Volume LV, No. 2
October, 2001
Surviving In A Material World
The Lived Experience of People in Poverty
Ronald Paul Hill, Ph.D.
IN THIS ISSUE
Business School professor Ronald Paul Hill examines six poverty subpopulations and their strategies for coping with consumer restriction in their daily lives. He also develops some strategies for poverty eradication in the 21st century.
When I began my career as a university professor in a management school, I made the decision to study consumption. This topic, of course, was quite vast. From the sociology of consuming to psychological perspectives of consumer decision making, researchers had developed a rich body of literature that helped business organizations understand the rational behind why people buy. Through the years, topics of inquiry included processing of information contained in commercial promotions, decision making in the face of a number of distinct alternatives/choices, utilization of goods and services once they are acquired, and dispossession of what remains after a product's useful life has been extinguished.
The underlying theme of most of this research is that there is too much. There is too much information to process efficiently and effectively, too many choices to evaluate, select from among, and use, and too much waste when we have finished consuming. Thus, the material lives that are chronicled within this research stream are of the fortunate ones within our global community whose relative affluence places them in the enviable position of meeting most of their needs on a regular basis.
While this perspective may be appropriate for many citizens within the United States, it fails to characterize a significant number of people here as well as abroad. Approximately thirteen percent of the population in this country lives in abject poverty, totaling about thirty-five million Americans. The poverty rate for children alone is even worse, with nearly one-in-five young people living in homes without adequate income or access to affordable rents, nutritious foods, and proper health care. Globally, the statistics are numbing—about one-third of the developing world, or 1.3 billion human beings, survive on less that the equivalent of one dollar a day. Many of these people are illiterate, lack safe drinking water, go to sleep hungry each night, and are unable to receive any health services.
The material lives of such individuals are markedly different than the more affluent population. Instead of abundance and too much, their existence is defined by restriction and too little. For example, the poor face significant income barriers and logistical problems that severely limit their ability to acquire a wide range of needed and desired goods and services. The consequences of these restrictions typically are negative, and may include separation and alienation from society, feelings of loss of control over important aspects of their lives, and poor mental and physical health. Nonetheless, the impoverished cope with these circumstances through a variety of emotional and behavioral strategies. From the perspective of a typical middle-class American these strategies may not make sense, but within the context of a restricted consumer existence, their use becomes easier to understand.
Over the course of the last decade, I have dedicated much of my research effort to answering the following question—How do the poor survive in our material world? I began this scholarly voyage of discovery by examining how the homeless who lived outside the social welfare system acquired and consumed basic commodities. From there I moved to an investigation of homeless women and their children who were dependent upon shelters for their lodging, food, and clothing. My next venue was poor children who were incarcerated for property crimes that they committed in order to feast at the material table presented to them by the media. The portrayals of welfare mothers advanced during the most recent round of welfare reform provided my next research direction, and I examined the extent to which the stereotypes advanced by both sides of the political spectrum represented the lived experience of such women and their children. Investigating the material existence of the rural poor was a natural subsequent step, and the focus of this study was on the provision of health care. The final context involved global poverty among indigenous people whose culture was disrupted and material lives shattered by European invaders.
Six Poverty Subpopulations
It is these six groups that are the focus of my book published recently by University of Notre Dame Press. Each chapter is organized similarly. It opens with a brief description of my scholarly research conducted with a particular subpopulation in order to give the reader grounding in empirical findings. The text then moves to a short story that employs internal dialogue and thick contextual description to provide a vivid portrait of the lived experience of a member of this group. The chapter closes with suggested readings that illuminate important aspects of the material lives of this subpopulation.
Chapter 2 chronicles the trials and tribulations of Jack, a man who recently became homeless. He spends his first night homeless in a municipal shelter but finds the experience threatening and demoralizing. He moves outside, living under a bridge on a landing until arsonists destroy his possessions, and then into a homeless community that resembles the shantytowns of the Great Depression. His final residence is an abandoned building that he shares discreetly with two other homeless men. Over time his vision of what constitutes a "home" evolves as he scales down his material goods to basic necessities. He does not thrive from the perspective of the dominant material culture, but he remains independent.
Chapter 3 describes Zoë and her family's experience of homelessness. After a difficult childhood, Zoë becomes pregnant for a second time and moves in with the father of her younger child. Unfortunately, his employer reduces his work status to part-time, and they must leave their modest home. After a series of stays with relatives, Zoë and her children are forced to live in a variety of shelters where many of their original possessions are lost and new ones are obtained. By the end of the story their circumstances have not improved, and they have run out of viable housing options. Zoë's emotional coping strategies are pushed to the breaking point.
Chapter 4 profiles the life of Fast Eddie, a late teen who lives in a poor community. Eddie grows up in an unstable environment where he is forced to move from one residence to another during his early childhood. His father is a distant and violent man who comes in and out of his life. His mother is warm and caring but submissive, and Eddie takes advantage of her nature as he matures into a teenager. Over time his relationship to material possessions goes from joyful anticipation to apathy to anger at his relative poverty. Eddie falls in with a fast crowd, and they eventually commit property crimes in order to gain access to the material world. He eventually is caught, punished, and returned to society. However, a lack of opportunity causes him to slowly drift back toward a life of crime.
Chapter 5 is about Anita and her children and their existence on welfare. Anita struggles as a child of a welfare mother and vows not to live that life. However, her existence takes a radical turn when she becomes pregnant as a teenager, quits school, and marries. The first few years of this union go smoothly and her family grows to five persons. Unfortunately, her husband's employer lays him off and the only viable option for a new job is out of town. He takes the position and works diligently but is fired after a physical confrontation with his boss, leaving Anita without much income. She eventually joins the welfare rolls only to find that the level of support is too low for her family to survive. Nonetheless, she copes by learning how to navigate the welfare system and even gets her high school diploma and some clerical training along the way. In the end she wonders whether her family can make it on their own without any external support.
Chapter 6 centers on Tammy and her mother and their lives in a former coal-mining town near the Appalachian Mountains. As a youngster, Tammy's family had most of what they needed to get by. However, by the time Tammy's own children were young adults, the mines closed permanently and the financial basis of the town collapsed. Jobs became scarce and supporting services within the town dried up. Tammy's mother eventually took ill and they were unable to get adequate medical attention within a reasonable distance from their home. Alternative care from medical professionals who operated a mobile health unit eventually provided aid that was grounded in the community spirit of these rural people.
Chapter 7 examines the world of Mary and her maternal ancestors, Aboriginal people who lived most of their lives in a remote region of the Australian Outback. Mary rebels against her cultural heritage and marries a white man in order to partake in the material world that exists outside of her homeland. However, over time Mary realizes the importance of her identity as an Aborigine, and she returns home to live among her people following the death of her mother. She works tirelessly to bring cultural renewal to them and to seek Aboriginal ways of living in a white society. The community experiences many successes but the long-term survival of their ancient way of life remains in doubt.
Surviving in a Material World
Taken together, the short stories contained in this volume provide a vivid portrait of what it is like to survive in our material world. For example, there are several instances of individuals and families who were unable to meet their most fundamental material needs. Both Jack and Zoë eventually were without adequate shelter after exhausting doubling up opportunities with family and friends. Jack ultimately ended up living in an abandoned building, and Zoë and her family eventually lived in a private shelter run by a Catholic religious community. Additionally, Zoë and Anita faced difficulties providing healthful foodstuffs to their families. As a result they often relied on less nutritious alternatives such as fast food and inexpensive substitutes such as Kool-Aide. Finally, Tammy and her mother were unable to locate appropriate medical care within a reasonable distance of their town. Instead they had to travel several hours over treacherous mountain roads to have their critical needs met.
All of the individuals whose lives are chronicled in these stories faced social deprivation and/or exclusion from the decisions that impacted their existences. Consider Jack and Mary. Because of Jack's physical appearance and mannerisms and the color of Mary's skin and her Aboriginal heritage, most of the people they came in contact within the primary white culture avoided, ignored, or disparaged them. Eddie and Anita's children found that the bright light of their childhood was extinguished when they were deprived of the material abundance displayed by the media. Finally, Zoë, Anita, and Tammy regularly interacted with private and public service personnel who sought little or no input when these persons made decisions that dramatically affected their material lives.
Nonetheless, despite these adversities the focal characters in these stories persevered. While they lacked economic and cultural capital that might have translated into power, prestige, and affluence, they sought out social capital in the form of community that ultimately provided a source of strength and resilience. For example, Mary worked within her aboriginal reserve to instill pride in their ancient culture and to find traditional ways of life that allowed them to become more independent and self-reliant. Both Tammy and Anita sought leadership roles within their local church groups in order to marshal the limited resources of their town or neighborhood in support of those in need. Even Jack was able to improve his housing arrangement by living with or near other homeless people. In fact, the lack of community support and the opportunities it provides left Zoë and her children with no place to live and Eddie without an alternative to a life of crime.
Poverty Eradication in the 21st Century
Beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, freedom from poverty and its negative repercussions acquired the status of a basic human right along side civil and political rights. Over the last two decades several additional global pronouncements have advanced this cause, with special attention given to vulnerable groups such as women and children. Culminating in the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development in 1995, which posited that a post-Cold War society should make the eradication of poverty a priority, 1996 was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty and the period 1997-2006 as the United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty.
Such political pronouncements follow ethical imperatives advanced by leading scholars such as John Rawls of Harvard University. His theory of distributive justice, titled Justice as Fairness, is based on the belief that social and economic inequalities are just only if they are to the advantage of all members of society, especially the least advantaged or the poor. However, in a world where the richest twenty-percent in the global economy control eighty-six percent of the wealth while the poorest twenty-percent control little more than one percent, the situation clearly is unjust. In fact, the ratio of the incomes of the richest twenty-percent to the poorest twenty-percent has increased from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 78 to 1 by the mid-1990s, demonstrating that injustice is on the rise.
While this volume does not explicitly discuss poverty as a human rights violation, it should be clear that the focal characters in these stories, as well as their families and their communities, face restrictions that unnecessarily reduce the quality of their lives. These restrictions suggest the potential violation of economic and social rights including:
· The right to basic goods and services
· The right to human dignity and self-respect
· The right to participate in a meaningful way
· The right to a living wage
· The right to a positive future.
The right to security in the provision of basic goods and services is fundamental to all other rights because without their availability a person is consumed with the need to acquire them. For example, consider the amount of energy and time that went into seeking or constructing basic shelter by Zoë and Jack, or the activity by Tammy to get a proper diagnosis and treatment of her mother's illness. The subpopulations of people who informed these short stories use a much greater portion of their day in search of essential commodities than their middle-class counterparts. Societies and governments typically agree on little when it comes to the poor, but it is time that the world community set a universal standard for the unconditional provision of food, shelter, health care, and clothing to all human beings.
Once these basic needs are met and their future provision is secure, attention can turn to the right to human dignity and self-respect. All people should be afforded a minimum of status by virtue of their membership in the human family without regard to color, gender, location, or income level. As a global society, we need to promote public understanding of the complexity, diversity, and difficulty of the material lives of the impoverished as well as their tenacity in solving their own problems. Internal empowerment, through community-based organizations and methods that raise awareness among the impoverished of their resource strengths and weaknesses, can help them cope with their life circumstances and learn how to work effectively together. The stories involving Anita and Tammy provide good examples of internal empowerment, especially among groups of women.
The right to participate in society in a meaningful way follows quickly on the heels of the previous right. Both Jack and Mary became so alienated from the primary culture that they dropped out and found alternative living styles. Anita ended up so frustrated with the social welfare system and its lack of flexibility or concern for how well it served her family's needs that she eventually subverted the system in order to survive. If our society eventually understands the true material existence of the poor, we may begin to recognize the provision of a basic package of goods and services as a public entitlement rather than a public nuisance. Regardless, poverty communities need to evolve their sources of internal empowerment for external use in order to influence their public persona and gain the political clout necessary to direct their futures.
The right to a living wage requires that governments, working together with private industry, establish a package of pay and benefits for full-time workers at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum that allows a family to meet its primary consumer needs. Such a package is essential given the recent reform movement of welfare-to-work that impacts the lives of millions of families. As the story of Anita suggests, their ability to leave successfully the social welfare system requires an acceptable occupation to take its place. Our experience following recent increases in the minimum wage in this country have proved that pessimistic outlooks predicting job losses were wrong. In truth, a healthy global economy with increasing productivity has considerable room to expand wage rates at the lower end. A set of services deemed necessary to long-term success such as medical and childcare benefits should round out this package.
The right to a positive future completes the list and ensures that current poverty conditions are no longer a self-fulfilling prophesy for the future. As our information and technology-based economy replaces the unionized jobs held by people such as the men in the lives of Zoë, Anita, and Tammy, our society needs to make sure that the least advantaged are not left behind. Community-based programs that involve continuous training and lifetime learning among adults may provide the leg up necessary to rise out of poverty or avoid it all together. Such programs could be attached to the local schools where teachers and administrators accept a broader perspective of the constituency they serve. Of course, success depends upon parity of the school systems in impoverished neighborhoods with more affluent areas so that the next generation has the educational skills necessary to compete successfully for college placement or positions in the job market.
Closing Thoughts
While the reader may endorse some or all of these rights, their provision might appear prohibitively expensive, especially on a worldwide basis. However, in a global economy of approximately $25 trillion, the financial resources necessary to eliminate poverty currently exist. The United Nations estimates the price tag to provide universal access to essential goods and services (e.g., health care, nutrition, safe drinking water, and education) and to provide monetary transfers to abolish income poverty is $80 billion annually. This amount is less than .5 percent of the world's income or the net worth of the seven richest men on the planet.
One proposal to help pay for meeting the goal of poverty eradication in the 21st century is the 20:20 Initiative. First advanced by the United Nations Development Programme in their Human Development Report 1992 and endorsed by the World Summit in Copenhagen three years later, this proposal recommends that governments allocate twenty percent of their budgets to funding a baseline package of goods and services for all citizens. The same proposal asks that donor countries dedicate an equivalent percentage of their aid budgets to the provision of universal coverage, regardless of their political agendas.
Nonetheless, money alone will not be enough. A universal standard of living may prolong the lives of the impoverished, but it does not guarantee a better quality of life. In a world where the poor are segregated from mainstream society, vilified or misrepresented by politicians, and ignored or mistreated by those who control the provision of basic goods and services, their lives will continue to be characterized by humiliation, alienation, anxiety, and rage. I hope these stories help us to go beyond the negative stereotypes that portray the poor as unworthy of our respect or support. In the final analysis, when we remove our middle-class lenses of affluence and opportunity and replace them with lenses of poverty and restriction, our understanding of how and why people become and/or remain impoverished is forever changed.
About the Author
Ronald Paul Hill is the (Rev.) John B. Delaunay, C.S.C. Professor of Social Responsibility, Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. School of Business Administration, University of Portland. His research focuses on a variety of poverty subpopulations and their strategies for coping with consumer restriction in their daily lives. This article is based largely on his scholarly work, and the short stories described are published in a volume titled Surviving in a Material World: The Lived Experience of People in Poverty by University of Notre Dame Press.
