Yesterday Arts & Letters Daily linked to a New Yorker article suggesting that poverty is a relative, not absolute, condition. Which is to say, an attempted rebuttal of the “How poor can you really be if you own a car, a color TV and a microwave?” argument. While I think there’s some merit to this position, I have issues with several aspects of the article.

First, there’s the evidence provided to support this claim: the article cites a British study which found that mid-level civil servants die sooner than their bosses, research by Amartya Sen which found that Indians live longer than African-Americans despite being absolutely poorer, and animal studies suggesting that low-status monkeys are more stressed than their high-status counterparts.

Of course, you can’t directly compare the health or mortality of rich/high-status to that of poor/low-status people and animals; the rich and powerful typically eat better, smoke less, etc. In the case of the British study, the New Yorker article claims that a follow-up study demonstrated that “less than a third of the difference in patterns of disease and mortality can be ascribed to behavior associated with coronary risk, such as smoking or lack of exercise”, which would be a relatively easy thing to check with some regression. Straightforward as that sounds, though, it’s misleading. The one third only applies (assuming the paraphrase is accurate) to coronary risk, but what about other health risks that might correspond to poverty? For example, does the coronary risk associated with smoking also take into account the increased lung cancer risk? What about non-coronary nutritional issues? What about the increased environmental toxicity (and thus cancer risk) of low-income neighborhoods relative to their high income counterparts? What about the (presumable: I know virtually nothing about British health care other than that a lot of people I know say it sucks) lower access to preventative and emergency health care that poor people have? If volitional coronary risks account for one-third of the difference, mightn’t these other factors explain a good chunk of the remainder?

The above isn’t relevant in the case of African-Americans versus Indians, since in that case the richer group dies sooner. The article suggests that African-Americans are dying younger because, although they’re absolutely richer than the Indians they’re compared to, they’re poorer relative to the society that they live in. But the direct comparison is misleading here as well. Being richer in an absolute sense, African-Americans are more able to indulge in a number of activities that are bad for you but (in a global sense) quite expensive: Yes, I’m aware of the disjunction in simultaneously claiming that poor British people engage in more health-antagonistic activities than rich British people and that poor Indians might have healthier lifestyles than the (absolutely) richer African-Americans. But this is at least plausible if not definitively true: vice is, coarsely speaking, a luxury good and both the poor British and African-Americans are, on an absolute scale, quite wealthy and so likely to consume more vice than Indians who are poorer. So why don’t rich Brits consume even more vice? Because, as with many luxury goods, income inelasticity of demand isn’t constant; for the super-rich, vice (maybe) takes on more of the qualities of a normal or even inferior good. Plus, it has to compete with the whole health food/healthy lifestyle thing, which seems to follow a complementary trajectory. drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, a sedentary lifestyle and eating high-lipid foods, among others (only one such, recreational homicide, is addressed in the article). Dietary issues are of special interest, since the majority of people in Kerala (the region of India used for the comparison) are Hindus, meaning that vegetarianism was probably much more prevalent among the Indians in the study (especially since vegetarianism is particularly prevalent among South Indian Hindus) than among the Americans.

That’s not to say the argument that relative status is an important component of wealth (in the broad sense of that word) is completely dead: the animal studies cited are (presumably; I haven’t read them) compelling counter-evidence, as is the argument that you need more than color TV and microwaves to be able to navigate the modern job market. That being said, I also take issue with the statistic cited to cap this section of the article:

Research by Tom Hertz, an economist at American University, shows that a child whose parents are in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has only a six-per-cent chance of attaining an average yearly income in the top fifth. Most people who start out relatively poor stay relatively poor.

This is one of those statistics that sounds impressive but is, absent significant context, almost worthless. First, note the misdirection in the statement: by using “fifth” rather than percentages to describe the income levels, the above encourages a subconscious comparison of 6% to 100% rather than the 20% one would expect in a perfectly meritocratic society in which everyone had completely equal access to education and the job market (a.k.a. fantasyland). Also, counting the numbers of poor who make it to the top fifth is misleading in and of itself, since comparing top and bottom is guaranteed to give the least encouraging picture of income mobility; another measure might test what percentage of the children of the poor end up in poverty themselves: is it 20% (the utopian ideal)? 30%? 50%?

Anyway, these statistical quibbles aside, my more serious objections are to the “solutions” section of the article. The author suggests calculating poverty on a relative basis (set the poverty line at half the median income) rather than–as currently calculated–absolutely (the purported minimum necessary to afford food, clothing, housing, etc.). I don’t necessarily have a problem with that (other than to the extent that setting a poverty line is only relevant if you’re going to give tax-funded benefits to the poor), but his refutation of objections is weak. For example:

Many Americans are skeptical about government anti-poverty programs, because they believe that the impoverished bear some responsibility for their plight by dropping out of high school, taking drugs, or committing crimes. Raising public awareness about relative deprivation could help to change attitudes toward the poor, by showing how those at the bottom of the social hierarchy continue to face obstacles even as they, along with the rest of the society, become more prosperous. The Times recently reported that more than half of black men in inner cities fail to finish high school, and that, nationwide, almost three-quarters of black male high-school dropouts in their twenties are unemployed. “It doesn’t do a poor person any good to say ‘You are better off than you would have been thirty years ago,’ ” Fuchs said. “The pathologies we associate with poverty—crime, drug use, family disintegration—we haven’t eliminated them at all.”

It may just be me, but responding to the notion that many of the poor bear responsibility for their plight by saying that half of inner-city blacks drop out of high school and that three-quarters of those end up unemployed seems pretty non-sensical. I mean, if you drop out of high school despite the fact that three-quarters of the guys in your neighborhood who did the same are unemployed, then it seems to me that your probable future unemployment is, in large measure, your own fault. That’s not to say that a high school diploma (especially from an inner-city high school, where, based on my own limited experience, it seems like you only need a pulse and a willingness to get out of bed every morning to get a diploma) is a guarantee of employment, but neglecting to expend even that minimal amount of effort to make yourself employable seems to almost perfectly embody the responsibility argument that the author so casually dismisses.

Next paragraph:

The conservative case against a relative-poverty line asserts that since some people will always earn less than others the relative-poverty rate will never go down. Fortunately, this isn’t necessarily true. If incomes were distributed more equally, fewer families would earn less than half the median income. Therefore, the way to reduce relative poverty is to reduce income inequality—perhaps by increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes on the rich. Between 1979 and 2000, the inflation-adjusted earnings of the poorest fifth of Americans increased just nine per cent; the earnings of the middle fifth rose fifteen per cent; and the earnings of the top fifth climbed sixty-eight per cent.

The third sentence in the above is only partially true; really, only incomes below the median are relevant to the argument being advanced here. It’s easy to visualize a hypothetical income distribution with vast wealth differentials between the richest and the median, but with nobody earning below half the median: simply cluster the bottom half near the median.

With this picture in mind, it’s immediately apparent that raising taxes on the rich has absolutely no effect on poverty as defined in the article (other than insofar as those tax revenues on the one hand fund welfare programs and, on the other hand, reduce the ability of the rich to employ the poor). In fact, this definition of poverty makes an entirely different tax strategy orders of magnitude more effective: repeal all taxes on everybody who makes more than the median (since their income is irrelevant to what the median actually is) while aggressively taxing those who make between 50 and 100% of the median. Implement this tax regime and pretty soon there will be no poverty under the given definition (of course, as typically happens in such scenarios, the definition would be changed). Sound ludicrous? I guarantee that, if this new definition of poverty becomes the governmental standard, you’ll see more subtle implementations of similar strategies within five years.

But that’s not even the dumbest part of the sentence in which it’s suggested: that honor goes to the suggestion that raising the minimum wage would reduce relative poverty. It’s unbelievable to me that there still people who think raising the minimum wage helps the poor. Of course, some people still believe the earth is flat; what’s really unbelievable is that the belief that minimum wages are negatively correlated to poverty is a common, probably majority view. As pointed out by Matt MacIntosh on Wednesday, it’s common knowledge among economists that raising the minimum wage is bad for poor people. As with many economic truths, this is self-evident if you just think about it. If raising the minimum wage really helps the poor, why not just raise the minimum wage to, oh, $500/hour? In fact, mandating a “living wage” of, say, 50% of the median would, most likely, increase the number of households below that threshold.

Finally, a more general objection: while I do think there’s some merit to the idea that poverty is a relative (as opposed to purely absolute) phenomenon, the argument (especially in context of the dodginess of much of the supporting evidence and, especially, of the purported solutions) strikes me as superfluous (or, perhaps, self-aggrandizing) in much the way that modern Western feminists have made themselves largely superfluous. In both cases, a lesser domestic evil is being subjected to the minutest scrutiny while a greater global evil is largely ignored. After all, no matter how bad relative poverty is, absolute poverty still exists in the world and is unquestionably worse.