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Poverty
17 September 2026

Introduction

 

We didn't finish the discussion on poverty last month, or get anywhere close.  So here is a slightly updated version of the previous invitation.

 

I’m suggesting we use a recent book as the starting point.  I recently read it because Genny Harrison did a short and effective commentary on it. I have recommended Genny several times before - do follow her Facebook account and subscribe to her Substack feed.

 

The book she is talking about is "Poverty, by America" by Matthew Desmond. As we have repeatedly noted, this is one of the areas where any analysis of the challenges faced by the USA also applies to the UK with very few changes. And aspects of the analysis here include important points I have not heard as clearly before - such as the way we describe government support for the middle classes (‘encouraging responsible behaviour’) and government support for the poor (‘handouts’) in completely different ways.

 

You may also want to look at the short article I emailed and posted after the discussion - Poverty.

 

Background

 

We are sometimes told that the rich deserve their massive wealth because they take massive risks, but they don't take actual risks - they find ways to offload the risk onto others.  And the 'others' they offload their risk onto are the members of the general public, who are unable to choose whether to take that risk.  Bailouts, tax havens and subsidies are some of the structural aspects of this process.  In the 2008 financial crisis, many ordinary people lost their jobs, their homes and their businesses; but the banks which created the problem were protected with public money; many were forced to sell what they had, and the wealthy were able to buy assets at a massive discount.  Most people suffered, and the rich got richer.

 

The rules are set by the rich and powerful to protect the interests of the rich and powerful.  This is why if your salary arrives as cash, you have to pay income tax; but if it arrives as a right to buy shares, you pay no income tax.

 

Poverty is not fundamentally about lack of money: it is about a lack of security and a lack of power.  You don't need a lot of money to have a good quality of life, but you do need stability in order to build quality relationships over time, to build community; and you need safety, to protect you from the rich person who decides they want to take the little you do have.

 

Here are a couple of paragraphs from a recent post by Lisa Pohovich.

 

The world has a permission structure for every atrocity. The structure says: some people's suffering is the price of other people's prosperity, and the people making that calculation are authorized to make it because they have always been authorized to make it.

 

The Crusades established the authorization for Middle East intervention. The Doctrine of Discovery established the authorization for colonial seizure. The enclosure movement and the Poor Laws established the authorization for domestic extraction. The plantation system established the authorization for treating human beings as economic inputs. The offshore wealth network and the privatized energy market are running the same authorization today, on the people at the bottom of the system, in the country that built it.

 

(The 'Doctrine of Discovery' is a name for the 15th century papal decrees which supposedly gave European Christian nations the right to claim non-Christian lands and dominate their people. The Roman Catholic Church formally repudiated this teaching in March 2023.  It's a much-disputed subject, and Wikipedia inevitably has a decent summary of many of the arguments around this area.)

 

Every major empire had an elite who ruled, and a population who served them - the people who have the power, and the people who do the work.  The British Empire was not about Britain exploiting third world countries, it was about the British elite exploiting the population of these other countries in the same way that they had always exploited their own population.  The fundamental technique for keeping the poor in their place is 'divide and conquer': ensure that each group of poor people sees another group of poor people as their primary threat.

 

Almost every revolution in history promises to remove the elite, so the people can flourish; almost every successful revolution manages to replace the elite with a different group of elite, who then find it is necessary to keep the people in much the same place that they had before.  To be fair, running a country is difficult, and inevitably involves compromises and hard choices, and there is no blueprint for how to run a country without exploiting the people.  It is reasonably straightforward to dismantle the machinery of exploitation, but the result is chaos, not a fairer distribution of resources.  The people all agree that they want a larger slice of the pie, but they do not agree on how big a slice each one of them should receive.  How do you decide on a fair share to give to each group?  The farmers, the factory workers, the teachers and the soldiers can each present valid reasons to support their claim that they they deserve more than the other groups.

 

Making such decisions, and then selling them to the people, is incredibly difficult.  That is why it is much easier to persuade people to believe in 'the market'.  The government gets out of the way, the free market decides on resource distribution... and nobody is happy with the result, they don't have anyone to blame, so they end up wanting to tear down the system and trust a charismatic leader who promises to fix things if only you will give them the power they need.

 

Valerie sent us two questions.  I gave a couple of quick answers.

 

• How does poverty in America (with its history of enslaving and trafficking African people as involuntary workers) differ from poverty in the UK ( with its colonial past, with all that entails)?
  
  I think the history of slavery and empire, while it helps to explain how we got here, doesn't give us much guidance on how best to go forward.  But I'm open to being corrected on that one.
  
  To clarify: this is an area where I have spent quite a lot of time reading and talking with a wide range of people, and there are two distinct points here.  Firstly, there is very little agreement about what happened and why.  There are multiple,  completely contradictory, accounts of why the opposition to slavery succeeded to the extent that it did, and when it did.  If there are lessons which we can learn from that, the historians have not yet managed to agree on what they are.  And, secondly, if we did understand how and why the opposition to slavery made progress with the specifics of their day, I'm not convinced understanding what worked then would help us to address the very different specifics of today.   I have now read 'Poverty, by America', and I'm very impressed by it.  Desmond frequently talks about the experience of black Americans and the consequences of slavery to help us understand how we got to where we are today.  But when it comes to addressing the problems, he does not talk about the history - instead (to take one example) he talks about zoning regulations, and how we use them to keep the poor in their places. 

 

• If by our daily activities as voters and consumers, we reinforce the status quo and tacitly agree with how the economy is structured, what is the choice you are alluding to that is available to us to change things?
  
  My point was a very basic one: we are dealing with choices, not fixed laws of nature: until we understand that basic point, then we will forever be cowed by those who confidently tell us that it is impossible to build a just society.

 

 

Discussion

 

"Poverty, by America" by Matthew Desmond is worth reading.

 

Another relevant and helpful book: "What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity" by Daron Acemoglu.  Here are a couple of paragraphs from a review. 

 

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 raised hopes that we were one step closer to the triumph of liberalism. Soon, many predicted, we would all be living in functional liberal democracies. Sustained economic growth would benefit all segments of society and war would be a relic of the past. A generation later, one can only ask: What happened?

 

Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu argues in this powerful book that liberal democracy flourished when it pursued its core promises of shared prosperity, democratic governance, and the free pursuit of knowledge. But liberalism, a philosophy built to challenge power, never fully adjusted to becoming the establishment. Nor was it able to deal with the economic and social disruptions that digital technologies wrought. Worse, in the postindustrial economy, liberalism turned its back on its core promises. As a segment of college-educated elites became politically dominant and separated from the rest of society, they sowed the seeds of widespread inequality while intensifying efforts to reshape mass culture and values.

 

Demand for water in the UK will exceed supply in a decade, even without these new data centres.  We don't have an effective water distribution network, and have not built new reservoirs. Another failure of the market.  Actually, the market cannot help even in principle when you have a monopoly: we only have a pretend market, which is even worse.  

The government is encouraging us to use less water through running cinema adverts - again, putting pressure on individuals rather than fixing the system.

 

And, thinking about them, there are plans to build data centres in or near the sea.  Even if you need fresh water for cooling, that can run on a closed loop system, being cooled in the sea.

 

"If you are going to replace capitalism, who is going to produce the goods and services?"  See my article - we don't have capitalism, and it's not a binary choice anyway.

 

And another book worth reading: "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" by Cory Doctorow

 

A great deal of modern convenience opens us up to criminal activity - QR codes being masked by criminal substitutes, for example.  We have to put so much work into protecting ourselves, the convenience benefit largely disappears.  Fraud is an arms race - the better protection, the more sophisticated the systems to overcome it.  Convenience only works until someone abuses it.

 

Everything is connected - disrupt capitalism and what happens to our pension funds?  That's why revolution is risky: we need gradual change towards a more sane system.

 

In the UK, poverty is officially measured by household income. A person is considered to live below the poverty line if their household disposable income is less than 60% of the UK median average, calculated both before and after housing costs - £36,700 for the financial year ending 2024, so about £22k a year.

 

The Moral Maze last night asked: Is empathy ever a weakness?  Can you have too much empathy?   Everyone seemed to agree that yes, you can have too much.  The question is: where do you draw the line?  From the program website:

 

Reform's Robert Jenrick has described Britain’s welfare system as “suicidal empathy.” It’s also the title of a recent book by the Canadian marketing Professor Gad Saad, who argues that a misdirected sense of empathy can lead to favouring certain people over others – for example, the criminal over the victim. The idea has gained an admirer in Elon Musk who said that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy". The claim is that unconditional compassion is not a strength but a soft spot to be exploited, clouding our moral judgements.

 

Critics argue that empathy is the moral foundation of care for the most vulnerable in society and righteous anger against injustice. They see the language of “toxic” or “parasitic” empathy as laying the groundwork for inhuman treatment. Rousseau saw pity as the most natural of human virtues – an instinct which makes us not simply walk on by when we see someone suffering. Removing empathy, in other words, makes us both less human and less humane.

 

Mark tries to start with the morality and work to a practical implementation, but society seems to start with practical arrangements and find a suitable morality.

 

Justice needs to balance compassion with punishment.

 

Do we blame the people who commit the crimes or the people who build the systems which make those crimes likely?  Remember the Anatole France quote, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

 

The law sometimes upholds clear moral principles - prohibits murder, for example; but it also punishes people for getting into debt - imprisons mothers for stealing food for their hungry children.

 

It is hard to relate to someone whose economic situation is very different from yours.  And it's hard to know how to respond to people begging in the street, or on the trains.

 

Paul was asked about his experience running a charity for homeless people.  The resources to help people who struggle with mental health problems were never good, but they have been slashed since 2010; the police are often the only people available to respond in crisis situations; they frequently take people into custody because there is nowhere else for them to go, not because they are actually a danger to themselves or others.  The Police he worked with were brilliant, caring and hardworking, but facing problems they were neither equipped nor trained for.

 

Poverty is closely connected to homelessness; the simple and obvious answer to homelessness is to provide homes - suitable homes, in the right places, with the right level of support provided.  FInland proved that this works, not only as a humane response, but also as the cheapest: dealing with the problems caused by homelessness costs far more than dealing with the homelessness.  Finland also demonstrates that neither humanity nor economic self-interest are enough to overcome the human desire to punish the poor.

 

Talk about Burnham's plan for getting homeless people off the streets.  Paul believes he is genuine in wanting to largely solve this problem, and hopes he will be able to retain the amount of focus which this challenging target will require.  But the problem is not insoluble: we have about the same number of empty homes as homeless people.

 

Liberals find it hard to succeed in government, while conservatives tend to do better - it is much easier to maintain the status quo than to introduce real change.

 

Many manual workers have lost secure jobs, and AI will do the same for office workers.

 

4% of people in the UK live in households that used a Foodbank last year.

 

Rural poverty is real, but different from urban poverty.  Poverty is not just one thing (but it is always about a lack of power).

 

It is hard to understand how the rent on a property can cost significantly more than the mortgage - Matthew Desmond addresses this, and explains the mechanism.  In part, it is another failure of the market.

 

People are scared and desperate.

 

We are not a poor country.

 

 

book, righteous mind jonathan haidt

https://www.shortform.com/summary/the-righteous-mind-summary-jonathan-haidt?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=531475979&utm_content=1356799884546376&utm_term=84800398195876&utm_creative_format=the%20righteous%20mind%20book&utm_marketing_tactic=e&msclkid=776ef978760a17f5f37593d43c2405d4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

 

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0141039167/

 

 

poverty, a form of slavery

 

ot jubilee - distributive justice, even if they didn't practice

gleaning was practiced though

 

god and the moneylenders - looking at two debates in parliament

 

Two key questions:

• what would we like society to look like?
• starting from where we are, can we move towards a more just society?

 

The current system cannot continue , but we can't see how to change it

 

Asimov's three laws of robotics - very impressive, but nobody has any idea how to implement them.

 

Utopia - Moore introducing discussion of how to achieve social goals

 

society is 'dog eat dog' - in business, but not with your friends, your tribe.

 

game theory - competition between many different agents, cooperate or compete.  the best scores came from tit for tat, if someone hits you you hit them back.  On repeated rruns, you get more cooperation.

 

Another experiment: One player has ten pounds, proposes a division, if it is not agreed then nobody gets anything.  Most people would turn doen an unjust division.

 

In the OT, slave is a bondsman, most people are bound to a powerful person in reality.

slave/servant distinction is - was - fuzzy  'ebed'

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Booth

https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13799-slaves-and-slavery#:~:text=The%20Hebrew%20word%20%22%27ebed%22%20really%20means%20%22slave%22%3B%20but,far%20above%20that%20of%20slavery%20%28Ex.%20xxi.%202-7%29.

 

we have a class system,

they mainly had a patronage system, you advance by attaching yourself to a more powerful person

 

our servant king - an incredible and powerful inversion

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16g4jh2/im_done_with_all_the_partial_answers_did_the/

 

owning the earth, andras linklater, in Russian the serfs were tied to the land, the hstory of land opwnership

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Owning-Earth-Transforming-History-Ownership/dp/1408815745