Angus Deaton on absolute poverty
Speaking of poverty and inequality in the US and how that (along with other faults) makes us not a shining city on a hill – the US has a deep poverty problem.
According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).
But if you factor in needs, it’s even worse than that.
An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.
The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.
Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million)…
This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.
To put it succinctly, we abandon far more people to abject poverty than do most developed countries.
Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Hmm, the Mississippi Delta, what’s that – oh yes, it’s that place where hundreds of thousands of slaves were imported so that white people could get rich on cotton.
Not much shine.
Take the worst imagined conditions to define a shithole country, in terms of poverty, standard of living, or protection of law. It’s striking that, the more those conditions are found in an area of the United States, the more likely Trump voters will be found there. Shithole county (white) voters are his base.
Of course, when you compare our absolute population to countries like Nepal and Sierra Leone, the percentage living in poverty is smaller – but that doesn’t make it all right. That is still a lot of people starving.
And I’ve been one of those people making so little. During the 90s, I made next to nothing, and squeaked by on it. It’s damn scary, especially with children.
The Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia are also the most deeply superstitious and priest-ridden zones of the U.S. Another link to Trump-voting.