In today’s New York Times Angus Deaton takes note of genuine poverty in the United States:
Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.
Properly interpreted, the numbers suggest that the United Nations has a point — and the United States has an urgent problem. They also suggest that we might rethink how we assist the poor through our own giving.
According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).
This is a subject about which I’ve written before. You’ve got to dig through the article a bit but most of the genuinely poor are people living on Indian reservations, rural blacks, particularly in the Mississippi delta, and rural whites, particularly in Appalachia. Most of those who are thought of as the poor, the urban poor, are only relatively poor. They aren’t subsisting on the grind, absolute poverty you see in the place noted above.
These are the people most in need of help and most deserving of our charity and concern. We’ll never reach them using the tools we’re presently applying like Medicaid, HUD housing assistance programs, TANF, or WIC. Those programs do the most good for the urban poor.
