As we approach the mid-term elections it is exciting to see truly progressive candidates across the country gaining a foothold.  As we consider candidates and their policy positions, it is important to be able to identify what problems they are worried about and how their solutions would impact those problems.  As social justice advocates, especially when we are building coalitions, it is equally important to understand what we are asking for (and sometimes, what we are disagreeing about).  In each section of this post I first define what each of these terms means (from a social science/policy perspective) and then provide a short commentary on what it means politically.

Poverty

The dictionary defines poverty is “a lack of something.”  When we talk about poverty we usually talk about people lacking money or other possessions.  In my research, interviews with dozens of people from across the economic spectrum, the term poverty usually brought up images of homelessness and hunger, or severe deprivation.  The federal government reports the poverty rate each year.  In 2017 it was 12.3%.  These statistics are based on a poverty threshold.  Most scholars believe the threshold is too low.  It was originally calculated in the 1950s based on a family’s food budget which made up about 1/3 of the total budget.  Today, the threshold has been updated for inflation, but does not account for the fact that family budgets have changed significantly since then – food only accounts for about 1/8 of the budget these days.  Many scholars of poverty note that the percentage of people that can not meet their basic needs given their income is much higher than the official percentages of those living in poverty.  For example, according to the California Poverty Measure developed by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Public Policy Institute of California 19.4% of people lived in poverty in 2016 compared with the 15.3% reported by the U.S. Census Bureau (by the way 4% is equivalent to 1.6 million people).

The policy implication of all this is that to eliminate poverty we have to give people who are lacking more.  This can happen in a variety of ways – more social services and subsidies like food assistance, MediCaid, and subsidized housing, higher paying jobs, more voluntary sharing across family and friends.  Policies that would eliminate poverty are not particularly popular.  One reason may be because the poor are highly stigmatized.  Most people make excuses for why we don’t end poverty by blaming poor people for their situation and questioning whether they are deserving of assistance.  Another common refrain is that we took care of people’s basic needs that would provide a disincentive for working.  Neither of these approaches is factually accurate.

Inequality

Inequality is not about if people have enough, its about how things are distributed across society.  Consider three scenarios where there are 100 people and there are $10 million in the entire society:

1. Two people have $4,000,000 dollars ($2 million each), 98 share $6,000,000 ($61,224 each). There is a lot of inequality (a person with $2 million has 32 x more money than a person with $62K) but there is no poverty. Put another way, the top 2% have 40% of the money.
2. Everyone has $100,000. There is no inequality and no poverty.
3. 90 people have $110,000 each, but 10 people only have $10,000 each. There’s quite a bit of equality.  Afterall, 90 percent of the population has the exact same income, but we might worry that 10% of people with just $10,000 are in poverty.

Calculating inequality gets complicated.  The point is you can live in a society with a lot of equality but also a lot of poverty as in scenario 3.  You can live in a society with a fair bit of inequality but no poverty – the people with the least are still not lacking as in scenario 1.  And, you can live in a society with a lot of inequality and a fair bit of poverty – that’s the U.S. today.  Put in terms of the scenario above 5 people would share $3.3 million ($660,000 each), 15 would share 2.6 million, 20 would share 1.8 million, 20 would share 1.2, 20 would share .76 ($38,000 each) and 20 would share .3 million ($15,000 each).

Focusing on inequality as a public policy issue means you are changing the distribution of money.  This too is a deeply unpopular idea because our dominant cultural narrative claims that if you fairly earned money you are entitled to keep all or most of it.  Nevertheless, a powerful progressive wing of the democratic party is arguing that we should redistribute resources by taxing the rich and super rich in order to provide free medical care, free college education, and other basic rights.

I think, that many of the rifts in progressive circles and coalitions tend to center around the idea of who will get the benefits of this redistribution.  For example, it is possible to change that distribution without fixing poverty – just give more to the middle class by taxing the super rich.  Take the example from above in the U.S. today: The top 10% have $3.8 million.  The bottom 10% have $150,000.  That means the top has 25 times more than the bottom.  Now, you could take 2 million away and leave the bottom 10% just as they are.  Now the top 10% have just 6 times more than the bottom 10%, but we could imagine the bottom 10% are still doing very poorly.¹

Mobility

Mobility is yet a different concept.  Intergenerational mobility is about whether kids leave the part of the income distribution their parents were in.  The question for those interested in mobility is, if a person’s parents were poor (or rich), does the person end up poor (or rich)?  Usually this measurement splits a society into quintiles or 5 equal parts or 20% of the population.  Perfect mobility means that only 20% of kids in each quintile stay where their parents were.  The other 80% are split evenly across the other 4 quintiles.  So 80% of kids at the top move down and 80% of kids at the bottom move up. Some middle income kids move up and some move down.

Usually, when people talk about “equality of opportunity” what they are talking about is mobility.  Perfect mobility seems all but impossible because people want to pass along advantages to their children. No one wants their children to move down.  When people in the policy world argue for mobility, all but the most radical, seem to want a simple outcome – if you work hard, you shouldn’t be relegated to poverty because of bad schools, unsafe neighborhoods, and no job opportunities.  While the inverse of this suggests that if you are a slacker you shouldn’t stay rich because of a system that rewards you simply on the basis of who your parents were that argument is almost never made.  The idea of mobility has deep roots.  Early (white) settlers of the US were escaping a society organized through monarchy, aristocracy, and inheritance laws that only supported first born male children where they had little chance at  mobility.  While ensuring equality of opportunity might help with mobility by eliminating some of the barriers kids in low-income families face, we could observe an increase in mobility without seeing any change in poverty or inequality.  Those moving to the bottom would still lack the basics and those moving to the top could still be insanely rich.

As people that care about justice, it is important to think through these three concepts and decide where we stand – then pursue policies that are aligned with that stance paying attention to the details.

footnote 1: my characterization of the U.S. today is a highly stylized one based on the income distribution (not wealth) in the mid-2010s.  It is not perfectly, factually accurate, but is utilized here to illustrate a point.