THE NATURE OF MASS POVERTY

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS                       1979

PART V

 

Chapter 4: Accommodation

In the rich country a large proportion of the people have come to expect a comfortable and also an increasing income. This is a circumstance to which they have accommodated their thoughts and expectations. An effort, general though by no means universal, to improve income is assumed. Most significantly, it is assumed by economists and other scholars. There is broad accommodation to the idea of increasing income.

It should not surprise us then, though it does, that the poor also accommodate to their poverty. And especially so the rural poor. This tendency to accommodation is a fact of the greatest importance.

We have observed the forces making for an equilibrium of poverty – that make poverty self-perpetuating and restore the previous level of deprivation, or something approaching it, if there is a temporary improvement. But nothing so reinforces this equilibrium as the absence of aspiration – the absence of effort to escape it. In the poor rural community such aspiration, in turn, is in conflict with one of the most profound and predictable elements of human behavior. That is the refusal to struggle against the impossible, the tendency to prefer acquiescence to frustration.

People who have lived for centuries in poverty in the relative isolation of the rural village have come to terms with this existence. It would be astonishing were it otherwise.

• It is more civilized, more intelligent, as well as more plausible, that people, out of the experience of centuries, should reconcile themselves to what has for so long been the inevitable.
• The deeply rational character of accommodation lies back, at least in part, of the central instruction of the principal world religions.
• All without exception, urge acquiescence, some in remarkably specific form. The poor pass through the eye of the needle into Paradise; the rich remain outside with the camels.

The ethical judgment of the affluent community, as well as its economics, is thought appropriate to the poor. Accordingly and instinctively, the rich community reacts derogatorily to the accommodation of the poor to their poverty; here are people who deserve no sympathy, for they do not even try. This again reflects a serious failure of understanding, another example of the highly inappropriate transfer of the highly conditioned attitudes of the rich country to the poor.

• Even in the poorest country, there is always a minority which seeks to escape. As the possibility of escape increases, the logic and rationality of accommodation decline.
• Countries lie in a continuum between the extremes of general mass poverty and relative mass affluence.
• The hold of the equilibrium of poverty is relaxed, to be replaced by the dynamic of improvement. Accommodation persists in a progressively smaller share of the population.
• In the farming community is southern Ontario, the struggle for economic improvement was held to be general.

A practical manifestation of accommodation has long been important for the work of agricultural extension services and similar agencies of agricultural improvement in the advanced countries. The most effective work of these agencies was with a minority of farmers, and it was noticed, not without some sense of guilt and failure, that these were usually the most progressive and prosperous, the ones who seemed least to need the help. Those most in need remained the most stolidly with their accustomed methods of cultivation or husbandry or changed only slowly in response to the example of their progressive neighbors.

• Though regarded as unworthy and even unnatural, accommodation was fully recognized.
• The practical importance of such recognition in the poor countries is, if anything, much greater.
• The notion of accommodation has very little standing in the literature of economic development.
• Economists of both the advanced capitalist and socialist worlds take the will to improve for granted. Their recommendations are universally for people who seek improvement.
• We too seek to keep alive the beliefs and myths that are essential for our profession.
• An understanding of accommodation explains why seemingly promising efforts at the relief of mass poverty have miscarried, been disappointing. And it shows how effort can be more effectively expended in the future.
• One source of disappointment which the equilibrium of poverty and the resulting accommodation allow us to understand is the often meager consequence of land reform.
• All rural communities have a class structure. Beneath the smallest proprietors there is always a class of landless laborers whose hold on existence is even more fragile than that of the poorest peasant.
• The relationships between the owner of land and those who work it are infinitely various, and they have lent themselves, over the years, to a precision of scholarly study which has gone far to conceal the circumstances that apply to all.
• It is quite possible, as in Central America and elsewhere in Latin America, for landlords to extract enough income for tenants, even when these are excrutiatingly poor, to provide a living standard for themselves that is far above that of the community in general.
• Landlords have survived because the tenants have accommodated to their poverty. This, not their access to power, was the protection of the landed class.
• After land reform, economically at least, all is much as before.
• This we now see was predictable. The changed relation of people to land did not alter the more enduring fact of an equilibrium of poverty and the accommodation thereto.

 

Chapter 5: What is Now Explained

Chapter 6: The Framework of Policy

Chapter 7: The Industrial Escape

Chapter 8: On Migration

Index