These are people who have become poor. They possess skills, and they once moved upward with the rest of society. But now their jobs have been destroyed, and their skills have been rendered useless. In the process, they have been pushed down toward poverty from whence they came. This particular group is Negro, and the chances of ever breaking through, of returning to the old conditions, are very slim. Yet their plight is not exclusively racial, for it is shared by the semi-skilled and unskilled workers who are the victims of technological
These people are the rejects of the affluent society. They never had the right skills in the first place, or they lost them when the rest of the economy advanced. They are the ones who make up a huge portion of the culture of poverty in the cities of America. They are to be counted in the millions.
... there are new definitions of what man can achieve, of what a human standard of life should be. In recent times, this has been particularly true since technology has consistently broadened man's potential: It has made a longer, healthier, better life possible. Thus, in terms of what is technically possible, we have higher aspirations. Those who suffer levels of life well below those that are possible even though they live better than medieval knights or Asian peasants, are poor.
Related to this technological advance is the social definition of poverty. The American poor are not poor in Hongkong or in the sixteenth century; they are poor here and now, in the United States. They are dispossessed in terms of what the rest of the nation enjoys, in terms of what the society could provide if it had the will. They live on the fringe, the margin. They watch the movies and read the magazines of affluent America, and these tell them that they are internal exiles.
... To have one bowl of rice in a society where all other people have half a bowl may well be a sign of achievement and intelligence; it may spur a person to act and to fulfill his human potential. To have five bowls of rice in a society where the majority have a decent, balanced diet is a tragedy. .
This point can be put another way in defining poverty. One of the consequences of our new technology is that we have created new needs. There are more people who live longer. Therefore they need more. In short, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.
It is difficult to take all these imponderables together and to fashion them into a simple definition of poverty in the United States, Yet this analysis should make clear some of the assumptions that underlie the assertions in this book:
a. Poverty should be defined in terms of those who are denied the minimal levels of health, housing, food, and education that our present stage of scientific knowledge specifies as necessary for life as it is now lived in the United States.
b. Poverty should be defined psychologically in terms of those whose place in the society is such that they are internal exiles who, almost inevitably, develop attitudes of defeat and pessimism and who are therefore excluded from taking advantage of new opportunities.
c. Poverty should be defined absolutely, in terms of what man and society could be. As long as America is less than its potential, the nation as a whole is impoverished by that fact. As long as there is the other America, we are, all of us, poorer because of it.
1. The current official definition of poverty includes some of the measurable elements. listed in Harrington's definition. How could we measure the individual points in b and c, and should we?
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