I believe it was St. Francis de Sales who said that the worst thing about being poor is that you feel poor. In other words, if there are not-so-poor people around you, they have a way of making you feel like a loser. Not being sure where your next meal or your next rent payment is coming from is bad; but being made to feel like a loser is worse.

There was an article in the Economist recently that inadvertently made this point. The article intended to point out what a liberal fallacy the idea of “relative poverty” is, by comparing the lives and circumstances of a disabled man in a poor coal town in the mountains of Kentucky, versus a surgeon in the Congo. The man in the Congo was quite rich relative to his neighbors in the Congo, and yet his circumstances were much worse than the poor man in Kentucky. This supposedly proves that the notion of “relative poverty”, which is a popular measure of deprivation and qualification for government assistance in Europe, is a crock. Except that that article admits that because the Congo is so poor, most people there aren’t looked down upon by anyone else. They can maintain their sense of dignity. Whereas the man in Kentucky was well aware of his living in a trailer, and knew that American society looked down on people like him — i.e., “trailer trash”.

So, maybe relative poverty is important after all. America is a very materialistic society, and Americans are largely judged by their economic achievement. If you are rich, you are assumed to be good. If you are poor, you are poor in every which way. That’s the working assumption. Perhaps that helps to explain why there is so much crime and drug abuse in our “relatively poor” communities (both black and white, rural and urban; if you need stereotypes, think black / urban housing project / crack and Colt 45, versus white / rural trailer park / meth and Mountain Dew). Social assumptions have a way of being self-fulfilling. If you call some one “no good”, they’re probably going to act that way.

So, if we all started giving the poor more respect and stopped worshipping the rich, would crime rates suddenly drop and drug abuse disappear? No, of course not. It would take time, and it would have to be real, from the heart. But eventually, I think it would help to improve things, if it were sincere.

And then, there’s the problem of being rich; wealth doesn’t necessarily correlate with happiness. The rich spend barrels of money fighting off depression, and rich towns have the highest suicide rates. I live in a relatively wealthy section of town, and I can testify that there are psychoanalysts everywhere you look.

The Economist article says ends by saying that if Americans weren’t always striving so hard to have more and more, “their great country would not be half as dynamic as it is”. Admittedly, stagnation is not good, but dynamic is definitely overrated. Whatever happened to “a balanced approach”? Personally, I’d be willing to trade half of our “dynamic” nature for less crime, less drug abuse and less depression.

Oh, OK, here’s the article LINK.