Anarchy 84/From articles on poverty
The rich and the poor are inexorably pulling away from each other on the income scale. Thus another popular myth of the fifties hits the dust. The fashionable wisdom of the Economist and its supporters is seen to be phony. They predicted that social growth would inevitably accompany economic growth; that a radical redistribution of wealth would be brought about by progressive taxation and the effects of the social services.
“But if my own personal observations as a reporter over some 38 years of roaming around the world are valid then the United States is unique in having serious massive poverty in the midst of affluence. Not in the whole of Western Europe together would it be possible to find 30 million persons who live in the prospect of wasted lives.
“It would be fascinating to know whether there is in the Soviet Union a segment of the whole which could be said to live in relative poverty. Poverty is, after all, relative. A person could have a wasted life in the United States at 10 times the annual wage of a successful person in India.”
While Mr. Harsch found “pockets of underprivileged” in Britain, France, and Italy, a slum in Poland, and unpleasant areas in Denmark and Germany, the numbers so afflicted are not numerous, by comparison with those in the United States. He adds this important distinction:
“Nor does the squalor of even a Sicilian slum debase the self-
respect of its dwellers as does the rotting centre of many an industrial city in the United States. And the dividing line, surely, is drawn not by money income but by whether one is needed, or unwanted.”
During his eight years in London Mr. Harsch was often asked by American visitors to see some slums. He would take them to “the poorest, shabbiest, most neglected, most race-
“But the cold fact is that the United States has tolerated within its midst a degree and quantity of poverty which other advanced societies do not tolerate. On this scale of values the United States is the most backward of modern Western countries.”