I’ve been reading Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish on which quite a few bloggers have already commented. I agree with some of the points Clive makes and disagree, sometimes strongly, with others. I may do a full length review some time, but for the moment I’ll post a bit at a time.
I’ll start with a point of disagreement. Clive dismisses traditional social democratic concerns with absolute deprivation as being relevant, at most, to those in the bottom 10 per cent of the income distribution.
Taking food as the most basic necessity and the US as the developed country where social democracy has lost most ground, I looked for stats and found this briefing by the US Department of Agriculture. The key finding:
89.3 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout calendar year 2001. “Food secure” means they had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The rest (10.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, meaning that they did not always have access to enough food for active, healthy lives for all household members. In 3.3 percent of all households, one or more household members were hungry at least some time during the year. The remaining 7.4 percent obtained enough food to avoid hunger using a variety of coping strategies such as eating less-varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries.
The figure is close enough to Clive’s 10 per cent, but this is a one-year snapshot. Since people move into and out of poverty, it’s clear that the proportion of Americans who have problems feeding their families at some time in a given period of say, five years, is well above 10 per cent. And this is using a very tight definition of deprivation at a time when the US economy, though past the absolute peak in 2000, was still doing very well by the standards of the last two decades. I’d say that the traditional social democratic concern with poverty is not yet obsolete.
John Quiggin 
Food may not also be a good indicator of poverty in the US. The argument goes somewhere along the lines of the USG subsidises food alot, whereas the other main requirement of the poor, housing, is a much larger percentage of income than food. I believe the figure was around 40% of income was spent on housing, but don’t quote me on that. 🙂
I don’t agree with Hamilton either, but the US has got to be worst possible case of absolute poverty amongst developed countries, apart southern Europe.
I’ll bet a lot less than 10% of Australians don’t have food security.
The problem with poor Americans is not so much that they don’t have enough to eat but rather the quality of what they DO eat is often terrible.
Similar trends are starting to emerge in Australia.
Given that my own diet seems to consist of coffee, cigarettes and the occasional bundy, I perhaps should not be throwing stones in this direction, but it’s a point worth making.
You shouldn’t say “the” problem rather than “a” problem – for those with that other food shortage problem, THAT is “the” problem; saying “the” rules their issues off the agenda. Even if your formulation does indeed apply to a great many, it rules this problem out.
And I suspect that 10% figure may be accurate as so few Americans really do climb out of poverty – their social mobility is actually lower than is commonly supposed, particularly at the bottom. I doubt if the problem gets spread over a much larger group than the year by year figure.
My mother often commented on how much better off she was as a pensioner, than she had been when she and her husband were both working in the 40s. And she considered herself lucky in those same 40s, by comparison with many neighbours.
In Australia, we continue to redefine the word upwards. Even much of that which we now define as “poverty”, is self induced. Many have grown up with the attitude “society” owes them a life uncluttered by such insensitive impositions as working, or eating a non-McDonalds meal.
Unlike the bleeding hearts, I don’t miss the bleeding obvious, so I know there are genuine cases of non-self inflicted hardship. I also realise that much of the self induced “poverty” is a product of what society has instilled in the victims.
But unless we recognise what’s creating the sort of mentality in which dependence thrives, as the years go by, there’s going to be a steady [and not necessarily slow] increase in an underclass that WASN’T there in significant numbers in my youth.
PML, you’re right that US social mobility is much less than is often thought. This is particularly true of ‘long-range’ social mobility, e.g. from the bottom 20 per cent to the top 20 per cent or even the top half.
But there’s still a fair bit of short-range mobility, for example, into and out of the bottom 10 per cent, as people get and lose short-lived jobs. So I’ll stick with my claim that the proportion affected is well above 10 per cent.
Then it comes down to working out how to measure it (and also to deciding whether it’s material enough to be worth measuring – both 10% and much higher yield the same inferences).
I still don’t like the whole concept of “relative” poverty as such, as it is too hard to work with consistently though obviously it does have consequences and ramifications. I prefer to stick with something like the definition Jack London brought out: circumstances that harm the worker’s usefulness to him/herself and to others (including employers). I forget just which book it was in, maybe “the Iron Heel”.
Apart from the fact that the US is not Australia, was “food insecurity” imputed from an income survey? If so, disregard it – very low reported incomes in household surveys are always suspect (I’ve posted earlier about that on this blog). That’s why the usual headline-making measures of “poverty” in this country, based solely on self-reported incomes, are basically crap.
There are a host of conceptual and measuremnt problems with poverty. The problem seems to be that approaches which are conceptually sound (eg Sen’s capability approach) are almost impossible to operationalise, and approaches which are easy to operationalise are conceptually deeply confused. So the poverty “debate” generates far more heat than light – time we started talking of “opportunities” and “hardship” rather than using the p-word.
DD, there’s no imputation here. The survey asks direct questions about food security. I’ll try to upload the relevant file, but if you follow the link I gave you can get to this Q&A.
Q15. What questions are asked about food insecurity and hunger?
Food security status is assessed by a series of 18 questions that ask about behaviors and experiences
across a wide range of severity of food insecurity. For example, the least severe question asks
whether respondents worried that their food would run out before they got money to buy more. A
question at a somewhat more severe level asks whether they were unable to afford to eat balanced meals.
At midrange are questions on reducing food intake, such as whether adults in the household cut the size of
meals or skipped meals because there wasn?t enough money for food. Questions tapping the more severe
levels of food insecurity ask whether children skipped meals because there wasn?t enough money for
food, and whether adults did not eat for a whole day because there wasn?t enough money for food.
Q16. How are food-insecure households identified from these questions?
Households that answer yes to 3 or more of the 18 food security questions are classified as food insecure.
At a minimum, food-insecure households have affirmed all of the following three items or else items
indicating more severe conditions:
· They worried whether their food would run out before they got money to buy more.
· The food they bought didn?t last, and they didn?t have money to get more.
· They couldn?t afford to eat balanced meals.
I have read with interest the debate sparked by John Quiggin’s comment on my book “Growth Fetish”. In a way the debate just confirms my point. I argue in the book that the left has remained preoccupied with a social model of material deprivation that is hopelessly out of date. After several decades of sustained growth, the fact is that the great majority of citizens in Western countries live lives of abundance. Material deprivation is not the life-determining problem for most people (the sicknesses of affluence are), yet the constant talk of deprivation (“struggling families”, “Australians doing it tough out there”) reinforces the sense of deprivation that most people feel. In our report on overconsumption we found that nearly two thirds of Australians say they cannot afford to buy everything they really need, and half of those in the richest quintile report feeling this way. As long as this sense of imagined deprivation is pandered to, and the majority of people who want for nothing feel deprived, we will never, as a society, take seriously the genuine hardship of that small minority at the bottom. My estimate is that the minority varies from 5-15% among rich countries, with the US at the top, some northern European countries at the bottom and Australia in between. But the fact that the debate on the web became hung up on whether 10% is an accurate estimate makes my point. Only a progressive politics that begins with the fact of abundance in a post-scarcity world can connect with the concerns of ordinary people and become a force for social change. Such a post-growth politics can also take seriously the residual poverty that a growth-obsessed society so difficult. Attempting to reduce residual poverty is of course a moral imperative for any decent society, but the more we pursue a politics of deprivation the more we promote selfishness. After all, we are richer than we have ever been, yet our levels of foreign aid are lower than ever.
Nirvana
Ross Gittins has a typically excellent review of Clive Hamilton’s book Growth Fetish in today’s SMH. I blogged on aspects of the book dealing with happiness studies some time ago, as did other bloggers including John Quiggin here and here….