Territories of Poverty

Rethinking North and South

Deborah Cowen, Nik Heynen, Melissa Wright, Ananya Roy, Emma Shaw Crane

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780820348445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Territories of Poverty challenges the conventional North-South geographies through which poverty scholarship is organized. Staging theoretical interventions that traverse social histories of the American welfare state and critical ethnographies of international development regimes, these essays confront how poverty is constituted as a problem. In the process, the book analyzes bureaucracies of poverty, poor people's movements, and global networks of poverty expertise, as well as more intimate modes of poverty action such as volunteerism. From post-Katrina New Orleans to Korean church missions in Africa, this book is fundamentally concerned with how poverty is territorialized.

In contrast to studies concerned with locations of poverty, Territories of Poverty engages with spatial technologies of power, be they community development and counterinsurgency during the American 1960s or the unceasing anticipation of war in Beirut. Within this territorial matrix, contributors uncover dissent, rupture, and mobilization. This book helps us understand the regulation of poverty—whether by globally circulating models of fast policy or vast webs of mobile money or philanthrocapitalist foundations—as multiple terrains of struggle for justice and social transformation.

Section 1

Programs of Government

We understand poverty programs—from welfare in the North Atlantic to development projects in the global South—as political technologies that act both to problematize poverty and to govern the poor. Charting an analytical shift from thinking about spaces of poverty, bounded and bordered (a neighborhood or a village or a slum), to territories of poverty, we pay particular attention to how we know poverty. In tracing genealogies of poverty knowledge, this section seeks to situate ways of knowing and acting upon poverty in historically specific forms of political organization. In doing so, these chapters and essays interrogate how authoritative poverty knowledges are produced, and how they travel and transform across the reconfigured geographies of millennial development.

ESC

What Kind of a Problem Is Poverty? The Archeology of an Idea

MICHAEL B. KATZ

Lilian Brandt Explains the Causes of Poverty

In the early twentieth century, no one wrote about poverty with more authority and insight than Lilian Brandt. Born in Indianapolis in 1873, Brandt followed her 1895 graduation from Wellesley College with a stint teaching history and classical languages at various colleges before returning to Wellesley, where she earned her master’s degree in economics and history in 1901 with a thesis, “The Negroes of St. Louis: A Statistical Study.” Her return marked a career shift from the humanities to practical social science and social reform, which in the summer of 1902 brought her to the New York Charity Organization Society’s Summer School of Philanthropy, the precursor of Columbia University’s School of Social Work. Her talent for statistical analysis led Edward T. Devine, president of the Charity Organization Society, to appoint her secretary of the organization’s Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1902. From 1902 to 1904, she served as the statistician to the COS’s Committee on the Prevention of Tuberculosis, a position that forced her into intimate contact with the poverty with which the disease was closely correlated. In 1905 she became secretary of the COS Committee on Social Research and a member of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections Committee on Statistics. In 1907 she authored the remarkable twenty-fifth-anniversary history of the Charity Organization Society. She also worked as Devine’s research assistant, analyzing the five thousand cases on which he based his 1909 Kennedy lectures at the School of Philanthropy, subsequently published as Misery and Its Causes (Devine 1911: ix). Brandt continued in a distinguished career in social research until her death in 1951.¹

In the December 1908 issue of Political Science Quarterly, Brandt published one of the first articles on poverty in an academic journal. “The Causes of Poverty” (Brandt 1908) offered a devastating critique of experts’ analyses of poverty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Her criticism drew on the emerging revolution in social science that was transforming both the causal analysis of social problems and the practical work of social amelioration. The article is worth sustained attention because it reveals assumptions that underlie enduring differences in explanations of poverty, the consequences of different theoretical orientations, and the emergence of an aborted progressive program as relevant today as when it was formulated a century ago.

Brandt (1908: 637) began by highlighting a “new view of poverty—that it not only is not desirable and not inevitable, but is actually unnatural and intolerable and has no legitimate place on our diagram of social conditions.” Following up this insight “involves logically an inquiry into the reasons for the existence of poverty, but as a matter of experience this step seems to be omitted” because reformers wanted to jump straight to the attack. However, to grasp “how . . . poverty may be diminished and prevented . . . we are again driven to hunt for its causes” (Brandt 1908: 637). This is why she wrote her article.

Brandt damned the prevailing individual-centered approach to studying poverty. Her critique reflected the emergence of new forms of causal attribution throughout the social sciences that replaced single-factor explanations with a much more sophisticated understanding of the multiple, interacting factors producing social problems like poverty (Haskell 1977). The individual-centered, single-cause “method consists in studying a large number of individual cases of poverty, indicating in each case what is considered to be the cause, then adding up the number of cases ascribed to each cause and finding what proportion they form of the number of cases studied” (Brandt 1908: 638). Some researchers refined the method by differentiating between “principal” and “subsidiary” causes, and one expert ranked them on a scale of one to ten in importance. Practical weaknesses undermined this method because charity investigators reporting on individual cases or coding case histories varied wildly in their assessment of causation. The assumptions on which the method rested—“(1) that in every case of poverty there is one chief or principal cause, and (2) that this cause will readily be recognized by the person who is told to find it” (Brandt 1908: 638)—were anything but scientific and, in fact, both a theoretical and practical dead end.

The first attempt by the National Conference of Charities and Corrections to classify the causes of poverty, Brandt points out, consisted of twenty-two items held together by no theory and focused mainly on individuals and families. In 1899 dissatisfaction with the list led to a revision dividing items into “causes within the family” and “causes outside the family” (Brandt 1908: 642). In the nine years between the revision and her article, Brandt observed, the causes in the first group generally were moved into the second. Poverty had become less an internal problem—a problem of persons—and more a problem of conditions—a problem of place and, to the most acute students, political economy. “Behind ‘intemperance,’” for instance, “we see poor food, congested living, lack of opportunities for wholesome recreation and the power of the liquor trust” (Brandt 1908: 642). Rather than “‘licentiousness, dishonesty, and other moral defects,’” students of poverty now emphasized “ineffectual penal methods and, again, defective education, and, again, unwholesome conditions of modern city life” (Brandt 1908: 643).

Older explanations of poverty missed the symptoms for the causes: “In short, the recognized causes of poverty are . . . largely symptoms or results of poverty” (Brandt 1908: 643). To be sure, they produce poverty, but they are not its “‘underlying’ causes.” Even the most sacrosanct tenet of nineteenth-century scientific charity embodied in the work and advocacy of the Charity Organization Society crumbled under the weight of the new understanding. The notion that overly generous and unsystematic relief bred dependence and deeper poverty proved shallow: “If we were now to pick out a family whose dependence is due to the unwise administration of relief, we should be apt to select a widow broken down by over-exertion in supporting her children because we had not been generous enough in our help” (Brandt 1908: 644). Brandt (1908: 649) also pointed astutely to the prolonged dependence of children and the aged—the intersection of demography and political economy—to underscore the intensification of modern poverty: “Both of these periods during which dependence is the normal state, are lengthening at the expense of the working period.” Children started to work at a later age, and older workers left the workforce earlier and lived longer: “Until wages have fully responded by an increase that will enable the average man not only to support his children for a longer time, but also to provide in a shorter working period for a longer old age, or until the effective working period has been materially lengthened, this adverse condition will persist. In it we find the reason why the problem of old-age pensions has become acute; from it comes much of the misery which gives point to radical socialistic proposals” (Brandt 1908: 649).

In fact, Brandt (1908: 644) observed, in the last two or three years the heretical idea that “poorly paid employment” constituted one of the prime causes of poverty had taken root among some researchers: “And we are coming, therefore, to think of ‘insufficient income,” when it means inadequate compensation, not as a joke, but as one of the authentic causes of dependence.” In the end, most poverty, Brandt (1908: 644) concluded, resulted from “some form of exploitation or . . . some defect in governmental efficiency.” Poverty, in short, was at heart a problem of political economy: exploitation without, in modern terms, an adequate safety net. To be sure, some “natural depravity” and “moral defects” resulted in dependence, but they “may not be large enough to constitute a serious problem” (Brandt 1908: 645)

Knowing the causes of poverty, Brandt (1908: 645) asserted, held value in two ways: “It is equally important in helping the individual family that needs assistance and in planning movements for the improvement of social conditions.” Recent antipoverty efforts left Brandt optimistic—she cited the emergence of a successful “social movement” to conquer tuberculosis and its impact on families and communities and the successful campaigns against child labor—as evidence that something less than an attack on ancient underlying causes would ameliorate the poverty of individuals: “The existing conditions are what we have to deal with, and our practice has been to deal with them more hopefully than our theories would warrant. The results have justified the hopefulness; and a new theory is now emerging, namely that there is in human nature recuperative power of such strength that the removal of the existing visible effects of the ‘underlying causes’ will do almost as well, as far as the individual case is concerned, as the removal of the causes themselves; or, in other words, that poverty is itself one of the most potent causes of poverty and one of those most responsive to treatment” (1908: 647). Brandt cited with approval George Bernard Shaw’s observation “that the whole trouble with the poor was their poverty, and that this could be made all right by dividing among them the money contributed for charity without any intermediate waste in salaries” (1908: 647). Poverty, in other words, was at root a problem of resources; what made people poor was a lack of money—a simple insight never wholly absent from poverty talk but submerged, rarely able to gain traction in mainstream policy. Poverty, however, was very much also a product of place: “Even in normal times there are adverse conditions in every American city. There are insanitary houses, over-crowded apartments, ill-ventilated factories, germ-laden dust in the streets and germ-laden water in the mains” (Brandt 1908: 650).

Poverty did not appear only in hard times. Rather, it resulted from the routine operation of the political economy: “Little children are in glass-works or selling papers, when they should be in school or in bed. Men and women are working over-long hours in disease-breeding surroundings . . . Men are exploiting, for their own profit, the weaknesses of their fellows, both as employees and consumers” (1908: 650). The study of poverty, therefore, “need not wait for hard times or times of great calamity, but may proceed at all times, under the most favorable conditions yet known in any community” (Brandt 1908: 650–51).

Brandt had contradicted herself, or at least backed into an inconsistency. She had started by arguing that the essential precondition for ameliorating poverty lay in grasping its deep causes, and she criticized the theoretical weakness of existing causal models that inhibited their practical effectiveness. By the end of her article, however, she had retreated. Some mechanisms for reducing poverty were well known. They could be applied with success even in the absence of a developed theory of poverty’s underlying causes. Reformers should place their efforts on what worked. She was, of course, right on both counts. Understanding the deep causes of poverty remains essential to the development of coherent antipoverty programs. But some things just work, and they should not be dismissed or overlooked because they do not result from theory. This inconsistency has bedeviled every practically minded reformer who harbors an appreciation of theory.

In the last analysis, Brandt (1908: 651) considered her article less a contribution to theory than a call to action, a plea for evidence-based application of the known levers of poverty alleviation, even when they elided its fundamental causes: “In the language of current philosophical discussion, pragmatism affords our best working program.” Nonetheless, Brandt had contributed to theory by implicitly laying out most—although not quite all—of the definitions of poverty that have reverberated during the century since she wrote.

Let us step back, then, and ask what answers to the question—what kind of a problem is poverty?—emerge from Brandt’s article and which ones are missing.

What kind of a problem is poverty? The literature on poverty gives six answers. Certainly, there is overlap among them, but each can be teased out of the record to stand on its own. Brandt identified the first four. What they give us is not just a historical taxonomy but an archeology—a progressive discovery of the layers of meaning in poverty discourse.

• Persons. Poverty is the outcome of the failings of individuals or families.

• Places. Poverty results from toxic conditions within geographic spaces.

• Resources. Poverty is the absence of money and other key resources.

• Political economy. Poverty is the by-product of capitalist economies.

• Power. Poverty is a consequence of political powerlessness.

• Markets. Poverty reflects the absence of functioning markets or the failure to use the potential of markets to improve individual lives.

How one bundles these answers carries consequences because, as Brandt realized, they lead straight to what one does, or tries to do, about poverty. In the rest of this essay, I will expand briefly on each of these answers, pointing out their origins and trajectories and their implications for the present moment. My examples will come mainly from U.S. history because that is what I know best. However, I am well aware that these definitions of poverty are international in their scope and that the interplay between the international and domestic constitutes one of the most promising and important areas for poverty research and theory.

Persons

The idea that poverty results from personal inadequacy has dominated the history of poverty for more than two centuries. Before the twentieth century, the idea that poverty is a problem of persons—whether deserving or undeserving—remained intertwined with the biblical idea that poverty is always with us. With production limited and population pressing on resources, poverty appeared in-grained within the human condition (D. Fox 1967: 88). When this fatalistic idea of poverty as a result of universal scarcity began to crumble in the early twentieth century under Progressive Era economists’ “discovery of abundance,” a wholly new dilemma emerged. If poverty was unnecessary, then what accounted for its stubborn persistence? Why were so many people poor? The most straightforward answer unbundled the two strands: scarcity and individual deficiency. With scarcity off the table, individual failings marked persons as all the more undeserving in a world of possibility where poverty was unnecessary. This idea—we might call it the irony of optimism—carved a hard edge of inferiority into ideas about poor people. That is one reason why the idea that poverty as a problem of persons persists with such tenacity, despite whatever evidence social scientists produce. The idea is so ubiquitous that there is no need to belabor its march through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or its role in keeping poverty off the political agenda during the Great Recession.

The idea of poverty as a problem of persons comes in both hard and soft versions. The soft version portrays poverty as the result of laziness, immoral behavior, inadequate skills, and dysfunctional families. The hard version views poverty as the result of inherited deficiencies that limit intellectual potential, trigger harmful and immoral behavior, and circumscribe economic achievement. The soft view, which is the older of the two, holds out the possibility of individual escape from poverty. In America the primary antipoverty mechanism supported by the soft side has been education in one form or another. The hard side burst onto the policy scene in the 1860s to explain institutional failure. Its pessimistic implications fixated on containing and managing dependence at the least possible cost. Neither the soft nor hard side resulted in much sympathy for poor persons other than children, widows, and a few others whose lack of responsibility for their condition could not be denied. These were the deserving poor. Today they are most often referred to as the working poor, and in recent years they have elicited sympathy and support from public programs. The others have been thought to have brought their poverty on themselves; they are the undeserving poor.

In one form of another, this distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor has dominated discussions of poverty for more than two hundred years, but the identity of the undeserving poor, constructed by time and circumstance, has varied. In the late ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Why Territories of Poverty Now?
• Introduction: The Aporias of Poverty
• Section 1 Programs of Government
• Section 2 The Ethics of Encounter
• Section 3 Geographies of Penality and Risk
• Conclusion: Theory Should Ride the Bus
• Contributors
• Index