condition, with no way of improving one’s situation, it is as bad as portrayed. When poverty is conjoined with oppression, be it a caste system or a hacienda system or a people’s republic, it is as bad as portrayed. My thought experiment is not a paean to peasant life, but a paean to communities of free people. If poverty is defined in terms of money, everybody in the Thai village is poor. If poverty is defined as being unable to live a modest but decent existence, hardly anyone there is poor.
VERSION II: BEING MADE SUDDENLY POOR IN THE UNITED STATES
Does this thought experiment fail when it is transported to the United States? Imagine the same Thai village set down intact on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Surely its inhabitants must be miserable, living in their huts and watching the rest of the world live in splendor.
At this point in the argument, however, we need no longer think in terms of thought experiments. The situation I described is one that has been faced by hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the United States, whether they came from Europe at the end of World War II or from Vietnam in the mid-1970s. Lawyers found themselves working as janitors, professors found themselves working on assembly lines.
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Sometimes they followed the same process I just described, working their way up and out. Many had to remain janitors and factory workers, because they came to America too late in life to retool their foreign-trained skills. But their children did not have to remain so, and they have not. A reading of their histories, in literature or in the oral testimony of their children, corroborates the pattern I described. Was a Latvian attorney forced to flee his country “happy” to have to work as a janitor? No. Was he prevented by his situation—specifically, by his poverty—from successfully pursuing happiness? Emphatically, no.
Let us continue the thought experiment nonetheless, with a slightly different twist. This time, you are given a choice. One choice is to be poor in rural Thailand, as I have described it, with just enough food and shelter and a few hundred dollars a year in cash: a little beyond bare subsistence, but not much. Or you may live in the United States, receive a free apartment, free food, free medical care, and a cash grant, the package coming to a total that puts you well above the poverty line. There is, however, a catch: you are required to live in a particular apartment, and this apartment is located in a public housing project in one of the burned-out areas of the South Bronx. A condition of receiving the rest of the package is that you continue to live, and raise your children, in the South Bronx (you do not have the option of spending all of your waking hours in Manhattan, just as the village thought experiment did not give you the option of taking vacations in Bangkok). You still have all the assets you took to the Thai village—once again, it is essential that you not imagine what it is like for an Alabama sharecropper to be transplanted to the South Bronx, but what it would be like for you.
In some ways, you would have much more access to distractions. Unlike the situation in the Thai village, you would have television you could watch all day, taking you vicariously into other worlds (an inferior form of the experience machine). Or, for that matter, it would be much easier to get books than in a Thai village, and you would have much more money with which to buy them. You could, over time, fix up your apartment so that within its walls you would have an environment that looks and feels very like an apartment you could have elsewhere.
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There is only one problem: You would have a terrible time once you opened your door to the outside world. How, for example, are you going to raise your children in the South Bronx so that they grow up to be the adults you want them to be? (No, you don’t have the option of sending them to live elsewhere.) How are you going to take a walk in the park in the evening? There are many good people in the South Bronx with whom you could become friends, just as in the village. But how are you to find them? And once they are found, how are you to create a functioning, mutually reinforcing community?
I suggest that as you think of answers to those questions, you will find that, if you are to have much chance to be happy, the South Bronx needs to be changed in a way that the village did not—that, unlike the village as it stood, the South Bronx as it stands does not “work” as an environment for pursuing happiness. Let us ignore for the moment how these changes in environment could be brought about, by what combination of government’s “doing things” and “refraining from doing things.” The fact is that hardly any of those changes involve greater income for you personally, but rather changes in the surrounding environment. There is a question that crystallizes the roles of personal vs. environmental poverty in this situation: What is the dollar sum that would persuade you to move self and family to this public housing project in the South Bronx?
VERSION III: POVERTY AND YOUR OWN CHILDREN
The purpose of the first two versions of the thought experiment was to suggest a different perspective on one’s own priorities regarding the pursuit of happiness, and by extension to suggest that perhaps public policy ought to reflect a different set of priorities as well. It is easy in this case, however, to assume that what one wants for oneself is not applicable to others. Thus, for example, it could be said that the only reason the thought experiments work (if you grant even that much) is because the central character starts out with enormous advantages of knowledge and values—which in themselves reflect the advantages of having grown up with plenty of material resources.
To explore that possibility, I ask you to bear with me for one more thought experiment on this general topic, one I have found to be a
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touchstone.11 This time, the question is not what kinds of material resources you (with your fully developed set of advantages) need for your pursuit of happiness, but what a small child, without any developed assets at all, needs for his pursuit of happiness—specifically, what your own child needs.
Imagine that you are the parent of a small child, living in contemporary America, and in some way you are able to know that tomorrow you and your spouse will die and your child will be made an orphan. You do not have the option of sending the child to live with a friend or relative. You must choose among other and far-from-perfect choices. The choices, I assure you, are not veiled representations of anything else; the experiment is set up not to be realistic, but to evoke something about how you think.
Suppose first this choice: You may put your child with an extremely poor couple according to the official definition of “poor”—which is to say, poverty that is measured exclusively in money. This couple has so little money that your child’s clothes will often be secondhand and there will be not even small luxuries to brighten his life. Life will be a struggle, often a painful one. But you also know that the parents work hard, will make sure your child goes to school and studies, and will teach your child that integrity and responsibility are primary values. Or you may put your child with parents who will be as affectionate to your child as the first couple but who have never worked, are indifferent to your child’s education, who think that integrity and responsibility (when they think of them at all) are meaningless words—but who have and will always have plenty of food and good clothes and amenities, provided by others.
Which couple do you choose? The answer is obvious to me and I imagine to most readers: The first couple, of course. But if you are among those who choose the first couple, stop and consider what the answer means. This is your own child you are talking about, whom you would never let go hungry even if providing for your child meant going hungry yourself. And yet you are choosing years of privation for that same child. Why?
Perhaps I set up the thought experiment too starkly. Let us repeat it, adding some ambiguity. This time, the first choice is again the poor-but-virtuous couple just described. The second couple is rich. They
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are, we shall say, the heirs to a great fortune. They will not beat your child or in any other way maltreat him or her. We may even assume affection on their part, as we will with the other couples. But they have never worked and never will, are indifferent to your child’s education, and think that integrity and responsibility (when they think of them at all) are meaningless words. They do, however, possess millions of dollars, more than enough to