Rich and Poor

It occurred to me a few years ago that I’m a rich man. Many would doubt that if they knew the sum total of my assets and annual income, but it’s true if you accept the definitions of rich and poor my students and I developed over the years: “Poor” is having insufficient funds to supply adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. “Rich” is defined as having all those things and some extra besides. If you have a little extra, you’re a little rich. If you have a lot extra, you’re very rich. 

By that definition, I’ve never been poor because I’ve always had basic necessities. Early in my marriage, however, our family was below the poverty line as calculated annually by the federal government according to income and size of family. I was a low-paid teacher with a stay-at-home wife and four children.

Working the woodpile at our old house

Our house needed constant repair and maintenance. We drove a vehicle that did too, but never did we lack the basics. I had to learn carpentry, plumbing, and electrical skills to fix up my house, and I had to buy or borrow the necessary tools. I had to learn basic mechanics to work on my vehicles because they frequently broke down and I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it. I had to cut my own firewood for heat. Those were our circumstances for most of three decades.

My wife and me

About twenty years ago things changed. Opportunities came up and my income rose. I could start paying down the mortgage and other debts and after ten years I was debt-free. I considered taking early retirement from teaching and a few years later I did — while keeping the part-time jobs I always had. My income went down, but with no payments to make we still lived well. I spent more time on photography, which I enjoy very much, and now I’m making money with that too. Life is good. I have everything I want — another definition of rich.

Although I’ve written the following before in this space, it’s worth repeating. My wife will agree that the happiest times of our lives so far were when we had only those basic necessities and no more —  when we were under the federal poverty line. I worried about paying the bills many months, but we did it. We never threw food away and ate a lot of soup. We shopped at thrift stores and yard sales and we got excited when finding a nice piece of furniture or clothing cheap.

Our youngest in the old kitchen

My late father-in-law came up during the depression and his family didn’t have much. Still, I remember him saying: “I was happiest when we were eating onion sandwiches.” By that, he meant bread and onions were all there was to eat for a while. My own father was the same age and he also came up through the depression His father, my grandfather, was a binge-drinking alcoholic who often burned up his paycheck with booze. He made enough money as a street-car driver in the Carmen’s Union (of which he was president), and somehow kept his job, but his family lacked basic necessities. Those were not happy times for my father, the oldest of his six children. If not for my grandfather’s drinking, his family would not have been poor.

Sad evidence of poor money management

It might be claimed that America won the war on poverty. If we still have people lacking funds for basic necessities, it’s likely because, like my grandfather, they don’t manage their money well. Yes, there are people who have had serious health problems and have run up enormous medical bills. Even if they went bankrupt and had to go on welfare, their basic needs are still met — unless they spend unwisely. Unfortunately, that describes a rising number of Americans

More sad evidence

Their DBT cards are charged up at the beginning of every month but they run out of funds after the first or second week. Can that be helped? Not by government, it can’t. If their allotments were increased, it’s likely they’d continue to spend frivolously and still be poor for two or three weeks of every month. Maybe they’ll run out of food or heating oil. Maybe they won’t have enough for gasoline. Maybe they’ll be late on the rent or the electric bill or the gas bill, or all of those.

Schools used to teach something called “home economics,” but I don’t think it’s part of the curriculum in most schools anymore. Even if people learned those skills, a certain amount of self-discipline is still necessary. My grandfather lacked it, and too many others in America do too. Their numbers are rising. As my old friend, fellow selectman and “Overseer of the Poor,” the late Stub Eastman, said: “We have the poor, and the poor have us.”

Some things never change, and recent promises by 2020 Democrats won’t have any effect either.

Rich and Poor

Our federal government classified me as poor when I moved to Maine in August, 1977. My family of four was “under the poverty line” according to their way of measuring things. I had just taken a job as Director of Special Education for Maine School Administrative District #72 in Fryeburg at an annual salary of $9200. With four individuals to feed, clothe, and house, our federal government said I was poor and eligible for lots of programs which we didn’t use. That our daughter, Annie, was still in utero portended deeper “poverty” when she was to be born in December. Then our son, Ryan, came along five years later when my salary was still about the same. As a family of six, we must have gone from poor to very poor in the eyes of government.

 

Rather than take assistance from taxpayers, I chose to take on additional work. For most of my teaching career, I carried two or three part-time jobs as a caretaker, a writer, and a ski instructor — working all four simultaneously during several of those years. After all the kids were in school, my wife took on various part time jobs as well. She waitressed, cleaned houses, and drove a school bus before going back to school herself to become a therapist. She’s been doing that for almost twenty years, the last five or so part time. Each of us now works the equivalent of a half time job — roughly twenty hours a week. Now our federal government considers me rich because our combined household income is in the top quintile according the census statistics. I don’t worry about bills because my wife and I made it a priority to pay them off some time ago.

Ours is a common story. The “poor” don’t remain poor unless they stay on government programs. If they work, they often become “rich.”

Angus Deaton

Why tell you all this? Because it was announced last week that Princeton University’s Angus Deaton was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, in part because of his work measuring poverty. I didn’t expect to agree with Deaton on much considering the Nobel committee awarded a previous economics prize to Paul Krugman, but I looked him up anyway and found his observations quite reasonable. The first thing I came to was a 2003 essay he wrote called “Measuring Poverty.” In it, Deaton writes:

“Everyone has some idea what poverty is, and most people have little difficulty answering the question, ‘Do you consider yourself poor?’ although some people need a moment or two to think about it. Nor do people find it hard to answer the same question about their neighbors or other people that they know. Yet these simple ideas turn out to be hard to extend to countries, and harder still to the world as a whole.”

International agencies like the United Nations and the World Bank work mainly to mitigate poverty rather than spur economic development. Doing so, they allow local people to self-identify according to Deaton and that’s a problem, he says: 

“…It is not possible to push this local poverty identification too far. If the sums to be distributed are large enough, they become worth misappropriating, and there is an incentive for people to identify their friends and relatives (or themselves) as poor. Similarly, some NGOs have discovered that, if they use the poverty identification to enroll people into employment or training schemes, then after a few visits everyone is reported to be poor.”

I would point out here that in local school districts there is a similar phenomenon — applications for free and reduced lunches sent to each family each September are not vetted. I’ve asked people in at least three Maine districts and none vet the applications. They don’t check to see if families fudge their income/assets because the district qualifies for lots of additional federal and state aid based on percentage “qualifying” for free or reduced lunch.

When I was teaching economics, we found it necessary to define poverty. Students and I agreed that one is poor if he lacks sufficient funds to purchase food, clothing, shelter, and medical care to sustain life. We also agreed that someone is rich if he has enough for those basic needs — and some left over. He’s a little rich if he has a little left, and very rich if he has a lot left.

There’s another definition on which my wife and I agree: We’re rich, not just because we have everything we need and some left over, but also because we have everything we want — everything that money can buy, at least. Some may say our wants are modest and maybe they are, but they’re ours. They were established during lean times when our family was young and they haven’t changed much. We learned to live on less and haven’t forgotten how. We learned to be happy with what we have, and that became the habit of a lifetime.