Can the rich be poor?

In a recent paper, Mark Peacock asks 'can the rich be poor?' The answer is no. The fat can't be thin and the good can't be bad.

Peacock's abstract reads-  This theoretical contribution to poverty studies investigates Amartya Sen’s work as a basis for examining poverty.

In which case, it is mental masturbation.

 Sen discusses two social capabilities, each essential to the avoidance of poverty; one is the ability to appear in public without feeling shame,

which drunk people can do even if they are naked and have a radish stuck up their bum.

 the other the ability to participate in the life of the community. 

which has nothing to do with poverty or wealth. Being nice or charming helps. Being nasty or boring is what gets you shunned. Take it from me. I know whereof I speak.

This essay analyzes the intricacies of using the concept of community as a reference group for judging a person’s poverty, and it compares Sen’s use of this reference group with that of Adam Smith and Peter Townsend. 

Townsend really cared about the poor in Britain. Sen only pretended to care about the poor so as to advance his own career.

The essay develops a notion of the “affluent poor,” which is a logical category of the capability perspective which Sen has developed.

There has always been an 'affluent poor'- we call them debtors. 

 Although the affluent poor might appear to be oxymoronic, those who embrace the capability perspective should acknowledge it as a necessary implication thereof.

But what they are embracing is shit the necessary implication of which is being shitty. 

Amartya Sen argues that poverty should be assessed in the space of capabilities (Sen 1992, 9; Sen 1999, 87).

But the space of capabilities is unknowable. Who can tell which entrepreneur or which scientist or which sportsman will prove to be one of the greats? What about how capabilities will change if we have access to quantum computers? Would a cretin like me suddenly become capable of solving complex mathematical problems?  

Whether someone has the capability to do or be X is often independent of whether others have the same capability.

It is unknown. We might think a kid is capable of becoming a great basketball player because he is very tall. But he might not have some mysterious X-factor and thus will never make the grade.  

Consequently, a person who lacks a capability may be deemed deprived irrespective of the capabilities of others, that is, “without [us] having to ascertain first the relative picture” (Sen 1981, 17).

But this is done by arbitrary stipulation. Anyone can point at a kid and say 'I tell you that boy will be the next Roger Federer'.  Equally, I can say 'the poorest man in the world is Bill Gates. Everybody thinks he is rich but they are wrong. All is the fault of the mind-rays of the Lizard people.' 

This is why Sen holds that poverty has an “irreducible absolutist core” (Sen 1983, 332).

No. Sen says things like that because he thinks it makes him sound smart. But he isn't smart. Nothing has an 'irreducible core'. On the other hand, Sen is an incorrigible bore.  

Nevertheless, one’s ability to realize capabilities absolutely

'ability to realize capability' is meaningless. Ability means the same thing as capability. The thing only exists if it can be realized at will. 

can, and often does, involve relativity in the space of resources, commodities or income necessary for realizing certain capabilities.

No. Ability involves realization at will. Realization occurs in a configuration space. But such spaces are not relativized. One might say 'only one person can come first' so realizations are relative. But this is not really true. Two people can come first.  

This is the case for what Sen calls “social capabilities” (Sen 1985b, 670; Sen 1992, 115). One such is the capability to appear in public without shame, which, in what follows, I refer to as the no-shame capability.

Which has nothing to do with poverty. The Duchess may feel she can't appear in public without shame because her new tiara hasn't yet been delivered by the jeweler. I may feel no shame in appearing nude in public because I am drunk. 

Sen may not have noticed that much has changed in England since the time of Adam Smith. Dukes might dress like dustmen if that was what is considered cool.  

Another social capability concerns the ability to participate in the life of the community,

which is solely a function of your social skills, not your poverty or wealth.  

which, henceforth, I call the community-participation capability. Realizing these capabilities, that is, transforming the capability into an achievement or functioning, presupposes that one “meet the demands of social convention” (Sen 1983, 335). Both capabilities therefore involve a reference group – one’s community – which is the bearer of the standards or conventions up to which one must live if one is to be a participating member of the community and to avoid shame.

But, in England, things have changed since the eighteenth century. People aren't judged on the basis of their apparel, the height of their wigs,  or the quality of the sword they have dangling from their belt.  

In this article, I engage in the sort of “conceptual questioning” of poverty for which Sen (2006, 30) calls to accompany the empirical study and measurement of poverty.

Poverty- like Sickness- means an unfortunate state of affairs. The only type of conceptual questioning that is acceptable is such as might mitigate or reduce Poverty or Sickness. Sen-tentious shite won't help. Saying 'x is starving' may cause people to give money to x. But saying 'please help the affluent poor or the  healthy sick or the orphan whose mummy and daddy are very much alive' is counter-productive.   

Sen’s no-shame capability is inspired by Adam Smith’s discussion of “necessaries” which Sen often quotes. Smith writes: By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in present times … a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in publick without a linen shirt … Custom … has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them (1981/1776, V.ii.k.3).

That has changed. Cotton shirts are perfectly acceptable as are trainers made of goretex or some other such artificial fabric. In any case, Smith was wrong about his own period. Wooden clogs were perfectly respectable in many English towns.  

Smith draws attention to varying resource requirements for meeting the no-shame capability: the eighteenth-century day-labourer, in contrast to his ancient forebears in Greece and Rome, required a linen shirt to meet this capability.

This simply wasn't true. A respectable man or woman remained respectable whatever he or she wore. A rogue or a prostitute remained an object of scorn even if finely dressed.  

Sen stresses that a person who fails to meet the no-shame capability because, say, he lacks appropriate attire, suffers an absolute capability deficit.

Sen comes from the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Theresa. Moreover, the most respected members of the wealthy Digambara Jain sect are completely naked. It is obvious that the ability to receive respect is wholly unrelated to what one wears.  

The absolute deficit in the space of capabilities involves a relative deficit in the space of commodities (Sen 1983, 333, 335):

No. Ability is unrelated to what can be bought or sold. I may dress like a Bishop. I am not a Bishop. But Bishops may wear mufti without any impairment of their dignity.  

Smith’s day-labourer, for example, commands relatively fewer commodities (in particular, no linen shirt) than others in the same community; ridding himself of this shame would be an absolute  achievement for the labourer, the accomplishment of which would require that he pull equal with others in the space of commodities by acquiring a linen shirt.

This is sheer fantasy. The day laborer could wear a woolen or cotton garment. What mattered was his strength and skill. 

Smith draws our attention to two dimensions along which customary differences in resource requirements for meeting the no-shame capability operate. One is temporal, the other spatial. Methodologically, we must consider each separately, although they can be combined. Purely temporal comparisons examine the way in which what is deemed a necessity in one and the same society changes over time. Purely spatial comparisons, on the other hand, involve two spatially separate but contemporaneous societies. Smith (1981/1776, V.ii.k.3) offers us a purely spatial comparison when he tells us that, in England, leather shoes were but, in France, were not required to appear in public without shame.

Smith was wrong. The English had clogs. The French had sabots.  Sen, with typical stupidity, latched on to something silly that Smith wrote and produced a spatially and temporally stupid theory out of it. Maybe, in the Fifties, one could say that men needed to wear suits and hats so as to be considered gentlemen. But, by the Seventies, this simply wasn't true. 

If we compare two geographically separate and non-contemporaneous societies, both temporal and spatial comparison is involved, as with Smith’s comparison of the ancient world (Greece and Rome) with early-modern England.

Socrates would not have been spurned from the doors of the Athenaeum had he turned up in his customary attire. The ability to command respect is a function of virtue and skill not the clothes you have on your back.  

In 1985- in between Thatcher's landslide victories in '83 and '87- Joanna Mack and Stewart Lansley published a book titled 'Poor Britain' which suggested that poor British people were very very stupid. That's why they kept voting for Thatcher even though they were starving to death. Sen, too, suggested that Britain might soon face a huge famine because the working class were too stupid to understand that they had nothing to eat. So they would die and then the Government would feel very sorry for its callousness. 

Similarly, one’s capability to nourish oneself adequately can be misperceived by first-person reports, as Joanna Mack and Stewart Lansley illustrate with the case of “Tricia” who, in order to afford toys for her children, had reduced her food intake to one meal per day. Her self-perception of this state of affairs was that it is “just something I’ve got used to, you know, so I don’t think I could eat every day if people put it in front of me” (1985, 95).

Atul Gopichand and Vivek Iyer investigated the case of 'Tommy' who kept sucking off Tory Cabinet Ministers because this was his only way to gain a little protein in his diet. His self-perception was that he was actually the Queen of Engyland and that Magna Carta obliged him to perform fellatio on evil upholders of Neo-Liberalism. He said 'sucking dicks is just something I've got  used to, you know, so I don't think I could not suck dicks even if none were put in front of me. Also I vote Tory coz Thatcher will soon rid us of all them Pakis and Nig Nogs and Yuropeens.'  

This Stoic attitude belies the objective fact that she suffers from dizziness, most likely a consequence of eating irregularly.

while voting Tory 

Cases like this should lead us to mistrust a person’s expressions of happiness or desire fulfilment as bases for judgements about that person’s well-being.

No. It should cause us to mistrust nutters who tell stupid lies in the belief that this helps the poor. 

  Although the two disagree about many aspects of poverty (Sen, 1985b; Townsend, 1985), both use the notion of community as a reference point for judging poverty.

But the 'community' turned its back on Townsend's bollocks. Still, when he started out, he was part of something good and useful. But pretending that Mrs Thatcher was starving the proles was a stupid lie and so Townsend faded into obscurity.  

In what follows, I compare Townsend and Sen with regard to their respective understandings of community. Townsend holds people to be poor “when they lack the resources to ... participate in the activities and have the living conditions and the amenities which are customary ... in the societies to which they belong” (Townsend 1979, 31, 413, 922).

Which is why they emigrated or were helped to do so. Redistribution soon hit the brick wall of 'stagflation'. The working class wasn't going to tax itself to pamper the work-shy. Thatcher and Reagan came to power and things got better for those with a work ethic and a bit of get up and go.  

There exist, according to Townsend, expectations which render certain goods or “styles of life” necessities if one is to participate in the life of the community. What does Townsend understand by “society” and “community”? Townsend eschews the idea of a monolithic national society which imposes the same expectations on all: “[t]here is no unitary and clear-cut national ‘style of living’. Rather, there are series of overlapping and merging community, ethnic, organizational and regional styles” (Townsend 1979, 249). There exist “social sub-systems” based on ethnicity, sex, locality (urban or rural), class and religion (Townsend 1979, 554, 59, 53).

Imagine the plight of a poor Muslim who can only afford three wives or a starving Hindu who has only one 257 meter tall statue of Sardar Patel. A multi-cultural society has a duty to lift such people out of the abject shame and misery of their deprivation. 

The plain fact is that affluent countries encouraged their poor to emigrate but brought in people from poorer countries who had lower standards of living and thus lower 'disutility' from work. There may have been a time when some silly Lefties thought that voters would want to help the poor by paying more in tax but those days are long gone. Even Sweden it seems has turned to what used to be called 'the far right'.