There are problems that the government can fix, but the problem of people not liking to be in the bottom of the distribution is not among them

From What Does it Mean to Be Poor? by Megan McArdle.

Ever since that report, it's been conservatives on one side, pointing to the consumption data, while liberals retort that there is more to life than flat screen televisions. And I'd say that both sides have a point. When you look at what people are consuming, you don't see the gross material deprivation that really used to characterize being poor, like lack of hot water, regularly having no food in the house, shivering yourself to sleep in the cold, or wearing patched (or worse, unpatched) clothes. Younger poor people quite frequently have things that older non-poor people consider nonessential luxuries, like cable or satellite television, expensive sneakers, and high-end cellular phones. On the other hand, it's still really terrible to be poor, and there are quite clearly rather a lot of people suffering this terribleness.

So how do we reconcile these two observations? There's what I'd call the implicit conservative view, which is that poor people are not so much lacking in money, as lacking in the self-discipline to spend their money wisely. This view is reinforced by the fact that a lot of immigrants do arrive here with even less than the native poor, often don't qualify for supplemental benefits that cushion the deprivation of the native poor, and nonetheless after a generation or two end up quite prosperous. This Bryan Caplan post is a fairly strong version of that argument.

I think it's hard to disagree that the poor could stop being poor--at least as the US currently defines poverty--if they behaved differently; it's basically numerically impossible to fall under the poverty line if you finish high school, wait to have children until you get married, and both work full time. On the other hand, as I wrote a while back, I think this ignores the evidence that when you are poor--"which is to say", noted George Orwell of unemployed coal miners, "when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable"--it is actually much harder to make those choices than Bryan seems to imagine. Which is why the poor of Orwell's England also struggled with things like obesity and dental decay from consuming too much sugar and not enough vegetables; it is hard to get interested in dieting if a sugar high is the nicest thing that ever happens to you.

There's also what I'd call the implicit left view, which is that, as Jesus said, "The poor, you will always have with you." This Noah Smith post on poverty in Japan seems to encapsulate it pretty well. In response to Caplan, Smith argues out that about 16% of the Japanese seem to be poor, even though they are notoriously crime free, averse to single parenthood, and not big drinkers or drug users. These are people who work, but need to scrimp on things like food, and eschew vacations, in order to afford even more necessary items such as medical care and school uniforms. “Poverty in a prosperous society usually does not mean living in rags on a dirt floor,” Tokyo social welfare professor Masami Iwata told the New York Times. “These are people with cellphones and cars, but they are cut off from the rest of society.”

I take the point. The minimum decent living standard--aka the poverty line--does rise along with national wealth. In 1900, many middle class families may have lacked a telephone. But by 1980, not having a telephone indeed meant that you were "cut off from the rest of society". It's hard to even look for a job if you cannot put a phone number on a resume. Similarly, now that we do not have an elaborate infrastructure for feeding and sheltering horses, or a place that they may be easily and safely driven to town, some sort of car is a minimum requirement for living in many places.

And yet, this sort of observation often comes dangerously close to the trivially true point that there is a bottom of the income distribution. If you simply define the bottom 15% or so of society as poor, you will have gained definitional clarity, but at the expense of moral clarity on the required response. There's a bottom 15% of the income distribution at Davos every year, yet I would not contribute to a charity which promised to help those unfortunates. There are problems that the government can fix, but the problem of people not liking to be in the bottom of the distribution is not among them. At least, not short of a sort of radical communism that not even the radical communists managed to actually implement.