2. Humans act brutally under brutal conditions. “People who have never experienced chronic hunger are apt to underestimate its effects,” the psychologist A. H. Maslow once wrote. “If they”—the well-fed, the housed—“are dominated by a higher need, this higher need will seem to be the most important of all.” So it is with so many thinkers and pundits who try to explain violence in poor communities without considering the limitations of human capacity in the teeth of scarcity and suffering. Look how neighbors, perfectly peaceful when the crop yield is plenty, will claw and trample and bite one another when bread is tossed from a food truck during a famine. Or as Maslow would put it: “It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread.” Ideas about aggression in low-income communities that do not account for the hard squeeze of poverty, the sheer emotional and cognitive burden that accompanies severe deprivation, do not come close to capturing the lived experience of people like Arleen and Crystal. A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–96, 387, 375. For accounts of human behavior under extreme conditions, see, e.g., Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1982 [1960]), 95; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: First Mariner Books, 2009 [1990]), 64–81.
People respond to structural conditions, like food scarcity or concentrated disadvantage, in cogent ways. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who popularized the notion of a “culture of poverty,” thought those patterned actions and beliefs themselves become sentient and help to reinforce the conditions that originally produced them. It is in this moment of sentience that those actions and beliefs are thought to constitute something like a “culture”—enduring and shared views and practices—instead of something more fleeting and circumstantially necessary. Omitted from this model are institutions that occupy a space between people and structural conditions and that encode disadvantage in people’s language, habits, belief systems, and practices. Resource-poor schools in low-income neighborhoods often leave children with subpar language and critical-thinking skills. Those deficits will remain even if those children relocate to safe and prosperous neighborhoods later in life. To think of those school-conditioned speech patterns and belief systems as evidence of a “culture of poverty,” the invention of poor families themselves, is to overlook the influence of broken cultural institutions through which low-income families pass. We do not think that the rich are rich because they invented a “culture of affluence” but because they pass through elite institutions that modify their behavior, habits, and worldviews, and this constellation of skills and ways of being, in turn, eases their entrance into other elite institutions. What might be viewed as a “culture of affluence” is, simply, affluence; and “many of the features alleged to characterize the culture of poverty…are simply definitions of poverty itself,” as Carol Stack pointedly observed in All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 23. On the culture of poverty, see Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small, “How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Understanding of Poverty,” in The Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist, eds. David Harris and Ann Lin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), 76–102; Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond, The Racial Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), chapter 6; Matthew Desmond, “Relational Ethnography,” Theory and Society 43 (2014): 547–79.
18. LOBSTER ON FOOD STAMPS
1. Jason DeParle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and the Nation’s Drive to End Welfare (New York: Penguin, 2004); John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2008 [1999]).
2. On waiting as a lived experience of poverty, see Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
3. Social Security Administration, Understanding Supplemental Security Income SSI Resources (Washington, DC: SSA, 2014).
4. “When I write about this, it’s going to be a little hard for people to understand,” I said.
“You’re going to put this in your book?” Larraine asked.
“Yeah, I think so. They’ll say, ‘What is she doing? She just got evicted. She’s practically homeless. She’s living with her brother, and who knows how that’ll go. She just got out of a meeting to renew her food stamps. What on earth is she doing putting on layaway a fifteen-hundred-dollar sixty-two-inch TV?’ They’ll say that.”
“Well, they don’t have to understand it. I don’t understand a lot of things other people do, but they do it.”
“What would you say to them if they were sitting right here, and they were saying, ‘Larraine, why would you do such a thing?’?”
“I would say because I wanted to.”
5. Some middle-class people can’t help feeling incredulous, even furious, upon walking into a low-income household and spotting a big-screen television or fresh Nikes by the door. Conservative think tanks and news outlets publish reports with titles such as “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?” and Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? Liberals try to change the subject to avoid talking about behavior they wish would go away. That fancy television in the ratty apartment? Those new shoes worn by the kid eating free school lunch? Their owners likely didn’t pay full dollar for them. You can take a nice television off a hype for fifty bucks and find marked-down Nikes at the corner store. The price tags in inner-city clothing stores are for white suburban kids who don’t know how to haggle. Next to that big-screen television too it is harder to see what is missing. You are almost as likely to find as many televisions in a poor household as in a rich one. But most poor Americans do not own a computer. When Larraine ate her special meal, she didn’t even have a phone. See Tami Luhby, “Are You Poor If You Have a Flat-Screen TV?,” CNN Money, August 13, 2012; Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in America? (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2011); US Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2012.
It is an old liberal tradition: ignoring the nastier, more embarrassing aspects of poverty. And because, to paraphrase Carol Stack (All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community [New York: Basic Books, 1974], 24), liberal commentators and researchers do not take a hard look at these aspects of poverty, they can only apologize for them. But as William Julius Wilson argued in The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), 6, 12, “to avoid describing any behavior that might be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing” to poor people is to “render liberal arguments ineffective” because the American public wants answers to questions about that behavior. There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of all sin.
6. Would people behave differently if they were provided with a real opportunity to break out of poverty? There is good reason to expect as much. Behavioral economists and psychologists have shown that “poverty itself taxes the mind,” making people less intelligent and more impulsive. Moreover, when poor families are provided with a meaningful economic uplift, they often respond by building assets and paying off debt. A recent study found that almost 40 percent of parents who received an Earned Income Tax Credit in excess of $1,000 saved a considerable portion of their refund and almost 85 percent used the refund to address debt. The expectation of ongoing refunds gave parents hope, and they responded by saving toward the goal of climbing out of poverty. See Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013), 60, 66; Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, “The Shape of Temptation: Implications for the Economic Lives of the Poor,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, No. 15973 (2010); Ruby Mendenhall et al., “The Role of Earned Income Tax Credit in the Budgets of Low-Income Households,” Social Service Review 86 (2012): 367–400.
7. Eviction is costly, often preventing tenants from saving up first-month’s rent and security deposit for a new place.