Solving poverty

This may be an incredibly naïve - not to mention completely unoriginal - post; I'm putting that right out front, in the hopes that I'll get a pass if this turns out to be pure nonsense.

I'm at my second conference in 3 weeks, as my high-travel post-employment period draws to a close and my schedule-free period begins. I'm listening to the panelists and responders in a fabulous presentation on community food systems and environmental justice, which is a topic that has grown increasingly near to my heart over the past couple years. And as I've been attending all these sessions at these two conferences about improving cities and designing communities and engaging all stakeholders, this recurring question of addressing poverty and its affects seems to lurk just below the surface of many discussions.

I mentioned tongue-in-cheek in a previous post that, following my rant against and intellectual non-producer class, I had also come up with a simple solution to poverty. This was only half in jest; as I was sitting in sessions later that day, I really started thinking about what poverty is and how we define it. We typically define it by income - but as with pretty much everything about money, that measurement is merely a proxy for the real issue at hand. To wit, I asked a friend: if you lived in the US and made only $15,000/year but you had secure access to safe, healthy, good quality housing, food, health care and education, are you actually poor? I'd argue not; poverty is not about any specific amount of wealth you have, but about whether your available resources allow you to reliably meet your basic needs.

Well, duh. Who would argue with that? But while we might all agree on that basic definition of poverty, I think we generally put our resources and efforts in the wrong place. The error starts with money, actually; we've forgotten that money is a proxy for real things, not a real thing itself. So we focus on solving poverty through "wealth creation": giving people ways to earn money to buy their basic needs. We think this is a much better long term alternative than just giving people food, housing, etc., directly ... and I'd agree with the idea that we don't want people to be dependent on others to get their basic needs and unable to be more self-sufficient.

Except: the phrase is "Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime," not "Teach a man to work a job that gets him money to buy fish and he eats for a lifetime." The fallacy is that having money to purchase the goods we need makes us independent; but it actually makes us totally dependent on a production and distribution system for basic goods that most of us don't understand and aren't involved in except at the very end stages. Not to mention that we are also dependent on the vagaries of the employment market to provide our income, over which we also have very little control.

I think a real solution to poverty and dependency would take out the money proxy and the middle man's profit that raises the barrier to goods, as much as could possibly be done. My solution to poverty has three pretty simple stages:

1) Provide basic necessities to those who lack them, immediately. Rent all the high-quality housing on the market for everyone currently defined as poor. Hire doctors, rent space to increase clinic capacity and buy equipent and supplies to provide free care for their medical needs. Buy all the food we can from local and organic farmers and distribute it for free to those who need it. Get everyone clothes and shoes appropriate for the climate they live in. Do all necessary school repairs for immediate health and safety, hire a huge number of the best teachers we can find and purchase all the up-to-date materials they need to teach the best classes to the poorest students. And don't tell me we lack the money to do it; we can always find money for whatever we decide is important enough to fund. We just dropped uncountable billions on the most asinine bailouts of the most irresponsible companies in the world; we could feed, house, heal and educate everyone in the country if we actually wanted to.

2) Once folks are initially settled into their homes, having regular healthy meals, receiving medical care and basic education, now we can start skills building, teaching people how to meet these basic needs for themselves: how to grow food; build; keep healthy and treat the sick; make clothes, furniture, and other household goods and tools; and how to share knowledge and civic responsibility with others in their community. I absolutely agree that it's critical to establish a level of independence and self-sufficiency where people can do as much as they can for themselves. I also agree with another principle behind "welfare-to-work" efforts: the time where you can depend on others to keep providing for you should be limited, and extended only in rare circumstances. Let's use 2 years as a time frame to start with, although it might not be the right one; during that time, after basic needs are initially met, anyone receiving services has to be actively participating in training toward being able to provide those services for themselves and others. Over the two years, they should move from being service provider trainees to the highly competent leaders and organizers of these services for their community. They should be building the new homes, schools, shops, clinics or hospitals, and governing and knowledge-transfer systems that they will need for themselves; and the outside helpers who were initially needed to provide those services will increasingly release responsibility and involvement to the people themselves.

3) In order to move from the emergency systems that were initially established to opportunities for ongoing self- and community-sufficiency, people need access to space and initial materials to build from. It's the 40 acres and a mule principle, which we're still paying for not properly implementing at the time: you can't just set someone loose from a position of systemic oppression, not give them some resources that can generate their future, and expect them not to end up back in a system of oppression in the near future. I actaully think the more difficult part of this process won't be the material goods, but rather the space question. Our conception of land and property ownership and its conncetion to status make us loath to consider giving it to others without making them pay for it, to say nothing of yielding up what we've already laid claim to. Land control and exclusion have been key tools for those who are in power (or want to be) to maintain dominance over another person or group. Sharing and/or giving back use, rights and control over land is a critical component of addressing poverty in the US and abroad, and without recognizing and responding to that, we will never solve the problem.

4) Almost finally, there has to be the flexibility to determine the kinds of exchange systems that people want to establish related to meeting their basic needs. Beyond a fairly basic level, it's highly likely that any one person or family will need help from other members of their community in continuing to meet basic needs. (None of us are actually self-sufficient, even the most wealthy.) There should be a variety of accepted and easily facilitated ways to exchange between communities members - and preference should be placed on those systems that don't require money. Money not only represents distance between people and the goods or services they consume, but also between people themselves; it's a way to make exchange possible between people who don't know or trust each other enough to exchanges goods and services directly. We should encourage communities to form relationships that allow exchanges of trust with one another; this is true social capital, the stuff we're always trying to create in our communities.

5) Really finally, while a traditional capitalist market for manufacture and exchange may arise and thrive for non-essential/luxury goods, certain things must be protected from the vagaries of markets and ensured for our citizens at all times. This sounds like total blasphemy to our capitalist ears, but we already do this with one important aspect of essential citizen services - public education. We've made a societal commitment to providing public schools for every child no matter where they live or how rich they are, rather than leaving that up to someone's ability to generate a certain level of income. (Mind you, we've tied quality to income through the way that we fund and maintain said schools ... but at least part of the system was trying to head in the right direction.) What's odd is that we seem completely unwilling to provide that same universal assurance of access for other services even more essential, and without which it's unreasonably difficult to take advantage of public education: we recognize a right to education that must be protected, but not to housing, food, clothing or medical care. How do we expect a homeless, hungry, naked and sick person to get through schooling or training well?

I call this solution simple, and I think it is. It's tempting to say that we're going to need a huge new bureaucracy to manage all of this; but I'd argue that we have plenty of existing bureaucracy that can not only be used, but also simplified to focus on easily and quickly meeting these goals. The problem may not be so much complicated as just plain difficult, because of the radical change in our priorities and will to achieve them that all of the above assumes. (Yes, I'm back to radicalism again.)

At any rate, I've been writing this post all day, and missing pieces of conference sessions, so it's time to close out. I'll be thinking about this some more ... People may call me crazy, and hypocritical because my life doesn't look like this yet - but I still think there's a gem of truth here to be dug out and shared, and that it's important to shake it free.