Poverty May Be Good for You

Ignorance, lack of specialized training, discrimination and substandard wages are the reasons usually cited for the persistence of poverty in the affluent U.S. But Sociologist Herbert J. Gans of M.I.T. believes that there is a more subtle underlying cause for the substandard living conditions of millions of Americans. Poverty, Gans says, continues to exist because it performs useful functions for many members of society.

Writing for the July-August issue of Social Policy, Gans lists more than a dozen economic, social and political uses of poverty. One of the most important is the job market that it creates for penologists, criminologists, social workers, public health workers, crusading journalists and OEO paraprofessionals. In other words, Gans suggests, many people who are presumably fighting poverty actually profit from it. Besides, the poor "support medical innovation" as patients in teaching and research hospitals, and they constitute "a labor pool that is willing--or, rather, unable to be unwilling--to perform dirty work at low cost." Poor people "prolong the economic usefulness" of day-old bread, secondhand clothes and cars and deteriorated buildings; they also provide income for incompetent doctors, lawyers and teachers who might otherwise be an economic drain on society.

Among the social functions performed by poverty, says Gans, is the guarantee of status to the nonpoor. The working class needs the poor to look down on; the aristocracy, by busying itself with settlement houses and charity balls, justifies its existence and proves its superiority to workers who grub for money. Beyond that, the poor "offer vicarious participation to the rest of the population in the uninhibited sexual, alcoholic and narcotic behavior in which they are alleged to participate." They have a cultural role too: Americans have taken over much music that was born in the slums, and poetry by ghetto children is fawned over in literary circles. Politically, the poor provide votes for liberal candidates, but they are also used by conservatives for making liberalism look unattractive--as it does if its chief beneficiaries can be described convincingly, even if wrongly, as "lazy, spendthrift, dishonest and promiscuous."

Despite his novel theory, Gans does not consider poverty a permanent fixture of society. It will last, he believes, only until alternatives are found. What are those alternatives? Gans suggests that social workers could counsel the rich; policemen could concentrate on traffic and organized crime; entertainers, hippies and adolescents could be given a bigger scapegoat role than they already have. But most solutions--like paying menial workers higher wages --would cause the affluent both fiscal and psychological pain. As a result, Gans concludes, poverty may disappear only "when the powerless can obtain enough power to change society."

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