I saw recently a calculation that to be able to afford a two bedroom apartment required a wage of $15.80 an hour. In any event, I believe that the Feds assume 50% of a poor person's wage goes in Rent, while a third goes for food.
(So, it's perfectly understandable why people live in their cars.)
Contrasted with 500 years ago when a laborer probably got a free cottage from the local landowner and spent 29% of income for food (19% for the artisan). This was for a family and I rather think families were than a lot larger than they are now.
So, how do we find your "low income cut-off definition of poverty"?
If you give people money enough to have a better life, we raise the "threshold" where sensibly people find it better to take the goodies than work. You'll notice that I use "sensibly". That's because I know that "People seek to satisfy their desires with the least exertion". (Isn't scientific Classical Political Economy wonderful?)
So, when socialists concentrate on charity rather than justice, they are bound to lose. As "living wage" welfare raises the threshold, so do more join their ranks because it makes sense to do so.
However, as you know, I broaden the definition of poverty. And you somewhat agree with me. You said:
"And given our insecure times, who would want to take a month off without pay?"
But, hold it! We've just been through 10 years of boom times, where for most people things were rosy. Insecure times - surely not. Yet, we know, don't we, that the boom times were carried on the back of two wage-earners, lots of overtime, hideous commuting - and mounting debt.
I would suggest that "getting out of poverty" means being secure enough to take a month off if you want to. Hence, our high school definition of poverty.
At times, I really get fed up with modern "reformers". They campaign for a living wage, whatever that is, for full employment (whatever that is), then go off in tangents, such as advocating family leave for new parents (by golly, that's taking a month off, isn't it?)
Not to mention blaming the rich for everything, as Chris is wont to do - though he hotly denies it. Perhaps modern socialism, which used to be a significant philosophy, has dropped its philosophic underpinnings and kept the political propaganda.
None of us work for money. We work for bacon and eggs, clothes, furniture, and a place to live. So, if I am rich, how many bacon and eggs can I deprive you of, how many chairs can I forbid you to use? A friend of mine has an enormous house with 11 bathrooms. How many bathrooms are therefore taken away from the poor?
In her foyer is a very large painting by van Dyke with a hole in the canvas caused by a youngster's billiard cue. What philistines are the rich!
Yet, her damaged van Dyke doesn't keep me away from the Getty Museum, which is free. She probably eats fewer bacon and eggs than do I. How does she deprive me of food clothing and shelter? She has the largest private swimming pool in the country. I just had a small one in my garden, later taken out because nobody was using it. Was that somehow her fault?
I suppose the modern socialist would take from the her and buy eggs and bacon for the poor. In emergencies anything may be done. But to do such things as a economic and political policy seems to me to be somewhat degrading and patronizing.
But, then, I am not a socialist. I believe in a just society - not a charitable one.
So, we get around to those neither rich, nor poor. We are back to those who do not need a gift of bacon and eggs - the middle class. They are often doing well. They have nice houses, a decent car or two, pleasant furniture, and eat out often.
All resting on two breadwinners with full time jobs at which they may work perhaps 50 hours and more a week, with additional horrendous commuting hours giving them little time to spend with the children (if they can afford to have more than one) and perhaps not much of an annual vacation (a recent study indicated that Americans average 9 days of vacation a year).
And debt - ranging from the required mortgage to too much expensive insurance. That, to purchase a security they know they don't have - and still don't have after paying the premiums.
In a sense, we may compare these classes to the house slave and the field slave. The house slave enjoyed better conditions, became perhaps a status symbol, and (almost) a member of the family.
Yet, he was no less a slave than his brother in the fields.
The real big "reform" for the poor employed is the minimum wage - now up to $6.75 in California and obviously paid for by California consumers. Back in the Golden Age the wage law was called the Statute of Labourers. It was designed to put a lid on wages. (Thorold Rogers found instances in the books of real wages being erased and replaced with a fictitious lower wage. This, in case an inspector found the higher wage and punished the employer.)
Ed, we've come long way in 500 years. From a law designed to stop wages from rising, to a law that stops wages from falling.
Harry
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Ed wrote:
It does seem that extraordinary times follow disastrous periods. The best of times in the 20th Century, at least in Canada, followed WWII when there was lots of rebuilding to be done, government was expanding and labour was relatively scarce.
I'd have to think about your definition of poverty. It would, as you suggest, define a lot of people as poor or on the "edge". And given our insecure times, who would want to take a month off without pay? As well, it suggests a negative connotation to work, as implying that people would just love to be away from their work if they could do it, or that they would eagerly save whatever they could just so that they could do that. Those who could not, would feel thwarted. This could only happen under conditions of extreme labour scarcity, perhaps like your English golden age. But I don't know if that's how most people think about work. When I was working full time, I saw my paid vacation time as part of the contract I had made with my employer. I guaranteed him that I would return after my vacation, and even be on call, and he guaranteed that my job would be secure in my absense. Perhaps, though, I'm being of an older school here. During the recent high tech boom, it seemed there was a lot of jumping about from employer to employer, with very little loyalty shown either way.
Personally, I prefer a low income cut-off definition of poverty, which bears on the question of affordability: Can a family afford, even at a basic level, the kinds of things that comprise the components of a decent living by the standards of society? Can it pay for decent housing, food, clothing, recreation, etc., etc. If it can't do so at a minimum level, then it is poor and will likely need assistance.
Ed Weick
----- Original Message -----
From: Harry Pollard
To: Ed Weick
Cc: futurework
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2002 5:49 PM
Subject: Re: Very gentle reminder to Ed (was Re: community and money
Ed,
You've used that quote before, for which I am grateful. I copied it into my archive.
All countries have their ups and down, but this period of a few years at the end of the 15th century was a special case - which was why Rogers called it "The Golden Age of English Labor". It was the lonely high spot over the six centuries that he studies.
However, the point I was making was that people could have a good life with a high wage in spite of their primitive conditions, so how come all countries have a leavening of poverty in their rich economies? Of course it is hidden by welfare of all kinds, but it's still there. Yet it wasn't during the Golden Age. Rogers found instances of laborers taking a couple of months off.
You may recall the definition of poverty I use is my High School senior economics course. Poverty means you cannot take a month off from work without pay. This covers all the people who may apparently be doing well, but who are on the edge.
The Golden Age never came back.
Harry
_________________________________________________
Ed wrote:
>The point is that a half millennium ago, it was possible to have a pretty
good working life with high wages, so why isn't it possible now?
>So, there's my question for today.
>Harry
I agree, Harry, that time were good for workers in many parts of Europe for more than a century after the Black Death. The plague had wiped out a lot of people, one third or more of the population of Europe, and good labour remained scarce until population rebuilt itself. Rounds of plague recurred every so often, keeping population from rebounding quickly. After it had done so, things began to worsen again.
The following passage illustrates this for a region of France at the turn of the 18th Century:Before the last two centuries or so, ever so much depended on weather and climate, the incidence of diseases of various kinds, whether or not there were wars among princes or Viking (or Tatar or whatever) raids, and other such factors. The European world was not really very stable. This is off the top of my head, but I recall that conditions in the 12th Century were highly favourable, but things then turned miserable late in the 13th and very, very miserable in the 14th and then less miserable again and then quite favourable. Apart from people being miserable toward each other (always the case), they had no control over their natural circumstances. Nor did they have the technology that permitted them to store food from good to bad years or the distribution systems to move food to those in need.
- "There was a family in Beauvais in the parish of Saint Etienne in the year 1693 named Cocu: Jean Cocu, weaver of serges, and his wife with three daughters, all four spinning wool for him, since the youngest daughter was already nine years old. The family earned 108 sole a week, but they ate 70 pounds of bread between them. With bread up to � a sol a pound, their livelihood was secure. With bread at 1 sol a pound, it began to get difficult. With bread at 2 sols, then at 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 -- as it was in 1649, in 1652, in 1662, in 1694, in 1710 -- it was misery.
- Crisis in agriculture was nearly always intensified by crisis in manufacturing: it certainly was in 1698, so work began to fall off, then income. They went without; perhaps they were able to lay their hands on a coin or two saved for a rainy day; they pawned their things; they began to eat unwholesome food, bran bread, cooked nettles, mouldy cereals, entrails of animals picked up outside the slaughterhouses. The 'contagion manifested itself in various ways; after hunger came lassitude, starvation, 'pernicious and mortifying fevers. The family was registered at the Office of the Poor in December, 1698. In March, 1694, the youngest daughter died; in May the eldest daughter and the father. All that remained of a particularly fortunate family, fortunate because everyone in it worked, was a widow and an orphan. Because of the price of bread." (Goubert, Pierre (1960), Beauvais et les Beauvaisis de 1600 � 1730, Paris, quoted in Laslett, Peter, The World we have Lost, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1984, pp. 127-8)
All of which suggests that we should be very grateful to live in societies that do have the technology to smooth out food surpluses and shortages, that have learned to control major diseases, that, via fiscal and monetary policy, are able to exercise some control over the trade cycle, and that care enough about their citizens to initiate publicly funded programs in health, education, and welfare.
Regards,
Ed W.
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Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
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