Yesterday I mentioned that John F. Kennedy got the idea for the War on Poverty from Dwight MacDonald's review of Michael Harrington's The Other America in The New Yorker. And today I learn that thanks to the magic of the internet, the MacDonald piece is freely available to the masses. We live in a wondrous age. But reading the article, which was first published in January of 1963, it's depressing how much of it could be written, well, today:
Mr. Harrington estimates that between forty and fifty million Americans, or about a fourth of the population, are now living in poverty. Not just below the level of comfortable living, but real poverty, in the old-fashioned sense of the word—that they are hard put to it to get the mere necessities, beginning with enough to eat. This is difficult to believe in the United States of 1963, but one has to make the effort, and it is now being made. The extent of our poverty has suddenly become visible. The same thing has happened in England, where working-class gains as a result of the Labour Party's post-1945 welfare state blinded almost everybody to the continued existence of mass poverty. It was not until Professor Richard M. Titmuss, of the London School of Economics, published a series of articles in the New Statesman last fall, based on his new book, “Income Distribution and Social Change” (Allen & Unwin), that even the liberal public in England became aware that the problem still persists on a scale that is “statistically significant,” as the economists put it.Statistics on poverty are even trickier than most. For example, age and geography make a difference. There is a distinction, which cannot be rendered arithmetically, between poverty and low income. A childless young couple with $3,000 a year is not poor in the way an elderly couple might be with the same income. The young couple's statistical poverty may be a temporary inconvenience; if the husband is a graduate student or a skilled worker, there are prospects of later affluence or at least comfort. But the old couple can look forward only to diminishing earnings and increasing medical expenses. So also geographically: A family of four in a small town with $4,000 a year may be better off than a like family in a city—lower rent, no bus fares to get to work, fewer occasions (or temptations) to spend money. Even more so with a rural family.
43 years later, John Cassidy would take to the New Yorker to write an article on the difficulty of managing a "relative" phenomenon like poverty. It's tricky stuff. Meanwhile, MacDonald sure knew how to skewer. His review also examines a handful of other books on poverty, and it is not kind:
The only pages in “Poverty, and Deprivation” that can be read are the statistical tables. The rest is a jungle of inchoate data that seems deliberately to eschew, like other collective research projects, such human qualities as reason (the reader has to do most of the work of ordering the material) and feeling (if Mr. Harrington sometimes has too much, it is a venial sin compared to the bleakness of this prose). My hypothesis is that “Poverty and Deprivation” was composed on that TX-0 “electronic brain” at M.I.T. This would account both for the vitality of the tables and for the deadness of the text.
