Our Deep Poverty Problem

The US Can No Longer Hide from its Deep Poverty Problem

multidimensional poverty index

It was with great pleasure that we read the recent New York Times Op-ed: The U.S. Can No Longer Hide from its Deep Poverty Problem.

We at ATD Fourth World followed the visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty, Philip Alston, to the US with great interest and were pleased to have been able to contribute in various ways to the impressive work he did with his team. The troubling, if not surprising, conclusions Professor Alston reached – that the US has the lowest degree of social mobility among developed countries, that extreme poverty is all too common, and that the political will to address these serious problems is nonexistent – deserve even more attention in the media than they have received.We were thrilled then to read Professor Deaton’s article raising awareness of these issues at the national level both with the authority of an eminent academic and with such a personal tone.

The understanding of the day to day lives of people living in poverty which ATD Fourth World has gained through our grassroots presence in underserved communities has helped build a tremendous trove of knowledge about the most underprivileged population - their deprivations but also their courage, intelligence, and contributions to our societies. One of the challenges our organization has been facing for over sixty years now has been raising awareness among the general public of the deep poverty which exists even at times of full-employment and strong economic growth.Unfortunately, that knowledge alone has not been enough to prevent people in Europe and the United States from turning a blind eye to the deep poverty in their own communities. This is why we share Deaton’s enthusiasm for the decision of the World Bank to include high income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty: at the very least the recognition by a major international institution that extreme poverty exists in developed nations will give some people pause.

The challenge of measuring poverty

Simply measuring more with an imperfect tool is not enough. Even with these new measures, many people remain invisible. ATD Fourth World’s teams in Switzerland, for instance, are daily witnesses to growing levels of homelessness and more and more families living in campsites, even as the country is found to have 0% of its people living in extreme poverty.

We are not the first to address this issue in the United States of course. To mention just the authors which Professor Deaton himself mentioned, Matthew Desmond and Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have demonstrated how poverty, when approached from the perspective of those who live it, is multidimensional.Unfortunately, despite groundbreaking research such as the Multidimensional Poverty Index developed by Sabina Alkire and James Foster, the scientific community working on poverty has yet to come to an agreement about what would be appropriate multidimensional aspects of global poverty to measure and how to go about measuring them. The fact that we still have not fully met this challenge comes from a knowledge gap: The expertise of people with a direct experience of poverty is still missing.

We cannot determine the dimensions of poverty without those who live it every day.

Our experiences in the field once again coincide with the recommendations of the Report of the Commission on Global Poverty: participatory methods are the best way to understand what defines poverty from the point of view of those who live it.

It is with this challenge in mind that ATD Fourth World and Oxford University are in the process of implementing a participatory research project about the dimensions of poverty. This research is taking place in six countries, including the US, with people living in poverty as co-researchers on an equal footing with academics and social workers. After more than a year of working together and with focus groups across the US, some promising findings are already emerging. Emotions like fear and shame have been evoked again and again, along with structural violence. In the words of one participant, “Poverty, it’s stress, stress and stress. And then, it’s humiliation and discrimination.”

The words of those living in poverty, just as much as those of diplomats like Professor Alston and academics like Professor Deaton, shed an important light on what it is like to live in poverty in the US today, and around the world. The time has come for us to listen.