Meditations on Poverty [Part 2: Concerning Dorothy]

First some Economic theory! [Don’t worry… you’ll survive it]

For all intents-and-purposes [an expression I have pronounced for years as “all intensive purposes” – one of those situations where you lean how to use a term from the context you hear it used instead of starting with the definition, but back to economics…] we have unlimited wants. I’m going to avoid the enormous can of worms that statement is because no matter how we might fight it, it is pragmatically true and is the basis of economics. Because we have a finite amount of resources to allocate to those unlimited wants, we have to make choices between them. Whatever you choose, you miss out on something else which has an inherent opportunity cost, which is to say you lose the benefits that the other option would have given rise to. An example: Choosing between a summer job in the city or a summer working in Fort Mac… the opportunity costs are numerous but the primary ones are summer earnings, a summer social life, physical health, and perhaps your sanity- I would go crazy in Fort Mac. You choose the option which has the biggest opportunity cost if you choose something else. What makes a lot of the decisions tricky is the comparison of benefits that - to be a total engineer I’m going to say - don’t have the same units. Some benefits you are comparing is amount of sleep you get, your social life, spiritual health, enjoyment factor, money, etc. etc. And for every person that will be different because everyone values, for example, sleep differently.

So that conclude the economic theory portion of this post. What am I getting at?

In EWB, and development at large there is a continual need to define what exactly poverty is. It’s a tricky one, let me tell you. There are some fundamentals like being able to feed yourself, but then once you satisfy those fundamental needs things get really fuzzy. Often in EWB we talk about poverty being a lack of opportunity, such as opportunity to work in the field you are passionate about, or work at all, or go get a post-secondary education if you so wish. One of the volunteers met a fellow who studied nutrition in school. He just loved food and wanted to know more about it and how to use it to be healthy. By what the volunteer told me it sounds like the fellow pretty much fell of his chair when he head in North America there are people who not only use nutritional knowledge in their job, but that that is there job.

I would like to add a bit to the definition, in light of the economic theory I’ve just mentioned:

Poverty is having to weigh opportunity costs between things that are fundamental to a healthy life.

To make that statement real: What is the opportunity cost of sending Jessie to school instead of Jamie. [note: these names are intentionally gender neutral]. What is the opportunity cost of feeding one of them and not the other.

Poverty is when that scarcity devours your unlimited wants and moves on to infringe on your basic needs.

I’m really not sure if that added anything at all to the “what is poverty?” debate. But in light of the economic theory I was reading I thought it was an interesting way to look at it. I’d love to have a in-depth discussion on it. Sounds like grounds for a potluck dinner party with a raging conversation that carries on late into the night – with the people who put a lot of value on sleep dropping out because the opportunity cost has been exceeded (they can get the re-cap in the morning) – and ending up with a second dinner at the Naam at 3 a.m. because we truly know very little about the scarcity we are discussing as our own scarcity permits a second dinner.