{"id":68081,"date":"2015-10-13T10:10:50","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T15:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=68081"},"modified":"2015-10-24T14:04:33","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T19:04:33","slug":"arent-the-poor-comparatively-rich-the-fallacy-of-faulty-comparison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/10\/13\/arent-the-poor-comparatively-rich-the-fallacy-of-faulty-comparison\/","title":{"rendered":"Aren’t the poor comparatively rich? The fallacy of faulty comparison"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opponents of government aid to the poor often argue that the poor are not really poor. The evidence they are fond of is often an inappropriate comparison, usually with people in other countries: \u201cThus we can say that by global standards there are no poor people in the US at all: the entire country is at least middle class or better\u201d (Tim Worstall in Forbes<\/a>).\u00a0 Sometimes the comparison is with earlier times, as in this quote<\/a> from Heritage’s Robert Rector: \u201c\u2018Poor\u2019 Americans today are better housed, better fed, and own more property than did the average US citizen throughout much of the 20th Century.”<\/p>\n

I parodied this approach in a post<\/a> a few years ago\u00a0by using the ridiculous argument that poor people in the US are not really poor and are in fact \u201cbetter off than Louis XIV because the Sun King didn\u2019t have indoor plumbing.\u201d I mean, I thought the toilet argument was ridiculous. But sure enough, Richard Rahn of the Cato Institute used it in an article last year in the\u00a0Washington Times<\/a><\/em>, complete with a 17th century portrait of the king:<\/p>\n

\n
\"2\"<\/a>Common Folk Live Better Now than Royalty Did in Earlier Times<\/b><\/div>\n

Louis XIV lived in constant fear of dying from smallpox and many other diseases that are now cured quickly by antibiotics. His palace at Versailles had 700 rooms but no bathrooms…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg<\/a>\u00a0has an ingenious way of showing how meaningless this line of thinking his. He compares today not with centuries past but with centuries to come. Consider our hedge-fund billionaires, with private jets whisking them to their several mansions in different states and countries. Are they well off?\u00a0 Not at all.\u00a0 They are worse off than the poor of 2215.<\/p>\n

Think about what the poor will enjoy a few centuries from now that even the 0.01 percent lack today. … \u201cImagine, they died of cancer and heart disease, had to birth their own babies, and even drove their own cars. How primitive can you get!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Comparisons with times past or future tell us about progress. They can\u2019t tell us who\u2019s poor today. What makes people rich or poor is what they can buy compared with other people in their own society. To extrapolate a line from Mel Brooks\u2019s Louis XVI, \u201cIt\u2019s good to be the king . . . even if flush toilets haven\u2019t been invented yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

And you needn\u2019t sweep your gaze to distant centuries to find inappropriate comparisons. When Marty McFly in \u201cBack to the Future\u201d goes from the ’80s to the ’50s, he feels pretty cool, even though the only great advances he has over kids there seem to be skateboards, Stratocasters, and designer underpants. How would he have felt if in 1985 he could have looked forward thirty years to see the Internet, laptops, and smartphones?<\/p>\n

People below the poverty line today do not feel well off\u00a0 just because they have indoor plumbing or color TVs or Internet connections. In the same way,\u00a0 our 1% do not feel poor even though they lack consumer goods that people a few decades from now will take for granted.<\/p>\n

Originally posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>. Re-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opponents of government aid to the poor often argue that the poor are not really poor. The evidence they are fond of is often an inappropriate comparison, usually with people in other countries: \u201cThus we can say that by global standards there are no poor people in the US at all: the entire country is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":68082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,23384,85],"class_list":["post-68081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/09\/2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68081"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68222,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68081\/revisions\/68222"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}