Casaubon's Book

Poor Mitt

Category: politics • poverty

Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news.

GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very poor because there are social safety nets that take care of them.

"I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I'll continue to take that message across the nation."

Ultimately, Mitt is pretty safe in saying this, because he's playing on a whole host of American presumptions about poor people that are generally shared - even by many poor people. First of all, that the poor constitute only a tiny percentage of people, while 95% of us are "middle class." In America, everyone is middle class - it is one of our cultural precepts. There is lower middle class, which for the most part could be more accurately described as "poor' or "poorish" and upper middle class (better known as "richish" or actually rich), but very few people who will willingly call themselves rich or poor. This is, of course, factually ridiculous, but it is part of our national mythos.

The second assumption is that the very poor people are doing pretty well. You can see this on evidence any time any news story about social welfare appears, whereupon one is deluged with commenters about people on food stamps driving Jaguars and how unfair it is that some people get to live with these awesome safety nets while others have to work for a living. This is because one of America's best tricks is setting the poorish against the poor, and setting up the very poor as the enemy. What we like to believe is that poor people are those whose moral failings are the primary reason for their being in poverty. In fact, their moral failings (which exist) tend to be mostly the same moral failings of ordinary Americans, only exacerbated by a lack of support and many things that other people take for granted.

Mitt seems to believe what most Americans believe, which is that those on social welfare programs are doing just awesome, while the real victims are middle class Americans. This is a pretty funny idea, but it isn't just Mitt's. The notion that lower and middle class Americans are struggling more than the truly poor is not an uncommon one by people who look on social welfare programs with hostility. If there's anything really different about his assumptions it is the very funny classing of the desperately poor with the extremely rich as having a lot in common.

Let's take a look at some of Mitt'e assumption, though. First, how many people are actually poor in the US? The number is just around 40 millon at this point, not the 2-5 percent at the top and bottom that Mitt seems to think, but around 15% of the US population (relative poverty is greater, but I'm using the US census figures).

More than half of all Americans will spend at least a year in poverty during their adult life times. Almost a quarter of those people that Mitt just said he didn't give a crap about are children. Another ten percent are senior citizens. Let us note for the record that Mitt just disavowed interest in just under 10 million children and four million elders. Just mentioning it, since kids and senior citizens get a lot of attention during an election year. But they aren't the right kind of kids or seniors.

How well are safety nets doing for these folks? Well, we know that despite those safety nets, the ones that the Republicans do their best to hammer Barack Obama with (despite the fact that the dramatic rise in food stamp usage began under George W. Bush), 11 percent of American households were food insecure in the course of a year. This means that even though the largest percentage of people in history are on food support programs, we still have a significant number of people who don't know where their next meal is coming from a lot of the time. Again, it would be worth noting that a lot of those people are kids.

What about other measures? Well, we know that infant mortality rates in poor areas are a scandal. We know that in a number of poor counties around the America lifespans are actually declining, and that the poor endure more stress, having higher rates of suicide, depression, homicide and disability due to untreated medical conditions - yup. those poor people are doin' just awesome - practically as good as their counterparts like Mitt, the incredibly rich.

What's disturbing about this is that it reinforces an absolutely insane set of beliefs that people really do hold - that an upper-middle class person struggling to manage private school tuition is actually really hurting, while the desperately poor are protected by social welfare programs. Unfortunately, this belief isn't limited to the American right - it is reinforced by the language of the Occupy movement, which speaks of the "99%" as though they are uniformly oppressed by the ultra-rich 1%. This isn't the intent of Occupy, of course, which is vastly more concerned about poverty than Mitt is, but the rhetoric being used builds on the assumption that we're all basically part of one group, the (vast) middle class except for a few people, and that there is a great deal of commonality between the moderately rich and the very poor.

That simply isn't the case. While the 1% have more money than the 2 and 3%, all of them are doing just fine - what the rhetoric does is make sure that the people you are opposing are never you, always someone else. By building on language of classlessness that America loves so much, we elide differences just as much on the left as the right. That's not to say that under the sound bites the Occupy Movement hasn't a had a lot of good things to say about class and poverty - but that the sound bites are the things that other people hear best and remember longest.

Income disparity and poverty have become part of the national discourse in a way that owes enormously to both the Occupy Movement and the traditional poor-bashing that goes with an election year. That's a positive thing - but the language that we use to talk about poverty, class and equity falls short of what is needed and that's a problem on all sides.

It is easy to pillory sleazy, ignorant Mitt Romney for his inaccuracy and inequity - actually what really should be news about this is the unpublicized part of this. What's actually shocking is Mitt's statement that if safety nets are inadequate he'll fix them, a statement almost unheard of by a Republican. What he doesn't know about poverty and class aren't really news, unfortunately, because they represent what America doesn't know and doesn't want to talk about.

In a society where energy and resource decline has clear economic results - more poverty, more volatilty, more uncertainty and a winding down of the growth economy, those people that Mitt doesn't care about will get greater in number - indeed, have been growing greater in number. As long as we use language and misconception to conceal them, however, they can grow and grow and still be marginalized until the day that they decline to be marginalized any more, and everyone looks up, startled, that the very poor are so many and so angry and so familiar to us.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:57 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Independence Days Challenge is Back!

Category: independence days challenge

Check it out at ye olde blogge ;-).

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:01 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Bark of Popple, Twig of Willow: In the Woods in Winter

Category: forestry • weather • wood

Counting Out Rhyme

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

I should be in the woods at this time of year. Instead, because of the unusually warm winter and heavy rains that have left the ground saturated and soggy, rather than frozen and covered with snow, and because I managed to do something to my shoulder chopping wood. (I turn forty this summer, and my assumption is that the two different minor injuries I sustained in about two weeks were the official "the warranty on your body has expired and it will all go to hell now" notice.) I mostly haven't been, but they call me. This is the season of trees on a farm.

In the dark of January and February, when the ground is hard as stone (normally) and the weather is cold, cutting wood, hauling downed braches by sled, harvesting bark for baskets and medicinal use and pruning trees are the natural works of the season, and I really enjoy them. We don't cut most of our own wood - when we first moved here we assumed we would take all our own wood from the property, but what we found was that firewood and hay are the two most common ways for our rural neighbors to make a living, and in the end, we'd rather have the time for other things and enrich our neighbors, so those are two jobs we don't do a lot of. Still, we put up some hay by hand every year, and we cut some of our own wood. The depredations of the hurricanes this fall mean that we've got a large supply of fallen wood - plenty for many years to come, so I expect I'll do more soon.

One cuts wood for the following winter - 9 months or a year to season is a minimum, and a bit longer is better. I don't use a chainsaw, because, frankly, I'm afraid of them - I have always been more than a little clumsy, and I like my limbs attached. The Bucksaw and the Crosscut saw are slower, but also quieter and much less likely to keep going without me if I make a mistake.

In a good year Eric and I find time to go out in the woods together - the two person cross-cut saw is an art and a pleasure to use, and it is good for a marriage. Until you master it, it can be bad for marriage too, but once you learn one another's motions it can be deeply satisfying. Most of the time, though, it is just one of us that go into the woods to make piles of firewood that will then be sledded out.

There has been no sledding this year - in fact the pussy willows have catkins and today is supposed to hit sixty degrees. My daffodils are up and the world is convinced that spring is nigh - whether it is or it isn't, it makes the woods harder.

Harvesting small wood for bentwood (one of Eric's hobbies), hurdle making, basket making (which I do incredibly badly, but I try) and pruning the fruit trees are less tough on my shoulder, so most of the time I spend with wood of late is around the house. The goats and the rabbits are delighted when I bring them the trimmings from the peach and apple trees, and I the quince prunings I set in glasses of water to force into bloom.

I found pruning intimidating at first, not really grasping what it was that I was trying to do. A friend who is an old orchardman simplified it for me - he taught me to imagine what the tiny growth of this year will look like in ten, drew me pictures, and then showed me what it would look like if I made different choices - all of a sudden the idea penetrated and I was able to look and see what I wanted my trees to look like - more or less. I still pay some price for my years of not fully grasping things, but it gets better all the time.

Our property has more willow than anyone would want to shake a stick at - it is a wet piece of land, and willow grows abundantly here. We have encouraged the goats to cut back on the sumac and willow in certain areas, and we coppice the willows behind the barn - in fact, this year I'll take our second harvest after the cutting we did 7 years ago. We have only just finished burning the willow - not great firewood, but old dry willow make a good starter - that we took off the trees the first time.

Thorny locusts are wonderful fence posts and great firewood if you can cut it - we lost two big locust trees to the hurricanes, one right by the barn, the other behind the house, and the goats and calves quickly denuded them, eating their high protein leaves. In a few weeks, after the calves are gone to the butcher, I'll need to cut up the locusts, but it must wait until I take the fence that encloses it down.

We're out of "tree hay" at this point - mostly locust and willow that I put up and dry on old shipping pallets for winter. The rabbits, goats and calves love it, and it is an infinitely renewable resource for us. Over time, I hope to cut more each summer to feed our herd. To do so, I also have to keep planting trees - I want plenty, and of course, we also sell some trees in the nursery business, so I check on the little dormant nursery, and then harvest willow to make willow water for rooting cuttings in late winter.

The sap is already starting to rise in the trees because of the unseasonable warmth - soon enough we'll put up our little mite of syrup - our sugar bush is tiny, and we do it in the simplest possible way, with buckets and homemade taps, but it is a sign that winter is winding down. Ordinarily the beginning of February doesn't mark spring at all, but simply the time when northern people and critters start to dream of spring, but this year all is early, and everything feels ready.

I still hope for some snow and ice yet - it is too early for things to move forward, and while it saves on heating fuel, it isn't good for birds and plants to be so out of synch. Moreover, I still hope for some time in the woods yet when my shoulder mends and the sound of chickadees and the crosscut saw are the only songs in a wintry silence. If I don't get it, though, the trees and I still have plenty to do.

This coming week is Tu B'shevat, the Jewish holiday that marks the "new year" of the trees - the date that one counts tree birthdays from. It is traditional to celebrate with the fruits of trees, mostly out of season here, but a pleasurable luxury that reminds us of days to come when we will devour piles of peaches and apricots, process baskets of apples and quinces into jars, when the fruit of trees will pour upon us in abundance, asking little, giving much. Now, in the quiet season of winter in the north, it seems that trees give little - unless of course, you go into the woods and see what there is to receive.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:09 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Goat Humor

Category: goats • humor

My fellow geeky Jewish goat-farmer Reb Deb sent me this, and I couldn't resist posting it:

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:56 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

What Could the Farm Bill Accomplish?

Category: agriculture

Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady - after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many of us - we get all of the burdens of regulation without any of the economies of scale that accompany large scale agriculture. Most small producers are driven, then, to serve communities that can pay, rather than necessarily their poorer rural neighbors (although all of us do some of that too). We then get accused of being elitist (as I've written about before),
usually with the word "arugula" mentioned somewhere (I've never fully grasped why a perfectly nice green, fast growing, easy to grow plant like arugula is actually a code word for "rich asshole" - why not "mustard greens" or "kale?")

The accusation that local food is elitist is actually a product of the industrial food infrastructure - that is, the requirements of an industrial food system, the presumption that the basic structure of food production should be industrialized is what makes the price of good food higher. The accusation that local food isn't "serious" because it costs more is an accusation in bad faith - the reason it costs more is because the same system makes it cost more.

Now I can hear the protests - after all, all this stuff exists in the name of progress and food safety, right? Well, the problem with that is that if you need all this stuff for milk to be produced safely, you have to first explain away the fact that the French are all still alive ;-). Because it is perfectly evident that it is possible for someone to hand milk six cows in a milking parlor without electricity or running water, in a building built 400 years ago and to the standards of that day, to take it from the cow and cool it in a bucket of water from a spring, and sell some of it directly to consumers who do not die, and indeed, go on to have lifespans longer than our own and who spend less per year on illness and health costs

So the idea of some of the many billions that the USDA throws around going to local producers as Hamerschlag suggests is pretty cool in some respects. That said, however, among the actual farmers I know, there's a lot of ambivalence about subsidies and programs that actually work to our benefit - a lot of times the seeming generosity comes with some downsides like new levels of scrutiny and regulation that make it harder, not easier in the net. In many cases policies that seem to favor the small and local are actually more easily taken advantage of by the large and industrial.

That's not an argument wholly against Hamerschlag, but it is a cautionary note - most small farmers I know would love to see the barriers and benefits shifted off an un-level playing field. They are less sure that they want to engaged the USDA's full attention ;-).

Hamerschlag proposes the following:

Increasing support for local aggregation, processing and distribution so that farmers can more easily sell healthy food, including locally raised and processed meat, directly to schools, hospitals, stores and restaurants.

Diversifying and increasing the production of healthy and sustainable food by increasing funding for the Specialty Crop Block Grant program and increasing access to credit, crop insurance, and other support for organic producers, diversified operations, smaller-scale and beginning farmers.

All of these things could be good - particularly a program that upped the percentage of SNAP and WIC foods that could come from local resources (I've always thought that the elegant simplicity of Michael Pollan's proposal that WIC and SNAP dollars should pay double at farmer's markets worked to everyone's advantage). Beginning farmer programs also are good. But I wonder if we're coming at this from the correct end - what the Farm Bill and the USDA as a whole have done over the years is radiically re-shape the way Americans eat - ostensibly, of course, it was about agriculture, but really it has been at least as much about changing how we consume. Perhaps that's the end of this we need to focus on.

As much as I'm in favor of working with schools to bring in local produce, what most farmers I know that have done so have found is that because schools are not set up to process produce themselves, what ends up happening is that our "local" food gets transported to a distant processing plant and then back to the school - establishing both the infrastructure to deal with crops closer to home and also giving schools the capacity to use foods in states nearer to their actual origin (you would not believe what a carrot has to go through to show up on a school system plate). One wonders if perhaps what's needed most is to shift the expectations of school systems and school children so that they recognize the value of a carrot piece that isn't encased in plastic, waffle shaped and three days old.

Supporting an increase in processing facilities that support small scale producers of all kinds could be of huge benefit - community kitchens that support small-scale producers, local slaughter infrastructure and when possible, local processing infrastructure for institutions like schools and hospitals - but the question becomes, if we smaller local producers have to specialize and narrow our focus in order to grow precisely the kinds of vegetables that run best through processing equipment so they can be bagged and shipped to school children, are we still doing what really matters - producing the diverse crops that grow best and meet our community needs?

I'm not opposed to any of these programs, and generally, I think anything that keeps small farmers in business or helps create new ones is good - but if the larger goal is for small farmers to be producing a larger chunk of our food, which I think it is, we have to look down the road towards that larger goal. It may be that what we need most are resources devoted to shifting the American diet to the kinds of foods that grow best around them. If there's a place for the USDA, which after all, has helped shape America's diet into one that is demonstrably bad for us, it might be there - in putting resources away from big ag, and towards eaters, as much as farmers, and towards helping people change their expectations about food. So much of what we do is focused on what farmers grow - but farmers respond to what eaters eat, and as I've argued before, farmers alone cannot transform their agriculture - it starts at the table.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:21 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Disaster Recovery and Big Government

Category: Climate Change • agriculture • flooding of 2011

Christian Parenti has a really good article in TomDispatch about the reasons why Climate Change may change people'st thinking about the role of government:

Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won't help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity groups -- each may prove helpful in limited ways, but for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change.

Or consider sweltering Texas. In 2011, firefighters responded to 23,519 fires. In all, 2,742 homes were destroyed by out-of-control wildfires. But government action saved 34,756 other homes. So you decide: Was this another case of wasteful government intervention in the marketplace, or an extremely efficient use of resources?

The increasing number of natural disasters attributable to climate change will make us more dependent on institutional response structures, and we are likely to have no choice but to prioritize those. At the same time, I'm less optimistic than Parenti that this will change rhetoric - after all, disaster recovery is big government, but so is the world's largest military force, and many of those who oppose big government favor highly interventionist militarism. Imagining a sudden outbreak of consistency seems optimistic to me.

One point not mentioned is the biggest impact of climate change is most likely to be one that is hard to respond to with emergency inputs - drought. A reader who like me has been following Stuart Staniford's reading of the climate model papers on drought mentioned it, and I thought the rest of you, if you haven't been reading, should also follow along. There are more here and here, just in case your morning isn't cheery enough.

Needless to say the conclusions here are terrible - if there is that much drought on a regular basis, lots of US forests will be turning into savannah (and savannahs into grasslands or deserts) and there will be huge releases of carbon dioxide from the biosphere - really nasty positive feedbacks that the climate models I'm quite sure are not capturing properly - and we are really going to turn our beautiful planet into a hell fit only for robots to live on.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the robots won't like the grit in their gears from the massive dust storms either. Unfortunately, if you've been tracking this data, it isn't really new, either. The data has suggested for years that the biggest impacts of climate change will be the drying of presently fertile lands. For example of the 17% of global grainlands that are presently irrigated, more than half are likely to lose their water supplies (that 17% of irrigated grainland produces almost a third of the world's grains).

Drought is ongoing and chronic - governments can set up refugee camps, bring in emergency food supplies and help with resettlement, but they can't make it rain, restore glacial melt or refill depleted aquifers. And in a world that is going to have to produce more food than ever before, that's bad news indeed - I suspect that Parenti is right that many of us will cease to object to these government services as they become more necessary - the only question being whether anyone will fully grasp the underlying philosophical issues that lead some to undermine the infrastructure that would enable a humane and just response.

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:01 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Oil's Tipping Point in _Nature_

Category: Climate Change • peak oil

What I think is most important about the Nature article (unfortunately behind a paywall - Energy Bulletin has a summary here) is that part of its underlying presence is that it is possible to make major changes in the use of fossil fuels on the peak oil issue in ways it is not possible to make those changes due to the politically charged nature of climate change.

The authors, James Murray and David King, confirm what geologists involved with peak oil have known for a long time - that reserve estimates are unreliable at best, and that the science behind oil peaks is both clear and established - we know that the rate of consumption has long exceeded the rate of new discovery, we know that a majority of oil producing nations have already had peaks, and that the world itself must inevitably peak - the only question is when - and the material evidence increasingly suggests that we are already on a bumpy plateau:

The typical industry response is to point to increasing assessments of global reserves -- the amount known to be in the ground that can be produced commercially. But this is misleading. The true volume of proven global reserves is clouded by secrecy; forecasts by state oil companies are not audited and seem to be
exaggerated.

Production at existing oil fields around the world is declining at rates of about 4.5% (ref. 4) to 6.7% per year. Only by adding in production from new wells is
overall global production holding steady. In 2005, global production of regular
crude oil reached about 72 million barrels per day. From then on, production capacity
seems to have hit a ceiling at 75 million barrels per day. A plot of prices against production from 1998 to today shows this dramatic transition, from a time when supply could respond elastically to rising prices caused by increased demand, to when it could not (see 'Phase shift'). As a result, prices swing wildly in response to small changes in demand. Other people have remarked on this step change in the economics of oil around the year 2005, but the point needs to be lodged
more firmly in the minds of policy-makers

This is an important article, not because the data is new, but because it clarifies the need for immediate response and also points out that while much progress on climate change is stalled out, a response to our oil situation can move us in several right directsions at once - if we have the common sense to respond appropriately.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:36 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Best Front Page Ever

Category: humor

I try really hard to ignore the presidential election, I do, but this was too funny not to post! Yes, a hoax, but hey, shoulda been.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:47 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (and Neighbors)

Category: Economy • poverty

This is a revised version of a post that appeared three years ago, towards the start of the recession. It seems just as relevant, maybe more relevant, now.

A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to anyone who has actually been poor, this probably made perfect sense. Among the ways that being poor cost you money:

1. Your infrastructure is limited, so you are limited to what fits in your infrastructure - for example, you don't have a car, so you can only shop at the convenience stores or those on your bus line, which are more expensive than the Walmart outside town. Your house or apartment is underinsulated, so your utility bills are extremely high. You have to have food and heat, so you pay them, and struggle. You can't move closer to your job so you could walk or take the bus because you can't afford housing in that area - or don't have first and last months rent.

2. You are less likely to have insurance, or to have exhausted your safety nets, so you are more likely to find yourself paying for acute costs because of things you've let go - instead of routine dental care, you don't got the dentist until there's a major crisis, involving multiple root canals. You can't afford to have the roof replaced, so you wait until things start falling on your head.

3. You find yourself falling behind on bills and incurring the costs associated with that fall behind - $50 here to get your electricity turned back on when the child support payment didn't come in, higher interest rates on the credit cards because of late payments, the returned check fee for the school yearbook you'd hoped your tips would cover...

4. You have little access to ways of getting ahead - you can't buy in bulk because you can't lug your toddler, your infant stroller and a 50lb sack of anything on the bus. You credit is shaky, nonexistent or minimal, so you can't borrow enough to start that business or get a car that wouldn't break down. You continue to buy the higher priced bags of rice, and pay the repair and heat bills - even though you'd save money with a minor upgrade that is as out of reach for you as the moon.

5. The upgrades are out of reach because things like "return on investment" don't matter when you can't front the cash. People who talk about "Only 3 years until you get your money back" for some investment don't quite grasp that fronting 3 years of anything is out of the question - you can't get the credit, you can't handle the payments, and odds are you, can't get the loan anyway.

6. Prior indebtedness weighs you down. Those payments that seemed so manageable when they were described to you at teaser reates or in isolation are now major drags on your budget. Borrowing to meet crisis needs - say, the payments you owe the hospital from after your car accident, make it less likely you can get along day to day. Moreover, the costs keep shooting higher, either because companies are making less profit and want more out of you, or because you screwed up as in #3. You now know you will never, ever get out from under it - and thus, your choices are limited by your debt.

7. Most of the people around you are also poor - limiting your ability to borrow from a friend or rely on someone else. Higher crime rates, more pollution in your neighborhood and a host of other ills make it harder to keep what you have - the money gets spent on a son's asthma medication because all the diesel plants are in your area, or your checks get stolen.

8. You must keep up appearances because you are under much closer scrutiny due to poverty - no lights in your house could mean your kids get taken away. What you buy is scrutinized by everyone at the checkout line since you receive SNAP benefits. You have to spend hours filling out forms and exposing choices others get to make in comparative peace in order to get help - and that comes out of your work time.

There are other ways that this high cost of poverty plays out, but these are enough examples to get you going. I'm willing to bet that some of my readers have experienced some of these costs themselves, and more probably will as the current economic crisis expands.

Individuals are not the only people struggling with restrictions - the debates over state budgets over the last few years have been fraught with these kinds of choices. Watching the New York State budget be negotiated is in many ways an exercise that mirrors, if often less ethically, the hard choices of the American poor.

We'd like to do better, of course, but it is increasingly beyond our states, just as it is beyond most poor people. For example, you'd like to move to a better apartment, the one with a bedroom for your daughters who now sleep in the living room, no cockroaches and nearer your husband's job. But to do so, you'd have to get first months, last months and security accumulated, plus the cost of the moving truck, and the landlord isn't likely to give you back the security deposit because he's that kind of landlord.

Now many states are in roughly the same situation as your average working class poor person - they aren't allowed to carry deficits (ie, no credit for you), and the one thing they can't do is get enough money to do the things that are really needed - even if they knew what they were. Thus, for example, my governor has just defunded a program created during the foreclosure crisis to keep families in their homes - arguing that the foreclosure problem is gone. Sure.

Meanwhile, their infrastructure begins to degrade, the rough equivalent of skipping your dentist appointments - the bridges start to crumble, the roads have potholes, etc... And of course, a year or two of neglect is going to mean more costs down the road - but that can't be helped.

Your infrastructure is now limited to the cheap energy infrastructure, the states are now limited to cheap energy adaptations - and emphasis on the cheap, or the ones that use what you've got - that is, without a public transport network, the best we can hope for is carpooling. Without good housing, the best we can expect is for someone in any given family to keep their house and move their relatives in.

Crises keep coming along to undercut your attempts to catch up. First the unemployment funds start to empty, and then the bond defaults start. A city goes bankrupt and needs state aid to keep the trash pickup coming, and no one budgeted for that. Yet another major weather disaster hits and they funding to rebuild is totally inadequate - in part because the sheer numbers of these disasters are going up.

Credit becomes almost impossible to find - no one wants your muncipal bonds, no one shows up for the auctions. Which means that you have to stop even the steps you've been taking to get ahead.

Things that would give you a return on investment - say, improving the quality of education for your million school kids, or ensuring that some of them can go on to college through state subsidies, or investing in the good health of your households, or making your environment attractive to the kind of businesses that are most likely to stay and bring in tax revenues become impossible - you don't have the money to make sweetheart deals or improve education - in fact, you are probably cutting back on it, and accepting that in 12 years, you'll pay the price in students who did about as well in 35 kid classrooms as you'd expect.

That is, real poverty works pretty much the same at the personal, state or national (Iceland, say) level - you can't buy much, you can't save money, your costs get driven up. you lurch from crisis to crisis, getting further and further in the hole. Some people are able to make their way out due to concerted effort and some good luck, but for most people, no matter how you try, getting out is almost impossible - because it would require the ability to invest in your future. At best, you can maintain, get a little ahead this year, and fall back next, rather as Japan has done for the last 25 years.

We are not yet at the stage where the US government is fully in this mode - it is still able to borrow money, some states are doing better than others but there are ominous signs of what is to come.

This is something that many people, maybe even most, simply can't get their minds around. The idea that a nation could get poor - and that it could look a lot like when Grandma got poor seems strange and alien. The idea that our country or our state would lose the ability to invest in major infrastructure changes, that we might have to live with what we have, seems very strange. After all, can't the nation run deficits? Can't it just print money?

Yes, it can. It can run huge deficits - but remember, all those debts will have to be served, and with a declining tax revenue (poor unemployed people and companies that go out of business pay fewer taxes than employed folks and functioning corporations) revenue base, more and more of our wealth has to go to servicing debt. And all that borrowed money has to come from somewhere - and more and more debt makes people less likely to lend. Think of it in terms of your own credit score - the lender is far more likely to lend to you if you have money in the bank and a loan level you can reasonably service than if not.

So what about printing money? Yes, the US can do that, indeed, the Fed already is. But the amount being printed is comparatively trivial in relationship to the debts and losses, and because we know that, the temptation is to hang on to any money we have in anticipation of the next emergency, which always comes.

To do it on the scale required would require that we decouple from the world economy in a lot of ways, and we've already seen ways that the process of globalization has coupled us up in ways that are hard to break up - consider Greece. If it ever becomes necessary, the process of decoupling is likely itself to be difficult, and deeply destructive to the economy. That is, you can print money if you've already accepted that other nations aren't going to be doing a lot of foreign investment - but that means seeing other economies take their wealth out of yours, which is a further deflationary event. By the time hyper-inflation does come, what you probably have is something called "collapse."

And by this point, the assumptions one can safely make about what nations can and can't do are probably rather different - one stops, I suspect, seeing nations like the US as powerful actors who could do things like extend health care to everyone or rebuild our energy infrastructure. Instead, governments can do one of two things - pitch their entire effort into ameliorating suffering, or pitch their effort mostly into preserving wealth and privilege. Something has to go, generally, and the first thing is likely to be the big dreams. Instead, goals get smaller - either petty small, or more basic, simpler and more honest. So far, we've been heavy on choice #2, help the rich, but there are still hopes for better, and reason to try and make it happen at every level.

I think a lot of people who "get" the hard realities of recession and then a period of long stagnation break off here, at the idea that there can be such a thing as a nation becoming poor. And yet, it does happen - we've seen standards of living fall in several nations over the last few decades.

Americans particularly struggle to get their heads around the idea that many of the big things governments do might cease to be done. And they may be right - but I think it is wise to recognize the real possibility that at the municipal level, the trash pickup and snowplows may stop, that at the state level, your wife who is an employee may end up collecting worthless IOUs, or that projects designed to improve all our lives may simply be abandoned mid project. And that at the national level, the scope of our ambitions may have to get smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

What is remarkable about the resilience of many (but not all) poor people is how often they do manage to keep themselves from hitting rock bottom, despite the heavy burdens they labor under. That is, while some do end up homeless and desperate, most ordinary poor people work their job or jobs, tend their kids, put food on the table, keep everyone going, get their kids to school. That's something that states and nations could also do - we will have sufficient resources to keep everyone fed, even to keep our commitments to the hungry in the world. We will probably have sufficient resources, if we choose, to educate children and offering support to the elderly, the frail, the vulnerable. But this will mean giving up most other goals - including the ones that talk about growth and executive salaries.

Moreover, there is an alternate form of poverty - self-sufficient poverty. That is, it is possible to shift one's idea of growth from the "quarter over quarter" to the "generation over generation" model - that is, you don't get richer with your annual raises, you get richer because your parents save what they have, and pass it down to you. They improve the soil, they plant more trees, they pay off the debt, and then you add the extra room for your sister and her children, dig the drainage, start the business that you can pass on to your children.

At the personal level, this is the difference between someone who lives on $2 per day and spends 80% of her income on food, and the one who lives on $2 per day on a piece of land that produces enough food for them. In the first case, a medical crisis is a disaster, and you can never get ahead, never find the money to send your kids to school, never keep up. In the second, most years the money can be held for doctor's bills and school fees, and there's hope.

The major functional difference in the two cases is this - the self-sufficient model has found ways around the constant falling behind. It isn't perfect - people do fall behind. But there's more stability in the long term. Instead of paying heavy fees to have services or energy provided, you might make your own, uisng a methane digester to provide cooking fuel from your own bodily wastes, or you might turn to community funds to start a business, or build a home, rather than banks with heavy interest rates. Infrastructure investments are slow and less frequent - but because you stay in place for generations, the accumulated benefit of those investments, whether richer soil or a carefully harvested and nurtured forest or a house adapted to your climate and needs accrue enough to each generation to make progress. Instead of always losing because you cannot afford to borrow ahead from the next generation or the next year, you never borrow against them - you plan for their enrichment by doing what you can, slowly, and then passing down the benefits over time.

At the government level, it is possible to respond to less formal wealth with more informal wealth - with improving people's quality of resources, rather than their quantity. This can be done by offering incentives for self-sufficiency, by campaigns to encourage people to feel content with what they have, or even proud of doing without and living well. It is possible to imagine a patriotism built on our ability to adapt to these changing conditions, a sense that we are passing on to the future a legacy. It is feasible to invest in natural capital - to plant more trees that will bear and serve future generations, to improve soil and water quality, and pass down more and better - not more and better economic growth, but more and better natural resources, and more and better priorities.

The transition from on-the-edge to self-sufficient is not a magic bullet - it is all poverty, and no poverty is bliss. I do not claim that poverty is an ideal - merely that at least for a time, it may be inevitable that we will experience a dramatic drop in what we can afford and have. In fact, many of us have already had that experience.

The good thing is that we are still endowed with resources, nature still repairs itself to a degree, though we have done deep damage, there is still hope for the future, if we were to invest ourselves in it. And the other good thing is that after a period of poverty, one can reach equilibrium in which one no longer feels poor - that is, perhaps if we can find a way to induce people to improve their culture, soils, water, resources, we may find that living with much less is easier, we have adapted and developed a vernacular lifestyle in which "poverty" is no longer the right description, because we are accustomed to what we have, and we get back a little more each year, a little more beauty, a little more community and social capital.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:58 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks