Poverty and Welfare

I didn't have a whole lot to say at the start of this session.  Mostly, I had questions that needed clarifying: What do we mean by poverty?  What kind of conditions qualify?  What constitutes welfare?

Our Doctor attempted to address the first two questions in his first contribution.  He told us he was always surprised by how fragile his mind is, since he thinks he knows a lot, but he didn't know what poverty was.  After pondering it, he decided "poverty" meant a lack of a needed substance, and therefore something individual (as most of our topics end up being) and with different manifestations in different societies.  Later he took a stab at "welfare" too, focusing on the money aspect.  In his opinion, the availability of welfare may make some people think they don't have to work anymore, but it is impossible to predict where society will go.  Money doesn't exist, like love, he said.  Banks control the money, therefore they also control society, and the younger generations have lost their idealism, he lamented.  He mentioned a patient he had had who had turned to prostitution to pay her mortgage, saying that she had told him that she had sold her dignity to keep her shelter.  Our Doctor did not explain whether he considered her to be living in physical poverty, but his implication was one of poverty of moral and morale.

After a contribution mentioning Spanish children being left without even one good meal daily, our Leader responded that this situation was more a question of making poor choices than being economically poor.  It is, however, another symptom of poverty in that the poor are most likely not given access to the information they need to make healthy choices about their lifestyles.  It makes little sense to compare poverty levels in different countries because each society has its own needs, and those needs determine what may be lacking for each individual.  The lack of a cell phone in a slum in India may not matter too much to its inhabitants level of wealth or poverty, but in the developed West, it has become almost absolutely essential to have that type of access to contact in order to find work, be able to do work acceptably, or manage one's life.  A few do get along without them, but the vast majority of citizens in Western countries would have difficulty maintaining their current lifestyle without that connectivity.  The lack of cell phone is, in fact, poverty and an obstacle to leaving it.  The Leader continued, saying poverty is a political concept, the outcome of poor management and outright oppression.  The essence of it in modern society is the limited access to education even more than simple lack of money.  The Welfare State, in his British opinion, is not meant to simply provide charity or give money away, but to create access to opportunities for people to better themselves; in a society, everyone does better when everyone does better.  His pre-discussion thoughts are in his essay.

The True Philosopher was able to give us a different perspective on the question, although not mentioned in his written thoughts, coming from an East Asian country as he does.  His viewpoint was that poverty is more a state of mind that a physical experience.  The poverty he has seen in his country was of the urban variety, in which people come from the rural areas looking for paying jobs and more life choices (although possibly education too, I would think) but are stuck living in squalid conditions in slums and tenements.  The people he saw living in the country did not appear to him to be impoverished because their basic needs were covered; they had good food, enough of it, shelter, and water.  They might not have the options of city dwellers for leisure or work (or education), but they really lacked for nothing essential.  However, people from the country continue to migrate to the city for a "better life" of higher pay and higher prices.  For the Philosopher, this points to poverty being rooted in the mental state of people, who would leave behind basic physical needs for only vaguely possible emotional fulfillment.  In the end, he worried that the Welfare State would indeed perpetuate a poverty mentality.

As the meeting drew to a close, the Great Yawn Inducer took the floor and refused to relinquish it for 20 full minutes.  Unable to make the useless effort to decipher his heavily accented foghorning for more than 2 minutes, I was left unsure of the point of his oxygen burning.  My best guess is that it was more victim blaming of the less fortunate for not simply having money and being so greedy as to take out bank loans.  I wouldn't be surprised if he attends the Mitt Romney school of financial advice.