Читать книгу In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government - Charles Murray - Страница 13
Оглавление[print edition page 38]
“Poverty” has in recent years been to policy analysts what damnation is to a Baptist preacher. For more than two decades, progress or retrogression in social policy has been measured against this benchmark. Few goals have been more highly valued than to “bring people above the poverty line.” To be below the poverty line has constituted proof that government help is needed.
There are three reasons for this preoccupation. One is that deficits in material resources are visible. We can see, paint, photograph, film, televise, and videotape sunken cheeks and tattered clothes. Deficits in the other enabling conditions are not so visible. Compounding this imbalance, deficits in any of the other enabling conditions may manifest themselves as poverty. Self-esteem again provides a good example. Large numbers of the homeless are dispirited in ways that are traceable to deficits in esteem (and in other enabling conditions besides poverty). It is often such deficits that created the homelessness. But the symptom is poverty—living in the streets, dressed in rags, begging for food—and the symptom can be alleviated by material resources.
This points to the second reason why money has taken on such a central place in social policy calculations: Material resources, alone among the enabling conditions, are fungible. I can use money to buy you a meal or a place to stay. I cannot use money to buy you esteem. Deficits in material resources are in this sense susceptible to “solutions” in ways that the other enabling conditions are not.
The third reason is that deficits in material resources suggest threats to survival. Without food, people starve to death. Without shelter, they perish of exposure. The state of being “in poverty” is loosely identified with a state of being at risk of life and health. The plight of the street people again provides an apt illustration. The street people are in the
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streets and do appear to be in danger of starving—and they are also “in poverty.” The observer may point out that the street people constitute a small fraction of the people labeled “homeless,” and that the homeless constitute a small fraction of the people under the poverty line. He may analyze the data on why people live in the streets, and point out that the reason why people live in the streets in Calcutta or Cairo (no way to make a decent living) applies to only a small fraction of street people in the United States. He may then conclude, with logic and evidence on his side, that the problem of street people and the poverty problem are separate, that the means for solving one are all but unrelated to solving the other. But for most of us the visceral link will remain. Poverty taken to its ultimate extreme means death.
These are some of the reasons why poverty has so preoccupied us. It is the generic stand-in for the social problems of our age. Solve the riddle of poverty, we have often seemed to hope, and the rest of our problems will solve themselves. As long as poverty exists, we have often seemed to despair, nothing else can compensate the poor for their condition. “Whatever progress has been charted on the graph of ‘progress and poverty,’” Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in her history of the idea of poverty, “it is poverty that still strikes the eye and strikes at the heart. It is as if the modern sensibility can only register failure, not success, as if modernity has bequeathed to us a social conscience that is unappeasable and inconsolable.”1
A continuing theme of this book will be that in fact most of the pains and damages that we associate with contemporary poverty in Western societies have little to do with a lack of material resources (beyond a certain point): that money in itself, by itself does not inspirit the dispirited homeless, make loving mothers of neglectful mothers, make a cheerful home of a dump. A few days later, even if the money continues to be provided, the dispiritedness and neglectfulness will be back and the home will be a dump with different furniture. The crucial qualifier, of course, is that phrase “beyond a certain point,” for below that point money can make all the difference in the world. So the topic for now is material resources and an exploration of that “certain point.” When the enabling condition is material resources, how much is enough?
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I will present two talking points. The first is that, for purposes of opening up a wide range of ways to pursue happiness, “enough money” lies close to subsistence—not precisely at subsistence, but close. The second is that the first proposition can hold true, to a far greater degree than we commonly realize, for inhabitants of sophisticated Western societies.
What Is “Enough” Money?
The proposition that “enough money to pursue happiness” lies close to subsistence is a minor revision of the notion that money does not buy happiness. Combine this unoriginal proposition with the truth that you can’t pursue happiness if you’re starving, and the implication for the quantitative relationship of income to happiness is fully defined: If we have an accurate measure of happiness and an accurate measure of income, then the relationship of happiness to income should look something like figure 1.
Happiness is very low until subsistence is reached, rises very steeply immediately thereafter, but quickly levels off as subsistence is left behind. Or, as Maslow would argue, once the physiological needs are met, the next level of needs arises and determines the organism’s state of satisfaction. How does this expectation compare with what is known about the relationship of wealth to happiness?
FIGURE 1. On Money Buying Happiness, Theoretically . . .
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HAPPINESS AND NATIONAL WEALTH
The answer depends on whether you look at the relationship of happiness to income across countries or within countries. If the question is “Are people in rich countries happier than people in poor countries?” the answer seems to be quite close to the expectation. Very poor countries in which much of the population is barely surviving—countries such as India, Bangladesh, and some parts of sub-Saharan Africa—show very low levels of avowed happiness. But this holds true only at the extremes (and even then with exceptions). Avowed happiness rises quickly with national wealth in the early stages, then much more slowly among the wealthier countries. Figure 2 gives a rough idea of the relationship, using happiness data from the Cantril and Gallup international surveys, both of which used a self-anchored scale
FIGURE 2. On Money Buying Happiness, Empirically . . .
Sources: The happiness data are from the Gallup world sample (1976) and the Hadley Cantril data (1965), as reported in Ruut Veenhoven, Databook of Happiness (Boston: D. Reidel, 1984), table e, p. 518. Per capita GNP data are taken from Charles Lewis Taylor and David A. Jodice, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, 3 d ed., vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), table 3.6; and from Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970), table 1254, p. 810. All per capita GNP are expressed in 1978 dollars. Note that a per capita GNP in 1978 of $9,770 in the United States translated into median family income of $17,640, or more than $30,000 in 1987 dollars.
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that is claimed to have high cross-cultural validity.2 National wealth is expressed as gross national product (GNP) per capita.
These are not data to go to court with—sample sizes for some countries are only 300 people—but the general correspondence with the curvilinear “predicted” relationship in figure 1 is obvious. Very quickly, more money buys little more happiness.
Some argue that the relationship between national wealth and happiness is even weaker than figure 2 indicates. Political scientist Richard Easterlin, who has done the most rigorous work in this area, reached the conclusion that the relationship is nil: “[R]icher countries are not typically happier than poorer ones. . . . By and large, the evidence indicates no relation—positive or negative—between happiness and national income. Whether the people in a particular time or place are comparatively happy is seemingly independent of the average level of income.”3 The Gallup data suggest that this may overstate the case slightly—examined closely, those data show signs that happiness scores continue to increase, albeit slightly and irregularly, with wealth even after subsistence is left behind. But such uncertainties only tend to reinforce the proposition that national wealth has at most only a very tenuous relationship to avowed happiness.
HAPPINESS AND INDIVIDUAL WEALTH
The predicted relationship of wealth to avowed happiness fails to match reality, however, when we turn to the happiness of individuals within a given nation. This was the second of Easterlin’s findings. People in poor Mexico and in affluent France may have similar mean avowed-happiness scores, but rich people in France are happier than poor people in France, as rich people in Mexico are happier than poor people in Mexico. In every country, Easterlin found, people with high income tended to report higher levels of happiness than people with low income.
The same relationship held true longitudinally within countries. The United States is a good example. As Easterlin pointed out, from the late 1940s to 1970, average real income in the United States increased by about 60 percent while reported levels of happiness in the United States were about the same in the late 1940s as they were in
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TABLE 1
| Year | Percentage Responding “Very Happy” | Median Family Income (1987 Dollars) |
| 1948 | 44% | $15,300 |
| 1956 | 54% | $20,400 |
| 1963 | 47% | $23,600 |
| 1970 | 43% | $29,400 |
| 1977 | 42% | $30,600 |
| 1981 | 46% | $28,500 |
Sources: The Gallup Report, no. 189 (June 1981): 40; Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1982–83 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), table 714; Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), table G 179–88.
1970, but in each survey richer people had higher happiness scores than poorer people. The same phenomenon continued through the 1970s. Table 1 gives the percentages of people who identified themselves as “very happy” in Gallup polls taken from 1948 to 1981, alongside the median family income in those years (expressed in constant 1987 dollars).
Perversely, the percentage of people reporting themselves as happy dropped steadily from 1956 through 1977, as real income soared—then increased from the 1977 to the 1981 measures, as real income dropped. But at any given time within that period, rich people reported themselves as being happier than poor people. Table 2 shows the gradient, using Gallup’s 1981 income categories.
The effect of income is not as great as some might have predicted. That more than a third of people with incomes under $5,000 reported themselves to be “very happy” is intriguing, and it would be fascinating to find what happens to the relationship at higher income levels (Does it keep rising through $50,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?). But that a relationship exists is clear.
Putting the longitudinal and cross-sectional data together, one emerges with a paradoxical situation. You may think of it this way:
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TABLE 2
| Family Income (1981 Dollars) | Percentage Responding “Very Happy” |
| $25,000 & over | 56% |
| $20,000–24,999 | 48% |
| $15,000–19,999 | 48% |
| $10,000–14,999 | 38% |
| $5,000–9,999 | 40% |
| Under $5,000 | 35% |
Source: The Gallup Report, no. 189 (June 1981): 38.
Imagine a man with a real income of X dollars in 1950 and his son with precisely the same real income in 1970. On average, the son can be expected to be less happy with his income than the father was with his. To be as happy as the father, the son must make more money. Furthermore, there are no signs that the process will be any different for the son’s son. Easterlin’s gloomy conclusion was that “to an outside observer, economic growth appears to be producing an ever more affluent society, but to those involved in the process, affluence will always remain a distant, urgently sought, but never attained goal.”4 Two other researchers came up with a memorable phrase to describe the situation. We are caught, they said, on “a hedonic treadmill.”5
This is all very well as a matter of aggregate statistics, but there is also the wisdom of Sophie Tucker to consider: “I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich, and believe me, honey, rich is better.” Perhaps the hedonic treadmill writ small works out to something like this: It is true that when you think back to the happy and unhappy times of your life, they do not necessarily match up with the amount of money you had at the time. Still, other things being equal, at this very moment in your life, you prefer your current income over any lesser amount and probably have a hankering for more.
The hedonic treadmill is not as depressing as it may seem at first glance. It is not irrational. We get caught on it for any number of understandable reasons, some of which are summarized in the note
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below.* And it is not even necessarily a frailty that we need to fight. Sophie Tucker was at least partly right. It may be true that people by and large are always going to seek more money and will always find as they succeed that money in and of itself is of limited value in increasing their happiness. People may still, quite reasonably, want to increase their income. If they can’t buy happiness, they can make some other good use of the money.
The empirical findings about the relationship between money and happiness thus tell us little that is surprising or even particularly
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dismaying about human beings. They do, however, raise a fascinating question: What are the implications of the hedonic treadmill for good public policy?
THE ULTIMATE IRRELEVANCE OF THE HEDONIC TREADMILL TO GOOD POLICY
The issue is how government enables people to pursue happiness. For the enabling condition called “material resources,” the question therefore is: How may we characterize the state of affairs when everyone in a society has sufficient material resources to be able to pursue happiness? When will we be able to say, “The government of the United States has met its obligation to provide for the material needs of its citizens, and may now devote its attention to other matters”?
One internally consistent answer is “Never.” The fact is that people with more money tend to be happier than people with less money at any given slice in time, no matter how much money the poorer people have. The appropriate conclusion, judging from these data, is that money does make a difference and that the only way to deal with the hedonic treadmill is to treat it as a fact of life and go on using the government to redistribute money from rich to poor, no matter how much money the “poor” have.
The logic is internally consistent. The only problem is that the conclusion is absurd. It is absurd first at the limit. No thinking person believes that more money means more happiness after a point. This assertion is no more controversial than saying that no thinking person believes that a person with five million dollars is likely to be happier than a person with four million dollars. The problem is to find the point after which increases in money no longer facilitate the pursuit of happiness.
We may cut down the range by asking questions of this sort: Suppose that at some time in the future the United States becomes so wealthy that the poorest families have the purchasing power of the current median (more than $30,000 in 1987), while the average income has tripled in the meantime. In that state of affluence, would you be prepared to argue that poor people are prevented from pursuing happiness because they have too little money? Or to put it another way, if all families in the United States had at least that much
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purchasing power, could we then forget about poverty as an issue for social policy and worry about other matters instead (even if the median had by that time increased to $100,000)?
In such a society, “poor” people—that is, people with only $30,000 in purchasing powers—will doubtless still envy the rich people, that being human nature. And it will also be true that people with only $30,000 will be unable to purchase some desirable goods, and will feel that if only they made $40,000, or $50,000, or $100,000, then they would have what they need, and would be satisfied. But granting that these reactions will prevail, the question remains: In designing public policy, will changes in economics be the answer anymore, if our goal is to enable people to pursue happiness?
In answering the question, remember that we have defined out of existence all issues of safety nets and minimum income and the meaning of the poverty line. We are saying that the poorest people in the country are making the equivalent of $30,000 a year. So if we are to say that, yes, people are still prevented from pursuing happiness for economic reasons, the policy prescription that follows is (as far as I can tell) necessarily the egalitarian solution, whereby everyone makes roughly the same amount of money. That would succeed in changing the terms of the envy (people then could concentrate on envying other people their power, talent, beauty, and other unequally distributed gifts). Would it enhance the pursuit of happiness among the previously poor people?
In the egalitarian literature, there is a presumption that income leveling would have some such utilitarian effect, but these arguments have historically been put in terms of societies in which wealth exists side by side with abject poverty. It is an interesting question to put to the egalitarians, and one that is increasingly pertinent in a world of expanding wealth: Why, in pursuing happiness, is one person with enough money impeded by someone else’s having more? As far as I can tell (the reader is invited to work through his own answers), the logic behind an answer ultimately has to hinge on some strange understandings of happiness—roughly on the order of, “my happiness is augmented by knowing that other people do not have more than I do.” Presumably this logic is most attractive to those who see unequal incomes as ipso facto proof of social injustice, an argument that I will not try to contest here.
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But if one is not attracted by the logic of the egalitarian solution, as I am not, then one is left without economic solutions for getting people off the hedonic treadmill. When we reach a state of prosperity in which poverty is defined as an income equivalent to $30,000 a year, the hedonic treadmill will remain, but policy solutions to the unequal happiness of the poorer members of society cannot be based on raising their income (I am arguing). Everything we know about how people have reacted in the past tells us that they are not going to be any happier when they are making $40,000, or $50,000, or $100,000, if the rest of society has continued to get still richer.
It may be objected that by assuming $30,000 as the floor I have fundamentally changed the terms of the issue. Currently, poor people in American society are genuinely in need of more material resources, whereas in my imaginary society the “poor” people who make $30,000 would not have such an objective deficit. This raises the fascinating question of where poverty begins, however. Macaulay, writing of Victorian England, chided his contemporaries for sentimentalizing about a Golden Age in the past when “noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman.”9 A century later, we think of Victorian England as a swamp of Dickensian poverty. Would a $30,000 floor really be “enough material resources,” whereas the current poverty line represents “not enough material resources”? Or has our current poverty line in fact already passed the threshold of enough?
Suppose, for example, that you put yourself in the position of a person in 1900. The same question is put to you, only slightly amended to fit the different moment in history: “Suppose that at some time in the future the United States becomes so wealthy that the poorest families have an income of the current (1900) average, while the average income has tripled in the meantime?” I suggest that no poor person in 1900 would have imagined that his material needs would not be met by the income of the average American at that time—which is to say, an average that made America at the turn of the century the promised land for poor people around the world.
The point is, of course, that we have already surpassed that millennial state of affairs from the vantage point of a poor person in 1900. The real purchasing power of families at the poverty line in the late
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1980s (in 1987, $11,612 for a family of four) is much greater than the purchasing power of the average family in 1900.* Does this mean that people at the contemporary poverty line are living lives in which they can pursue happiness? Not necessarily. Rather, I am arguing that the reason why they cannot does not necessarily lie in money.
All this is far from demonstrating that people with near-subsistence incomes have “enough” material resources to pursue happiness. In fact, two points should be conceded. One is that providing more money to poor people probably will increase the felt-happiness of the people who get the money in the short term (for the same reasons discussed under the explanations for the hedonic treadmill). The second is that if nothing else is done, poor people who stay at the same near-subsistence income while the rest of the society gets richer will probably become more unhappy than they were before. But our topic is the pursuit of happiness. Once subsistence has been passed, what are the relative priorities to be attached to further augmenting income versus other steps (which may preclude augmenting income)? To explore this question, I ask you to join in a series of thought experiments.
Thought Experiments about Being Poor
One of the great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor. The diminishing supply of the formerly-poor in policy-making and policy-influencing positions is a side effect of progress. The number of poor households dropped dramatically from the beginning of World War II through the end of the 1960s. Despite this happy cause, however, it is a troubling phenomenon. From the beginning of American history through at least the 1950s, the new
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generation moving into positions of influence in politics, business, journalism, and academia was bound to include a large admixture of people who had grown up dirt-poor. People who had grown up in more privileged surroundings did not have to speculate about what being poor was like; someone sitting beside them, or at the head of the table, was likely to be able to tell them. It was easy to acknowledge then, as it is not now, that there is nothing so terrible about poverty per se. Poverty is not equivalent to destitution. Being poor does not necessarily mean being malnourished or ill-clothed. It does not automatically mean joylessness or despair. To be poor is not necessarily to be without dignity, it is not necessarily to be unhappy. When large numbers of people who were running the country had once been poor themselves, poverty could be kept in perspective.
Today, how many graduates of the Kennedy School of Government or of the Harvard Business School have ever been really poor? How many have ever had close friends who were? How many even have parents who were once poor? For those who have never been poor and never even known any people who were once poor, it is difficult to treat poverty as something other than a mystery. It is even more difficult to be detached about the importance of poverty, because to do so smacks of a “let them eat cake” mentality. By the same token, however, it is important that we who have never been poor be able to think about the relationship of poverty to social policy in a much more straightforward way than the nation’s intellectuals and policy-makers have done for the past few decades. To that end, I propose first a thought experiment based on the premise that tomorrow you had to be poor. I do not mean “low-income” by Western standards of affluence, but functioning near the subsistence level, as a very large proportion of the world’s population still does.
In constructing this thought experiment, the first requirement is to divorce yourself from certain reflexive assumptions. Do not think what it would be like to be poor while living in a community of rich people. I do not (yet) want to commingle the notions of absolute poverty and relative poverty, so you should imagine a community in which everyone else is as poor as you are; indeed, a world in which the existence of wealth is so far removed from daily life that it is not real.
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The second requirement is to avoid constructing an imaginary person. The point is not to try to imagine yourself in the shoes of “a poor person” but to imagine what you, with your particular personality, experiences, strengths, and limitations (including your middle-class up-bringing and values), would do if you were suddenly thrust into this position.
VERSION I: BEING POOR IN A THAI VILLAGE
To do all this in the American context is difficult. Any scenario is filled with extraneous factors. Let me suggest one that I used as a way of passing the time when I was a researcher driving on the back roads of rural Thailand many years ago. What if, I would muse, I had to live for the rest of my life in the next village I came to? (Perhaps a nuclear war would have broken out, thereby keeping me indefinitely in Thailand; any rationalization would do.)
In some ways, the prospect was grim. I had never been charmed by sleeping under mosquito netting nor by bathing with a few buckets of cloudy well water. When circumstances permitted, I liked to end a day’s work in a village by driving back to an air-conditioned hotel and a cold beer. But if I were to have no choice . . .
As it happens, Thailand is an example of an attractive peasant culture. Survival itself is not a problem. The weather is always warm, so the requirements for clothes, fuel, and shelter are minimal. Village food is ample, if monotonous. But I would nonetheless be extremely poor, with an effective purchasing power of a few hundred dollars a year. The house I would live in would probably consist of a porch and one or two small, unlit, unfurnished rooms. The walls might be of wood, more probably of woven bamboo or leaf mats. I would have (in those years) no electricity and no running water. Perhaps I would have a bicycle or a transistor radio. Probably the nearest physician would be many kilometers away. In sum: If the criterion for measuring poverty is material goods, it would be difficult to find a community in deepest Appalachia or a neighborhood in the most depressed parts of South Chicago that even approaches the absolute material poverty of the average Thai village in which I would have to make my life.
On the other hand, as I thought about spending the next fifty years in a Thai village, I found myself thinking more about precisely what
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it is that I would lack (compared to my present life) that would cause me great pain. The more I thought about the question, the less likely it became that I would be unhappy.
Since I lacked any useful trade, maybe I could trade the Jeep for a few rai of land and become a farmer. Learning how to farm well enough to survive would occupy my time and attention for several years. After that, I might be able to improve my situation. One of the assets I would bring from my Western upbringing and schooling would be a haphazardly acquired understanding of cash crops, markets, and entrepreneurial possibilities, and perhaps I could parlay that, along with hard work, into some income and more land. It also was clear to me that I probably would enjoy this “career.” I am not saying I would choose it, but rather that I could find satisfaction in learning how to be a competent rice farmer, even though it was not for me the most desired of all possible careers.
What about my personal life? Thais are among the world’s most handsome and charming people, and it was easy to imagine falling in love with a woman from the village, marrying, and having a family with her. I could also anticipate the pleasure of watching my children grow up, probably at closer hand than I would in the United States. The children would not get the same education they would in the States, but I would have it within my power to see that they would be educated. A grade school is near every village. The priests in the local wat could teach them Buddhism. I could also become teacher to my children. A few basic textbooks in mathematics, science, and history; Plato and Shakespeare and the Bible; a dozen other well-chosen classics—all these could be acquired even in up-country Thailand. My children could reach adulthood literate, thoughtful, and civilized.
My children would do well in other ways too. They would grow up in a “positive peer culture,” as the experts say. Their Thai friends in the village would all be raised by their parents to be considerate, hardworking, pious, and honest—that’s the way Thai villagers raise their children. My children would face few of the corrupting influences to be found in an American city.
Other personal pleasures? I knew I would find it easy to make friends, and that some would become close. I would have other good times, too—celebrations on special occasions, but more often
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informal gatherings and jokes and conversation. If I read less, I would also read better. I would have great personal freedom as long as my behavior did not actively interfere with the lives of my neighbors (the tolerance for eccentric behavior in a Thai village is remarkably high). What about the physical condition of poverty? After a few months, I suspect that I would hardly notice.
You may conclude that the thought experiment is a transparent setup. First I ask what it would be like to be poor, then I proceed to outline a near-idyllic environment in which to be poor. I assume that I have a legacy of educational experiences that would help me spend my time getting steadily less poor. And then I announce that poverty isn’t so bad after all. But the point of the thought experiment is not to suggest that all kinds of poverty are tolerable, and even less that all peasant societies are pleasant places to live. When poverty means the inability to get enough food or shelter, it is every bit as bad as usually portrayed. When poverty means being forced to remain in that condition, with no way of improving one’s situation, it is as bad as portrayed. When poverty is conjoined with oppression, be it a caste system or a hacienda system or a people’s republic, it is as bad as portrayed. My thought experiment is not a paean to peasant life, but a paean to communities of free people. If poverty is defined in terms of money, everybody in the Thai village is poor. If poverty is defined as being unable to live a modest but decent existence, hardly anyone there is poor.
VERSION II: BEING MADE SUDDENLY POOR IN THE UNITED STATES
Does this thought experiment fail when it is transported to the United States? Imagine the same Thai village set down intact on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Surely its inhabitants must be miserable, living in their huts and watching the rest of the world live in splendor.
At this point in the argument, however, we need no longer think in terms of thought experiments. The situation I described is one that has been faced by hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the United States, whether they came from Europe at the end of World War II or from Vietnam in the mid-1970s. Lawyers found themselves working as janitors, professors found themselves working on assembly lines.
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Sometimes they followed the same process I just described, working their way up and out. Many had to remain janitors and factory workers, because they came to America too late in life to retool their foreign-trained skills. But their children did not have to remain so, and they have not. A reading of their histories, in literature or in the oral testimony of their children, corroborates the pattern I described. Was a Latvian attorney forced to flee his country “happy” to have to work as a janitor? No. Was he prevented by his situation—specifically, by his poverty—from successfully pursuing happiness? Emphatically, no.
Let us continue the thought experiment nonetheless, with a slightly different twist. This time, you are given a choice. One choice is to be poor in rural Thailand, as I have described it, with just enough food and shelter and a few hundred dollars a year in cash: a little beyond bare subsistence, but not much. Or you may live in the United States, receive a free apartment, free food, free medical care, and a cash grant, the package coming to a total that puts you well above the poverty line. There is, however, a catch: you are required to live in a particular apartment, and this apartment is located in a public housing project in one of the burned-out areas of the South Bronx. A condition of receiving the rest of the package is that you continue to live, and raise your children, in the South Bronx (you do not have the option of spending all of your waking hours in Manhattan, just as the village thought experiment did not give you the option of taking vacations in Bangkok). You still have all the assets you took to the Thai village—once again, it is essential that you not imagine what it is like for an Alabama sharecropper to be transplanted to the South Bronx, but what it would be like for you.
In some ways, you would have much more access to distractions. Unlike the situation in the Thai village, you would have television you could watch all day, taking you vicariously into other worlds (an inferior form of the experience machine). Or, for that matter, it would be much easier to get books than in a Thai village, and you would have much more money with which to buy them. You could, over time, fix up your apartment so that within its walls you would have an environment that looks and feels very like an apartment you could have elsewhere.
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There is only one problem: You would have a terrible time once you opened your door to the outside world. How, for example, are you going to raise your children in the South Bronx so that they grow up to be the adults you want them to be? (No, you don’t have the option of sending them to live elsewhere.) How are you going to take a walk in the park in the evening? There are many good people in the South Bronx with whom you could become friends, just as in the village. But how are you to find them? And once they are found, how are you to create a functioning, mutually reinforcing community?
I suggest that as you think of answers to those questions, you will find that, if you are to have much chance to be happy, the South Bronx needs to be changed in a way that the village did not—that, unlike the village as it stood, the South Bronx as it stands does not “work” as an environment for pursuing happiness. Let us ignore for the moment how these changes in environment could be brought about, by what combination of government’s “doing things” and “refraining from doing things.” The fact is that hardly any of those changes involve greater income for you personally, but rather changes in the surrounding environment. There is a question that crystallizes the roles of personal vs. environmental poverty in this situation: What is the dollar sum that would persuade you to move self and family to this public housing project in the South Bronx?
VERSION III: POVERTY AND YOUR OWN CHILDREN
The purpose of the first two versions of the thought experiment was to suggest a different perspective on one’s own priorities regarding the pursuit of happiness, and by extension to suggest that perhaps public policy ought to reflect a different set of priorities as well. It is easy in this case, however, to assume that what one wants for oneself is not applicable to others. Thus, for example, it could be said that the only reason the thought experiments work (if you grant even that much) is because the central character starts out with enormous advantages of knowledge and values—which in themselves reflect the advantages of having grown up with plenty of material resources.
To explore that possibility, I ask you to bear with me for one more thought experiment on this general topic, one I have found to be a
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touchstone.11 This time, the question is not what kinds of material resources you (with your fully developed set of advantages) need for your pursuit of happiness, but what a small child, without any developed assets at all, needs for his pursuit of happiness—specifically, what your own child needs.
Imagine that you are the parent of a small child, living in contemporary America, and in some way you are able to know that tomorrow you and your spouse will die and your child will be made an orphan. You do not have the option of sending the child to live with a friend or relative. You must choose among other and far-from-perfect choices. The choices, I assure you, are not veiled representations of anything else; the experiment is set up not to be realistic, but to evoke something about how you think.
Suppose first this choice: You may put your child with an extremely poor couple according to the official definition of “poor”—which is to say, poverty that is measured exclusively in money. This couple has so little money that your child’s clothes will often be secondhand and there will be not even small luxuries to brighten his life. Life will be a struggle, often a painful one. But you also know that the parents work hard, will make sure your child goes to school and studies, and will teach your child that integrity and responsibility are primary values. Or you may put your child with parents who will be as affectionate to your child as the first couple but who have never worked, are indifferent to your child’s education, who think that integrity and responsibility (when they think of them at all) are meaningless words—but who have and will always have plenty of food and good clothes and amenities, provided by others.
Which couple do you choose? The answer is obvious to me and I imagine to most readers: The first couple, of course. But if you are among those who choose the first couple, stop and consider what the answer means. This is your own child you are talking about, whom you would never let go hungry even if providing for your child meant going hungry yourself. And yet you are choosing years of privation for that same child. Why?
Perhaps I set up the thought experiment too starkly. Let us repeat it, adding some ambiguity. This time, the first choice is again the poor-but-virtuous couple just described. The second couple is rich. They
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are, we shall say, the heirs to a great fortune. They will not beat your child or in any other way maltreat him or her. We may even assume affection on their part, as we will with the other couples. But they have never worked and never will, are indifferent to your child’s education, and think that integrity and responsibility (when they think of them at all) are meaningless words. They do, however, possess millions of dollars, more than enough to last for the life of your child and of your child’s children. Now, in whose care do you place your child? The poor couple or the rich one?
This time, it seems likely that some people will choose the rich couple—or more accurately, it is possible to think of ways in which the decision might be tipped in that direction. For example, a wealthy person who is indifferent to a child’s education might nonetheless ship the child off to an expensive boarding school at the earliest possible age. In that case, it is conceivable that putting the child with the wealthy ne’er-do-wells is preferable to the poor-but-virtuous couple, if they end up providing the values of the poor family through the surrogate parenting provided by the boarding school—dubious, but conceivable. One may imagine other ways in which the money might be used to compensate for the inadequacies of the parents. But failing those very chancy possibilities, I suggest that a great many parents on all sides of political fences will knowingly choose hunger and rags for their child rather than wealth.
Again, the question is Why? What catastrophes are going to befall the child placed in the wealthy home? What is the awful fate? Would it be so terrible if he grew up to be thoughtlessly rich? The child will live a life of luxury and have enough money to buy himself out of almost any problem that might arise. Why not leave it at that? Or let me put the question positively: In deciding where to send the child, what is one trying to achieve by these calculations and predictions and hunches? What is the good one is trying to achieve? What is the criterion of success?
One may attach a variety of descriptors to the answer. Perhaps you want the child to become a reflective, responsible adult. To value honesty and integrity. To be able to identify sources of lasting satisfaction. Ultimately, if I keep pushing the question (Why is honesty good? Why is being reflective good?), you will give the answer that permits no
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follow-up: You want your child to be happy. You are trying to choose the guardians who will best enable your child to pursue happiness. And, forced to a choice, material resources come very low on your list of priorities.
Reprise: A Question of Priorities
We have begun with the most obvious of all the enabling conditions. How is policy to be arranged so that everyone has enough material resources to pursue happiness? Let me try to draw together the discussion in terms of the usual way of construing the problem, the problem reconstructed according to the pursuit-of-happiness criterion, and where this leaves us.
Construing Progress: The Usual Understanding. The contemporary intellectual basis for talking about public policy and material resources has been redistribution. Great inequalities in material resources exist. They are at the least morally suspect and, if they are morally permissible at all, must be justified.* A main function of public policy is to define a floor of material resources below which no one should be permitted to fall. The criteria for assessing public policy are the poverty line (progress consists of reducing the number of people who fall
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below it) and distribution (a widening gap between rich and poor is in itself seen as a problem, independently of other considerations).
One need not endorse the ethics of redistribution to be in favor of a redistributive solution to the problem of poverty, however. Probably everyone who is troubled by the problem of poverty in America has at one time or another thought something like this: “America is so rich that it can afford to give everyone a decent income. Let’s do it and be done with it: Guarantee an adequate material base, then let people work out the other goods they need to be happy as best they can. Maybe it’s not the ideal way, but at least I won’t have to worry about poverty anymore.” The underlying assumption in all such formulations, whether they are proposed enthusiastically from the left or reluctantly from the right, is that the way in which people provide for their material needs is more or less independent of the way in which they provide for their other needs.
Recasting the Role of Material Resources. In this chapter, I have limited the discussion to a narrow point: In deciding how to enhance the ability of people to pursue happiness, solutions that increase material resources beyond subsistence independently of other considerations are bound to fail. Money per se is not very important. It quickly becomes trivial. Depending on the other nonmonetary enabling conditions, poor people can have a rich assortment of ways of pursuing happiness, or affluent people can have very few.
The thought experiments and the farfetched scenarios of future general affluence were stratagems intended not to convince you of any particular policy implications, but rather to induce you to entertain this possibility: When a policy trade-off involves (for example) imposing material hardship in return for some other policy good, it is possible that imposing the material hardship is the right choice. For example, regarding the “orphaned child” scenario: If a policy leads to a society in which there are more of the first kind of parents and fewer of the second, the sacrifices in material resources available to the children involved might conceivably be worth it.
The discussion, with its steady use of the concept of “near-subsistence” as “enough material resources to pursue happiness,” has also been intended to point up how little our concept of poverty has
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to do with subsistence. Thus, for example, if one simply looks at the end result of how people live, a natural observation of contemporary America might be that we have large numbers of people who are living at a subsistence or sub-subsistence level. But I have been using “subsistence” in its original sense: enough food to be adequately nourished, plus the most basic shelter and clothing. The traditional Salvation Army shelter provides subsistence, for example. In Western countries, and perhaps especially the United States, two problems tend to confuse the issue. One is that we have forgotten what subsistence means, so that an apartment with cockroaches, broken windows, and graffiti on the walls may be thought of as barely “subsistence level,” even if it also has running water, electricity, heat, a television, and a pile of discarded fast-food cartons in the corner. It might be an awful place to live (for the reasons that the South Bronx can be an awful place to live), but it bears very little resemblance to what “subsistence” means to most of the world. Secondly, we tend to confuse the way in which some poor people use their resources (which indeed can often leave them in a near-subsistence state) with the raw purchasing power of the resources at their disposal. Take, for example, the apartment I just described and move a middle-class person with middle-class habits and knowledge into it, given exactly the same resources. Within days it would be still shabby but a different place. All of which is precisely the point of the thought experiments about Thailand and the South Bronx: Money has very little to do with living a poverty-stricken life. Similarly, “a subsistence income” has very little to do with what Americans think of as poverty.
That being the case, I am arguing that the job of designing good public policy must be reconstrued. We do not have the option of saying, “First we will provide for the material base, then worry about the other enabling conditions.” The enabling conditions interact. The ways in which people go about achieving safety, self-respect, and self-fulfillment in their lives are inextricably bound up with each other and with the way in which people go about providing for their material well-being. We do not have the option of doing one good thing at a time.
In the discussion of the enabling conditions, I have put material resources first on the list only because that is where it has stood in
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the political debate. I am suggesting that properly it should be put last. This stance still leaves us with the problem of making sure that the basic material resources for pursuing happiness are available to all. Warmth, shelter, and food are still essential. Under present social policy, large numbers of people are cold, unsheltered, and hungry. But before we decide how these basics are to be provided, let us examine the framework within which they should be provided if the other nutrients of happiness are to be available as well.
