inequality.

This summer I bought on sale an old-style color television, 32-inch screen (the kind with the big tube in the back and curved front) for about $130. A decade ago it would have cost $500. The surprise was that the clerk laughed about what he thought was the idiocy of wanting one of these now obsolete, but perfectly fine, televisions. He probably made about $10 an hour, but would never have apparently stooped to such sacrifice. Again, any discussion about this surreal world is entirely lacking in the current political debate.

A final note. I wrote about such anomalies about three years ago when I broke my arm and visited the local emergency room in Selma about three miles away. Nothing much has changed since then, which is good—however little the credit this country gets from its critics.

We also bought one of those $150 regular TVs recently, because we are waiting for the new technology to get cheaper and also new-technology sources to become more plentiful, i.e. cheaper, too. Our most recent TV before that, a WEGA, was supposedly HD ready, NOT! Lies, Lies, Lies--still a nice TV though. Next time, the TV, the DVD-follow-on, the cable, everything will be to hand BEFORE we buy.

Oh, and why was I buying a big bag of barley? To feed my family for weeks, of course, on Pilsner Beer. The 19th century---when technology peaked.