Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The Privilege of Poverty
Sorry for my lack of blogging: school is proving a little overwhelming right now. For anyone who actually reads this blog regularly, I've added an RSS feed in the sidebar. I still don't really know what an RSS feed is, but if you click on it, you'll be notified when I post again.
The shortcomings of being poor
Recently, I was blogging about being poor. But I recognize there are people who are a lot poorer than me. Some might even say that makes me privileged.
By Winston Smith
I don't have much time for 'race to the bottom' logic: just because someone else is poorer, doesn't make me rich. At the end of the day, you know if you're poor. You know if you can't make the rent, have to let bills slide, get calls from collectors, miss out on vacations, restaurants, concerts. Poverty does awful things to your head. As a Marxist, I think it's far more important to ask who gets the big pieces of the pie, not compare all the small ones.
But it's not a simple question. There's got to be some way of 'fixing' a standard to measure poverty and wealth. To that end, I mined some government databases and made some charts.
Scroll down to "How Poor Are You?" to skip the methodology. But it's worth a read, and not just cos I spent way too much time trying to figure it out. These figures are arbitrary, but that doesn't make them false. Income and price aren't an exact measure, but then social statistics never are. It's a snapshot of reality from far above. Your personal experience fills in the details.
How about anti-poverty? - Victoria, B.C. demonstration
Putting a number on it
The bureaucrats don't claim to measure poverty: their tools
What the bureaucrats are trying to say is that poverty is relative, not absolute. You could have a society where everyone is so rich, even those with low incomes can still meet their needs. As Marx said, needs are socially determined. In a society where everyone drives a Lexus, you're poor if you drive a Saturn.
But that shouldn't obscure some simple rules about capitalism: if everyone's wealthy, prices go up. Prices always rise to what 'the market will bear', and the market's been bearing quite a lot lately.
The Consumer Price Index measures what a "typical" person consumes "during a given month... including shelter, food, entertainment, fuel and transportation." It's about as close as you can get to measuring 'socially determined needs'. In 1981, the necessities of life cost '100'; by 1998, they cost 184.4. The cost of living nearly doubled in 17 years.
Dolla dolla bill ya'll
That's an indicator - what about actual incomes? Statscan uses two measures, internal and external. Internally, poverty includes families who
Sounds simple enough - but when the poverty line is $20K, that doesn't mean poor people are spending $20K on their basic needs. It means "incomes below these limits usually spent more than 56.2% of their income on food, shelter and clothing." You'd be poor if you spent more than 56.2% of $20K.
Statscan then figures out what the average is, based on how big a family you have, and how big a city you live in. It lumps in all cities over 500,000. This is like saying it costs the same to live in Edmonton as it does in Vancouver (average 2-bedroom apartment rent in Edmonton: $785; the same in Vancouver: $1192.) But let's be conservative here - though not too conservative. For example, right-wing thinktank the Fraser Instituts says you should spend $25 a week on food. Not everyone goes to your subsidized cafeteria, boys.
How Poor Are You?
In 1998, the LICO for an individual living alone (not related by "blood, marriage or adoption" to your roommates - now I'm imagining those old guys sitting in the park with a threadbare fedora feeding pigeons) was $16,486. If you spend 56.2% of that on basic needs - $9,265 - then you're poor.
My annual income, minus tuition, is $14,000. I earn $2,486 less than the poverty line. Or, put another way, assuming $9,265 keeps you afloat (which is impossible - my rent alone is $7K a year) I'm spending over 66.2% of my income on basic needs. Pre-tax, too. There - I think I have every right to be pissed off.
But let's go further. If social needs and poverty are relative, what's everyone else earning?
The average pre-tax income for 2004 is $31,200. For 'non-elderly males' - which, thankfully, I still qualify as - it's $34,800. Women, of course, earn less - but either way, I'm making less than half of the average.
Don't like average figures? Let's break it down more. From Statscan, here's the number of people in 3 different income groups - roughly lower, middle and upper, and the % of the total population they represent:
Now, here's the minimum income they control. Naturally, Statscan doesn't keep figures on how much money the rich actually have. So this is a rough estimate - the number of people, times the lowest amount in their income bracket:
I hope you're enjoying my early-80s colour schemes
112,000 people, earning $250,000 each, makes $28 billion. 2.7 million people in Canada, earning $10,000 a piece, doesn't even show up.
It's been brought to my attention that my suspect math skills invalidate this argument. 2.7 million x 10,000 = $27 Billion, not million. I must've left a zero off the calculator. So, to forestall dismissive comments from economics students, I must change the argument: 2.7 million people earn as much as 112,000. Though, as I suggest below, those 2.7 million earn maximum 15K a year. The 112,000 don't have a maximum. There's still a huge difference - but not as dramatic as the chart above implies. Thanks for bearing with the arts major!
And let's be honest: even if the low income folks earned the top of their bracket, that'd only be $5,000 more - an extra $13.5 billion. But you can bet your collection of medieval figurines that rich people earn way, way more than $250K - e.g. Ken Thompson, Canada's richest man, is worth $7 billion alone. So these lines vastly underestimate how much the wealthy control vs. the poor.
Yeah, the middle classes are doing well. But since they're comfortable, I'm not concerned with them. I'm concerned with the millions of people that capitalism leaves out. Notice how the two graphs are nearly reversed? Lots of people have no income; a few people have lots of income.
Privilege isn't creature comforts: those are rights. Real privilege is the richest %.5 of the population that controls $1 billion more money (at least) than the bottom 12%. As for the rest of us, struggling to make ends meet, we have far more in common just by virtue of being poor. Workers of the world unite - oh wait, someone already said that.
The shortcomings of being poor
Recently, I was blogging about being poor. But I recognize there are people who are a lot poorer than me. Some might even say that makes me privileged.
By Winston Smith
I don't have much time for 'race to the bottom' logic: just because someone else is poorer, doesn't make me rich. At the end of the day, you know if you're poor. You know if you can't make the rent, have to let bills slide, get calls from collectors, miss out on vacations, restaurants, concerts. Poverty does awful things to your head. As a Marxist, I think it's far more important to ask who gets the big pieces of the pie, not compare all the small ones.
But it's not a simple question. There's got to be some way of 'fixing' a standard to measure poverty and wealth. To that end, I mined some government databases and made some charts.
Scroll down to "How Poor Are You?" to skip the methodology. But it's worth a read, and not just cos I spent way too much time trying to figure it out. These figures are arbitrary, but that doesn't make them false. Income and price aren't an exact measure, but then social statistics never are. It's a snapshot of reality from far above. Your personal experience fills in the details.
How about anti-poverty? - Victoria, B.C. demonstration
Putting a number on it
The bureaucrats don't claim to measure poverty: their tools
identif[y] those who are substantially worse-off than the average. In the absence of an accepted definition of poverty, these statistics have been used by many analystsYou have every right to ask, "What's the difference between poverty and those 'worse-off than the average'?"
What the bureaucrats are trying to say is that poverty is relative, not absolute. You could have a society where everyone is so rich, even those with low incomes can still meet their needs. As Marx said, needs are socially determined. In a society where everyone drives a Lexus, you're poor if you drive a Saturn.
But that shouldn't obscure some simple rules about capitalism: if everyone's wealthy, prices go up. Prices always rise to what 'the market will bear', and the market's been bearing quite a lot lately.
The Consumer Price Index measures what a "typical" person consumes "during a given month... including shelter, food, entertainment, fuel and transportation." It's about as close as you can get to measuring 'socially determined needs'. In 1981, the necessities of life cost '100'; by 1998, they cost 184.4. The cost of living nearly doubled in 17 years.
Dolla dolla bill ya'll
That's an indicator - what about actual incomes? Statscan uses two measures, internal and external. Internally, poverty includes families who
usually spent more than 56.2% of their income on food, shelter and clothing and were considered to be in straitened circumstances.Chances are, if you have to spend that much, you're below the external measure too: the LICO or "Low Income Cut Off" rate. The LICO is "set where families spend 20 percentage points more of their income than the Canadian average on food, shelter and clothing." If you're already spending more than half your income on necessities, and you're spending 20% more of your income than average families - congrats! You're below the LICO and officially poor. (Does that mean the average family spends 36.2% on necessities? Someone who took a stats course correct me!)
Sounds simple enough - but when the poverty line is $20K, that doesn't mean poor people are spending $20K on their basic needs. It means "incomes below these limits usually spent more than 56.2% of their income on food, shelter and clothing." You'd be poor if you spent more than 56.2% of $20K.
Statscan then figures out what the average is, based on how big a family you have, and how big a city you live in. It lumps in all cities over 500,000. This is like saying it costs the same to live in Edmonton as it does in Vancouver (average 2-bedroom apartment rent in Edmonton: $785; the same in Vancouver: $1192.) But let's be conservative here - though not too conservative. For example, right-wing thinktank the Fraser Instituts says you should spend $25 a week on food. Not everyone goes to your subsidized cafeteria, boys.
How Poor Are You?
In 1998, the LICO for an individual living alone (not related by "blood, marriage or adoption" to your roommates - now I'm imagining those old guys sitting in the park with a threadbare fedora feeding pigeons) was $16,486. If you spend 56.2% of that on basic needs - $9,265 - then you're poor.
My annual income, minus tuition, is $14,000. I earn $2,486 less than the poverty line. Or, put another way, assuming $9,265 keeps you afloat (which is impossible - my rent alone is $7K a year) I'm spending over 66.2% of my income on basic needs. Pre-tax, too. There - I think I have every right to be pissed off.
But let's go further. If social needs and poverty are relative, what's everyone else earning?
The average pre-tax income for 2004 is $31,200. For 'non-elderly males' - which, thankfully, I still qualify as - it's $34,800. Women, of course, earn less - but either way, I'm making less than half of the average.
Don't like average figures? Let's break it down more. From Statscan, here's the number of people in 3 different income groups - roughly lower, middle and upper, and the % of the total population they represent:
Now, here's the minimum income they control. Naturally, Statscan doesn't keep figures on how much money the rich actually have. So this is a rough estimate - the number of people, times the lowest amount in their income bracket:
I hope you're enjoying my early-80s colour schemes
112,000 people, earning $250,000 each, makes $28 billion. 2.7 million people in Canada, earning $10,000 a piece, doesn't even show up.
It's been brought to my attention that my suspect math skills invalidate this argument. 2.7 million x 10,000 = $27 Billion, not million. I must've left a zero off the calculator. So, to forestall dismissive comments from economics students, I must change the argument: 2.7 million people earn as much as 112,000. Though, as I suggest below, those 2.7 million earn maximum 15K a year. The 112,000 don't have a maximum. There's still a huge difference - but not as dramatic as the chart above implies. Thanks for bearing with the arts major!
And let's be honest: even if the low income folks earned the top of their bracket, that'd only be $5,000 more - an extra $13.5 billion. But you can bet your collection of medieval figurines that rich people earn way, way more than $250K - e.g. Ken Thompson, Canada's richest man, is worth $7 billion alone. So these lines vastly underestimate how much the wealthy control vs. the poor.
Yeah, the middle classes are doing well. But since they're comfortable, I'm not concerned with them. I'm concerned with the millions of people that capitalism leaves out. Notice how the two graphs are nearly reversed? Lots of people have no income; a few people have lots of income.
Privilege isn't creature comforts: those are rights. Real privilege is the richest %.5 of the population that controls $1 billion more money (at least) than the bottom 12%. As for the rest of us, struggling to make ends meet, we have far more in common just by virtue of being poor. Workers of the world unite - oh wait, someone already said that.
