“It does seem to me, being the wealthiest country in the world, shameful that we have people who don’t have enough to eat in this country,” said history and psychology teacher Jim Smith. “You see the great abundance of our society, and the fact that there are so many people who go to bed hungry is unconscionable.
“I think of Julius Nyerere, who was the president of Tanzania. He said that a society should not be judged by how many millionaires or how much wealth they generate, but how they take care of the most dispossessed, the most disadvantaged of society. And if that’s how we’re being judged, I don’t think we’re doing very well.”
Smith’s view is one shared by many others; the United States boasts the world’s largest GDP (gross domestic product), yet has a population of impoverished persons large enough to populate Argentina.
This begs the question, “What is the state of poverty in the United States?”
Historical Perspective
Arguably, the most significant initiative to address the issue of poverty arose during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Economics correspondent Chris Farrell reports in the American RadioWorks documentary “War on Poverty: From the Great Society to the Great Recession”: “Back in the 1930’s, President Franklin Roosevelt created big programs like social security, public housing and unemployment insurance. He called it a ‘new deal’ for average Americans who lived on the edge of poverty because of the Great Depression. Those New Deal programs were aimed mostly at middle-class Americans.”
The poverty in America has improved, statistically speaking, since the middle of the 20th century. According to the National Poverty Center, the poverty rate stood at 22.4 percent in the late 1950’s, dropped to a low of 11.1 percent from the 60’s to the 70’s, and rose to 15.2 percent throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Today, according to the 2009 American Community Survey released by the US Census Bureau, the national poverty rate stands at 14.3 percent, representing 42.9 million Americans.
Quantifying Public Awareness
Martin Ravallion of the World Bank recently published a column discussing humanity’s “awareness of poverty over the past three centuries” using a curious method of evaluation: the number of references to the word ‘poverty’ in books published since 1700. His analysis reveals that there were two instances of a “Poverty Enlightenment”. One of took place between the years of 1740 and 1790 while the other began around the 1960 and has exhibited a relatively consistent upward trend through 2000.
He writes, “The last three centuries have seen a shift away from complacent acceptance of poverty, and even contempt for poor people, to the view that society, the economy and government should be judged in part at least by their success in reducing poverty.
There are a number of possible explanations for this change. Greater overall affluence in the world has probably made it harder to excuse poverty. Expanding democracy has given new political voice to poor people. And new knowledge about poverty has created the potential for more well-informed action.”
Initiatives in our community
Junior Ali Imani currently serves as the president of the Poverty Project at Aragon High School. The club focuses its energies on hosting fundraisers for the purpose of raising money to donate to various philanthropic organizations to be determined by the club members vote.
Imani says, “The Poverty Project mainly does fundraise and donate, but it is an avenue where people can find opportunities to help out themselves and help out the communities around them.”
Imani himself has volunteered at the Saint Anthony’s Soup Kitchen in San Francisco. He reflects, “St. Anthony’s is one room. There’s a line one side and the other side is where people sit down and eat. There’s a wall toward the entrance, and it’s a cubicle almost. And there’s a piano. The guests there are allowed to play it if they want, and you might see someone walk behind that cubicle, and suddenly you hear the most beautiful piano music that you’ve ever heard in your life.”
“To think that the person playing such a beautiful piece is living such an ugly life is really heavy. Most of all, I think the significance of that is it humanizes the homeless…. It shows that homeless people aren’t animals; they’re not all drug addict, alcoholics, bums. They can be capable of amazing things, but again, don’t have the means to carry them out.”
Initiatives like the Poverty Project and Saint Anthony’s Soup Kitchen all serve to embody the same rhetoric manifest in Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty and Ravallion’s analysis of poverty awareness: that compassion and empathy are observable all around us in our lives.
They serve to remind us that we are accountable for ourselves and our community, and that the success of our society depends in large part upon our capabilities of supporting the most disadvantaged constituents of it.
The poverty in America has improved, statistically speaking, since the middle of the 20th century. According to the National Poverty Center, the poverty rate stood at 22.4 percent in the late 1950’s, dropped to a low of 11.1 percent from the 60’s to the 70’s, and rose to 15.2 percent throughout the 80’s and 90’s