Provoking Policy

I have in a previous post (October 27, 2012) expressed my intellectual, personal and ethical discomfort with the extensive 'subjectification' (more trendily termed "participation') of poor people in research with the lofty and well-intentioned goal of 'understanding the poor' or 'understanding poverty' in order to alleviate the plight of the exploited and excluded. It resonated with many people and was read by multiples of the usual number of readers of my posts. However, I offered no alternative, so here goes. Let's interview the wealthy. Yes. Let's find them in their communities, offer them up something they desire, like to shake the hand of Bill or Hil or an invite to Davos (if they aren't already shuttling in on their private jet), and ask them pages of questions about why they do the things they do and ask them how they could do them with less harm to the world. Community-Based 'Solutions' Poverty is not 'created' b...

I could write a long list of statistics about poor people in the USA but at the end of it all, you will know what you already know: being poor in America is a hard row to hoe. What with the cutbacks in food stamps, subsidized childcare and a stubborn unemployment rate, being poor means to do without and to struggle to get what you have and fight to get what help is offered. And yet.... it is not the poor that President Obama is worried about as he does his stump(?) speech on his economic plan for America. It's the middle class. It's the people who may have to tighten their belts but their kids will go to college. They have health insurance (or soon will be forced to under Obamacare) and tend to live in the suburbs unless they are flush enough to live the more expensive life of the urbanite. It seems the poor have nothing to contribute to economic growth. Our Gini index could put us on par close to Jamaica and Cameroon and behind Uganda in terms of income inequality, which da...

I am an academic and thus I am required to do research and to write. As someone who studied sociology, social welfare, public health, international health, and economics I am plenty equipped to study poverty and the lives of poor people. And in my areas of study, these are the people of whom we ask questions, whether here or abroad.Were I to do a search of any library database using poverty as a keyword, I will get hundreds of hits for journal articles published in the past month alone. But I have decided that I will no longer study 'poverty' or 'the poor' because I find it exploitative in its convenience, somewhat useless in its findings and creates a conundrum in its recommendations: how to change poverty by changing the poor. We study how the poor shop, what they eat, what they drink, how fat they are, how (un)educated they are, how much health care they (don't) get, how they parent, and how a wide range of social, political and economic factors interact to inf...