The Epidemic of Poverty

Following the course of major social problems such as poverty, drug abuse, violence, and
oppression, it often seems that nothing works. Government programs come and go as political
parties swing us back and forth between stock answers whose only effect seems to be who gets
elected. If anything, the problems get worse, and people feel increasingly helpless and frustrated
or, if the problems dont affect them personally, often feel nothing much at all.
As a society, then, we are stuck, and weve been stuck for a long time. One reason were
stuck is that the problems are huge and complex. But on a deeper level, we tend to think about
them in ways that keep us from getting at their complexity in the first place. It is a basic tenet of
sociological practice that to solve a social problem we have to begin by seeing it as social.
Without this, we look in the wrong place for explanations and in the wrong direction for visions
of change.
Consider, for example, poverty, which is arguably the most far-reaching, long-standing
cause of chronic suffering there is. The magnitude of poverty is especially ironic in a country like
the United States whose enormous wealth dwarfs that of entire continents. More than one out of
every six people in the United States lives in poverty or near-poverty. For children, the rate is
even higher. Even in the middle class there is a great deal of anxiety about the possibility of
falling into poverty or something close to it through divorce, for example, or simply being laid
off as companies try to improve their competitive advantage, profit margins, and stock prices by
transferring jobs overseas.
How can there be so much misery and insecurity in the midst of such abundance? If we
look at the question sociologically, one of the first things we see is that poverty doesnt exist all
by itself. It is simply one end of an overall distribution of income and wealth in society as a

whole. As such, poverty is both a structural aspect of the system and an ongoing consequence of
how the system is organized and the paths of least resistance that shape how people participate in
it.
The system we have for producing and distributing wealth is capitalist. It is organized in
ways that allow a small elite to control most of the capital factories, machinery, tools used to
produce wealth. This encourages the accumulation of wealth and income by the elite and
regularly makes heroes of those who are most successful at it such as Microsofts Bill Gates. It
also leaves a relatively small portion of the total of income and wealth to be divided among the
rest of the population. With a majority of the people competing over whats left to them by the
elite, its inevitable that a substantial number of people are going to wind up on the short end and
living in poverty or with the fear of it much of the time. Its like the game of musical chairs:
since the game is set up with fewer chairs than there are people, someone has to wind up without
a place to sit when the music stops.
In part, then, poverty exists because the economic system is organized in ways that
encourage the accumulation of wealth at one end and creates conditions of scarcity that make
poverty inevitable at the other. But the capitalist system generates poverty in other ways as well.
In the drive for profit, for example, capitalism places a high value on competition and efficiency.
This motivates companies and their managers to control costs by keeping wages as low as
possible and replacing people with machines or replacing full-time workers with part-time
workers. It makes it a rational choice to move jobs to regions or countries where labor is cheaper
and workers are less likely to complain about poor working conditions, or where laws protecting
the natural environment from industrial pollution or workers from injuries on the job are weak or
unenforced. Capitalism also encourages owners to shut down factories and invest money

elsewhere in enterprises that offer a higher rate of return.

These kinds of decisions are a normal consequence of how capitalism operates as a
system, paths of least resistance that managers and investors are rewarded for following. But the
decisions also have terrible effects on tens of millions of people and their families and
communities. Even having a full-time job is no guarantee of a decent living, which is why so
many families depend on the earnings of two or more adults just to make ends meet. All of this is
made possible by the simple fact that in a capitalist system most people neither own nor control
any means of producing a living without working for someone else.
People can argue about whether chronic widespread poverty is morally acceptable or what an
acceptable level of inequality might look like. But if we want to understand where poverty comes
from, what makes it such a stubborn feature of social life, we have to begin with the simple
sociological fact that patterns of inequality result as much from how social systems are organized
as they do from how individuals participate in them. Focusing on one without the other simply
wont do it.
The focus on individuals is so entrenched, however, that even those who think theyre
taking social factors into account usually arent. This is as true of Murrays critics as it is of
Murray himself. Perhaps Murrays greatest single mistake is to misinterpret the failure of federal
antipoverty programs. He assumes that federal programs actually target the social causes of
poverty, which means that if they dont work, social causes must not be the issue. But hes
simply got it wrong. Welfare and other antipoverty programs are social only in the sense that
theyre organized around the idea that social systems like government have a responsibility to do
something about poverty. But antipoverty programs are not organized around a sociological
understanding of how systems produce poverty in the first place. As a result, they focus almost

entirely on changing individuals and not systems, and use the resources of government and other
systems to make it happen.
If antipoverty programs have failed, it isnt because the idea that poverty is socially
caused is wrong. Theyve failed because policymakers who design them dont understand what
makes the cause of something social. Or they understand it but are so trapped in individualistic
thinking that they dont act on it by targeting systems such as the economy for serious change.
Because social problems are more than an accumulation of individual woes, they cant be
solved through an accumulation of individual solutions. We must include social solutions that
take into account how economic and other systems really work. We also have to identify the
paths of least resistance that produce the same patterns and problems year after year. This means
that capitalism can no longer occupy its near-sacred status that holds it immune from criticism. It
may mean that capitalism is in some ways incompatible with a just society in which the
excessive well-being of some does not require the misery of so many others. It wont be easy to
face up to such possibilities, but if we dont, we will guarantee poverty its future and all the
conflict and suffering that go with it.