Your paper must include a discussion of the following concepts from our text:
-
Stigma/s associated with poverty
-
At least two of the following thinkers’ work on poverty: Max Weber, David Matza, Melvin Lerner, Amartya Sen/Diego Reyles, Loic Wacquant
-
Poverty and community “instability”
- Poverty and health
Direct evidence from course media & the text – your paper should have rich detail (not just general summaries) from the videos. Use video content, quotes, and specific examples to support your paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV8Cy8rIock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyVri9edOrU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RfOnp1kVbc
A man in grimy clothes installs his sleeping bag, a flattened cardboard box, a one-gallon
plastic water jug, and a chrome teakettle in a cluster of bushes next to a building occupied by
upper-middle-class residents, just a block from a large university campus. Diagonally across
the street from this man’s temporary al fresco domicile, there’s a boozy block, lined with bars,
taverns, and restaurants that attract a youngish, affluent, largely suburban, budding yuppie
clientele. The facial reactions of people who cross the indigent man’s path range from contempt
to compassion, from condescension to blasé indifference. But mostly they avoid him—perhaps
caused by a fear of contamination, a wariness that the destitute offers nothing but a bottomless
pit, a virtual black hole of neediness and deprivation that can’t be filled with a small handout.
Perhaps the observer will see on the countenance of these well-off pedestrians a shudder of re-
vulsion that says, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” The reactions this man touches off in
his fleeting encounters with the well-off are characteristic. There’s no doubt about it: members
of the affluent classes stigmatize the poverty-stricken, and the poorer those impoverished are,
the more evident their misery is, the more the well-to-do stigmatize them. Perhaps the poor
feel shame, but it’s possible that they are inured to how the rest of us feel about them.
What is social stratification? It is the hierarchical arrangement of people in a society accord-
ing to the occupational prestige of the head, or the heads, of the household, their education,
and the income of that household. Social class is a type of stratification that is based mainly on
income and wealth; socioeconomic status (or SES) combines all three of these dimensions—
income (along with wealth), occupational prestige, and education. A social class is all the
people whose ranking in the economic hierarchy is approximately the same. We can arrange
nearly all households in nearly all communities, as well as in a nation as a whole, according
to these criteria. There are all sorts of wrinkles and complexities in this definition, but the
basic outline of the definition suffices for our purposes. For the most part, education tracks
class fairly closely; for most of us, education grants access to a well-paying occupation and
career—although not always. We’ll find a considerable number of anomalies in the education-
occupational prestige-income blueprint, but the pattern is there.
One way the stratification system is linked with deviance is that higher-ranked individuals
in a given class system tend to consider themselves better than persons who rank lower. Most
people who rank higher in a social class system tend to feel a sense of superiority that is con-
joined with a moral ranking, that is, they feel they are superior not only because they have
more money, education, and prestige than those who rank lower, but that they are entitled to
it because they are superior in important ways, among them, because they have conformed to
the American norm of achievement. In contrast, the poor have deviated from or violated that
norm by failing to achieve a modicum of success in the occupational, economic, and educa-
tional realms; thus, they are looked down upon by nearly everyone who interacts with them.
Thus, a small-town dentist might not deign to be close friends with a garbage collector. They
are unlikely to live in the same neighborhood, and if their children wished to date, in all
Chapter 4
Poverty and the Hierarchy of
Social ClassCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
plastic water jug, and a chrome teakettle in a cluster of bushes next to a building occupied by
upper-middle-class residents, just a block from a large university campus. Diagonally across
the street from this man’s temporary al fresco domicile, there’s a boozy block, lined with bars,
taverns, and restaurants that attract a youngish, affluent, largely suburban, budding yuppie
clientele. The facial reactions of people who cross the indigent man’s path range from contempt
to compassion, from condescension to blasé indifference. But mostly they avoid him—perhaps
caused by a fear of contamination, a wariness that the destitute offers nothing but a bottomless
pit, a virtual black hole of neediness and deprivation that can’t be filled with a small handout.
Perhaps the observer will see on the countenance of these well-off pedestrians a shudder of re-
vulsion that says, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” The reactions this man touches off in
his fleeting encounters with the well-off are characteristic. There’s no doubt about it: members
of the affluent classes stigmatize the poverty-stricken, and the poorer those impoverished are,
the more evident their misery is, the more the well-to-do stigmatize them. Perhaps the poor
feel shame, but it’s possible that they are inured to how the rest of us feel about them.
What is social stratification? It is the hierarchical arrangement of people in a society accord-
ing to the occupational prestige of the head, or the heads, of the household, their education,
and the income of that household. Social class is a type of stratification that is based mainly on
income and wealth; socioeconomic status (or SES) combines all three of these dimensions—
income (along with wealth), occupational prestige, and education. A social class is all the
people whose ranking in the economic hierarchy is approximately the same. We can arrange
nearly all households in nearly all communities, as well as in a nation as a whole, according
to these criteria. There are all sorts of wrinkles and complexities in this definition, but the
basic outline of the definition suffices for our purposes. For the most part, education tracks
class fairly closely; for most of us, education grants access to a well-paying occupation and
career—although not always. We’ll find a considerable number of anomalies in the education-
occupational prestige-income blueprint, but the pattern is there.
One way the stratification system is linked with deviance is that higher-ranked individuals
in a given class system tend to consider themselves better than persons who rank lower. Most
people who rank higher in a social class system tend to feel a sense of superiority that is con-
joined with a moral ranking, that is, they feel they are superior not only because they have
more money, education, and prestige than those who rank lower, but that they are entitled to
it because they are superior in important ways, among them, because they have conformed to
the American norm of achievement. In contrast, the poor have deviated from or violated that
norm by failing to achieve a modicum of success in the occupational, economic, and educa-
tional realms; thus, they are looked down upon by nearly everyone who interacts with them.
Thus, a small-town dentist might not deign to be close friends with a garbage collector. They
are unlikely to live in the same neighborhood, and if their children wished to date, in all
Chapter 4
Poverty and the Hierarchy of
Social ClassCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
92 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
probability, they’d discourage the liaison. Thus, the other side of the coin of one party having
more prestige is that the other has less, and that typically means being treated as a deviant in
multiple realms of life.
In some societies, ranking is mainly ascribed, that is, based on inherited positions, while
in others, it is mainly achieved, that is, it is earned though one’s own accomplishments. A
meritocracy is a system based mainly on the principle that only through one’s own achievement
does one earn one’s class and status positions. But even in a meritocracy, invidiousness prevails.
A recent analysis of the workings of the meritocracy that prevails in the United States puts
the deviance of social class in sharp focus. Michael Sandel (2020) argues that though reward-
ing merit seems a fair and equitable system of ranking people, it produces a form of oppression
that has effects that are very similar to those that hand position down from one generation
to the next, irrespective of ability. Consider the fact that more undergraduates at Princeton
and Yale come from families at the top 1% of the US income ladder than from the bottom
60%. Two-thirds of students attending Ivy League colleges come from families who earn the
top 20% of incomes in the nation. And the reason, the author argues, is strictly meritocratic,
that is, the system is based on achievement. These families are more likely to engage in edu-
cationally enriching dinner conversations as their children are growing up; these students are
more likely to attend top-flight high schools; many have had their formal education enriched
by private tutors; and most have traveled abroad. At the same time, the children of such
families—who grew up in upper- and upper-middle-class families—“have come to imagine
themselves smarter, wiser, more tolerant, and therefore more deserving of recognition and
respect—than the noncredentialled” (Hochschild, 2020, p. 19). As Sandel points out, even
the poorly educated look down on their peers, likewise the poorly educated. The system isn’t
rigged, the author argues, at least, not directly, but it has much the same negative impact on
people at the lower end of the hierarchy as a system that is rigged—and very likely an even
more negative impact, since many of us believe that, since we got what we’ve earned, it’s our
own fault if we end up at the bottom of the pile.
Here then are some of the implicit, unspoken rules of any system of stratification, that is, what
social class and socioeconomic status says to people at the top of the class system. They receive
the following message, and hence, tend to operate under the principles that this message spells
out. The higher-ranking members of the society think, in relation to those who rank beneath
them in that system:
I do not want to associate with you as a friend. I do not want you to join the clubs to
which I belong. I do not want your sons and daughters to have a romantic relationship
with or marry my sons and daughters. I don’t want you to live in my neighborhood. I am
going to maintain a certain social distance from you, just as I expect you to do with me.
I expect you to display a certain deference toward me, even though I will not treat you as
an equal. And keep in mind that there’s a reason why people who work at my job receive
more status honor and a higher paycheck than those who work at yours. The reason is,
it’s very difficult to obtain my job and to perform at it well, as I do. I possess a lot of ex-
pertise and have received a great deal of training that show up in my job performance. In
contrast, the job you have—assuming you have one—is easier to get and less difficult to
perform; therefore, you don’t receive as much prestige or pay as I do, and that’s perfectly
natural and understandable. Moreover, I am more sophisticated than you, my tastes are
more refined; we are different sorts of people. I have certain values, tastes, beliefs, and a
certain lifestyle with which I am comfortable; I like what I like, and I feel OK about it,
and the people I hang with are similar to me in these respects. In all likelihood, yours
are different and, no doubt, a reflection of your background, education, and position, as
well as those of your friends. All of this is well understood by everyone in this society, soCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
probability, they’d discourage the liaison. Thus, the other side of the coin of one party having
more prestige is that the other has less, and that typically means being treated as a deviant in
multiple realms of life.
In some societies, ranking is mainly ascribed, that is, based on inherited positions, while
in others, it is mainly achieved, that is, it is earned though one’s own accomplishments. A
meritocracy is a system based mainly on the principle that only through one’s own achievement
does one earn one’s class and status positions. But even in a meritocracy, invidiousness prevails.
A recent analysis of the workings of the meritocracy that prevails in the United States puts
the deviance of social class in sharp focus. Michael Sandel (2020) argues that though reward-
ing merit seems a fair and equitable system of ranking people, it produces a form of oppression
that has effects that are very similar to those that hand position down from one generation
to the next, irrespective of ability. Consider the fact that more undergraduates at Princeton
and Yale come from families at the top 1% of the US income ladder than from the bottom
60%. Two-thirds of students attending Ivy League colleges come from families who earn the
top 20% of incomes in the nation. And the reason, the author argues, is strictly meritocratic,
that is, the system is based on achievement. These families are more likely to engage in edu-
cationally enriching dinner conversations as their children are growing up; these students are
more likely to attend top-flight high schools; many have had their formal education enriched
by private tutors; and most have traveled abroad. At the same time, the children of such
families—who grew up in upper- and upper-middle-class families—“have come to imagine
themselves smarter, wiser, more tolerant, and therefore more deserving of recognition and
respect—than the noncredentialled” (Hochschild, 2020, p. 19). As Sandel points out, even
the poorly educated look down on their peers, likewise the poorly educated. The system isn’t
rigged, the author argues, at least, not directly, but it has much the same negative impact on
people at the lower end of the hierarchy as a system that is rigged—and very likely an even
more negative impact, since many of us believe that, since we got what we’ve earned, it’s our
own fault if we end up at the bottom of the pile.
Here then are some of the implicit, unspoken rules of any system of stratification, that is, what
social class and socioeconomic status says to people at the top of the class system. They receive
the following message, and hence, tend to operate under the principles that this message spells
out. The higher-ranking members of the society think, in relation to those who rank beneath
them in that system:
I do not want to associate with you as a friend. I do not want you to join the clubs to
which I belong. I do not want your sons and daughters to have a romantic relationship
with or marry my sons and daughters. I don’t want you to live in my neighborhood. I am
going to maintain a certain social distance from you, just as I expect you to do with me.
I expect you to display a certain deference toward me, even though I will not treat you as
an equal. And keep in mind that there’s a reason why people who work at my job receive
more status honor and a higher paycheck than those who work at yours. The reason is,
it’s very difficult to obtain my job and to perform at it well, as I do. I possess a lot of ex-
pertise and have received a great deal of training that show up in my job performance. In
contrast, the job you have—assuming you have one—is easier to get and less difficult to
perform; therefore, you don’t receive as much prestige or pay as I do, and that’s perfectly
natural and understandable. Moreover, I am more sophisticated than you, my tastes are
more refined; we are different sorts of people. I have certain values, tastes, beliefs, and a
certain lifestyle with which I am comfortable; I like what I like, and I feel OK about it,
and the people I hang with are similar to me in these respects. In all likelihood, yours
are different and, no doubt, a reflection of your background, education, and position, as
well as those of your friends. All of this is well understood by everyone in this society, soCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 93
don’t take it personally. If you observe the rules of social class in relation to me, I’ll do
the same with regard to you. This is how things work in this society—and probably all
societies in Earth.
This message and these rules might seem cruel and down-putting, but the fact is, this is how
social class works everywhere. Some societies are more hierarchical than others, but all are hi-
erarchical. Very few people would admit outright to believing in them, but most follow them
anyway. And sociologists have found that these rules and messages do tend to be followed.
When it comes to friendships, like hangs out with like; there’s a strong measure of consonance
or similarity in the tastes, values, beliefs, and lifestyles of friends, at least, in comparison with
those in different class positions. The same with marriage; like tends to marry like, like is
more comfortable with like, like gets along with like more than with those who are unalike,
and unalike partners are more likely to divorce than those who are similar to one another—
class-wise as well as in virtually all ways. Neighborhoods are more homogenous with respect
to class than heterogeneous. And so on. There are exceptions to these rules, but as with all
rules, for the most part, they tend to prevail.
What has all this got to do with deviance? It’s really quite simple: when we contravene these
rules, the people we know will probably call us on it; they are likely to remind us that we have
violated the norms of our society. “Are you sure you want to do this? Is this really the neigh-
borhood you want to move to? Is he/she really the right partner for you? Why do you want to
be friendly with Billy? He’s not our kind.” The people you don’t know, but who are of a higher
social standing than you are, and are members of the groups, associations, and social circles
you wish to enter, are likely to inform you that you have over-stepped your boundaries. To put
the matter plainly, deviance is densely woven into social class and status systems. Whenever
someone violates the rules of class or status, interacting parties are likely to react in a negative,
censorious matter in order to put the violators in their place.
One consequence of the failure to achieve a respectable position in meritocratic stratification
is that poorly educated males, those with only a high school diploma, who are in the prime
of their occupational lives (roughly, 25–54), are increasingly slipping out of the labor force
as a result of underemployment, unemployment—occasional work or no work at all—earlier
retirement, and an earlier death, including “deaths of despair.” In 1965, among American men
in this age range with no college education, 98% worked; of those in 2017, only 68% worked
(Hochschild, 2020, p. 19; Sandel, 2020). The very ranking system of social class and socioeco-
nomic status sorts people into hierarchical categories that is virtually equivalent to a system of
morality, a system of achievement and under-achievement that situates those at the bottom as
disreputable and “bad” and those at the top as righteous and “good.” And this ranking system
has decidedly pernicious psychological consequences on its lower-ranking members.
In addition to being a ranking based on income, education, and occupational prestige, so-
cial class is a moral ranking: people who rank toward the top of the class structure consider
themselves superior in multiple ways; worse, those who rank lower on the socioeconomic
ladder usually recognize that they have failed to do something that would earn them a higher
ranking, that they are less honorable, less deserving of respect. Those at the top feel they are
more virtuous; they have conformed more closely to the American norm of achievement. Even
people whose parents have achieved positions at or toward the top of the social class structure
feel they are deserving of their status in life than those they regard as beneath them. No mat-
ter that this feeling is not sustained by the facts; many people do believe it, and these beliefs
are fundamental to the class structure. The fact is, many people in every class structure, from
top to bottom, believe that persons at the top are better in important ways, and these norms
upholding notions of superiority and inferiority, when violated, constitute deviance in every
society on Earth. Sociologists define deviance as wrongfulness which attracts stigma, moralCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
don’t take it personally. If you observe the rules of social class in relation to me, I’ll do
the same with regard to you. This is how things work in this society—and probably all
societies in Earth.
This message and these rules might seem cruel and down-putting, but the fact is, this is how
social class works everywhere. Some societies are more hierarchical than others, but all are hi-
erarchical. Very few people would admit outright to believing in them, but most follow them
anyway. And sociologists have found that these rules and messages do tend to be followed.
When it comes to friendships, like hangs out with like; there’s a strong measure of consonance
or similarity in the tastes, values, beliefs, and lifestyles of friends, at least, in comparison with
those in different class positions. The same with marriage; like tends to marry like, like is
more comfortable with like, like gets along with like more than with those who are unalike,
and unalike partners are more likely to divorce than those who are similar to one another—
class-wise as well as in virtually all ways. Neighborhoods are more homogenous with respect
to class than heterogeneous. And so on. There are exceptions to these rules, but as with all
rules, for the most part, they tend to prevail.
What has all this got to do with deviance? It’s really quite simple: when we contravene these
rules, the people we know will probably call us on it; they are likely to remind us that we have
violated the norms of our society. “Are you sure you want to do this? Is this really the neigh-
borhood you want to move to? Is he/she really the right partner for you? Why do you want to
be friendly with Billy? He’s not our kind.” The people you don’t know, but who are of a higher
social standing than you are, and are members of the groups, associations, and social circles
you wish to enter, are likely to inform you that you have over-stepped your boundaries. To put
the matter plainly, deviance is densely woven into social class and status systems. Whenever
someone violates the rules of class or status, interacting parties are likely to react in a negative,
censorious matter in order to put the violators in their place.
One consequence of the failure to achieve a respectable position in meritocratic stratification
is that poorly educated males, those with only a high school diploma, who are in the prime
of their occupational lives (roughly, 25–54), are increasingly slipping out of the labor force
as a result of underemployment, unemployment—occasional work or no work at all—earlier
retirement, and an earlier death, including “deaths of despair.” In 1965, among American men
in this age range with no college education, 98% worked; of those in 2017, only 68% worked
(Hochschild, 2020, p. 19; Sandel, 2020). The very ranking system of social class and socioeco-
nomic status sorts people into hierarchical categories that is virtually equivalent to a system of
morality, a system of achievement and under-achievement that situates those at the bottom as
disreputable and “bad” and those at the top as righteous and “good.” And this ranking system
has decidedly pernicious psychological consequences on its lower-ranking members.
In addition to being a ranking based on income, education, and occupational prestige, so-
cial class is a moral ranking: people who rank toward the top of the class structure consider
themselves superior in multiple ways; worse, those who rank lower on the socioeconomic
ladder usually recognize that they have failed to do something that would earn them a higher
ranking, that they are less honorable, less deserving of respect. Those at the top feel they are
more virtuous; they have conformed more closely to the American norm of achievement. Even
people whose parents have achieved positions at or toward the top of the social class structure
feel they are deserving of their status in life than those they regard as beneath them. No mat-
ter that this feeling is not sustained by the facts; many people do believe it, and these beliefs
are fundamental to the class structure. The fact is, many people in every class structure, from
top to bottom, believe that persons at the top are better in important ways, and these norms
upholding notions of superiority and inferiority, when violated, constitute deviance in every
society on Earth. Sociologists define deviance as wrongfulness which attracts stigma, moralCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
94 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
inferiority and disrepute; being at the bottom of a class structure, likewise, is a form of stigma
and disrepute (Matza, 1971). But it’s important to note that the sociologist does not attribute
anyone with such qualities; it is the members of the society who make this judgment, and the
sociologist takes note of this judgment.
As we shift our gaze up and down the class ladder, we notice that relationships prevail be-
tween the two variables, class and engaging in deviance. Looked at this way, we’d postulate
that members of one social class is more likely to engage in certain forms of deviance than
others. People at the top pretty much everywhere have more of the good things of life than
people at the bottom. What are these “good things,” and how does their distribution make a
difference in the lives of their citizens? More specifically, how does having more, versus less,
influence the ways we define and react to what’s regarded as deviant?
It should come as no surprise that notions of good versus bad, conventional versus deviant, and
morality versus immorality, vary by social class and socioeconomic status, or SES. Social scien-
tists and social philosophers have used the notion of social class, or simply class, in all likelihood,
since the ancient Greeks. Karl Marx defined social class with regard to one’s ownership of the
means of production, or one’s relationship to owners of the means of production. For the soci-
ologist’s purposes, this sorted out to four classes—first, the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, who
owned the factories (the “means of production”), and who hired and fired workers and reaped
profits from the enterprise; second, professionals, proprietors, craftspeople, and merchants who
catered to the interests and needs of the bourgeoisie and their minions; third, the working class
or proletariat, or manual laborers; and fourth, the lumpenproletariat, the “dregs” of the society,
those unable to work, or who worked as strikebreakers, thereby serving a reactionary function
for the capitalist class. Marx relied heavily on social class when he predicted that the proletariat
would power the socialist revolution and usher in a new age. Marx was right enough to be a
significant figure in intellectual history, but egregiously wrong about the major arc of history:
capitalism, though substantially domesticated over the centuries, has outlived its doomsayers,
including Karl Marx, as well as the respect their works once attracted.
Max Weber recognized the importance of Marx’s notion of class, but argued that ranking
systems based on status, and status symbols, honor, and esteem—that is, prestige—provided
the impetus for collectivities to associate with one another in the form of neighborhoods,
houses of worship, clubs, friendship networks, marriages, families, and the like. Weber argued
that status is a more powerful force than income and wealth in attracting and holding mem-
bers into such social circles and institutions, and he also articulated the view that status is a
more powerful driver of attitudes, values, beliefs, and, by extension, voting patterns, and style
of life (1946, passim). For most sociological researchers, Max Weber’s views on status have
proven to be far more useful in understanding contemporary post-industrial societies than
Marx’s view of class. Indeed, Marx would have been puzzled to discover, had he been awak-
ened today from the grave, that the most economically advanced societies he imagined were
the most inevitable prospects for a socialist revolution never launched one. The cataclysmic
events he predicted would most likely befall these “advanced” capitalist societies were in fact
the ones that were least touched by them.
How is poverty linked to deviance? Here, I argue that the links are conspicuous and unde-
niable. A substantial proportion of affluent Americans consider the visibly poor to be deviants;
they stigmatize and avoid contact with them. Moreover, a high proportion of the economically
well-off resist paying for federal programs intended to help the poor, insisting that that’s not
a proper government function, or that by doing so, they’ll inhibit initiative, or that poverty is
a well-deserved consequence of being lazy and unmotivated. The poverty-stricken are inter-
personally, ideologically, and institutionally stigmatized in the eyes, and by the actions and
reactions, of many members of the economically better-off classes. On the other side of the
coin, perhaps some of the affluent feel guilt at their good fortune—but chances are, most haveCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
inferiority and disrepute; being at the bottom of a class structure, likewise, is a form of stigma
and disrepute (Matza, 1971). But it’s important to note that the sociologist does not attribute
anyone with such qualities; it is the members of the society who make this judgment, and the
sociologist takes note of this judgment.
As we shift our gaze up and down the class ladder, we notice that relationships prevail be-
tween the two variables, class and engaging in deviance. Looked at this way, we’d postulate
that members of one social class is more likely to engage in certain forms of deviance than
others. People at the top pretty much everywhere have more of the good things of life than
people at the bottom. What are these “good things,” and how does their distribution make a
difference in the lives of their citizens? More specifically, how does having more, versus less,
influence the ways we define and react to what’s regarded as deviant?
It should come as no surprise that notions of good versus bad, conventional versus deviant, and
morality versus immorality, vary by social class and socioeconomic status, or SES. Social scien-
tists and social philosophers have used the notion of social class, or simply class, in all likelihood,
since the ancient Greeks. Karl Marx defined social class with regard to one’s ownership of the
means of production, or one’s relationship to owners of the means of production. For the soci-
ologist’s purposes, this sorted out to four classes—first, the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, who
owned the factories (the “means of production”), and who hired and fired workers and reaped
profits from the enterprise; second, professionals, proprietors, craftspeople, and merchants who
catered to the interests and needs of the bourgeoisie and their minions; third, the working class
or proletariat, or manual laborers; and fourth, the lumpenproletariat, the “dregs” of the society,
those unable to work, or who worked as strikebreakers, thereby serving a reactionary function
for the capitalist class. Marx relied heavily on social class when he predicted that the proletariat
would power the socialist revolution and usher in a new age. Marx was right enough to be a
significant figure in intellectual history, but egregiously wrong about the major arc of history:
capitalism, though substantially domesticated over the centuries, has outlived its doomsayers,
including Karl Marx, as well as the respect their works once attracted.
Max Weber recognized the importance of Marx’s notion of class, but argued that ranking
systems based on status, and status symbols, honor, and esteem—that is, prestige—provided
the impetus for collectivities to associate with one another in the form of neighborhoods,
houses of worship, clubs, friendship networks, marriages, families, and the like. Weber argued
that status is a more powerful force than income and wealth in attracting and holding mem-
bers into such social circles and institutions, and he also articulated the view that status is a
more powerful driver of attitudes, values, beliefs, and, by extension, voting patterns, and style
of life (1946, passim). For most sociological researchers, Max Weber’s views on status have
proven to be far more useful in understanding contemporary post-industrial societies than
Marx’s view of class. Indeed, Marx would have been puzzled to discover, had he been awak-
ened today from the grave, that the most economically advanced societies he imagined were
the most inevitable prospects for a socialist revolution never launched one. The cataclysmic
events he predicted would most likely befall these “advanced” capitalist societies were in fact
the ones that were least touched by them.
How is poverty linked to deviance? Here, I argue that the links are conspicuous and unde-
niable. A substantial proportion of affluent Americans consider the visibly poor to be deviants;
they stigmatize and avoid contact with them. Moreover, a high proportion of the economically
well-off resist paying for federal programs intended to help the poor, insisting that that’s not
a proper government function, or that by doing so, they’ll inhibit initiative, or that poverty is
a well-deserved consequence of being lazy and unmotivated. The poverty-stricken are inter-
personally, ideologically, and institutionally stigmatized in the eyes, and by the actions and
reactions, of many members of the economically better-off classes. On the other side of the
coin, perhaps some of the affluent feel guilt at their good fortune—but chances are, most haveCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 95
become indifferent to the plight of the poverty-stricken. The links between poverty and devi-
ance reach higher than micro-encounters on the street; they extend to the upper levels of the
major social institutions, including politics, education, health care, welfare, criminal justice,
and economics. And these links begin before birth and continue after death.
Researchers believe that the majority of Americans feel ambivalent toward the indigent,
the homeless, the extremely poor. On the one hand, many of us do feel a kind of empathy, a
compassion that makes us wish to reach out and help persons in need. But many of us also feel
contempt and disparagement as well—the strong desire to hurry away from their presence,
avoid being contaminated or morally stained by them, or too entangled in their multiple, insol-
uble problems. If people can’t do what they have to do to get ahead, some feel, they deserve to
be poor; what the poor need is sufficient grit, character, determination, and gumption to pull
themselves up out of their condition by their bootstraps. Others believe that what’s necessary
is effective government programs that give the poor opportunities to achieve—but many
well-off others oppose those programs. No one considers poverty an acceptable way to live;
virtually all Americans feel that being poor is inferiorizing in some way. The solution? Earn
more money. The hopelessly poor tend to be disaffiliated, marginalized, and in a condition
of insistent need; this makes them disreputable, tainted, drenched with stigma, and often, in
their encounters with others, humiliated. There’s no getting around the fact that being at the
bottom of the economic barrel in an achievement-oriented society is a form of deviance. “Pull
yourself up by your bootstraps!” many well-off members of society exhort the poor to do. “All
you need is gumption, grit, determination, and effort!”
Poverty is a “multi-dimensional” phenomenon, yet there’s something there that all of us
recognize and “intuitively understand” yet rarely discuss. “This is the social stigma associated
with poverty.” Stigma—along with disrepute—is “the external social counterpart to feeling
shame, worthlessness and moral inferiority.” Shame is what the poverty-stricken feel; “stigma
is the imposition by others of a shameful identity” (Gaffney, 2013). The Nobel Prize-winning
Indian economist Amartya Sen argues that shame is the “irreducible absolutist core” of the
experience of poverty (1983, p. 159); poverty’s shadow, stigma, inevitably falls on the lives of
those who are extremely poor.
Poverty and hence, disrepute, represent the conjunction of individual, behavioral, and bi-
ographical variables and the larger, structural, and macro-level factors that determine the
distribution of a society’s resources, including global economic and political forces. Wealth
and income accrue as a result of one’s relationship to the economy—capital and trade, manu-
facturing, buying, and selling—as well as one’s relationship to persons centrally situated and
successfully performing in the economy. Factors include socioeconomic background, motiva-
tion to acquire an education and marketable skills, mental health, alcoholism, crime, marital
choices, and other biographical facts of one’s life. And capitalism is inherently unstable as well
as highly variable; whole economies perform more—or less—well according to the vagaries of
regional, global, and temporal forces beyond the control of individual actors. Moreover, race
and ethnicity play a central role in determining access to the distribution of wealth and in-
come. The government’s commitment to help the poor—the percentage of the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) devoted to poverty programs—will mitigate the experience of the destitute,
up to a point. Civil rights legislation and other race-based government strategies have likewise
somewhat altered the relationship of ethnicity to being poor. We need to understand the forces
that generate poverty to appreciate what makes the interactional relationship between rich
and poor a fulcrum of deviance. Perhaps the two most visible micro-level American manifesta-
tions of poverty can be apprehended in its street-level or backroads-level appearances: looking
out of our car window to see the decay of our rust-belt cities, such as Detroit and Cleveland,
and the tumble-down, abandoned shacks and empty storefronts in our chronically depressed
rural areas, those communities that are too poor even to have a municipal government.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
become indifferent to the plight of the poverty-stricken. The links between poverty and devi-
ance reach higher than micro-encounters on the street; they extend to the upper levels of the
major social institutions, including politics, education, health care, welfare, criminal justice,
and economics. And these links begin before birth and continue after death.
Researchers believe that the majority of Americans feel ambivalent toward the indigent,
the homeless, the extremely poor. On the one hand, many of us do feel a kind of empathy, a
compassion that makes us wish to reach out and help persons in need. But many of us also feel
contempt and disparagement as well—the strong desire to hurry away from their presence,
avoid being contaminated or morally stained by them, or too entangled in their multiple, insol-
uble problems. If people can’t do what they have to do to get ahead, some feel, they deserve to
be poor; what the poor need is sufficient grit, character, determination, and gumption to pull
themselves up out of their condition by their bootstraps. Others believe that what’s necessary
is effective government programs that give the poor opportunities to achieve—but many
well-off others oppose those programs. No one considers poverty an acceptable way to live;
virtually all Americans feel that being poor is inferiorizing in some way. The solution? Earn
more money. The hopelessly poor tend to be disaffiliated, marginalized, and in a condition
of insistent need; this makes them disreputable, tainted, drenched with stigma, and often, in
their encounters with others, humiliated. There’s no getting around the fact that being at the
bottom of the economic barrel in an achievement-oriented society is a form of deviance. “Pull
yourself up by your bootstraps!” many well-off members of society exhort the poor to do. “All
you need is gumption, grit, determination, and effort!”
Poverty is a “multi-dimensional” phenomenon, yet there’s something there that all of us
recognize and “intuitively understand” yet rarely discuss. “This is the social stigma associated
with poverty.” Stigma—along with disrepute—is “the external social counterpart to feeling
shame, worthlessness and moral inferiority.” Shame is what the poverty-stricken feel; “stigma
is the imposition by others of a shameful identity” (Gaffney, 2013). The Nobel Prize-winning
Indian economist Amartya Sen argues that shame is the “irreducible absolutist core” of the
experience of poverty (1983, p. 159); poverty’s shadow, stigma, inevitably falls on the lives of
those who are extremely poor.
Poverty and hence, disrepute, represent the conjunction of individual, behavioral, and bi-
ographical variables and the larger, structural, and macro-level factors that determine the
distribution of a society’s resources, including global economic and political forces. Wealth
and income accrue as a result of one’s relationship to the economy—capital and trade, manu-
facturing, buying, and selling—as well as one’s relationship to persons centrally situated and
successfully performing in the economy. Factors include socioeconomic background, motiva-
tion to acquire an education and marketable skills, mental health, alcoholism, crime, marital
choices, and other biographical facts of one’s life. And capitalism is inherently unstable as well
as highly variable; whole economies perform more—or less—well according to the vagaries of
regional, global, and temporal forces beyond the control of individual actors. Moreover, race
and ethnicity play a central role in determining access to the distribution of wealth and in-
come. The government’s commitment to help the poor—the percentage of the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) devoted to poverty programs—will mitigate the experience of the destitute,
up to a point. Civil rights legislation and other race-based government strategies have likewise
somewhat altered the relationship of ethnicity to being poor. We need to understand the forces
that generate poverty to appreciate what makes the interactional relationship between rich
and poor a fulcrum of deviance. Perhaps the two most visible micro-level American manifesta-
tions of poverty can be apprehended in its street-level or backroads-level appearances: looking
out of our car window to see the decay of our rust-belt cities, such as Detroit and Cleveland,
and the tumble-down, abandoned shacks and empty storefronts in our chronically depressed
rural areas, those communities that are too poor even to have a municipal government.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
96 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
During most of humanity’s life on Earth, the vast majority of people were, by today’s stand-
ards, extremely poor; they were what anthropologists refer to as hunters and gatherers, and
mostly they lived a subsistence existence, with just enough resources to feed, clothe, and house
them. Hunting and gathering was the principal economic strategy for 99% of human history.
Moreover, most societies with such an economy were nomadic because they depleted the game
and plants in a given area; the rare exceptions were fishing communities which could stay put.
A very exceptional few hunting and gathering societies could build villages, because their
hunters ranged far and wide then returned to those villages with ample fresh food. The point
is, there were no “haves” or “have-nots” in hunting and gathering societies—and hence, no
stigma of poverty. There was no disgrace that adhered to such poverty; everybody lived at a
subsistence level, and so there was no poverty in the sociological sense. There were good and
bad hunters, and societies that found abundant game and plants and others that didn’t do as
well, and a drought meant that some would starve. But, in such societies, there was no elite,
no social classes, and poverty was not associated with shame or disrepute.
Roughly 8–10 millennia ago, humans learned how to grow food; paleontologists call this
the agrarian era. Farming was discovered independently in China, India, Egypt, parts of
Africa, Mexico, and Central and South America. For the most part, farming was more ef-
ficient and productive than looking for food, and so, the economic surplus these societies
stored up, mainly in the form of grain, was capable of supporting a ruling elite who needed
record-keepers or scribes, who, in turn, devised writing. Agrarian societies founded and popu-
lated cities, fashioned metals, and developed a wide range of crafts—all supported by the eco-
nomic surplus that agriculture permitted. During the agrarian era, a very small merchant or
trading class emerged whose members bought and sold the goods that the economic surplus
generated. In short, during agrarianism, the vast majority of the population was still poor—
again, by today’s standards, they lived in poverty. The point is, that affluent members of the
population began looking down on the peasants who worked in the field and lived in hovels.
True social poverty had begun; the rich lorded it over the poor, and had real power over them.
At first, the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760–1840), which began in Great Britain, did
not change the picture very much. Trading and commerce hugely expanded in the years just
before industrialization, but it was not until the late 1700s that the factory system was imple-
mented. Most laborers were as poor as peasants had been during most of human history. More-
over, unemployment was chronic and starvation, common. It was only with the huge expansion
of the middle class during the second half of the 1800s that the majority of the population in
Western Europe and North America was not impoverished (Keep in mind that in the mid-
1800s, between 10 and 15 percent of the population of the United States were enslaved.). When
we read through this chapter, we should picture the history of the world, as well as the current
economic situation globally, as a backdrop to the discussion on poverty and disrepute. Today,
roughly one-seventh of the people on Earth, about a billion people, face chronic starvation.
Humanity evolved from an economic system with no social classes, no rich or poor, no genuine
poverty—only hunger and want—and no stigma attached to being poor, to one today, with
enormous differences between rich and poor, and great humiliation attached to being dirt-poor.
In the later industrial era, democratic ideologies evolved that insisted that all men (and eventu-
ally, all men and women) were equal, and there should be no shame in being poor, which were
only partly successful. We arrive at today, when some are rich, some are poor, many in between,
and yes, there is substantial shame in being poor, but this developed only a century or so ago.
The current condition of the shamefulness of poverty is the subject of our chapter. How poverty
generates stigma, shame, and disrepute in audiences is a dynamic, interpersonal phenomenon,
but the foundation-stone of the phenomenon is structural and institutional; how politics and
economics interlock to breed deviance—that is the story of our subject. Shame for being poor is a
global condition, and capitalism is the engine of the locomotive that drives the train.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
During most of humanity’s life on Earth, the vast majority of people were, by today’s stand-
ards, extremely poor; they were what anthropologists refer to as hunters and gatherers, and
mostly they lived a subsistence existence, with just enough resources to feed, clothe, and house
them. Hunting and gathering was the principal economic strategy for 99% of human history.
Moreover, most societies with such an economy were nomadic because they depleted the game
and plants in a given area; the rare exceptions were fishing communities which could stay put.
A very exceptional few hunting and gathering societies could build villages, because their
hunters ranged far and wide then returned to those villages with ample fresh food. The point
is, there were no “haves” or “have-nots” in hunting and gathering societies—and hence, no
stigma of poverty. There was no disgrace that adhered to such poverty; everybody lived at a
subsistence level, and so there was no poverty in the sociological sense. There were good and
bad hunters, and societies that found abundant game and plants and others that didn’t do as
well, and a drought meant that some would starve. But, in such societies, there was no elite,
no social classes, and poverty was not associated with shame or disrepute.
Roughly 8–10 millennia ago, humans learned how to grow food; paleontologists call this
the agrarian era. Farming was discovered independently in China, India, Egypt, parts of
Africa, Mexico, and Central and South America. For the most part, farming was more ef-
ficient and productive than looking for food, and so, the economic surplus these societies
stored up, mainly in the form of grain, was capable of supporting a ruling elite who needed
record-keepers or scribes, who, in turn, devised writing. Agrarian societies founded and popu-
lated cities, fashioned metals, and developed a wide range of crafts—all supported by the eco-
nomic surplus that agriculture permitted. During the agrarian era, a very small merchant or
trading class emerged whose members bought and sold the goods that the economic surplus
generated. In short, during agrarianism, the vast majority of the population was still poor—
again, by today’s standards, they lived in poverty. The point is, that affluent members of the
population began looking down on the peasants who worked in the field and lived in hovels.
True social poverty had begun; the rich lorded it over the poor, and had real power over them.
At first, the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760–1840), which began in Great Britain, did
not change the picture very much. Trading and commerce hugely expanded in the years just
before industrialization, but it was not until the late 1700s that the factory system was imple-
mented. Most laborers were as poor as peasants had been during most of human history. More-
over, unemployment was chronic and starvation, common. It was only with the huge expansion
of the middle class during the second half of the 1800s that the majority of the population in
Western Europe and North America was not impoverished (Keep in mind that in the mid-
1800s, between 10 and 15 percent of the population of the United States were enslaved.). When
we read through this chapter, we should picture the history of the world, as well as the current
economic situation globally, as a backdrop to the discussion on poverty and disrepute. Today,
roughly one-seventh of the people on Earth, about a billion people, face chronic starvation.
Humanity evolved from an economic system with no social classes, no rich or poor, no genuine
poverty—only hunger and want—and no stigma attached to being poor, to one today, with
enormous differences between rich and poor, and great humiliation attached to being dirt-poor.
In the later industrial era, democratic ideologies evolved that insisted that all men (and eventu-
ally, all men and women) were equal, and there should be no shame in being poor, which were
only partly successful. We arrive at today, when some are rich, some are poor, many in between,
and yes, there is substantial shame in being poor, but this developed only a century or so ago.
The current condition of the shamefulness of poverty is the subject of our chapter. How poverty
generates stigma, shame, and disrepute in audiences is a dynamic, interpersonal phenomenon,
but the foundation-stone of the phenomenon is structural and institutional; how politics and
economics interlock to breed deviance—that is the story of our subject. Shame for being poor is a
global condition, and capitalism is the engine of the locomotive that drives the train.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 97
Poverty: A Form of Deviance or a Cause — or Both?
Sociologists rarely discuss poverty as a form of deviance—they’ve mostly considered it a major
cause of deviant behavior. The reason may be political correctness: nobody wants to be unjustly
accused of “blaming the victim” (Ryan, 1976)—stigmatizing the poor by attaching a demean-
ing “deviance” or “deviant” label to them (Matza, 1966a, p. 289). But the poor are already
socially stigmatized. When sociologists point out that stigma, they do not contribute to it. Quite
the reverse is true: a systematic analysis of the phenomenon may enable the society to reduce
it, whereas ignoring it may help sustain it. Even more to the point, systematic analysis is not
the same thing as blame. The accusation of blaming the victim usually turns out to be an
exercise in self-righteousness, a holier-than-thou attitude, rather than an effort to understand
how social processes operate.
As we’ve seen, Robert Merton (1938) based his well-known anomie perspective on the notion
that members of the lower economic reaches of the society, who are denied economic mobility,
are, as a consequence, more likely than the middle classes to engage in innovative and retreatist
forms of deviance. The “greatest pressure toward deviation,” he stated, is “exerted upon the
lower strata” (Merton, 1957, p. 144). According to anomie theory, the “innovative” adaptation
to failure spawns such deviant enterprises as burglary and robbery, prostitution and pimping,
drug dealing and engaging in organized crime. Many of society’s “double failures”—persons
who are unable to achieve either in conventional or in deviant economic activities—Merton
argues, eventually sink or retreat into the morass of psychosis, autism, addiction, alcoholism,
permanent poverty, homelessness, and, at the extreme end of the line, suicide. Thus, Robert
Merton indicates that Western society’s “aversion to failure” condemns a major sector of the
poor to the condition of deviancy. Merton devised a theory that argues that poverty breeds
deviancies rather than the more radical formulation that he might have made, namely that it
is a form of deviance. Had he recognized that poverty is itself deviant, his contribution to social
theory might have been more substantial, and the field of the sociology of deviance would have
taken on a more constructionist character—but, like most of the field, he was pretty much
focused on explaining non-normative behavior itself.
Most explanatory theories of deviance, from social disorganization to self-control theory, have
agreed with Merton’s assumption that occupying the bottom stratum of the economic ladder causes
untoward, non-normative, or criminal behavior. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, along with their
followers such as Willem Bonger—one of Marx’s most avid disciples—theorized that under cap-
italism, economic degradation, political marginalization, and exclusion from economic achieve-
ment likewise give rise to criminality, especially among this lowest stratum, which Marxists once
referred to as the “lumpenproletariat” (Bonger, 1905/1916). The first edition of Marshall Clinard’s
classic deviance text (1957) echoed this view of poverty by including a section entitled “Poverty
and Deviant Behavior” (pp. 92–100), which reasoned that poverty acts as a breeding ground for de-
linquency, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, vice, and addiction. Moreover, sociologists of deviance
generally explain that poverty reduces agency and increases the likelihood of marginality, thereby
rendering individuals more vulnerable to the harmful impact of drug use, alcoholism, mental
disorder, as well as the consequences of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment—in effect, making
deviants more deviant. Engaging in what members of the society conventionally regard as deviant
behavior tends to be stigmatizing for persons at the lower socioeconomic strata; it reminds others
that “that’s the way these people are.” Not only may such behavior further stigmatize the poor, it
also tends to isolate them from social institutions and resources that could ameliorate the problems
such behavior may cause and push them into social networks that reinforce these behaviors, thereby
reinforcing poverty and harmful forms of deviance.
Centering on the Australian context, Sharon Roach Anleu’s Deviance, Conformity, and Con-
trol (2006), offers an exception and a remedy to this one-side approach by discussing povertyCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty: A Form of Deviance or a Cause — or Both?
Sociologists rarely discuss poverty as a form of deviance—they’ve mostly considered it a major
cause of deviant behavior. The reason may be political correctness: nobody wants to be unjustly
accused of “blaming the victim” (Ryan, 1976)—stigmatizing the poor by attaching a demean-
ing “deviance” or “deviant” label to them (Matza, 1966a, p. 289). But the poor are already
socially stigmatized. When sociologists point out that stigma, they do not contribute to it. Quite
the reverse is true: a systematic analysis of the phenomenon may enable the society to reduce
it, whereas ignoring it may help sustain it. Even more to the point, systematic analysis is not
the same thing as blame. The accusation of blaming the victim usually turns out to be an
exercise in self-righteousness, a holier-than-thou attitude, rather than an effort to understand
how social processes operate.
As we’ve seen, Robert Merton (1938) based his well-known anomie perspective on the notion
that members of the lower economic reaches of the society, who are denied economic mobility,
are, as a consequence, more likely than the middle classes to engage in innovative and retreatist
forms of deviance. The “greatest pressure toward deviation,” he stated, is “exerted upon the
lower strata” (Merton, 1957, p. 144). According to anomie theory, the “innovative” adaptation
to failure spawns such deviant enterprises as burglary and robbery, prostitution and pimping,
drug dealing and engaging in organized crime. Many of society’s “double failures”—persons
who are unable to achieve either in conventional or in deviant economic activities—Merton
argues, eventually sink or retreat into the morass of psychosis, autism, addiction, alcoholism,
permanent poverty, homelessness, and, at the extreme end of the line, suicide. Thus, Robert
Merton indicates that Western society’s “aversion to failure” condemns a major sector of the
poor to the condition of deviancy. Merton devised a theory that argues that poverty breeds
deviancies rather than the more radical formulation that he might have made, namely that it
is a form of deviance. Had he recognized that poverty is itself deviant, his contribution to social
theory might have been more substantial, and the field of the sociology of deviance would have
taken on a more constructionist character—but, like most of the field, he was pretty much
focused on explaining non-normative behavior itself.
Most explanatory theories of deviance, from social disorganization to self-control theory, have
agreed with Merton’s assumption that occupying the bottom stratum of the economic ladder causes
untoward, non-normative, or criminal behavior. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, along with their
followers such as Willem Bonger—one of Marx’s most avid disciples—theorized that under cap-
italism, economic degradation, political marginalization, and exclusion from economic achieve-
ment likewise give rise to criminality, especially among this lowest stratum, which Marxists once
referred to as the “lumpenproletariat” (Bonger, 1905/1916). The first edition of Marshall Clinard’s
classic deviance text (1957) echoed this view of poverty by including a section entitled “Poverty
and Deviant Behavior” (pp. 92–100), which reasoned that poverty acts as a breeding ground for de-
linquency, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, vice, and addiction. Moreover, sociologists of deviance
generally explain that poverty reduces agency and increases the likelihood of marginality, thereby
rendering individuals more vulnerable to the harmful impact of drug use, alcoholism, mental
disorder, as well as the consequences of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment—in effect, making
deviants more deviant. Engaging in what members of the society conventionally regard as deviant
behavior tends to be stigmatizing for persons at the lower socioeconomic strata; it reminds others
that “that’s the way these people are.” Not only may such behavior further stigmatize the poor, it
also tends to isolate them from social institutions and resources that could ameliorate the problems
such behavior may cause and push them into social networks that reinforce these behaviors, thereby
reinforcing poverty and harmful forms of deviance.
Centering on the Australian context, Sharon Roach Anleu’s Deviance, Conformity, and Con-
trol (2006), offers an exception and a remedy to this one-side approach by discussing povertyCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
98 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
as both a cause and a form of deviance. “A range of activities and characteristics not usually
defined as crime or illness nevertheless get labelled deviant,” says Anleu, distinguishing the
conceptual ambit of deviance, which encompasses poverty itself, from its delineation, as it is
explicitly spelled out by mainstream sociologists. Examples of the reach of deviance into being
poor, she explicates, “include unemployment, homelessness, begging, being disabled, single
parenting and poverty generally.” People who receive welfare, she states, are “subject to nega-
tive labelling or stigmatization.” All of the negative terms that the affluent apply to the poor,
the unemployed, the homeless, and the beggar, as with all such stigmata, “act like magnets
and attract other deviant labels.” People who have secure, well-paying jobs and a comfortable
place to live often assume “that unemployed people are more likely to consume illicit drugs
and engage in acquisitive crime” and “that homeless people are more likely to be mentally ill
than other segments of the community” (1991, p. 176). In short, poverty is more than simply
a factor in causing deviant behavior; it is itself stigmatizing, denigrating—deviantizing. Society
constructs being poor as undesirable and, in effect, wrongful.
These forces influence the way in which many members of the society feel about the
poor. Western society places a strong value on economic achievement, and many individ-
uals stereotypically believe that a failure to live up to the norm of job success manifests
an inability to live up to society’s moral standards on a broad range of fronts. In a like
fashion, David Harvey argues that poverty “carries with it a moral stain as vexing as ma-
terial uncertainty itself” (2007, p. 3589). Perhaps the most clear-cut manifestation of the
deviantization of persons living in poverty is that, according to Erving Goffman, as with
members of racial and ethnic minorities, the poor tend to be disqualified from full social and
civic participation—“members of the lower class who quite noticeably bear the mark of their
status in their speech, appearance, and manner, and who, relative to the public institutions
of our society, find they are second class citizens,” marginalized in their own society (1963,
pp. 145–146). Our achievement-oriented society blames the poor for their plight and stigma-
tizes them for bearing the stains of their lower-class status. Critics who argue that sociolo-
gists contribute to the stigma of the poor, by implication, deny that the poor are stigmatized
at all—a blatantly false assertion. Sociologists take note of and write about that stigma. They
would be incompetent sociologists if they did otherwise. In contrast, it is the society that
blames the poor—not the sociologist.
Here, I would like to turn this equation on its head. That is, I retain the notion that that
poverty has attracted a label of deviance, that contemporary pathologists use illness as a meta-
phor: to many health professionals (and much of the society at large), poverty is demonstrably
associated with ill-health, social, mental, and medical. And people who are most likely to
engage in most forms of crime and deviance are also comparatively likely to fall victim to ill
health and an early demise. But for numerous forms of deviance—most notably, corporate and
white collar crime—the reverse is true: it is in the upper reaches of the economic structure in
which normative violations of a white collar sort take place.
According to data gathered and tabulated by the United Nations (UN) Development Pro-
gramme, the per capita GDP is substantially more inequitably distributed in the United States
than in almost any of the three dozen wealthiest nations on the planet; in other words, the
rich are richer and the poor are poorer in the United States than is true of practically all of
the other industrialized countries with a comparably high average GDP. And the people at the
bottom of the distribution ladder, those in the lowest quintile (or one-fifth), suffer from an ab-
sence of many of the needs and the good things of life—including, statistically speaking, good
physical and psychiatric health—that usually derive from being affluent. Income distribution
seems to be the key variable here. In order to understand deviance, we have to understand how
a society’s poorly distributed income generates a substantial stratum of very poor people. In
this equation, we need to ask what causes the United States—a country manifestly among theCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
as both a cause and a form of deviance. “A range of activities and characteristics not usually
defined as crime or illness nevertheless get labelled deviant,” says Anleu, distinguishing the
conceptual ambit of deviance, which encompasses poverty itself, from its delineation, as it is
explicitly spelled out by mainstream sociologists. Examples of the reach of deviance into being
poor, she explicates, “include unemployment, homelessness, begging, being disabled, single
parenting and poverty generally.” People who receive welfare, she states, are “subject to nega-
tive labelling or stigmatization.” All of the negative terms that the affluent apply to the poor,
the unemployed, the homeless, and the beggar, as with all such stigmata, “act like magnets
and attract other deviant labels.” People who have secure, well-paying jobs and a comfortable
place to live often assume “that unemployed people are more likely to consume illicit drugs
and engage in acquisitive crime” and “that homeless people are more likely to be mentally ill
than other segments of the community” (1991, p. 176). In short, poverty is more than simply
a factor in causing deviant behavior; it is itself stigmatizing, denigrating—deviantizing. Society
constructs being poor as undesirable and, in effect, wrongful.
These forces influence the way in which many members of the society feel about the
poor. Western society places a strong value on economic achievement, and many individ-
uals stereotypically believe that a failure to live up to the norm of job success manifests
an inability to live up to society’s moral standards on a broad range of fronts. In a like
fashion, David Harvey argues that poverty “carries with it a moral stain as vexing as ma-
terial uncertainty itself” (2007, p. 3589). Perhaps the most clear-cut manifestation of the
deviantization of persons living in poverty is that, according to Erving Goffman, as with
members of racial and ethnic minorities, the poor tend to be disqualified from full social and
civic participation—“members of the lower class who quite noticeably bear the mark of their
status in their speech, appearance, and manner, and who, relative to the public institutions
of our society, find they are second class citizens,” marginalized in their own society (1963,
pp. 145–146). Our achievement-oriented society blames the poor for their plight and stigma-
tizes them for bearing the stains of their lower-class status. Critics who argue that sociolo-
gists contribute to the stigma of the poor, by implication, deny that the poor are stigmatized
at all—a blatantly false assertion. Sociologists take note of and write about that stigma. They
would be incompetent sociologists if they did otherwise. In contrast, it is the society that
blames the poor—not the sociologist.
Here, I would like to turn this equation on its head. That is, I retain the notion that that
poverty has attracted a label of deviance, that contemporary pathologists use illness as a meta-
phor: to many health professionals (and much of the society at large), poverty is demonstrably
associated with ill-health, social, mental, and medical. And people who are most likely to
engage in most forms of crime and deviance are also comparatively likely to fall victim to ill
health and an early demise. But for numerous forms of deviance—most notably, corporate and
white collar crime—the reverse is true: it is in the upper reaches of the economic structure in
which normative violations of a white collar sort take place.
According to data gathered and tabulated by the United Nations (UN) Development Pro-
gramme, the per capita GDP is substantially more inequitably distributed in the United States
than in almost any of the three dozen wealthiest nations on the planet; in other words, the
rich are richer and the poor are poorer in the United States than is true of practically all of
the other industrialized countries with a comparably high average GDP. And the people at the
bottom of the distribution ladder, those in the lowest quintile (or one-fifth), suffer from an ab-
sence of many of the needs and the good things of life—including, statistically speaking, good
physical and psychiatric health—that usually derive from being affluent. Income distribution
seems to be the key variable here. In order to understand deviance, we have to understand how
a society’s poorly distributed income generates a substantial stratum of very poor people. In
this equation, we need to ask what causes the United States—a country manifestly among theCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 99
world’s most affluent nations—to generate such a high rate of poverty. And what implications
this fact has for our understanding of the sociology of deviance.
In Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), Charles Horton Cooley discussed the implications
of what he called “the looking-glass self,” which refers to reflexivity—seeing oneself as others see
one. When we interact socially with others, we attempt to picture ourselves as we appear to oth-
ers, assess the presumed evaluations of that image—whether they consist of praise or condemna-
tion. If we want to please others, we adjust our behavior accordingly, on the basis of what sort of
reaction we’d like to entice. Thomas Scheff (2003) pinpoints shame as a component of a cluster of
emotions causally linked in Cooley’s formulation; shame comes in infinite gradations, from dis-
comfort through embarrassment, to abject, long-term humiliation. Starrin (2002, p. 5) suggests
that the feeling of shame “has the potential of being harmful when the individual is the subject
of ridicule and insult.” Here, I am suggesting that poverty often results in ridicule and insult,
and hence, shame, especially if it takes the form of unemployment and welfare (pp. 9–30), two
frequent accompaniments of poverty. And such outcomes can not only cause behaviors we regard
as deviant—they are, themselves, manifestations of deviance. Is stigmatizing the poor fair? Most
sociologists do not believe it is fair, since they argue that poverty is largely the result of structural
conditions over which the poor have no control. But many people do believe it is fair and just,
arguing that everyone’s responsible for their economic condition in life and hence—although few
would admit it outright—the poor often get blamed for being impoverished. Hence, sociologists
recognize that we have to bring stigmatization into the human equation. And when stigma is
seen as a manifestation of deviance, living in poverty is deviantizing—it brings disrepute to the
lives and character of the poor.
For our purposes, how economists define poverty is less relevant than how the members of
the population—including the poor themselves—regard or look upon the poor. And whether
the poor are responsible for their condition is less relevant than whether the poor are thought to
be responsible for that condition. Martha Nussbaum (2004) argues that poverty is one of hu-
manity’s most stigmatizing conditions; the poor are treated as inferior to (and by) persons who
are not poor. Just where that income level this treatment kicks in depends on the audience—
who engages in making this judgment—as well as in what contexts in which the poor appear.
Unemployment contributes to poverty, and unemployment is, to a substantial degree, itself
stigmatizing; being on welfare is a manifestation or indicator of poverty, and it is likewise
stigmatizing. Hence, both are relevant to the topic of poverty. And, on top of everything else,
being imprisoned further reinforces poverty.
The stigma of poverty is a class-based form of disrepute that is built into the hegemonic
structure of stratification in American society. Under capitalism, this line of reasoning goes,
intelligence and hard work breed success, and success is a sign of virtue; poverty implies fail-
ure, and failure is impious, a kind of vice—virtually a sin. Outside of (and even within) their
own social circles, the poverty-stricken very often find their character impugned because of
their poverty. But not all poor persons valorize their own inferior status in relation to the class
structure. Although being without money is considered undesirable nearly everywhere, many
poor people do not believe themselves to be less worthy human beings by virtue of being poor;
not all are ashamed of their poverty. But nearly everywhere they go, the poor are reminded of
their inferior economic condition; not only does much of what they value cost money they do
not have, most of the people whose company they value agree with the proposition that it’s
worse to be poor than affluent. Thus, though self-assumed shame is not a universal outcome
of poverty, perceived stigma is very nearly so; one may not agree that one deserves to be stigma-
tized, but many others do, and it is difficult to avoid these people and their influence.
Poverty, stigma, and a lack of education indicate powerlessness and substantial marginality
from the society’s cultural and economic center. These characteristics reflect the inability to
achieve the goal of success that anomie theory argues American society inculcates into all of usCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
world’s most affluent nations—to generate such a high rate of poverty. And what implications
this fact has for our understanding of the sociology of deviance.
In Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), Charles Horton Cooley discussed the implications
of what he called “the looking-glass self,” which refers to reflexivity—seeing oneself as others see
one. When we interact socially with others, we attempt to picture ourselves as we appear to oth-
ers, assess the presumed evaluations of that image—whether they consist of praise or condemna-
tion. If we want to please others, we adjust our behavior accordingly, on the basis of what sort of
reaction we’d like to entice. Thomas Scheff (2003) pinpoints shame as a component of a cluster of
emotions causally linked in Cooley’s formulation; shame comes in infinite gradations, from dis-
comfort through embarrassment, to abject, long-term humiliation. Starrin (2002, p. 5) suggests
that the feeling of shame “has the potential of being harmful when the individual is the subject
of ridicule and insult.” Here, I am suggesting that poverty often results in ridicule and insult,
and hence, shame, especially if it takes the form of unemployment and welfare (pp. 9–30), two
frequent accompaniments of poverty. And such outcomes can not only cause behaviors we regard
as deviant—they are, themselves, manifestations of deviance. Is stigmatizing the poor fair? Most
sociologists do not believe it is fair, since they argue that poverty is largely the result of structural
conditions over which the poor have no control. But many people do believe it is fair and just,
arguing that everyone’s responsible for their economic condition in life and hence—although few
would admit it outright—the poor often get blamed for being impoverished. Hence, sociologists
recognize that we have to bring stigmatization into the human equation. And when stigma is
seen as a manifestation of deviance, living in poverty is deviantizing—it brings disrepute to the
lives and character of the poor.
For our purposes, how economists define poverty is less relevant than how the members of
the population—including the poor themselves—regard or look upon the poor. And whether
the poor are responsible for their condition is less relevant than whether the poor are thought to
be responsible for that condition. Martha Nussbaum (2004) argues that poverty is one of hu-
manity’s most stigmatizing conditions; the poor are treated as inferior to (and by) persons who
are not poor. Just where that income level this treatment kicks in depends on the audience—
who engages in making this judgment—as well as in what contexts in which the poor appear.
Unemployment contributes to poverty, and unemployment is, to a substantial degree, itself
stigmatizing; being on welfare is a manifestation or indicator of poverty, and it is likewise
stigmatizing. Hence, both are relevant to the topic of poverty. And, on top of everything else,
being imprisoned further reinforces poverty.
The stigma of poverty is a class-based form of disrepute that is built into the hegemonic
structure of stratification in American society. Under capitalism, this line of reasoning goes,
intelligence and hard work breed success, and success is a sign of virtue; poverty implies fail-
ure, and failure is impious, a kind of vice—virtually a sin. Outside of (and even within) their
own social circles, the poverty-stricken very often find their character impugned because of
their poverty. But not all poor persons valorize their own inferior status in relation to the class
structure. Although being without money is considered undesirable nearly everywhere, many
poor people do not believe themselves to be less worthy human beings by virtue of being poor;
not all are ashamed of their poverty. But nearly everywhere they go, the poor are reminded of
their inferior economic condition; not only does much of what they value cost money they do
not have, most of the people whose company they value agree with the proposition that it’s
worse to be poor than affluent. Thus, though self-assumed shame is not a universal outcome
of poverty, perceived stigma is very nearly so; one may not agree that one deserves to be stigma-
tized, but many others do, and it is difficult to avoid these people and their influence.
Poverty, stigma, and a lack of education indicate powerlessness and substantial marginality
from the society’s cultural and economic center. These characteristics reflect the inability to
achieve the goal of success that anomie theory argues American society inculcates into all of usCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
100 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
to value, covet, and strive for; hence, such a life-condition potentiates us for innovative forms of
deviance. But in addition, most people in an achievement-oriented society look down on per-
sons unable to rise on the economic ladder, remaining mired in deep, stagnating, permanent
poverty. They pity and feel sorry for such people—although they are moved by sentiments of
compassion as well—and don’t want to remain in their company for very long, or at all. “How
can they live like that?” they are likely to exclaim if they walk by them, or see them from the
highway, or hear or read about their condition. Most of us don’t want to live like that, and,
in our everyday lives, we tend to shun people who live in such a condition. Moreover, most of
the people who live in extreme poverty share many of those same sentiments, but structural
conditions, a lack of opportunity, a lack of education, disability, or old age have conspired to
keep them in their place. The urban and rural poor live in places that others have abandoned,
as has the economy, and many of those who leave avoid and disdain those who remain. Like-
wise, race and ethnicity play a major role in the socioeconomic picture. In the larger scheme
of things, the extremely poor are—unfairly—stigmatized as deviants.
In 2001, NPR (National Public Radio) conducted a poll on the public’s attitudes toward
poverty. About half of the sample’s respondents said that the poor are not doing enough to
pull themselves out of poverty, while the other half said the opposite, that “circumstances
beyond their control cause them to be poor.” At the same time, a substantial proportion of
Americans believe that, if you’re poor, it’s “your own fault.” The economic stagnation that be-
gan in 2008 may have altered these attitudes somewhat. In any recent year, a greater number
of the American population was recorded as living in poverty—roughly 45 million—than
in any previous year since the figure was calculated, a stretch of over a half a century. It’s not
clear that this increase has generated more empathy for the poor or a stronger feeling that
poverty justly attracts blame and disrepute. But the social reality is that the odds are stacked
against the poor, and creating a strictly equalitarian society requires more resources than any
known societies have been able to summon. Regardless of whether or not inequality stimu-
lates achievement, the “chances are if you are poor you will stay poor. Through little fault of
your own” (Mollman, 2011). According to government statistics, at the latest year for which
data are currently available (2020), the official poverty rate for the United States as a whole was
11.4 percent, an increase of one percent from the previous year.
Perspectives on Poverty and Stigma
Poverty will probably always be with us, but the extent and depth of poverty varies from one
period of history to another, and from one society to another. Poverty is both relative and abso-
lute, and it is relative to within-society comparisons as well as from one society to another; it is
absolute with respect to its relationship to disease and mortality—that is, virtually everywhere,
the poor get sick more and die younger than the affluent, but they do so more so in some societies
than in others. The UN’s figures indicate that the most equitably distributed economies are the
nations in Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway)—small, affluent, democratic, European
countries with high taxes, abundant social services, and very few poor people. The least equi-
table societies are those in poor, Third World countries, mainly in Africa, Latin America, and
the Caribbean (Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Panama, Haiti), with unstable, relatively poorly
performing economies, insufficient social services, and a comparatively high proportion of poor
people. The distribution of the economy of the United States is somewhere in between these two
extremes, at least with respect to the distribution of its resources.
Since antiquity, numerous philosophers and theologians have speculated and commented
on poverty from a variety of perspectives. Proverbs (14:31) declared, “He who oppresses the
poor shows contempt for his Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” In his
Politics, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) wisely argued that “poverty is the parent of revolution andCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
to value, covet, and strive for; hence, such a life-condition potentiates us for innovative forms of
deviance. But in addition, most people in an achievement-oriented society look down on per-
sons unable to rise on the economic ladder, remaining mired in deep, stagnating, permanent
poverty. They pity and feel sorry for such people—although they are moved by sentiments of
compassion as well—and don’t want to remain in their company for very long, or at all. “How
can they live like that?” they are likely to exclaim if they walk by them, or see them from the
highway, or hear or read about their condition. Most of us don’t want to live like that, and,
in our everyday lives, we tend to shun people who live in such a condition. Moreover, most of
the people who live in extreme poverty share many of those same sentiments, but structural
conditions, a lack of opportunity, a lack of education, disability, or old age have conspired to
keep them in their place. The urban and rural poor live in places that others have abandoned,
as has the economy, and many of those who leave avoid and disdain those who remain. Like-
wise, race and ethnicity play a major role in the socioeconomic picture. In the larger scheme
of things, the extremely poor are—unfairly—stigmatized as deviants.
In 2001, NPR (National Public Radio) conducted a poll on the public’s attitudes toward
poverty. About half of the sample’s respondents said that the poor are not doing enough to
pull themselves out of poverty, while the other half said the opposite, that “circumstances
beyond their control cause them to be poor.” At the same time, a substantial proportion of
Americans believe that, if you’re poor, it’s “your own fault.” The economic stagnation that be-
gan in 2008 may have altered these attitudes somewhat. In any recent year, a greater number
of the American population was recorded as living in poverty—roughly 45 million—than
in any previous year since the figure was calculated, a stretch of over a half a century. It’s not
clear that this increase has generated more empathy for the poor or a stronger feeling that
poverty justly attracts blame and disrepute. But the social reality is that the odds are stacked
against the poor, and creating a strictly equalitarian society requires more resources than any
known societies have been able to summon. Regardless of whether or not inequality stimu-
lates achievement, the “chances are if you are poor you will stay poor. Through little fault of
your own” (Mollman, 2011). According to government statistics, at the latest year for which
data are currently available (2020), the official poverty rate for the United States as a whole was
11.4 percent, an increase of one percent from the previous year.
Perspectives on Poverty and Stigma
Poverty will probably always be with us, but the extent and depth of poverty varies from one
period of history to another, and from one society to another. Poverty is both relative and abso-
lute, and it is relative to within-society comparisons as well as from one society to another; it is
absolute with respect to its relationship to disease and mortality—that is, virtually everywhere,
the poor get sick more and die younger than the affluent, but they do so more so in some societies
than in others. The UN’s figures indicate that the most equitably distributed economies are the
nations in Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway)—small, affluent, democratic, European
countries with high taxes, abundant social services, and very few poor people. The least equi-
table societies are those in poor, Third World countries, mainly in Africa, Latin America, and
the Caribbean (Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Panama, Haiti), with unstable, relatively poorly
performing economies, insufficient social services, and a comparatively high proportion of poor
people. The distribution of the economy of the United States is somewhere in between these two
extremes, at least with respect to the distribution of its resources.
Since antiquity, numerous philosophers and theologians have speculated and commented
on poverty from a variety of perspectives. Proverbs (14:31) declared, “He who oppresses the
poor shows contempt for his Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” In his
Politics, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) wisely argued that “poverty is the parent of revolution andCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 101
crime.” In Satires, Juvenal (first to second century CE) opined that “It is not easy for men to
rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.” More recent statements by theorists and social
scientists have added depth and complexity to these ancient assertions. Some of the commen-
tators whose observations bear most directly on the matter of poverty and disrepute, or stigma
and deviance, include Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), Max Weber (1864–1920), and
our twenty-first-century contemporaries or near-contemporaries, David Matza, Melvin Lerner,
Amartya Sen, Diego Zavaleta Reyles, and Loïc Wacquant.
Thomas Rober t Malthus
One of the earliest arguments charging the poor with a moral failing was laid out by Thomas
Malthus, in his An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. Malthus con-
tended that the population is theoretically capable of growing geometrically, but the resources
needed to support that increase only rise arithmetically. At some point during this hypo-
thetical growth, an expanding population will put a severe strain on society’s available re-
sources, making unemployment and starvation commonplace. As a consequence, checks on
the population are necessary. The refusal of the lower classes to limit family size can be seen
both as a moral failing and a cause of their poverty. They are “incorrigibles” and therefore
we need not dispense charity to them; it would be best for the society, Malthus argued, for
the profligate poor to starve to death and not burden the virtuous and abstemious with their
superfluous, squanderous, and impecunious presence. Malthus saw the poor—who bred more
children than they could support—as human feces that should be eliminated from the social
body. Malthus was one of the most venomous stigmatizers of the poor in the history of social
thought. Fortunately, as it turns out, birth control and the “green revolution” made Malthus’
argument increasingly irrelevant, at least in the more fully developed industrial societies with
adequate welfare systems.
Max Weber
Some social theorists have looked at the multiple perspectives on the stigma of poverty: how
the privileged view the underprivileged, how the privileged view their own good fortune, and
how the poor view the distribution of wealth, specifically their own lack of it. Max Weber in
particular argued that societies adapt religious beliefs to their own social and cultural needs.
This applies especially to social class: the wealthy and privileged will be attracted to certain
religious beliefs that reassure them that their wealth is deserved; the poor and less privileged
will seek out those sacred ideologies that promise them a glorious existence in the next life—
in heaven itself. He calls this tendency elective affinity—the tendency of people located in
specific social classes or strata to generate or gravitate toward (or “elect”) religions, or aspects
of religions, that resonate with demands and exigencies of their earthly existence (1946, pp.
62–63, 284–285). Hence, Weber explains, “classes with high social and economic privilege
will … assign to religion the primary function of legitimating their own life pattern and sit-
uation in the world.” There exists, he explained, the “psychological need for reassurance as to
the legitimation or deservedness of [the source of] one’s happiness, whether it involves political
success, superior economic status, bodily health, success in the game of love, or anything else.
What the privileged classes require of religion,” Weber pointed out, “is this psychological
reassurance of legitimacy” (1922/1963, p. 107). The privileged reason that adversity has more
often visited the less fortunate members of the society, such as the poor, because they are not
pleasing to God, or the gods, who look unfavorably upon them and punish them for their sins.
In short, according to Max Weber, there is a nearly universal tendency for religions of the up-
per strata to develop a “theodicity of good fortune” that legitimates the affluence of themselves,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
crime.” In Satires, Juvenal (first to second century CE) opined that “It is not easy for men to
rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.” More recent statements by theorists and social
scientists have added depth and complexity to these ancient assertions. Some of the commen-
tators whose observations bear most directly on the matter of poverty and disrepute, or stigma
and deviance, include Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), Max Weber (1864–1920), and
our twenty-first-century contemporaries or near-contemporaries, David Matza, Melvin Lerner,
Amartya Sen, Diego Zavaleta Reyles, and Loïc Wacquant.
Thomas Rober t Malthus
One of the earliest arguments charging the poor with a moral failing was laid out by Thomas
Malthus, in his An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. Malthus con-
tended that the population is theoretically capable of growing geometrically, but the resources
needed to support that increase only rise arithmetically. At some point during this hypo-
thetical growth, an expanding population will put a severe strain on society’s available re-
sources, making unemployment and starvation commonplace. As a consequence, checks on
the population are necessary. The refusal of the lower classes to limit family size can be seen
both as a moral failing and a cause of their poverty. They are “incorrigibles” and therefore
we need not dispense charity to them; it would be best for the society, Malthus argued, for
the profligate poor to starve to death and not burden the virtuous and abstemious with their
superfluous, squanderous, and impecunious presence. Malthus saw the poor—who bred more
children than they could support—as human feces that should be eliminated from the social
body. Malthus was one of the most venomous stigmatizers of the poor in the history of social
thought. Fortunately, as it turns out, birth control and the “green revolution” made Malthus’
argument increasingly irrelevant, at least in the more fully developed industrial societies with
adequate welfare systems.
Max Weber
Some social theorists have looked at the multiple perspectives on the stigma of poverty: how
the privileged view the underprivileged, how the privileged view their own good fortune, and
how the poor view the distribution of wealth, specifically their own lack of it. Max Weber in
particular argued that societies adapt religious beliefs to their own social and cultural needs.
This applies especially to social class: the wealthy and privileged will be attracted to certain
religious beliefs that reassure them that their wealth is deserved; the poor and less privileged
will seek out those sacred ideologies that promise them a glorious existence in the next life—
in heaven itself. He calls this tendency elective affinity—the tendency of people located in
specific social classes or strata to generate or gravitate toward (or “elect”) religions, or aspects
of religions, that resonate with demands and exigencies of their earthly existence (1946, pp.
62–63, 284–285). Hence, Weber explains, “classes with high social and economic privilege
will … assign to religion the primary function of legitimating their own life pattern and sit-
uation in the world.” There exists, he explained, the “psychological need for reassurance as to
the legitimation or deservedness of [the source of] one’s happiness, whether it involves political
success, superior economic status, bodily health, success in the game of love, or anything else.
What the privileged classes require of religion,” Weber pointed out, “is this psychological
reassurance of legitimacy” (1922/1963, p. 107). The privileged reason that adversity has more
often visited the less fortunate members of the society, such as the poor, because they are not
pleasing to God, or the gods, who look unfavorably upon them and punish them for their sins.
In short, according to Max Weber, there is a nearly universal tendency for religions of the up-
per strata to develop a “theodicity of good fortune” that legitimates the affluence of themselves,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
102 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
that is, the rich and privileged, and the ill-fortune of the poor, arguing that rich and poor
alike merit their status in life. Social class is “tangible proof” of God’s favor or disfavor (1963,
p. 114). The rich find these theological justifications compatible with their world view and
adapt them to their everyday lives—even in their secular ideology, detached from their sacred
origins. In short, the rich are attracted to a sacred ideology that says the poor are responsible for
their own poverty—because they are unmotivated and lazy and deserve what they get, includ-
ing a measure of society’s contempt. Weber didn’t endorse these views; he remarked on them.
David Matza
American society nurtures cultural values that tell us to root for the little guy and cheer when
people pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become successful, overcoming all odds
to forge their place in a competitive society. But though we all love Horatio Alger stories of
triumphs over adversity, many of us look down upon those who are not able to overcome the
odds and remain entrenched in the swamp of poverty; they must not have tried hard enough,
many of us feel, and have become overwhelmed by torpor, fecklessness, ineptitude—or sheer
laziness. David Matza argued that sociologists have ignored the issue of the “disreputable
poor” because they did not want to be charged with stigmatizing them; he decided to grapple
with the issue. It was Matza who coined the phrase, “poverty and disrepute” (1966b, 1971). To
understand the stigma of poverty, he contended, we need to picture three concentric circles.
The larger, outer, wider circle encompasses all poor people in the society; not all are stigma-
tized, nor are all considered disreputable. The intermediary circle is considerably smaller, and
includes those who are poor and have received government welfare assistance at some point in
their lives. The smallest or inner circle represents poor people who are sporadically or perma-
nently on some sort of government assistance program, “and, additionally, suffer the special
defects and stigma of demoralization” (1966b, p. 620).
In a competitive, achievement-oriented society, some measure of disrepute adheres to all
poor, even those “who are deemed deserving and morally above reproach. Poverty itself is
somewhat disreputable, and being on welfare somewhat more disreputable.” But the “so-called
hard core,” the innermost circle, is located at the furthest point along this range of disrepute.
These people possess the “major moral defects of demoralization and immorality” (p. 620).
Poverty, Matza contended, is especially stigmatizing to the extent that certain persons re-
main unemployed or casually employed during periods of prosperity and full employment;
the “disreputable or able-bodied poor” resist training, remain recalcitrant and, in effect, refuse
to work in spite of the inducement of wages. They are the “hard-to-reach,” the disaffiliated,
representing very probably society’s only “authentic outsiders,” remaining at or on the margins
of society as if by choice, continuing to be “disproportionately costly” to the rest of us, causing
the majority of its social problems—crime and delinquency, imprisonment, mental illness,
welfare, family desertion, separation, divorce, and so on. These are the lumpenproletariat of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, those workers who remain outside the work force, the down-
trodden, the chronic paupers, the apathetic, the aimless drifters, the beggars and tramps, the
“dregs,” the “sediment,” the least educated and least uneducable persons who “have no place
in the class hierarchy,” who are “content to live in filth and disorder with a bare subsistence”
(Matza, 1966a, p. 292, 1971, pp. 624–636; Matza and Miller, 1976).
Impoverishment, said Matza, is not the same as “pauperization.” The pauperized are not
only poor but oppressed, degraded, and debased as well, while the impoverished are merely
poor and have not yet become pauperized (1966a, p. 299). We penalize the poor for being
poor; they have become inured and resigned to their poverty, having fallen into an impulsive,
turbulent, immobilized, demoralized existence, all of which circularly contributes to their en-
trenchment in the pauperized class. Matza painted a bleak portrait of poverty and disrepute,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
that is, the rich and privileged, and the ill-fortune of the poor, arguing that rich and poor
alike merit their status in life. Social class is “tangible proof” of God’s favor or disfavor (1963,
p. 114). The rich find these theological justifications compatible with their world view and
adapt them to their everyday lives—even in their secular ideology, detached from their sacred
origins. In short, the rich are attracted to a sacred ideology that says the poor are responsible for
their own poverty—because they are unmotivated and lazy and deserve what they get, includ-
ing a measure of society’s contempt. Weber didn’t endorse these views; he remarked on them.
David Matza
American society nurtures cultural values that tell us to root for the little guy and cheer when
people pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become successful, overcoming all odds
to forge their place in a competitive society. But though we all love Horatio Alger stories of
triumphs over adversity, many of us look down upon those who are not able to overcome the
odds and remain entrenched in the swamp of poverty; they must not have tried hard enough,
many of us feel, and have become overwhelmed by torpor, fecklessness, ineptitude—or sheer
laziness. David Matza argued that sociologists have ignored the issue of the “disreputable
poor” because they did not want to be charged with stigmatizing them; he decided to grapple
with the issue. It was Matza who coined the phrase, “poverty and disrepute” (1966b, 1971). To
understand the stigma of poverty, he contended, we need to picture three concentric circles.
The larger, outer, wider circle encompasses all poor people in the society; not all are stigma-
tized, nor are all considered disreputable. The intermediary circle is considerably smaller, and
includes those who are poor and have received government welfare assistance at some point in
their lives. The smallest or inner circle represents poor people who are sporadically or perma-
nently on some sort of government assistance program, “and, additionally, suffer the special
defects and stigma of demoralization” (1966b, p. 620).
In a competitive, achievement-oriented society, some measure of disrepute adheres to all
poor, even those “who are deemed deserving and morally above reproach. Poverty itself is
somewhat disreputable, and being on welfare somewhat more disreputable.” But the “so-called
hard core,” the innermost circle, is located at the furthest point along this range of disrepute.
These people possess the “major moral defects of demoralization and immorality” (p. 620).
Poverty, Matza contended, is especially stigmatizing to the extent that certain persons re-
main unemployed or casually employed during periods of prosperity and full employment;
the “disreputable or able-bodied poor” resist training, remain recalcitrant and, in effect, refuse
to work in spite of the inducement of wages. They are the “hard-to-reach,” the disaffiliated,
representing very probably society’s only “authentic outsiders,” remaining at or on the margins
of society as if by choice, continuing to be “disproportionately costly” to the rest of us, causing
the majority of its social problems—crime and delinquency, imprisonment, mental illness,
welfare, family desertion, separation, divorce, and so on. These are the lumpenproletariat of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, those workers who remain outside the work force, the down-
trodden, the chronic paupers, the apathetic, the aimless drifters, the beggars and tramps, the
“dregs,” the “sediment,” the least educated and least uneducable persons who “have no place
in the class hierarchy,” who are “content to live in filth and disorder with a bare subsistence”
(Matza, 1966a, p. 292, 1971, pp. 624–636; Matza and Miller, 1976).
Impoverishment, said Matza, is not the same as “pauperization.” The pauperized are not
only poor but oppressed, degraded, and debased as well, while the impoverished are merely
poor and have not yet become pauperized (1966a, p. 299). We penalize the poor for being
poor; they have become inured and resigned to their poverty, having fallen into an impulsive,
turbulent, immobilized, demoralized existence, all of which circularly contributes to their en-
trenchment in the pauperized class. Matza painted a bleak portrait of poverty and disrepute,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 103
making us believe that little can be done to improve the hapless, hopeless existence of the stig-
matized, demoralized, pauperized poor. They are truly among society’s deviants, he argued.
Melvin Lerner
The line of thinking that holds that people are responsible for their own condition, that the
well-favored and well-off deserve their good fortune while the poor, the unfortunate, and the
miserable deserve the hardship they suffer, is called the belief in a just world or the just world
hypothesis (Lerner, 1980). Most researchers regard the belief in a just world as a “fundamental
delusion,” yet it is strongly held by much, perhaps most, of the population. It is a widely held
cognitive bias that human behavior results in fair, appropriate, and equitable consequences.
Ultimately, many feel, evil actions result in punishment and ignominy, and noble actions re-
sult in reward and admiration. “You reap what you sow,” or “You get what’s coming to you,”
or “You made your bed, now lie in it,” are common refrains that support this biased view of
retribution. Social psychologist Melvin Lerner has spent a career conducting research on the
origin and dynamics of this widespread but fallacious belief, as well as the conditions under
which it is more likely to be held, and those under which it is less likely (1980). Early on in
his career, Lerner was struck by the fact that when someone meets unfortunate circumstances,
people often blame the victim, conjuring up a reasonable-sounding rationale for their deroga-
tion. Belief in a just world, Lerner discovered in his research, is crucial for people to maintain
a sense of well-being. Like Max Weber, Lerner doesn’t endorse this view, but remarks on it.
The reality that individuals and categories of people suffer for no reason at all, while others
enjoyed fabulous good fortune, again, without apparent cause, is too painful for most of us
to sustain. We need an explanation that eases the jarring reality of irrationality, the random-
ness, even the seeming cruel hand of fate, and the just world hypothesis serves that function
for a major sector of the population. This bias accounts for stereotypes held about the poor,
attributions for the causes of poverty, and why conservatives express less compassion and more
scorn for the poor while liberals express more compassion and less scorn for them (Cozzarelli,
Wilkinson, and Tagler, 2001). Persons who believe in the logic of a just world regard poverty
as just desserts, the poor as deserving of the destitution and scorn they receive—and hence,
in effect, believe that they are, and deserve to be regarded as, deviants. Melvin Lerner lent
social-psychological rigor to our understanding of why some among us stigmatize the poor.
Amar tya Sen and Diego Zavaleta Reyles
As all of these classic perspectives on poverty insist, there’s a moral dimension to poverty.
Of course, these social scientists do not believe that the poor are immoral, but they observe
and emphasize that many members of societies do believe this. People who are poor are often
excluded from mainstream society by virtue of their poverty alone, and typically feel dispar-
aged and dishonored as a result. Adam Smith first enunciated this principle in 1776 in his
influential volume, The Wealth of Nations, which was extended by Sen and Reyles. Amartya
Sen is an Indian economist internationally well-known for his work on reducing famine by
improving food distribution. But Sen also developed the argument that the poor are unjustly
stigmatized—and they stigmatize themselves—for their poverty. Absolute deprivation, or
extreme poverty, not only causes hunger, it likewise brings about “the inability to appear in
public without shame” (Sen, 2000, pp. 4, 5). Being poor in a Third World village often entails
the inability to purchase a pair of shoes or sandals or a shirt made of decent cloth and having
to go about barefoot and dressed in shabby clothes, which causes shame, humiliation and
discomfort as a result of being stared at and commented on. This is not fair, but it is what
roughly a billion people around the globe have to live with every day.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
making us believe that little can be done to improve the hapless, hopeless existence of the stig-
matized, demoralized, pauperized poor. They are truly among society’s deviants, he argued.
Melvin Lerner
The line of thinking that holds that people are responsible for their own condition, that the
well-favored and well-off deserve their good fortune while the poor, the unfortunate, and the
miserable deserve the hardship they suffer, is called the belief in a just world or the just world
hypothesis (Lerner, 1980). Most researchers regard the belief in a just world as a “fundamental
delusion,” yet it is strongly held by much, perhaps most, of the population. It is a widely held
cognitive bias that human behavior results in fair, appropriate, and equitable consequences.
Ultimately, many feel, evil actions result in punishment and ignominy, and noble actions re-
sult in reward and admiration. “You reap what you sow,” or “You get what’s coming to you,”
or “You made your bed, now lie in it,” are common refrains that support this biased view of
retribution. Social psychologist Melvin Lerner has spent a career conducting research on the
origin and dynamics of this widespread but fallacious belief, as well as the conditions under
which it is more likely to be held, and those under which it is less likely (1980). Early on in
his career, Lerner was struck by the fact that when someone meets unfortunate circumstances,
people often blame the victim, conjuring up a reasonable-sounding rationale for their deroga-
tion. Belief in a just world, Lerner discovered in his research, is crucial for people to maintain
a sense of well-being. Like Max Weber, Lerner doesn’t endorse this view, but remarks on it.
The reality that individuals and categories of people suffer for no reason at all, while others
enjoyed fabulous good fortune, again, without apparent cause, is too painful for most of us
to sustain. We need an explanation that eases the jarring reality of irrationality, the random-
ness, even the seeming cruel hand of fate, and the just world hypothesis serves that function
for a major sector of the population. This bias accounts for stereotypes held about the poor,
attributions for the causes of poverty, and why conservatives express less compassion and more
scorn for the poor while liberals express more compassion and less scorn for them (Cozzarelli,
Wilkinson, and Tagler, 2001). Persons who believe in the logic of a just world regard poverty
as just desserts, the poor as deserving of the destitution and scorn they receive—and hence,
in effect, believe that they are, and deserve to be regarded as, deviants. Melvin Lerner lent
social-psychological rigor to our understanding of why some among us stigmatize the poor.
Amar tya Sen and Diego Zavaleta Reyles
As all of these classic perspectives on poverty insist, there’s a moral dimension to poverty.
Of course, these social scientists do not believe that the poor are immoral, but they observe
and emphasize that many members of societies do believe this. People who are poor are often
excluded from mainstream society by virtue of their poverty alone, and typically feel dispar-
aged and dishonored as a result. Adam Smith first enunciated this principle in 1776 in his
influential volume, The Wealth of Nations, which was extended by Sen and Reyles. Amartya
Sen is an Indian economist internationally well-known for his work on reducing famine by
improving food distribution. But Sen also developed the argument that the poor are unjustly
stigmatized—and they stigmatize themselves—for their poverty. Absolute deprivation, or
extreme poverty, not only causes hunger, it likewise brings about “the inability to appear in
public without shame” (Sen, 2000, pp. 4, 5). Being poor in a Third World village often entails
the inability to purchase a pair of shoes or sandals or a shirt made of decent cloth and having
to go about barefoot and dressed in shabby clothes, which causes shame, humiliation and
discomfort as a result of being stared at and commented on. This is not fair, but it is what
roughly a billion people around the globe have to live with every day.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
104 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
Reyles expands on precisely this motif. Being at the bottom of the heap in a context of ex-
treme inequality results in discrimination, social marginality, and exclusion, and contributes
not only to the experience of poverty but also the social ostracism of the poor (Reyles, 2007,
p. 407)—that is, their experience of being deviants in their own communities. In The Voice
of the Poor, a study of attitudes and feelings toward poverty in 60 countries around the world,
respondents cited “indignity, shame, and humiliation as painful components of their depriva-
tion.” The “stigma of poverty is a recurrent theme among the poor, with people often trying
to conceal their poverty to avoid humiliation” (p. 407). The sense of humiliation and shame
that poverty engenders results in a reduced freedom and agency, being unable to do what is
considered customary for a functioning member of the community, having to accept charity or
alms, experiencing painful encounters with officials, or belonging to sectors of the society “to
which negative values are attached”—that is, stereotypes dictating that poverty “is associated
with laziness, incompetence, or criminality” (p. 407).
Loïc Wacquant
Loïc Wacquant draws what may be the most dismal and pessimistic portrait of the growing
convergence of poverty, disrepute, race, and marginality. His Urban Outcasts (2008) argues that
advanced capitalism—he focuses specifically on France and the United States—has produced
an advanced marginality, which entails the physical removal of stigmatized populations, mainly
the poverty-stricken and, in the United States, a substantial proportion of the African Amer-
ican population, who have become increasingly incorporated into a “penal state” in which the
ghetto (a term Wacquant uses but doesn’t like) and the prison are indistinguishable—elements
in a “carceral continuum” (à la Foucault)—and “surplus” populations suffer “structural con-
straints” and the “vulnerable fractions of the urban proletariat” have become increasingly “spa-
tially stigmatized,” marginalized, and alienated (p. 286). The “dazzling growth of corporate
benefits,” says Wacquant, “go hand in hand with wage work” (p. 286). The state has cut the
poor loose to fend for themselves, but retains its “public monopoly of systems of surveillance
and sanction of deviancy” (p. 12). Wacquant’s work on the expansion of the super-rich, the
stigmatization and ghettoization of the urban poor and racial minorities, the “penalization
of misery,” and the hyper-surveillance of deviance sound a great deal like George Orwell’s
dystopic novel 1984. To someone living in Paris, New York, or London, the portrait he draws
may seem exaggerated—racial residential segregation is declining in the United States over
time, albeit unevenly, rather than increasing (Glaeser and Vigdor, 2012)—but his image does
capture what it must feel like to live at the bottom economic stratum in one of the most af-
fluent societies on Earth, and to feel marginalized, stigmatized, and deviantized by persons
who are vastly better-off.
Poverty and Affluence in the United States
In most ways, the economic situation in the United States has improved substantially in
recent years. During the 1960 to 1980 period, the per capita income of the U.S. population
rose dramatically, but in the stretch from 1980 to the 2020s, growth slowed down substan-
tially, and increased unevenly. In fact, because of the economic recession beginning late
in 2008, between 2008 and 2009, per capita income declined 2.83%, and between 2019
and 2020, because of the COVID pandemic, it declined 3.18%, from $65,095 to $63,028;
however, during the following year, incomes recovered quickly, and increased to $69,288 in
2021. The unevenness of the economy can be expressed by looking at the transition from
1970 to 2020 with respect to the percent each earning level quintile (one-fifth) received of
the total income pie. In 1970, the lowest-income quintile received 4.0 percent of the total;Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Reyles expands on precisely this motif. Being at the bottom of the heap in a context of ex-
treme inequality results in discrimination, social marginality, and exclusion, and contributes
not only to the experience of poverty but also the social ostracism of the poor (Reyles, 2007,
p. 407)—that is, their experience of being deviants in their own communities. In The Voice
of the Poor, a study of attitudes and feelings toward poverty in 60 countries around the world,
respondents cited “indignity, shame, and humiliation as painful components of their depriva-
tion.” The “stigma of poverty is a recurrent theme among the poor, with people often trying
to conceal their poverty to avoid humiliation” (p. 407). The sense of humiliation and shame
that poverty engenders results in a reduced freedom and agency, being unable to do what is
considered customary for a functioning member of the community, having to accept charity or
alms, experiencing painful encounters with officials, or belonging to sectors of the society “to
which negative values are attached”—that is, stereotypes dictating that poverty “is associated
with laziness, incompetence, or criminality” (p. 407).
Loïc Wacquant
Loïc Wacquant draws what may be the most dismal and pessimistic portrait of the growing
convergence of poverty, disrepute, race, and marginality. His Urban Outcasts (2008) argues that
advanced capitalism—he focuses specifically on France and the United States—has produced
an advanced marginality, which entails the physical removal of stigmatized populations, mainly
the poverty-stricken and, in the United States, a substantial proportion of the African Amer-
ican population, who have become increasingly incorporated into a “penal state” in which the
ghetto (a term Wacquant uses but doesn’t like) and the prison are indistinguishable—elements
in a “carceral continuum” (à la Foucault)—and “surplus” populations suffer “structural con-
straints” and the “vulnerable fractions of the urban proletariat” have become increasingly “spa-
tially stigmatized,” marginalized, and alienated (p. 286). The “dazzling growth of corporate
benefits,” says Wacquant, “go hand in hand with wage work” (p. 286). The state has cut the
poor loose to fend for themselves, but retains its “public monopoly of systems of surveillance
and sanction of deviancy” (p. 12). Wacquant’s work on the expansion of the super-rich, the
stigmatization and ghettoization of the urban poor and racial minorities, the “penalization
of misery,” and the hyper-surveillance of deviance sound a great deal like George Orwell’s
dystopic novel 1984. To someone living in Paris, New York, or London, the portrait he draws
may seem exaggerated—racial residential segregation is declining in the United States over
time, albeit unevenly, rather than increasing (Glaeser and Vigdor, 2012)—but his image does
capture what it must feel like to live at the bottom economic stratum in one of the most af-
fluent societies on Earth, and to feel marginalized, stigmatized, and deviantized by persons
who are vastly better-off.
Poverty and Affluence in the United States
In most ways, the economic situation in the United States has improved substantially in
recent years. During the 1960 to 1980 period, the per capita income of the U.S. population
rose dramatically, but in the stretch from 1980 to the 2020s, growth slowed down substan-
tially, and increased unevenly. In fact, because of the economic recession beginning late
in 2008, between 2008 and 2009, per capita income declined 2.83%, and between 2019
and 2020, because of the COVID pandemic, it declined 3.18%, from $65,095 to $63,028;
however, during the following year, incomes recovered quickly, and increased to $69,288 in
2021. The unevenness of the economy can be expressed by looking at the transition from
1970 to 2020 with respect to the percent each earning level quintile (one-fifth) received of
the total income pie. In 1970, the lowest-income quintile received 4.0 percent of the total;Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 105
in 2020, this had shrunk to 3.1 percent. In 1970, the highest-earning quintile received 43.4
percent of the total economic pie; in 2020, this had grown to 52.2 percent. In the latter
year, the top economic quintile earned more than the total earned by the lower-earning
four-fifths of the population.
Economists have attempted to systematically and empirically measure poverty at least
as long ago as 1965, when Lyndon Johnson declared his “War on Poverty.” Like all generic
measures, devising a poverty index is a thorny task. A given sum of money doesn’t pur-
chase the same necessities in New York City or San Francisco as it does in a rural county
in Mississippi or North Dakota. The government defines poverty as lacking the resources
to meet basic nutritional needs for healthy living; these resources include income from all
sources (including food stamps, lunch programs, income tax credits, and so on), how many
people live in the household, and the local consumer price index. In 2020, the federal
government’s poverty threshold for a single person household at $13,300, a two-person
household at $17,120; and for four people, at $26,900. By this designation, 10.5% of the
American population lives in poverty, a decline for two straight years; a total of 34 million
people in the United States fit the government’s designation for poverty. There’s a measure
of arbitrariness in these designations, and a different set of calculations would create a dif-
ferent set of figures, but they are reasonable measures, and by any conceivable reckoning,
these people are undeniably poor.
The ongoing specter of COVID-19, which broke out late in 2019 and became wide-
spread early in 2020, has shrunk the job market, decreased labor participation, caused
millions to stop looking for work, and increased long-term unemployment for millions of
workers in sectors of the economy such as leisure and hospitality, education and health,
and business and professional services; its persistence threatens to multiply the numbers of
poverty-stricken not only in the United States but globally. As a result of these and other
catastrophic developments, the December 14 issue of Time magazine proclaimed that 2020
was “The Worst Year Ever” (Zacharek, 2020). Hence, the favorable, pre-2020 figures are
misleading; now we have to contemplate the impact of economic stagnation caused by the
pandemic and post-pandemic conditions. By the first half of 2022, the economy returned
to its former health.
In the long run, pandemics aside, technology, sanitation, and modern medicine have made
it possible for the population in contemporary industrialized countries, including the poor,
to live longer, healthier, and less physically debased lives. Specifically, Americans live longer,
healthier lives than they did in the past, even over the span of the last quarter-century. Ac-
cording to the World Health Organization, worldwide, fewer people on the planet live in
extreme poverty than was true in past decades; people’s lives are measurably healthier, less
disease-ridden, and longer-lasting. Over the past decade, the number of food-insecure people
on the planet has dropped from 1.9 to 1.2 billion; that number may increase as the coronavirus
pandemic increasingly takes its deadly toll. Nonetheless, the long-term trend, worldwide, has,
on average, tended toward improvement. People are better-educated and more likely to be
literate; this change is especially true of girls. Household items (refrigerators, air conditioners,
televisions, computers, and so on) that used to be more expensive are less so, enabling people
with very little money to purchase them, but certain necessities, such as health care, higher
education, and the construction of a sturdy house, at least in the United States, have become
more expensive (Thompson, 2011), giving the lie to The Heritage Foundation’s charge that
families who are defined by the government as poor aren’t really living in poverty (Sheffield
and Rector, 2011). If their economic lives are closely examined, if given the resources, we
could undoubtedly count more people who are truly poor than the number the government
designates as living in poverty. It is true that, on average, Americans are materially better-off
than is true of most residents of Third World nations, and better-off today than most peopleCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
in 2020, this had shrunk to 3.1 percent. In 1970, the highest-earning quintile received 43.4
percent of the total economic pie; in 2020, this had grown to 52.2 percent. In the latter
year, the top economic quintile earned more than the total earned by the lower-earning
four-fifths of the population.
Economists have attempted to systematically and empirically measure poverty at least
as long ago as 1965, when Lyndon Johnson declared his “War on Poverty.” Like all generic
measures, devising a poverty index is a thorny task. A given sum of money doesn’t pur-
chase the same necessities in New York City or San Francisco as it does in a rural county
in Mississippi or North Dakota. The government defines poverty as lacking the resources
to meet basic nutritional needs for healthy living; these resources include income from all
sources (including food stamps, lunch programs, income tax credits, and so on), how many
people live in the household, and the local consumer price index. In 2020, the federal
government’s poverty threshold for a single person household at $13,300, a two-person
household at $17,120; and for four people, at $26,900. By this designation, 10.5% of the
American population lives in poverty, a decline for two straight years; a total of 34 million
people in the United States fit the government’s designation for poverty. There’s a measure
of arbitrariness in these designations, and a different set of calculations would create a dif-
ferent set of figures, but they are reasonable measures, and by any conceivable reckoning,
these people are undeniably poor.
The ongoing specter of COVID-19, which broke out late in 2019 and became wide-
spread early in 2020, has shrunk the job market, decreased labor participation, caused
millions to stop looking for work, and increased long-term unemployment for millions of
workers in sectors of the economy such as leisure and hospitality, education and health,
and business and professional services; its persistence threatens to multiply the numbers of
poverty-stricken not only in the United States but globally. As a result of these and other
catastrophic developments, the December 14 issue of Time magazine proclaimed that 2020
was “The Worst Year Ever” (Zacharek, 2020). Hence, the favorable, pre-2020 figures are
misleading; now we have to contemplate the impact of economic stagnation caused by the
pandemic and post-pandemic conditions. By the first half of 2022, the economy returned
to its former health.
In the long run, pandemics aside, technology, sanitation, and modern medicine have made
it possible for the population in contemporary industrialized countries, including the poor,
to live longer, healthier, and less physically debased lives. Specifically, Americans live longer,
healthier lives than they did in the past, even over the span of the last quarter-century. Ac-
cording to the World Health Organization, worldwide, fewer people on the planet live in
extreme poverty than was true in past decades; people’s lives are measurably healthier, less
disease-ridden, and longer-lasting. Over the past decade, the number of food-insecure people
on the planet has dropped from 1.9 to 1.2 billion; that number may increase as the coronavirus
pandemic increasingly takes its deadly toll. Nonetheless, the long-term trend, worldwide, has,
on average, tended toward improvement. People are better-educated and more likely to be
literate; this change is especially true of girls. Household items (refrigerators, air conditioners,
televisions, computers, and so on) that used to be more expensive are less so, enabling people
with very little money to purchase them, but certain necessities, such as health care, higher
education, and the construction of a sturdy house, at least in the United States, have become
more expensive (Thompson, 2011), giving the lie to The Heritage Foundation’s charge that
families who are defined by the government as poor aren’t really living in poverty (Sheffield
and Rector, 2011). If their economic lives are closely examined, if given the resources, we
could undoubtedly count more people who are truly poor than the number the government
designates as living in poverty. It is true that, on average, Americans are materially better-off
than is true of most residents of Third World nations, and better-off today than most peopleCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
106 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
were in the United States a century or two ago. And yet poverty persists in the United States,
as do regions and categories of poverty. Surprisingly, as I’ll explain shortly, among the 17 most
affluent countries on Earth, the health of Americans, specifically the health of poor Americans,
is the worst in the world.
The poorest large cities in America are former industrial “rust belt” municipalities. In
1950, Detroit was a prosperous, urban, industrial, unionized, working-class metropolis
of over 1.8 million; in 2019, the city numbered fewer than 667,300, a majority leaving
behind a crumbling, hollowed-out shell of its former infrastructure. Detroit is now, as we
saw, and as Time magazine declares, a semi-abandoned “ghost town” in which nearly four
in ten of its residents (38%) live in poverty, and an astonishing 60% of its children do.
Civic and business organizations are currently working to “bring Detroit back”—for in-
stance, Shinola, a watch company, recently established a factory there—but time will tell
the story of this effort’s success. (Different organizations and agencies define and measure
income and poverty in slightly different ways and hence, get slightly different results;
moreover, these results change year by year.) Detroit’s efforts at a come-back have become
so widely publicized that the city is sometimes currently featured in travel sections of
newspapers (Dorman, 2018).
During the past half-century, hundreds of deindustrialized cities across the United States
have lost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in municipal and state revenues. Within the
same period (1950–2019) Cleveland’s population plummeted from over 900,000 to 379,000,
and a third of its residents (33%), and half of its children (50%) are likewise currently classified
as impoverished. Like Detroit, Cleveland is struggling to reinvent and revive itself, but its
residents can probably never restore the city to its former apogee; the market forces are simply
too powerful and compelling. A substantial percentage of the poorer residents who remain in
the inner cities of these and other, similarly disadvantaged “rust-belt” regions, are virtually
guaranteed a poverty-stricken existence and a life of economic want. A substantial level of un-
employment seems ineradicable, and the concentration of unemployment, under-employment,
and sub-employment in specific sectors of the population, specifically among racial and eth-
nic minorities, remains chronic. Moreover, it is not only the non-working or low-income
wage-earners who are poor; their children are also impoverished. A third to nearly half of the
children living in two dozen of America’s medium-to-large cities, from Cincinnati, Ohio to
Corpus Christi, Texas, are poverty-stricken. Today, the child poverty rate is higher than it has
been in 20 years. Many of the poorest small-to-medium cities are in the Deep South and in
Appalachia. At the same time, a substantial proportion of the population of the country live
more comfortably than any generation in history. In many ways, the United States is really
“two countries” (Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, 2016)—the affluent, or top income quintile, and
the poor, the bottom quintile.
Rural poverty is even more extreme than its urban counterpart. According to the Census,
the majority of the 100 communities in America with the lowest per capita incomes, where
the most serious and persistent poverty is concentrated, are rural communities or “census
designated places”; they are too small and too poor to maintain a municipal government, have
limited to nonexistent economic opportunities, virtually no possibility for upward mobility,
and a substantial lack of access to markets. More than half of these places are located in only
two states—Texas, nearly all of them in the Rio Grande Valley, and South Dakota, mostly on
or near Indian reservations. Yet Texas also boasts two cities (Dallas and Houston) with large
and immensely wealthy elites.
We see substantial state-by-state variation in income. According to the U.S. Census, median
household income in 2020 in the most affluent states, Massachusetts ($82,475) and Con-
necticut ($82,082) is almost twice as high as states with the lowest incomes–West VirginiaCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
were in the United States a century or two ago. And yet poverty persists in the United States,
as do regions and categories of poverty. Surprisingly, as I’ll explain shortly, among the 17 most
affluent countries on Earth, the health of Americans, specifically the health of poor Americans,
is the worst in the world.
The poorest large cities in America are former industrial “rust belt” municipalities. In
1950, Detroit was a prosperous, urban, industrial, unionized, working-class metropolis
of over 1.8 million; in 2019, the city numbered fewer than 667,300, a majority leaving
behind a crumbling, hollowed-out shell of its former infrastructure. Detroit is now, as we
saw, and as Time magazine declares, a semi-abandoned “ghost town” in which nearly four
in ten of its residents (38%) live in poverty, and an astonishing 60% of its children do.
Civic and business organizations are currently working to “bring Detroit back”—for in-
stance, Shinola, a watch company, recently established a factory there—but time will tell
the story of this effort’s success. (Different organizations and agencies define and measure
income and poverty in slightly different ways and hence, get slightly different results;
moreover, these results change year by year.) Detroit’s efforts at a come-back have become
so widely publicized that the city is sometimes currently featured in travel sections of
newspapers (Dorman, 2018).
During the past half-century, hundreds of deindustrialized cities across the United States
have lost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in municipal and state revenues. Within the
same period (1950–2019) Cleveland’s population plummeted from over 900,000 to 379,000,
and a third of its residents (33%), and half of its children (50%) are likewise currently classified
as impoverished. Like Detroit, Cleveland is struggling to reinvent and revive itself, but its
residents can probably never restore the city to its former apogee; the market forces are simply
too powerful and compelling. A substantial percentage of the poorer residents who remain in
the inner cities of these and other, similarly disadvantaged “rust-belt” regions, are virtually
guaranteed a poverty-stricken existence and a life of economic want. A substantial level of un-
employment seems ineradicable, and the concentration of unemployment, under-employment,
and sub-employment in specific sectors of the population, specifically among racial and eth-
nic minorities, remains chronic. Moreover, it is not only the non-working or low-income
wage-earners who are poor; their children are also impoverished. A third to nearly half of the
children living in two dozen of America’s medium-to-large cities, from Cincinnati, Ohio to
Corpus Christi, Texas, are poverty-stricken. Today, the child poverty rate is higher than it has
been in 20 years. Many of the poorest small-to-medium cities are in the Deep South and in
Appalachia. At the same time, a substantial proportion of the population of the country live
more comfortably than any generation in history. In many ways, the United States is really
“two countries” (Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, 2016)—the affluent, or top income quintile, and
the poor, the bottom quintile.
Rural poverty is even more extreme than its urban counterpart. According to the Census,
the majority of the 100 communities in America with the lowest per capita incomes, where
the most serious and persistent poverty is concentrated, are rural communities or “census
designated places”; they are too small and too poor to maintain a municipal government, have
limited to nonexistent economic opportunities, virtually no possibility for upward mobility,
and a substantial lack of access to markets. More than half of these places are located in only
two states—Texas, nearly all of them in the Rio Grande Valley, and South Dakota, mostly on
or near Indian reservations. Yet Texas also boasts two cities (Dallas and Houston) with large
and immensely wealthy elites.
We see substantial state-by-state variation in income. According to the U.S. Census, median
household income in 2020 in the most affluent states, Massachusetts ($82,475) and Con-
necticut ($82,082) is almost twice as high as states with the lowest incomes–West VirginiaCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 107
($47,817) and Mississippi ($45,438). Of the 14 states with the highest percent living in pov-
erty, all but two (New Mexico, 17.9%, and Arizona, 13.29%). are located in the South or in a
border state.
What can be done about poverty? The nation’s poorest regions also rank lowest in education.
This may be cause or consequence—that is, poor regions and states spend the least on public
education, and hence, educate a lower percentage of their population, who are ill-equipped for
the labor market and end up poor. Or it could be that well-educated people are not attracted
to states that have a high percentage of poor people, sensing that economic opportunity lies
elsewhere. It could also be that a lack of education causes poverty, or poverty may cause
already-educated people, or soon-to-be-educated people, to move out, or those elsewhere to re-
fuse to move into such an area. In any case, the four states with the lowest percentage of adults
who are college graduates (West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky, about one in
five) have low incomes, while the states with a percentage of the population with bachelor’s
degrees that rank at or near the top in education (Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, and
Connecticut, with roughly two in five) are at the top in affluence as well. When we compare
states with one another, education is very closely related to income; hence, poverty is clustered
in much the same way that a lack of education is. But even states with populations that are
well-educated states encompass pockets of poverty. Interestingly enough, the states with the
least well-educated residents are “red” states whose electorate is most likely to vote against tax
increases to pay for public education, while residents in the more affluent “blue” states are
more likely to vote for a public educational system that would most benefit the children of the
economically least well-off. At one time, the United States ranked highest in the world in the
percentage of its population who were college graduates; its position has slid to 14th place.
Income Inequality
Poverty doesn’t confine itself to pin-points on a map of rural America and decaying neigh-
borhoods in formerly industrialized cities. It is persistent, though less common, even in areas
where affluence is widespread. The percentage of poor people in a country is determined not
only by its average income but also by how that nation’s income is distributed. Income distri-
bution is an indicator of the scale and spread of riches versus poverty and hence, by knowing
a nation’s GDP and how well its income is distributed, we can determine how many poor
people live in it. The income earned by quintiles (or 20% layers) in the population is one way
of expressing how income is distributed. In 1970, the lowest-income quintile earned 4.1% of
the total GDP; the second quintile, 10.8%, the third, 17.4%, and the fourth, 24.5%; the top
quintile earned 43.3% of the total economic pie. But in 2020, these figures were 3.1, 8.3, 14.1,
22.7—and 51.9%. In that recent year, the richest fifth of the population earned more than the
total income earned by the entire rest of the nation.
Over time, income inequality in the United States is substantially growing—the rich are
getting richer, and the income of the poor is increasing only slightly—and this trend has
taken place under administrations of both parties. Income rises very steeply at the very top
of the distribution. At the 99.5th percentile, yearly income stands at a million dollars, and at
the 99.9th percentile rung, it is over 2 million. According to the Economic Policy Institute,
the compensation for the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of the top 350 firms has increased
940% between 1978 and 2018, while the average increase in pay for workers during that pe-
riod was only 12% (Mishel and Wolfe, 2019). In 2019, the worker organization, the AFL-CIO
(American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations) estimated, the
average S&P (Standard & Poor’s) top 500 CEO earned $15.5 million, which was just shy of
300 times the median pay of manual workers in those same firms. However we measure itsCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
($47,817) and Mississippi ($45,438). Of the 14 states with the highest percent living in pov-
erty, all but two (New Mexico, 17.9%, and Arizona, 13.29%). are located in the South or in a
border state.
What can be done about poverty? The nation’s poorest regions also rank lowest in education.
This may be cause or consequence—that is, poor regions and states spend the least on public
education, and hence, educate a lower percentage of their population, who are ill-equipped for
the labor market and end up poor. Or it could be that well-educated people are not attracted
to states that have a high percentage of poor people, sensing that economic opportunity lies
elsewhere. It could also be that a lack of education causes poverty, or poverty may cause
already-educated people, or soon-to-be-educated people, to move out, or those elsewhere to re-
fuse to move into such an area. In any case, the four states with the lowest percentage of adults
who are college graduates (West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky, about one in
five) have low incomes, while the states with a percentage of the population with bachelor’s
degrees that rank at or near the top in education (Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, and
Connecticut, with roughly two in five) are at the top in affluence as well. When we compare
states with one another, education is very closely related to income; hence, poverty is clustered
in much the same way that a lack of education is. But even states with populations that are
well-educated states encompass pockets of poverty. Interestingly enough, the states with the
least well-educated residents are “red” states whose electorate is most likely to vote against tax
increases to pay for public education, while residents in the more affluent “blue” states are
more likely to vote for a public educational system that would most benefit the children of the
economically least well-off. At one time, the United States ranked highest in the world in the
percentage of its population who were college graduates; its position has slid to 14th place.
Income Inequality
Poverty doesn’t confine itself to pin-points on a map of rural America and decaying neigh-
borhoods in formerly industrialized cities. It is persistent, though less common, even in areas
where affluence is widespread. The percentage of poor people in a country is determined not
only by its average income but also by how that nation’s income is distributed. Income distri-
bution is an indicator of the scale and spread of riches versus poverty and hence, by knowing
a nation’s GDP and how well its income is distributed, we can determine how many poor
people live in it. The income earned by quintiles (or 20% layers) in the population is one way
of expressing how income is distributed. In 1970, the lowest-income quintile earned 4.1% of
the total GDP; the second quintile, 10.8%, the third, 17.4%, and the fourth, 24.5%; the top
quintile earned 43.3% of the total economic pie. But in 2020, these figures were 3.1, 8.3, 14.1,
22.7—and 51.9%. In that recent year, the richest fifth of the population earned more than the
total income earned by the entire rest of the nation.
Over time, income inequality in the United States is substantially growing—the rich are
getting richer, and the income of the poor is increasing only slightly—and this trend has
taken place under administrations of both parties. Income rises very steeply at the very top
of the distribution. At the 99.5th percentile, yearly income stands at a million dollars, and at
the 99.9th percentile rung, it is over 2 million. According to the Economic Policy Institute,
the compensation for the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of the top 350 firms has increased
940% between 1978 and 2018, while the average increase in pay for workers during that pe-
riod was only 12% (Mishel and Wolfe, 2019). In 2019, the worker organization, the AFL-CIO
(American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations) estimated, the
average S&P (Standard & Poor’s) top 500 CEO earned $15.5 million, which was just shy of
300 times the median pay of manual workers in those same firms. However we measure itsCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
108 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
distribution, huge income inequalities prevail. Some observers believe this is fair—just com-
pensation for the more skilled, demanding job—while others feel this practice is unfair and
discriminatory. Either way, enormous income inequality in the United States specifically and
advanced industrial and post-industrial corporations is the rule.
The Gini coefficient lends precision to income distribution. (Most economists believe that
it makes the most sense to measure Ginis in after tax income distribution, but for the poorer
residents of the poorest countries of the world, taxes don’t exist and hence, no such “after tax”
calculations can be made, and the poor receive no government services whatsoever.) A low
Gini (relatively equally distributed incomes) is represented, not surprisingly, by a low number
(closer to 0) while a high Gini is represented by a high number (that is, one closer to 1). The
Kuznets Curve predicts a curvilinear relationship between income inequality and economic
development: as societies develop economically, they first move from a low Gini (little ine-
quality, as with tiny hunting and gathering bands) to a high Gini (substantial inequality, as
among the agrarian empires of ancient Rome and medieval Europe) to, once again, a lower
Gini (less inequality, as in modern urban democracies).
Where is income most unevenly—and most unequally—distributed? Where is it most
evenly, and equally, distributed? The Gini of the nations of the world vary from year to year—
and, moreover, one economist’s calculation to another. From a strictly mathematical perspective,
it is more difficult for a very small elite to monopolize large economy than a small one. Still,
other factors are at work, as we can see from the example of Brazil—a country with a huge but
poorly distributed GDP. The latest World Bank’s calculations indicate that, generally speaking,
incomes in the economically developing nations of Africa, such as South Africa (with a Gini of
.630), Lesotho (.542), and the Central African Republic (.562), are substantially unequal. Incomes
in Latin America are somewhat less unequal than those in Africa—for instance, Brazil (.533),
Honduras (.505), and Panama (.499). And those in the more fully economically developed nations
of Western Europe, such as Belgium (.277), the Netherlands (.282), and Germany (.317), repre-
sent among most equalitarian of the world’s incomes, especially the Scandinavian countries—
Norway (.275), Denmark (.282), and Sweden (.292)—which have among the very lowest Ginis
and thus, stand as the most equitably distributed incomes in the world. The substantially poorer
former Soviet Republics and the East European former Soviet satellite countries have managed
to sustain the most equitably distributed economies in the world: Ukraine (.250), Belarus (.250),
Slovenia (.254), Slovenia (.254), the Czech Republic (.259), and Moldova (.259) exemplify this ten-
dency. The United Kingdom (.332) and the United States (.415) have more equitably distributed
incomes than most of the industrializing countries of the Second and Third World, but less than
those of most of the fully industrialized First World countries of Western Europe and the former
Soviet and formerly Soviet-orbited countries. Among the three dozen most fully industrialized
countries of the world, the United States ranks near the bottom in how equitably its income is
distributed—in other words, it is one of the most unequal of the richest countries of the world.
After more than a decade of refusing to release its Gini income figures, China, a formerly social-
ist country, and now newly emerging capitalist nation, recently revealed that its inequality was
growing; its Gini most recently stood at .386, an economy somewhere in between the United
States and the United Kingdom in its income distribution. Over time, as we saw, in the United
States, the richest strata have earned a large and growing slice of the total income, while the
poorest earn a comparatively smaller and shrinking proportion of it. The income inequality of a
society is likely to be related to the imputed deviance of its most poverty-stricken; moreover, as
this chapter pointed out, variable by country, poverty itself can be demeaning and stigmatizing
and hence, a deviant condition.
Recent economic recessions aside, in some industrialized countries of the world, the total
GDP—each nation’s total economic pie—is increasing. But in the United States, according
to GlobalEconomy.com, in constant 2010 dollars, in the late two-thousand-and-teens, the perCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
distribution, huge income inequalities prevail. Some observers believe this is fair—just com-
pensation for the more skilled, demanding job—while others feel this practice is unfair and
discriminatory. Either way, enormous income inequality in the United States specifically and
advanced industrial and post-industrial corporations is the rule.
The Gini coefficient lends precision to income distribution. (Most economists believe that
it makes the most sense to measure Ginis in after tax income distribution, but for the poorer
residents of the poorest countries of the world, taxes don’t exist and hence, no such “after tax”
calculations can be made, and the poor receive no government services whatsoever.) A low
Gini (relatively equally distributed incomes) is represented, not surprisingly, by a low number
(closer to 0) while a high Gini is represented by a high number (that is, one closer to 1). The
Kuznets Curve predicts a curvilinear relationship between income inequality and economic
development: as societies develop economically, they first move from a low Gini (little ine-
quality, as with tiny hunting and gathering bands) to a high Gini (substantial inequality, as
among the agrarian empires of ancient Rome and medieval Europe) to, once again, a lower
Gini (less inequality, as in modern urban democracies).
Where is income most unevenly—and most unequally—distributed? Where is it most
evenly, and equally, distributed? The Gini of the nations of the world vary from year to year—
and, moreover, one economist’s calculation to another. From a strictly mathematical perspective,
it is more difficult for a very small elite to monopolize large economy than a small one. Still,
other factors are at work, as we can see from the example of Brazil—a country with a huge but
poorly distributed GDP. The latest World Bank’s calculations indicate that, generally speaking,
incomes in the economically developing nations of Africa, such as South Africa (with a Gini of
.630), Lesotho (.542), and the Central African Republic (.562), are substantially unequal. Incomes
in Latin America are somewhat less unequal than those in Africa—for instance, Brazil (.533),
Honduras (.505), and Panama (.499). And those in the more fully economically developed nations
of Western Europe, such as Belgium (.277), the Netherlands (.282), and Germany (.317), repre-
sent among most equalitarian of the world’s incomes, especially the Scandinavian countries—
Norway (.275), Denmark (.282), and Sweden (.292)—which have among the very lowest Ginis
and thus, stand as the most equitably distributed incomes in the world. The substantially poorer
former Soviet Republics and the East European former Soviet satellite countries have managed
to sustain the most equitably distributed economies in the world: Ukraine (.250), Belarus (.250),
Slovenia (.254), Slovenia (.254), the Czech Republic (.259), and Moldova (.259) exemplify this ten-
dency. The United Kingdom (.332) and the United States (.415) have more equitably distributed
incomes than most of the industrializing countries of the Second and Third World, but less than
those of most of the fully industrialized First World countries of Western Europe and the former
Soviet and formerly Soviet-orbited countries. Among the three dozen most fully industrialized
countries of the world, the United States ranks near the bottom in how equitably its income is
distributed—in other words, it is one of the most unequal of the richest countries of the world.
After more than a decade of refusing to release its Gini income figures, China, a formerly social-
ist country, and now newly emerging capitalist nation, recently revealed that its inequality was
growing; its Gini most recently stood at .386, an economy somewhere in between the United
States and the United Kingdom in its income distribution. Over time, as we saw, in the United
States, the richest strata have earned a large and growing slice of the total income, while the
poorest earn a comparatively smaller and shrinking proportion of it. The income inequality of a
society is likely to be related to the imputed deviance of its most poverty-stricken; moreover, as
this chapter pointed out, variable by country, poverty itself can be demeaning and stigmatizing
and hence, a deviant condition.
Recent economic recessions aside, in some industrialized countries of the world, the total
GDP—each nation’s total economic pie—is increasing. But in the United States, according
to GlobalEconomy.com, in constant 2010 dollars, in the late two-thousand-and-teens, the perCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 109
capita GDP rose about a thousand dollars a year and in 2019, stood at $55,670. The United
States falls behind some of the other rich countries in another respect as well: the income of
its poorest strata. In 2015, The New York Times introduced an electronic site, The Upshot, which
offers detailed analyses of stories too complex to be fully elaborated in its daily print stories.
The Times inaugurated this site with a series on economic inequality in the United States (Le-
onhardt and Quealy, 2014), which included a table, “Losing the Lead,” demonstrating how the
inequality process played itself out over time. In 1980, the United States was the richest coun-
try in the world at every decile level—that is, from the richest 10% to the poorest, US residents
received higher incomes than the comparable decile levels of all the other countries in Earth.
Even the poorest 10% in the United States was more affluent than the poorest 10% of all other
countries in the world. But in 1980, this did not apply to its poorest 5%, who were less well-off
than the poorest 5% of Norway. Over time, the United States lost its lead at the bottom of the
income strata. In 1984, the bottom 10%, its poorest decile, became poorer than Norway’s, and
the next-to-bottom decile, the 20th percentile, was poorer than Canada’s next-to-bottom layer.
In 1988, the bottom three deciles—the 30th, 20th, and 10th percentiles—were poorer than
those three deciles in Austria. This process continues gradually and almost inexorably over
time to the year of the table’s latest tally, 2010, in which the bottom two strata, the 20th and
10th, were poorer than those of the Netherlands, and the next two, the 40th and 30th, were
poorer than their equivalents in Canada. In other words, America’s middle class is no longer
richer than the middle classes of all other countries of the world. In its most recent history,
the US economy has been stagnating while that of some other fully economically developed
nations pull ahead, from the bottom of the heap toward the middle, layer by layer, decile by
decile. Will this fate befall America’s richest class? Most economists believe that this is un-
likely in the foreseeable future, but when it comes to the global movement of money, no one
has a crystal ball. The total economic pie in the United States is so huge that the richest layer
will probably continue to be the richest in the world for some time to come. Still, this is the
trend: the US poor are losing ground, decade by decade, and its middle class, likewise, has
recently lost out to that of at least one affluent nation; others will undoubtedly follow.
Today, in the United States, income inequality has grown larger than it was since the
1920s, which preceded the Great Crash and the Depression. The United States has a higher
proportion of its children living in poverty (a fifth) than all but one of the richest countries in
the world. Not only are roughly 34 million Americans living in poverty, roughly 37 million
households in the United States have been “food insecure” at some point during the year, that
is, they didn’t know where their next meal is coming from. During 2020, the upward eco-
nomic trend after the end of the recession of 2008 trend seems to have reversed itself. Global
Economic Prospects announced that, because of COVID-19, during 2020, the world economy
has contracted by 5.2%. In any case, and more to the point, poverty is one outcome of extreme
income inequality, which is increasing, and, also increasingly, poverty tends to breed a stig-
matizing attitude among the more affluent toward the poor.
Unemployment
Because of the ongoing pandemic, the unemployment rate has been unstable. In February
of 2020, shortly before COVID-19 began sickening a very large number of Americans, the
official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment rate was 3.5%. By April of that year,
several million workers were laid off and unemployment reached 14.7%; by November, it
eased somewhat, to 6.7%. The BLS also promulgates what it regards as a “real” unemployment
rate, called U-6, which is the percentage of “discouraged” workers, that is, who aren’t recorded
as unemployed but are out of work and not looking for a job, but would accept a job if were
offered one; that figure, according to the BLS, was 12% in November 2020. Unemployment isCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
capita GDP rose about a thousand dollars a year and in 2019, stood at $55,670. The United
States falls behind some of the other rich countries in another respect as well: the income of
its poorest strata. In 2015, The New York Times introduced an electronic site, The Upshot, which
offers detailed analyses of stories too complex to be fully elaborated in its daily print stories.
The Times inaugurated this site with a series on economic inequality in the United States (Le-
onhardt and Quealy, 2014), which included a table, “Losing the Lead,” demonstrating how the
inequality process played itself out over time. In 1980, the United States was the richest coun-
try in the world at every decile level—that is, from the richest 10% to the poorest, US residents
received higher incomes than the comparable decile levels of all the other countries in Earth.
Even the poorest 10% in the United States was more affluent than the poorest 10% of all other
countries in the world. But in 1980, this did not apply to its poorest 5%, who were less well-off
than the poorest 5% of Norway. Over time, the United States lost its lead at the bottom of the
income strata. In 1984, the bottom 10%, its poorest decile, became poorer than Norway’s, and
the next-to-bottom decile, the 20th percentile, was poorer than Canada’s next-to-bottom layer.
In 1988, the bottom three deciles—the 30th, 20th, and 10th percentiles—were poorer than
those three deciles in Austria. This process continues gradually and almost inexorably over
time to the year of the table’s latest tally, 2010, in which the bottom two strata, the 20th and
10th, were poorer than those of the Netherlands, and the next two, the 40th and 30th, were
poorer than their equivalents in Canada. In other words, America’s middle class is no longer
richer than the middle classes of all other countries of the world. In its most recent history,
the US economy has been stagnating while that of some other fully economically developed
nations pull ahead, from the bottom of the heap toward the middle, layer by layer, decile by
decile. Will this fate befall America’s richest class? Most economists believe that this is un-
likely in the foreseeable future, but when it comes to the global movement of money, no one
has a crystal ball. The total economic pie in the United States is so huge that the richest layer
will probably continue to be the richest in the world for some time to come. Still, this is the
trend: the US poor are losing ground, decade by decade, and its middle class, likewise, has
recently lost out to that of at least one affluent nation; others will undoubtedly follow.
Today, in the United States, income inequality has grown larger than it was since the
1920s, which preceded the Great Crash and the Depression. The United States has a higher
proportion of its children living in poverty (a fifth) than all but one of the richest countries in
the world. Not only are roughly 34 million Americans living in poverty, roughly 37 million
households in the United States have been “food insecure” at some point during the year, that
is, they didn’t know where their next meal is coming from. During 2020, the upward eco-
nomic trend after the end of the recession of 2008 trend seems to have reversed itself. Global
Economic Prospects announced that, because of COVID-19, during 2020, the world economy
has contracted by 5.2%. In any case, and more to the point, poverty is one outcome of extreme
income inequality, which is increasing, and, also increasingly, poverty tends to breed a stig-
matizing attitude among the more affluent toward the poor.
Unemployment
Because of the ongoing pandemic, the unemployment rate has been unstable. In February
of 2020, shortly before COVID-19 began sickening a very large number of Americans, the
official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment rate was 3.5%. By April of that year,
several million workers were laid off and unemployment reached 14.7%; by November, it
eased somewhat, to 6.7%. The BLS also promulgates what it regards as a “real” unemployment
rate, called U-6, which is the percentage of “discouraged” workers, that is, who aren’t recorded
as unemployed but are out of work and not looking for a job, but would accept a job if were
offered one; that figure, according to the BLS, was 12% in November 2020. Unemployment isCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
110 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Clas
partly based (as so many official figures are) on “fuzzy math”; it includes only workers looking
for work who have filed a claim for unemployment benefits. It does not include discouraged
workers who have stopped looking for employment, workers who are still jobless when the
benefits run out, or the part-time and under-employed. It is likely that the chilling effect of
the pandemic on hiring and employment will result in a long-term lower employment rate by
business firms, especially small businesses and those in sectors that rely on temporary workers.
The official statistics also do not take into account employees in the “informal” sector, the
“shadow,” black market, or underground economy—those working off the books, under the ta-
ble, or in illegal enterprises. In such jobs, no unemployment benefits exist, no Social Security,
no taxes—and no official records. Hence, official figures do not count an enormous income
stream that benefits the lives of many millions—globally, even billions—of people. In many
less developed or developing countries, particularly in Latin America and Africa, according to
some estimates (Schneider, 2012), the informal economy is larger than the recorded or official
economy; it supports workers from street vendors to drug kingpins. In fully industrialized
countries such as the United States, the informal economy makes up roughly 10% of the total.
Of course, the officially unemployed may also work in the informal economy and receive an off-
the-books income as well, so they are two partly overlapping categories. Still, for most workers
in the United States, there is no shadow job, no alternate stream of earnings, and no extra
money; for the traditional worker and ex-employee, unemployment is a humbling, demeaning,
humiliating, and painful experience. It offers little but disrepute. Onto unemployment, we
must add incarceration. Convicts are not employed; they can’t enter the job market or earn
an income. African Americans are twice as like to be unemployed as whites, and six times
as likely to be in prison. All other things being equal, being Black compounds deprivation.
The classic study of the harmful impact of unemployment on self-esteem was conducted
during the Depression by Bohan Zawadski and Paul Lazarsfeld (1935), who analyzed 57 autobi-
ographies of laid-off Polish workers—reflecting a total of 774 that were submitted in a contest
by a worker’s institute—and found that others belittled them, causing them to suffer, lose their
sense of dignity, and feel ashamed of themselves. These men were gripped by “ever-increasing
perplexity,” “hopelessness,” and “fear of the future.” “I look for a job,” said one of the respondents.
“I beg, I humble myself, and lose my ego. I become a beast, a humiliated beast, excluded from
the ranks of society” (p. 238). “When I go out, I cast down my eyes because I feel myself wholly
inferior …. I instinctively avoid meeting anyone …. Former acquaintances and friends of better
times are no longer so cordial. They greet me indifferently …. Their eyes seem to say, ‘You are
not worth it, you no longer work’” (p. 239). This stigma inevitably darkened the emotions of
these workers and engendered negative behaviors. “Hopelessness, bitterness, hatred, outbreaks of
rage, gloominess …, flight into drunkenness … thoughts of suicide”—all appeared at least as a
“momentary mood” of every one of these biographies.
The negative impact of unemployment on the well-being of formerly employed workers hasn’t
changed a great deal since the thirties. The consequences of unemployment among American
workers are dire, say two economists (Baker and Hassett, 2012)—a “human disaster.” Workers
over 50 who are laid off are more likely than their employed peers to commit suicide, contract a
serious, potentially fatal illness; their life span is a year and a half shorter, and these disadvantages
negatively impact on their wives’ current and their children’s future employability and earnings.
Connie Wanberg, a psychologist at a school of management, summarized the “individual-focused
research” on unemployment, from the unemployed person’s perspective, a period during which
financial crisis produced “the worst unemployment situation the world has encountered since the
Great Depression.” According to ongoing United Nations surveys, roughly 200 million people
worldwide are out of work, more than a 30 million increase since 2000. A meta-analysis of dozens
of studies on the impact of unemployment indicated that, independent of the selection process (the
fact that the unhealthiest individuals are more likely to be laid off), the unemployed experienceCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
for work who have filed a claim for unemployment benefits. It does not include discouraged
workers who have stopped looking for employment, workers who are still jobless when the
benefits run out, or the part-time and under-employed. It is likely that the chilling effect of
the pandemic on hiring and employment will result in a long-term lower employment rate by
business firms, especially small businesses and those in sectors that rely on temporary workers.
The official statistics also do not take into account employees in the “informal” sector, the
“shadow,” black market, or underground economy—those working off the books, under the ta-
ble, or in illegal enterprises. In such jobs, no unemployment benefits exist, no Social Security,
no taxes—and no official records. Hence, official figures do not count an enormous income
stream that benefits the lives of many millions—globally, even billions—of people. In many
less developed or developing countries, particularly in Latin America and Africa, according to
some estimates (Schneider, 2012), the informal economy is larger than the recorded or official
economy; it supports workers from street vendors to drug kingpins. In fully industrialized
countries such as the United States, the informal economy makes up roughly 10% of the total.
Of course, the officially unemployed may also work in the informal economy and receive an off-
the-books income as well, so they are two partly overlapping categories. Still, for most workers
in the United States, there is no shadow job, no alternate stream of earnings, and no extra
money; for the traditional worker and ex-employee, unemployment is a humbling, demeaning,
humiliating, and painful experience. It offers little but disrepute. Onto unemployment, we
must add incarceration. Convicts are not employed; they can’t enter the job market or earn
an income. African Americans are twice as like to be unemployed as whites, and six times
as likely to be in prison. All other things being equal, being Black compounds deprivation.
The classic study of the harmful impact of unemployment on self-esteem was conducted
during the Depression by Bohan Zawadski and Paul Lazarsfeld (1935), who analyzed 57 autobi-
ographies of laid-off Polish workers—reflecting a total of 774 that were submitted in a contest
by a worker’s institute—and found that others belittled them, causing them to suffer, lose their
sense of dignity, and feel ashamed of themselves. These men were gripped by “ever-increasing
perplexity,” “hopelessness,” and “fear of the future.” “I look for a job,” said one of the respondents.
“I beg, I humble myself, and lose my ego. I become a beast, a humiliated beast, excluded from
the ranks of society” (p. 238). “When I go out, I cast down my eyes because I feel myself wholly
inferior …. I instinctively avoid meeting anyone …. Former acquaintances and friends of better
times are no longer so cordial. They greet me indifferently …. Their eyes seem to say, ‘You are
not worth it, you no longer work’” (p. 239). This stigma inevitably darkened the emotions of
these workers and engendered negative behaviors. “Hopelessness, bitterness, hatred, outbreaks of
rage, gloominess …, flight into drunkenness … thoughts of suicide”—all appeared at least as a
“momentary mood” of every one of these biographies.
The negative impact of unemployment on the well-being of formerly employed workers hasn’t
changed a great deal since the thirties. The consequences of unemployment among American
workers are dire, say two economists (Baker and Hassett, 2012)—a “human disaster.” Workers
over 50 who are laid off are more likely than their employed peers to commit suicide, contract a
serious, potentially fatal illness; their life span is a year and a half shorter, and these disadvantages
negatively impact on their wives’ current and their children’s future employability and earnings.
Connie Wanberg, a psychologist at a school of management, summarized the “individual-focused
research” on unemployment, from the unemployed person’s perspective, a period during which
financial crisis produced “the worst unemployment situation the world has encountered since the
Great Depression.” According to ongoing United Nations surveys, roughly 200 million people
worldwide are out of work, more than a 30 million increase since 2000. A meta-analysis of dozens
of studies on the impact of unemployment indicated that, independent of the selection process (the
fact that the unhealthiest individuals are more likely to be laid off), the unemployed experienceCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
higher rates of depression, psychological distress, feelings of helplessness, an erosion of the feeling
that one can exert control over one’s life outcomes, an increase in rates of suicide and “parasuicide”
(that is, self-inflicted injury), “deaths of despair,” and poor physical health. Over a span of 20 years,
the mortality rates are approximately 15% higher for job-displaced individuals. And job displace-
ment was associated with a 15% to 20% decline in long-term earnings. Of course, not all studies
had the same findings or reached the same conclusions, but the data pointed in the direction of
these harmful outcomes (Wanberg, 2012). The unemployed are stigmatized and lack respectability;
they are deviant in virtually every sense of the word, and the more long-term the unemployment,
the truer this tends to be.
Welfare
Some people believe that participation in welfare programs is evidence that recipients are lazy
and hold a deviant, insufficiently motivated, or unacceptable work orientation (Jarrett, 1996,
p. 368). Over time, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program has been
broadened to include never-married women and their children, further evidence, to critics,
that AFDC increasingly serves the “undeserving poor” (Murray, 1984)—in short, many be-
lieve, they should be stigmatized and deserve to be treated as deviants. Many caseworkers treat
recipients as deviants, asking them about their sex lives, berate them as reluctant workers and,
overall, treat them disrespectfully (Jarrett, 1996). AFDC recipients frequently respond by
adopting a passive, non-confrontational demeanor. To the recipient, stigma has often been the
price the welfare client is forced to pay to receive services and benefits. The applicant “must
adopt a suppliant role, like a medieval leper exhibiting his sores” (Rose, 1975, p. 152). The
humiliation is simply part of the bargain; it is part of the “ritual of degradation.”
According to Rogers-Dillon, the “language of welfare stigmatizing relationships, as they are
framed and defined” in concrete situations, is what demeans the recipient—although it comes
in degrees of discreditation. Rogers-Dillon follows Goffman’s distinction between a “virtual”
and an “actual” social identity (Goffman, 1963, pp. 2–3) by arguing that the virtual identity
of all Americans includes the possession of citizenship—but other citizens may challenge
that identity. Self-definitions of recipients incorporate necessity; the stigma of receiving wel-
fare becomes “almost meaningless in the face of pressing needs for food, shelter, diapers and
other goods.” Rogers-Dillon’s respondents told her that going on welfare “was not a difficult
decision to make,” and “with no job or child support, they had no other options” (p. 445).
“It’s survival,” said one of her interviewees. “You do what you have to do. It is demeaning. I
hate it.” In other words, though it was experienced by this woman as “demeaning,” her very
lack of options made it a necessity. The respondents were acutely aware of the stereotypes of
welfare recipients, but economic “hard times” recast their experience into as doing what they
had to do to survive. “They saw the public’s image of most welfare recipients as one of lazy,
baby-making women living off of other people’s labor,” but they felt it did not reflect their
circumstances, feeling alienated from these stereotypes. Receiving food stamps can be some-
thing of a humiliation, given that in order to redeem them, recipients have to publicly display
them, and to teach their children “how to manage food stamps and the information that food
stamps convey.” Yet even though food stamps “convey a degraded status,” they “also provide
essential goods.” Though recipients “disliked the social meaning of food stamps,” they found
them necessary; all found this balancing act between assistance and necessity a “central task”
(p. 450), sometimes choosing to avoid the dilemma by using up their reserve of cash. Hence,
though the stigma of welfare “is inherent to the current American welfare system,” just how
degrading it is partly contingent on the recipient’s necessity and partly on her management
and presentation of self (Rogers-Dillon, 1995, p. 454). In short, stigma is not necessarily or
inevitably internalized or accepted, though it is characteristically conveyed.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
that one can exert control over one’s life outcomes, an increase in rates of suicide and “parasuicide”
(that is, self-inflicted injury), “deaths of despair,” and poor physical health. Over a span of 20 years,
the mortality rates are approximately 15% higher for job-displaced individuals. And job displace-
ment was associated with a 15% to 20% decline in long-term earnings. Of course, not all studies
had the same findings or reached the same conclusions, but the data pointed in the direction of
these harmful outcomes (Wanberg, 2012). The unemployed are stigmatized and lack respectability;
they are deviant in virtually every sense of the word, and the more long-term the unemployment,
the truer this tends to be.
Welfare
Some people believe that participation in welfare programs is evidence that recipients are lazy
and hold a deviant, insufficiently motivated, or unacceptable work orientation (Jarrett, 1996,
p. 368). Over time, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program has been
broadened to include never-married women and their children, further evidence, to critics,
that AFDC increasingly serves the “undeserving poor” (Murray, 1984)—in short, many be-
lieve, they should be stigmatized and deserve to be treated as deviants. Many caseworkers treat
recipients as deviants, asking them about their sex lives, berate them as reluctant workers and,
overall, treat them disrespectfully (Jarrett, 1996). AFDC recipients frequently respond by
adopting a passive, non-confrontational demeanor. To the recipient, stigma has often been the
price the welfare client is forced to pay to receive services and benefits. The applicant “must
adopt a suppliant role, like a medieval leper exhibiting his sores” (Rose, 1975, p. 152). The
humiliation is simply part of the bargain; it is part of the “ritual of degradation.”
According to Rogers-Dillon, the “language of welfare stigmatizing relationships, as they are
framed and defined” in concrete situations, is what demeans the recipient—although it comes
in degrees of discreditation. Rogers-Dillon follows Goffman’s distinction between a “virtual”
and an “actual” social identity (Goffman, 1963, pp. 2–3) by arguing that the virtual identity
of all Americans includes the possession of citizenship—but other citizens may challenge
that identity. Self-definitions of recipients incorporate necessity; the stigma of receiving wel-
fare becomes “almost meaningless in the face of pressing needs for food, shelter, diapers and
other goods.” Rogers-Dillon’s respondents told her that going on welfare “was not a difficult
decision to make,” and “with no job or child support, they had no other options” (p. 445).
“It’s survival,” said one of her interviewees. “You do what you have to do. It is demeaning. I
hate it.” In other words, though it was experienced by this woman as “demeaning,” her very
lack of options made it a necessity. The respondents were acutely aware of the stereotypes of
welfare recipients, but economic “hard times” recast their experience into as doing what they
had to do to survive. “They saw the public’s image of most welfare recipients as one of lazy,
baby-making women living off of other people’s labor,” but they felt it did not reflect their
circumstances, feeling alienated from these stereotypes. Receiving food stamps can be some-
thing of a humiliation, given that in order to redeem them, recipients have to publicly display
them, and to teach their children “how to manage food stamps and the information that food
stamps convey.” Yet even though food stamps “convey a degraded status,” they “also provide
essential goods.” Though recipients “disliked the social meaning of food stamps,” they found
them necessary; all found this balancing act between assistance and necessity a “central task”
(p. 450), sometimes choosing to avoid the dilemma by using up their reserve of cash. Hence,
though the stigma of welfare “is inherent to the current American welfare system,” just how
degrading it is partly contingent on the recipient’s necessity and partly on her management
and presentation of self (Rogers-Dillon, 1995, p. 454). In short, stigma is not necessarily or
inevitably internalized or accepted, though it is characteristically conveyed.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
However recipients manage their feelings about their participation in welfare programs,
they report negative treatment by their neighbors and peers as a consequence of using food
stamp coupons, which can lower self-esteem and personal autonomy and efficacy. Hence, from
the perspective of welfare clients, it is difficult to avoid participation as “cost” of the program,
one that some potential recipients are not willing to bear. Stigma may be divided into two
types—self-identity stigma, or “internal” stigma, and the stigma that emanates from being
observed participating in a public assistance program, that is, external, or “treatment” stigma
which stems from anticipation of negative treatment (Stuber and Schlesinger, 2006). In ad-
dition, stigma is exacerbated by poor health, minority status and facilitated by “the ways
in which means-tested programs are implemented, including negative interaction with case
workers, long waiting lines, and … applications for alternative enrollment” (p. 933). Man-
chester and Mumford (2010) demonstrate that the cost of stigma, a powerful disincentive to
client participation by the poor in welfare assistance, can be reduced when benefits come in
the form of electronic benefits transfer (EBT) rather than in physical, identifiable vouchers.
Hence, to reduce “treatment” stigma, and increase the efficiency of dispersing assistance, states
have begun adopting electronic payment, which has resulted in 30% greater participation by
eligible clients. Studies such as this one indicate the strong public health applications of the
stigma concept.
The Indignity of Begging
In the fifteenth century, European authorities arrested idle, seemingly able-bodied vagrants,
“wandering rogues,” and “sturdy beggars,” and flogged, branded, expelled, and otherwise dis-
graced them in an effort to discourage idleness and encourage a life of wholesome labor (Jüte,
1994). Laws prohibiting panhandling or “aggressive behavior” such as “touching, accosting,
continuing to panhandle after being given a negative response, blocking or interfering with a
person’s free passage” (Lankenau, 1999, p. 302), remain in effect and serve to exclude beggars
from entering or loitering in public places. Today this law is implemented when pedestrians
and customers complain to store owners or the police, demanding that nearby beggars move
on; sometimes, storeowners post signs announcing that panhandling is prohibited. Public re-
actions to begging are likely to be negative, reminding panhandlers of their status as pariahs.
“Well, sometimes people just walk past you like you’re nobody, like you’re a piece of garbage,”
says Linda, a 25-year-old homeless, pregnant woman. Harlan, a 48-year-old homeless man,
describes an incident in which a man knocked the change out of his cup. Now he puts it in
his pocket. “Damn, man, your cup stay empty. Every time I see your cup, it’s empty,” people
tell him. “They don’t know why it’s empty. That’s why,” he explains (Lankenau, 1999, p. 297).
Journalist Josh Shaffer decided to find out what applying for a permit to ask people for
money feels like, so he went to North Carolina’s Wake County’s government office and ap-
plied for one, registering as the county’s twelfth registered panhandler. “It’s humiliating. It’s
degrading. It’s invasive.” Filling out the paperwork, he tells us, he got the feeling “that it’s
meant to be.” The form asked him to fill in his height, weight, hair color and eye color.
“There’s no mistaking what you’re doing when you write down this information. You’ve com-
pleted a police profile.” At the counter, in a room full of people, he was watched as someone
placed “an official stamp” on his request to seek alms. And there was no mistaking how he
felt: humiliated—very much like an outsider, a deviant. In the end, he decided not to go out
and beg (Shaffer, 2011). Make no mistake about it: the experience of begging itself is also
stigmatizing. Defying that stigma, Alison O’Riordan, an Irish reporter, got a polystyrene cup,
placed a sign in front of him that read “Homeless, any donations appreciated,” and sat down
on a Dublin sidewalk, looking for a story. “I felt physically sick. Imagine if, in reality, life had
turned this sour; abandoned by family and friends, without a job and a pillow to place myCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
they report negative treatment by their neighbors and peers as a consequence of using food
stamp coupons, which can lower self-esteem and personal autonomy and efficacy. Hence, from
the perspective of welfare clients, it is difficult to avoid participation as “cost” of the program,
one that some potential recipients are not willing to bear. Stigma may be divided into two
types—self-identity stigma, or “internal” stigma, and the stigma that emanates from being
observed participating in a public assistance program, that is, external, or “treatment” stigma
which stems from anticipation of negative treatment (Stuber and Schlesinger, 2006). In ad-
dition, stigma is exacerbated by poor health, minority status and facilitated by “the ways
in which means-tested programs are implemented, including negative interaction with case
workers, long waiting lines, and … applications for alternative enrollment” (p. 933). Man-
chester and Mumford (2010) demonstrate that the cost of stigma, a powerful disincentive to
client participation by the poor in welfare assistance, can be reduced when benefits come in
the form of electronic benefits transfer (EBT) rather than in physical, identifiable vouchers.
Hence, to reduce “treatment” stigma, and increase the efficiency of dispersing assistance, states
have begun adopting electronic payment, which has resulted in 30% greater participation by
eligible clients. Studies such as this one indicate the strong public health applications of the
stigma concept.
The Indignity of Begging
In the fifteenth century, European authorities arrested idle, seemingly able-bodied vagrants,
“wandering rogues,” and “sturdy beggars,” and flogged, branded, expelled, and otherwise dis-
graced them in an effort to discourage idleness and encourage a life of wholesome labor (Jüte,
1994). Laws prohibiting panhandling or “aggressive behavior” such as “touching, accosting,
continuing to panhandle after being given a negative response, blocking or interfering with a
person’s free passage” (Lankenau, 1999, p. 302), remain in effect and serve to exclude beggars
from entering or loitering in public places. Today this law is implemented when pedestrians
and customers complain to store owners or the police, demanding that nearby beggars move
on; sometimes, storeowners post signs announcing that panhandling is prohibited. Public re-
actions to begging are likely to be negative, reminding panhandlers of their status as pariahs.
“Well, sometimes people just walk past you like you’re nobody, like you’re a piece of garbage,”
says Linda, a 25-year-old homeless, pregnant woman. Harlan, a 48-year-old homeless man,
describes an incident in which a man knocked the change out of his cup. Now he puts it in
his pocket. “Damn, man, your cup stay empty. Every time I see your cup, it’s empty,” people
tell him. “They don’t know why it’s empty. That’s why,” he explains (Lankenau, 1999, p. 297).
Journalist Josh Shaffer decided to find out what applying for a permit to ask people for
money feels like, so he went to North Carolina’s Wake County’s government office and ap-
plied for one, registering as the county’s twelfth registered panhandler. “It’s humiliating. It’s
degrading. It’s invasive.” Filling out the paperwork, he tells us, he got the feeling “that it’s
meant to be.” The form asked him to fill in his height, weight, hair color and eye color.
“There’s no mistaking what you’re doing when you write down this information. You’ve com-
pleted a police profile.” At the counter, in a room full of people, he was watched as someone
placed “an official stamp” on his request to seek alms. And there was no mistaking how he
felt: humiliated—very much like an outsider, a deviant. In the end, he decided not to go out
and beg (Shaffer, 2011). Make no mistake about it: the experience of begging itself is also
stigmatizing. Defying that stigma, Alison O’Riordan, an Irish reporter, got a polystyrene cup,
placed a sign in front of him that read “Homeless, any donations appreciated,” and sat down
on a Dublin sidewalk, looking for a story. “I felt physically sick. Imagine if, in reality, life had
turned this sour; abandoned by family and friends, without a job and a pillow to place myCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Homelessness
Who are the homeless? And how would the sociologist calculate the rate of homelessness in
the population? Homelessness is not like unemployment; homelessness is not a specific social
and economic category. Studies attempting to measure homelessness are stymied by the fact
that the total number is influenced by duration. People may be undomiciled for varying peri-
ods of time; some are chronically homeless, while others don’t have a roof over their heads for
a night or two. If researchers draw a sample based on people who are out on the street on a
single night, who have no place to go to during those eight or ten hours, they find a very broad
cross-section of the population is likely to be homeless, and “no meaningful central tendencies
in the distribution” (Shalay and Rossi, 1992, p. 142). In contrast, if they look at the long-term
or persistently homeless, they find that the homeless are far more likely to be male, have con-
siderably less education, more mental health and drug issues and problems, and have been in-
carcerated more than the population at large. As a persistent or chronic problem, homelessness
affects a relatively small percentage of the population who are “seriously disabled and deviant
individuals from limited demographic subgroups” (Phelen and Link, 1999, p. 1336). When re-
searchers gather a sample of “formerly” homeless individuals, a substantial proportion of their
sample will be made up of people who are homeless occasionally or even for a single night—in
other words, a highly variable sample, not at all like the public stereotype. Gathering such a
broad sample could make a political point—that all of us are only a few mishaps away from
having to live on the street—but it would not be true to the reality of homelessness, and that
is that the persistently homeless constitute a particular type of social denizen, one who is rel-
atively rare, atypical, in serious behavioral difficulty, and in need of multiple social services.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Who are the homeless? And how would the sociologist calculate the rate of homelessness in
the population? Homelessness is not like unemployment; homelessness is not a specific social
and economic category. Studies attempting to measure homelessness are stymied by the fact
that the total number is influenced by duration. People may be undomiciled for varying peri-
ods of time; some are chronically homeless, while others don’t have a roof over their heads for
a night or two. If researchers draw a sample based on people who are out on the street on a
single night, who have no place to go to during those eight or ten hours, they find a very broad
cross-section of the population is likely to be homeless, and “no meaningful central tendencies
in the distribution” (Shalay and Rossi, 1992, p. 142). In contrast, if they look at the long-term
or persistently homeless, they find that the homeless are far more likely to be male, have con-
siderably less education, more mental health and drug issues and problems, and have been in-
carcerated more than the population at large. As a persistent or chronic problem, homelessness
affects a relatively small percentage of the population who are “seriously disabled and deviant
individuals from limited demographic subgroups” (Phelen and Link, 1999, p. 1336). When re-
searchers gather a sample of “formerly” homeless individuals, a substantial proportion of their
sample will be made up of people who are homeless occasionally or even for a single night—in
other words, a highly variable sample, not at all like the public stereotype. Gathering such a
broad sample could make a political point—that all of us are only a few mishaps away from
having to live on the street—but it would not be true to the reality of homelessness, and that
is that the persistently homeless constitute a particular type of social denizen, one who is rel-
atively rare, atypical, in serious behavioral difficulty, and in need of multiple social services.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
114 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
Hence, which sample the researcher draws conveys ideological, theoretical, and practical im-
plications. In the early 2020s, HUD (Housing and Urban Development) estimated that in any
given year, there were roughly a half-million point-in-time homeless in the United States, that
is, who had no place to sleep during a given night.
In an experimental study that entailed asking respondents about the degree to which they
would put social distance between themselves and a hypothetical homeless man, the research-
ers found that identifying the person as homeless “engenders a degree of stigma over and above
that attached to poverty” (Phelen et al., 1997, p. 332). Public perceptions of homelessness were
at least as negative as those of the formerly mentally hospitalized, even though hospitalization
increased the public’s perception of the person’s dangerousness, while the homeless label did
not. Moreover, mental hospitalization labeling is two-sided, engendering both positive and
negative reactions, it did increase the likelihood of a compassionate response (greater support
for government assistance), but this was not true of the homelessness label, which brought
forth a virtually entirely negative or rejecting reaction. The authors argue that social rejec-
tion, or a disqualification “from full social acceptance” (Goffman, 1963, p. i), “lies at the heart
of stigmatization” (Phelen et al., 1997, p. 328). Given that previous research has found that
mental illness is stigmatized more severely than the ex-convict status, gay sex, the diagnosis
of mental retardation, as well as a number of physical disabilities and disorders, it follows, the
authors argue, that homelessness is not only more stigmatized than poverty, in all likelihood
it is also more stigmatized than these other conditions (pp. 234–235).
Short of keeping someone out of one’s country—which is the ultimate stigma—the most
severe attempt to create social distance between the deviant and the person rejecting the devi-
ant, the strongest denial of “full social acceptance,” is the NIMBY reaction—Not In My Back
Yard. In other words, NIMBY is the attempt by one or more persons to keep members of a
deviant category out of that community. Community opposition to such social services began
mobilizing in the 1980s—a populist ideology that says the government can’t force deviants
down our throat, this is our neighborhood—and it creates a problem for public health and
social services outreach programs. Most programs serving clients who are homeless, or who
are infected with HIV/AIDS, often face NIMBY sentiment because a particular neighborhood
does not want those deviant clients wandering around their streets. Lois Takahashi points out
(1997) that such sentiment illuminates three distinct facets of stigma: nonproductivity, dan-
gerousness, and personal culpability. Members of the community feel that homeless people are
objectionable because they don’t earn a living, they don’t pay taxes, they mooch off the locals,
they are failures and deviants, and responsible for their own condition. But these community
residents and activists also fear (not entirely unreasonably) that the homeless and the HIV/
AIDS-infected will harm them, that they are a threat, they are dangerous, and hence, should
not inhabit their neighborhood. There is, in other words, an ecological or socio-spatial aspect to
stigma. Resistance to housing the stigmatized, or locating a service facility, in a particular
neighborhood is not a mere matter of prejudice, discrimination, or an irrational fear of the de-
viant, says Takahashi; it is a complex and sometimes reasonable and understandable sentiment
that must be understood before it is overcome or averted.
In November 2013, Bill de Blasio, a Democrat and a progressive, was elected as Mayor of the
City of New York. A few days before he was sworn in, on the first day of January 2014, he vowed
to hold down the City’s homeless population, and he couldn’t; by 2017, the number of homeless
persons in the country’s largest city had increased by 80%. New York attempts to move them
out of temporary shelters into more permanent housing, but the City’s gentrification process has
shoved many people out of neighborhoods that developers and builders have taken over; rents
are increasing rising faster than incomes, and so the ranks of the homeless swell. In 2017, New
York’s Department of Homeless Services recorded 63,000 on its rolls; when winter sets in and
the homeless can’t sleep outdoors, the total may double. Just in the year between 2015 and 2016,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Hence, which sample the researcher draws conveys ideological, theoretical, and practical im-
plications. In the early 2020s, HUD (Housing and Urban Development) estimated that in any
given year, there were roughly a half-million point-in-time homeless in the United States, that
is, who had no place to sleep during a given night.
In an experimental study that entailed asking respondents about the degree to which they
would put social distance between themselves and a hypothetical homeless man, the research-
ers found that identifying the person as homeless “engenders a degree of stigma over and above
that attached to poverty” (Phelen et al., 1997, p. 332). Public perceptions of homelessness were
at least as negative as those of the formerly mentally hospitalized, even though hospitalization
increased the public’s perception of the person’s dangerousness, while the homeless label did
not. Moreover, mental hospitalization labeling is two-sided, engendering both positive and
negative reactions, it did increase the likelihood of a compassionate response (greater support
for government assistance), but this was not true of the homelessness label, which brought
forth a virtually entirely negative or rejecting reaction. The authors argue that social rejec-
tion, or a disqualification “from full social acceptance” (Goffman, 1963, p. i), “lies at the heart
of stigmatization” (Phelen et al., 1997, p. 328). Given that previous research has found that
mental illness is stigmatized more severely than the ex-convict status, gay sex, the diagnosis
of mental retardation, as well as a number of physical disabilities and disorders, it follows, the
authors argue, that homelessness is not only more stigmatized than poverty, in all likelihood
it is also more stigmatized than these other conditions (pp. 234–235).
Short of keeping someone out of one’s country—which is the ultimate stigma—the most
severe attempt to create social distance between the deviant and the person rejecting the devi-
ant, the strongest denial of “full social acceptance,” is the NIMBY reaction—Not In My Back
Yard. In other words, NIMBY is the attempt by one or more persons to keep members of a
deviant category out of that community. Community opposition to such social services began
mobilizing in the 1980s—a populist ideology that says the government can’t force deviants
down our throat, this is our neighborhood—and it creates a problem for public health and
social services outreach programs. Most programs serving clients who are homeless, or who
are infected with HIV/AIDS, often face NIMBY sentiment because a particular neighborhood
does not want those deviant clients wandering around their streets. Lois Takahashi points out
(1997) that such sentiment illuminates three distinct facets of stigma: nonproductivity, dan-
gerousness, and personal culpability. Members of the community feel that homeless people are
objectionable because they don’t earn a living, they don’t pay taxes, they mooch off the locals,
they are failures and deviants, and responsible for their own condition. But these community
residents and activists also fear (not entirely unreasonably) that the homeless and the HIV/
AIDS-infected will harm them, that they are a threat, they are dangerous, and hence, should
not inhabit their neighborhood. There is, in other words, an ecological or socio-spatial aspect to
stigma. Resistance to housing the stigmatized, or locating a service facility, in a particular
neighborhood is not a mere matter of prejudice, discrimination, or an irrational fear of the de-
viant, says Takahashi; it is a complex and sometimes reasonable and understandable sentiment
that must be understood before it is overcome or averted.
In November 2013, Bill de Blasio, a Democrat and a progressive, was elected as Mayor of the
City of New York. A few days before he was sworn in, on the first day of January 2014, he vowed
to hold down the City’s homeless population, and he couldn’t; by 2017, the number of homeless
persons in the country’s largest city had increased by 80%. New York attempts to move them
out of temporary shelters into more permanent housing, but the City’s gentrification process has
shoved many people out of neighborhoods that developers and builders have taken over; rents
are increasing rising faster than incomes, and so the ranks of the homeless swell. In 2017, New
York’s Department of Homeless Services recorded 63,000 on its rolls; when winter sets in and
the homeless can’t sleep outdoors, the total may double. Just in the year between 2015 and 2016,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 115
the total increased by 40%. More recent evidence indicates that the picture has not changed
significantly into the 2020s. Of the total sleeping in shelters, on any given night, nearly 25,000
of them are children. Almost six in ten are Black, and about three in ten are Latino. The NYPD
(New York Police Department) have a Homeless Outreach Unit that attempt to route the home-
less into shelters, but they are encountering increased resistance; most of the homeless don’t want
to live in a shelter because they are dangerous. In spite of the improvement in the economy in
the past decade or so, the number of homeless on New York’s streets and in its parks continues
to increase. By its very nature, being homeless is a form of deviance.
The likelihood that a renting family will be evicted from its residence is strongly related to
poverty. The poorer the family, the higher the proportion of its income it will spend on rent
and the greater the chances, in a financial crisis, that it will be evicted. In the typical case,
families who are evicted are pushed into undesirable areas of a city, “moving from poor neigh-
borhoods into even poorer ones; from crime-filled areas into still more dangerous ones,” relo-
cating “to worse neighborhoods than those who move under less demanding circumstances.”
Eviction, says Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, quoting experts on the subject, represents
a “traumatic rejection,” a “shameful experience”. One solution to homelessness, he argues, is
that the government provide every family whose income falls below a certain level be provided
a universal housing voucher to help pay for housing. Such a program “would change the face of
poverty in this country. Evictions would plummet and become rare occurrences. Homelessness
would almost disappear”.
What about Disease?
Good health, explains Michael Marmot (2005) is strongly related to education, income, the
socioeconomic status (SES) of one’s parents, and one’s own SES, that is, the prestige and pay of
one’s occupation. The circumstances in which we live, according to Marmot, foster “autonomy
and control over life, love, happiness, social connectedness, riches that are not measured by
money,” affect illness and determine longevity. “It is precisely because these benefits of life are
doled out unequally in society that we have inequalities in health and death”. The conditions
under which people live and work—and Marmot refers to “education, family, career, friends,
getting and spending, spiritual and cultural life, and the nature of the society in which all this
takes place”—are all closely and intimately related to the likelihood of falling ill as well as how
long one lives.
Marmort asks us, his readers, to imagine four different parades of people filing past us. The
first parade is sorted out by formal education, the least well-educated walking past us first and
then, person by person in ascending order, those who are increasingly better educated. We will
notice, he says, as this parade marches past us, that the last sector of the marchers emanate “a
healthy glow increasing in radiance”. To be specific about it: “the higher the education, the
longer people are likely to live, and the better their health is likely to be”. If the parading starts
all over again, this time arranged according to income, the same process will take place, and this
time, it is the poor who are in the worst health and the affluent are in the best health. If we were
to repeat the entire process a third time, now according to the prestige of parents’ occupation, the
same sorting process will prevail. And a fourth time, repeated according to the prestige or SES of
one’s own occupation, once again, we’ll see the same thing. Of course, these are not separate and
independent parades, since the overlap and correlation of the four ranking systems is substantial
but imperfect. Many of the same people who began the first parade will be in the same position
in the second, third, and fourth one—many, but not all.
With a shift from this thought experiment to evidence in the material world, nothing
changes with respect to SES and relative health. Follow real people in a real study, let’s say,
from age 18 to 30, or 50, or 70—the same process will prevail. “Persons in the poorestCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
the total increased by 40%. More recent evidence indicates that the picture has not changed
significantly into the 2020s. Of the total sleeping in shelters, on any given night, nearly 25,000
of them are children. Almost six in ten are Black, and about three in ten are Latino. The NYPD
(New York Police Department) have a Homeless Outreach Unit that attempt to route the home-
less into shelters, but they are encountering increased resistance; most of the homeless don’t want
to live in a shelter because they are dangerous. In spite of the improvement in the economy in
the past decade or so, the number of homeless on New York’s streets and in its parks continues
to increase. By its very nature, being homeless is a form of deviance.
The likelihood that a renting family will be evicted from its residence is strongly related to
poverty. The poorer the family, the higher the proportion of its income it will spend on rent
and the greater the chances, in a financial crisis, that it will be evicted. In the typical case,
families who are evicted are pushed into undesirable areas of a city, “moving from poor neigh-
borhoods into even poorer ones; from crime-filled areas into still more dangerous ones,” relo-
cating “to worse neighborhoods than those who move under less demanding circumstances.”
Eviction, says Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, quoting experts on the subject, represents
a “traumatic rejection,” a “shameful experience”. One solution to homelessness, he argues, is
that the government provide every family whose income falls below a certain level be provided
a universal housing voucher to help pay for housing. Such a program “would change the face of
poverty in this country. Evictions would plummet and become rare occurrences. Homelessness
would almost disappear”.
What about Disease?
Good health, explains Michael Marmot (2005) is strongly related to education, income, the
socioeconomic status (SES) of one’s parents, and one’s own SES, that is, the prestige and pay of
one’s occupation. The circumstances in which we live, according to Marmot, foster “autonomy
and control over life, love, happiness, social connectedness, riches that are not measured by
money,” affect illness and determine longevity. “It is precisely because these benefits of life are
doled out unequally in society that we have inequalities in health and death”. The conditions
under which people live and work—and Marmot refers to “education, family, career, friends,
getting and spending, spiritual and cultural life, and the nature of the society in which all this
takes place”—are all closely and intimately related to the likelihood of falling ill as well as how
long one lives.
Marmort asks us, his readers, to imagine four different parades of people filing past us. The
first parade is sorted out by formal education, the least well-educated walking past us first and
then, person by person in ascending order, those who are increasingly better educated. We will
notice, he says, as this parade marches past us, that the last sector of the marchers emanate “a
healthy glow increasing in radiance”. To be specific about it: “the higher the education, the
longer people are likely to live, and the better their health is likely to be”. If the parading starts
all over again, this time arranged according to income, the same process will take place, and this
time, it is the poor who are in the worst health and the affluent are in the best health. If we were
to repeat the entire process a third time, now according to the prestige of parents’ occupation, the
same sorting process will prevail. And a fourth time, repeated according to the prestige or SES of
one’s own occupation, once again, we’ll see the same thing. Of course, these are not separate and
independent parades, since the overlap and correlation of the four ranking systems is substantial
but imperfect. Many of the same people who began the first parade will be in the same position
in the second, third, and fourth one—many, but not all.
With a shift from this thought experiment to evidence in the material world, nothing
changes with respect to SES and relative health. Follow real people in a real study, let’s say,
from age 18 to 30, or 50, or 70—the same process will prevail. “Persons in the poorestCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
116 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
households have nearly four times the risk of death” at any of these ages as compared with
those in the most affluent households—and not even “fantastically rich,” just those who are
financially better-off. Researchers actually conducted the study that Marmot summarized
in the United States, and they also replicated it for the populations of ten other well-off
nations— Canada, Finland, Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Australia, and
New Zealand. Wherever researchers look, they find this same gradient. It is true that health
and longevity have improved in all societies in the past century or two, and it is true for all
social classes. Today, lower-SES categories live longer, healthier lives even than higher-SES cat-
egories did in past centuries and decades. But today, in the twenty-first century, everywhere,
members of higher-SES categories live substantially longer, healthier lives than lower-SES
categories; and persons living in poverty live the shortest and unhealthiest lives of all. And
remarkably, even though different diseases have different etiologies or causes, for virtually all
diseases, the same social gradient of inequality prevails. Each of the diseases that humans die
of is caused by distinctive set of circumstances, but virtually all are related to the same social
class, income, and educational scale in the same way—with the poverty-stricken the most
at-risk.
“What characterizes being poor and lower in the hierarchy,” says Marmot, “is a great sense
of helplessness,” a “lack of control over life circumstances.” This lack of a sense of control of the
people at the bottom of the class structure, those who are poverty-stricken, will put them at
the highest risk of illness and other sources of death. The likelihood of dying from a particular
“agent”—whether it is TB, heart disease, cancer, accident, or homicide—will depend on the
degree to which individuals are exposed to that agent. But being poor will everywhere tend
to put people under chronic stress, the health impact of which is likely to be “profound”. In
other words, it is the agent that determines which particular disease or misfortune befalls an
individual, but it is social conditions that determine that getting and dying of a disease or be-
coming a casualty to a mishap follows the social class-health gradient. And it is persons living
in poverty, individuals living at the bottom of society’s heap, who are most likely to suffer
from this inequality gradient. It is an unkind, even cruel, reality that any student of society
must acknowledge, and it is shocking that this misfortune turns the social standing spectrum
into a dimension of deviance.
What matters in life expectancy is, not only absolute poverty, but also the degree of income
inequality—the more inequality that exists in a society, other things being equal, the shorter
the average life span. For the poor, in addition to being poor is the fact that inequality is bad
for one’s health. According to Marmot, we have to think of income in two ways—one, how
much one has, and two, how much one has relative to what others have. “If transportation,
medical care, education, recreation, quality housing, a safe neighborhood in which to raise
children all depend on individual income, then individual income will be an important meas-
ure, indeed, a determinant of control and capability to participate in society”. On the other
hand, if these are provided by the community or the society, then individual income is of less
consequence. An economist (2003), found that states in the United States with the highest
levels of inequality were also states with the highest proportion of African Americans in the
population. But inequality itself may not be the causal factor here; the population’s propor-
tion of Black people “is unlikely to be a cause of mortality” because the percent Black is also
correlated with the death rate among whites (p. 80). Marmot argues that income inequality
and proportion of African Americans in the population are indicative of the degree to which
people have the opportunity to fully participate in the society; both African Americans and
the very poor do not, he says, fully participate in society’s mainstream. “A society that excludes
high proportions of its population from full social participation is one that does not value all
its people equally highly. Such a society is not likely to provide the conditions that favor good
health”.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
households have nearly four times the risk of death” at any of these ages as compared with
those in the most affluent households—and not even “fantastically rich,” just those who are
financially better-off. Researchers actually conducted the study that Marmot summarized
in the United States, and they also replicated it for the populations of ten other well-off
nations— Canada, Finland, Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Australia, and
New Zealand. Wherever researchers look, they find this same gradient. It is true that health
and longevity have improved in all societies in the past century or two, and it is true for all
social classes. Today, lower-SES categories live longer, healthier lives even than higher-SES cat-
egories did in past centuries and decades. But today, in the twenty-first century, everywhere,
members of higher-SES categories live substantially longer, healthier lives than lower-SES
categories; and persons living in poverty live the shortest and unhealthiest lives of all. And
remarkably, even though different diseases have different etiologies or causes, for virtually all
diseases, the same social gradient of inequality prevails. Each of the diseases that humans die
of is caused by distinctive set of circumstances, but virtually all are related to the same social
class, income, and educational scale in the same way—with the poverty-stricken the most
at-risk.
“What characterizes being poor and lower in the hierarchy,” says Marmot, “is a great sense
of helplessness,” a “lack of control over life circumstances.” This lack of a sense of control of the
people at the bottom of the class structure, those who are poverty-stricken, will put them at
the highest risk of illness and other sources of death. The likelihood of dying from a particular
“agent”—whether it is TB, heart disease, cancer, accident, or homicide—will depend on the
degree to which individuals are exposed to that agent. But being poor will everywhere tend
to put people under chronic stress, the health impact of which is likely to be “profound”. In
other words, it is the agent that determines which particular disease or misfortune befalls an
individual, but it is social conditions that determine that getting and dying of a disease or be-
coming a casualty to a mishap follows the social class-health gradient. And it is persons living
in poverty, individuals living at the bottom of society’s heap, who are most likely to suffer
from this inequality gradient. It is an unkind, even cruel, reality that any student of society
must acknowledge, and it is shocking that this misfortune turns the social standing spectrum
into a dimension of deviance.
What matters in life expectancy is, not only absolute poverty, but also the degree of income
inequality—the more inequality that exists in a society, other things being equal, the shorter
the average life span. For the poor, in addition to being poor is the fact that inequality is bad
for one’s health. According to Marmot, we have to think of income in two ways—one, how
much one has, and two, how much one has relative to what others have. “If transportation,
medical care, education, recreation, quality housing, a safe neighborhood in which to raise
children all depend on individual income, then individual income will be an important meas-
ure, indeed, a determinant of control and capability to participate in society”. On the other
hand, if these are provided by the community or the society, then individual income is of less
consequence. An economist (2003), found that states in the United States with the highest
levels of inequality were also states with the highest proportion of African Americans in the
population. But inequality itself may not be the causal factor here; the population’s propor-
tion of Black people “is unlikely to be a cause of mortality” because the percent Black is also
correlated with the death rate among whites (p. 80). Marmot argues that income inequality
and proportion of African Americans in the population are indicative of the degree to which
people have the opportunity to fully participate in the society; both African Americans and
the very poor do not, he says, fully participate in society’s mainstream. “A society that excludes
high proportions of its population from full social participation is one that does not value all
its people equally highly. Such a society is not likely to provide the conditions that favor good
health”.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 117
Not only are the poor more likely to get sick and injured, they are less likely to be covered
by medical insurance, which causes further impairment and a higher chance of premature
death. The uninsured are more likely to suffer from undiscovered and untreated conditions,
such as hypertension, diabetes, and elevated cholesterol—not to mention obesity, heavy drink-
ing, smoking, and inactivity—and hence, become afflicted by more serious illness and debili-
tating medical disorders. The percentage of persons who are medically uninsured increases as
real household yearly income decreases. Only 7.9% of persons living in a household earning
an income of $75,000 or more are medically uninsured; this figure doubles for those in house-
holds earning $50,000 to $74,999 (15.4%); increases again, to 21.5%, for those in households
earning $25,000 to $49,999; and increases again for those who live in the poorest households,
those earning less than $25,000 (24.9%). “Though between 2011 and 2012, the percentage of
uninsured for the population as a whole decreased very slightly from 15.7 to 15.4 (about 50
million people), between 1999 and 2011, the uninsured rate for people in households with real
income less than $25,000 increased by 1.2 percentage points” (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and
Smith, 2012, pp. 21, 24, 25). And, according to the Census Bureau, after the 2010 passage of
Obamacare, the proportion of the US population who were uninsured dropped from 16% to
9.6%.
Illnesses—more so for mental disorders than physical diseases—are stigmatizing condi-
tions inextricably intertwined with poverty. In a society where both respect and health partly
depend on economic achievement, it must be pointed out that illness is strongly correlated
with poverty and hence, disrespect. Illness, like poverty, results in Goffman’s a disqualification
“from full social acceptance” (p. i), though illness, like poverty, is mixed with compassion,
and, as Goffman says, stigma (like deviance) is a matter of degree—physical illness perhaps
being less socially discrediting. To the extent that physical illness is regarded as a temporary
role out of which the usually normal person will emerge, it is correspondingly only tempo-
rarily deviant, but only to the extent that the normally well person refuses to do what he or
she needs to do to get well, the condition is correspondingly socially regarded as deviant. To
the extent that chronic physical illness and mental disorder disqualify the sick person from full
social acceptance, they constitute stigmata—and hence, examples of deviance.
Income is related to health; health, in turn, is related to longevity. And income is not only
an individual attribute, it is also variable according to the socioeconomic structure. In a nut-
shell, inequality determines “who gets to grow old” (Anderson, 2013; Span, 2015, p. D2). In
2015, a publication issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine
reported that, over historical time, living longer was experienced largely by the affluent; this
was true more for women than men. The Academy compared the average life span of the gen-
eration born in 1930 with that born in 1960, in the lowest income bracket versus the highest,
and among women versus men. Men in the lowest income bracket born in 1930 who reached
the age of 50 lived for an average of 26.6 years more, while those in the highest bracket lived
for another 31.7 years—an improvement in longevity over historical time of about five years’
difference between rich and poor. But the simulation estimates in longevity for the male gen-
eration born in 1960 tell a somewhat different story: for them, there will be no improvement
in living longer for the lowest earners, and an improvement of seven years for the highest earn-
ers. In other words, for men, the life expectancy of the richest category is growing over time
and among the poorest, no improvement at all. For women, these differences in income groups
are even greater. Earlier generations versus later, the longevity gap between affluent and poor
is growing among women even more than it is for men; for women, the income-related life-
span gap is four years for the 1930-born and 13 years for those born in 1960. This means
that, over historical time, not only do the rich get to live longer—more for women than for
men—they are also more likely to collect old-age benefits, such as Social Security, Medicaid
and Medicare (National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015). Not only areCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Not only are the poor more likely to get sick and injured, they are less likely to be covered
by medical insurance, which causes further impairment and a higher chance of premature
death. The uninsured are more likely to suffer from undiscovered and untreated conditions,
such as hypertension, diabetes, and elevated cholesterol—not to mention obesity, heavy drink-
ing, smoking, and inactivity—and hence, become afflicted by more serious illness and debili-
tating medical disorders. The percentage of persons who are medically uninsured increases as
real household yearly income decreases. Only 7.9% of persons living in a household earning
an income of $75,000 or more are medically uninsured; this figure doubles for those in house-
holds earning $50,000 to $74,999 (15.4%); increases again, to 21.5%, for those in households
earning $25,000 to $49,999; and increases again for those who live in the poorest households,
those earning less than $25,000 (24.9%). “Though between 2011 and 2012, the percentage of
uninsured for the population as a whole decreased very slightly from 15.7 to 15.4 (about 50
million people), between 1999 and 2011, the uninsured rate for people in households with real
income less than $25,000 increased by 1.2 percentage points” (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and
Smith, 2012, pp. 21, 24, 25). And, according to the Census Bureau, after the 2010 passage of
Obamacare, the proportion of the US population who were uninsured dropped from 16% to
9.6%.
Illnesses—more so for mental disorders than physical diseases—are stigmatizing condi-
tions inextricably intertwined with poverty. In a society where both respect and health partly
depend on economic achievement, it must be pointed out that illness is strongly correlated
with poverty and hence, disrespect. Illness, like poverty, results in Goffman’s a disqualification
“from full social acceptance” (p. i), though illness, like poverty, is mixed with compassion,
and, as Goffman says, stigma (like deviance) is a matter of degree—physical illness perhaps
being less socially discrediting. To the extent that physical illness is regarded as a temporary
role out of which the usually normal person will emerge, it is correspondingly only tempo-
rarily deviant, but only to the extent that the normally well person refuses to do what he or
she needs to do to get well, the condition is correspondingly socially regarded as deviant. To
the extent that chronic physical illness and mental disorder disqualify the sick person from full
social acceptance, they constitute stigmata—and hence, examples of deviance.
Income is related to health; health, in turn, is related to longevity. And income is not only
an individual attribute, it is also variable according to the socioeconomic structure. In a nut-
shell, inequality determines “who gets to grow old” (Anderson, 2013; Span, 2015, p. D2). In
2015, a publication issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine
reported that, over historical time, living longer was experienced largely by the affluent; this
was true more for women than men. The Academy compared the average life span of the gen-
eration born in 1930 with that born in 1960, in the lowest income bracket versus the highest,
and among women versus men. Men in the lowest income bracket born in 1930 who reached
the age of 50 lived for an average of 26.6 years more, while those in the highest bracket lived
for another 31.7 years—an improvement in longevity over historical time of about five years’
difference between rich and poor. But the simulation estimates in longevity for the male gen-
eration born in 1960 tell a somewhat different story: for them, there will be no improvement
in living longer for the lowest earners, and an improvement of seven years for the highest earn-
ers. In other words, for men, the life expectancy of the richest category is growing over time
and among the poorest, no improvement at all. For women, these differences in income groups
are even greater. Earlier generations versus later, the longevity gap between affluent and poor
is growing among women even more than it is for men; for women, the income-related life-
span gap is four years for the 1930-born and 13 years for those born in 1960. This means
that, over historical time, not only do the rich get to live longer—more for women than for
men—they are also more likely to collect old-age benefits, such as Social Security, Medicaid
and Medicare (National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015). Not only areCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
118 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
poverty and ill health punishing and stigmatizing experiences in themselves, the poor and the
sick get less of what life has to offer, including its government benefits.
Virtually all generalizations come with qualifications, and here’s an important qualification
about poverty and ill health: among the 17 most affluent, fully industrialized nations of the world,
Americans live the shortest, unhealthiest lives, and are most likely to be killed or injured by accident
and firearms homicide. In 2013, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine
released a report, entitled U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health, in-
dicating that the cumulative health and safety detriments added up to the conclusion that the
United States held the worst ranking among the world’s well-off nations with respect to health
and safety. Americans had the second highest rate of death from heart disease, second highest
for lung cancer, a rate of firearm homicide that is 20 times higher than the other countries,
and the highest with respect to diabetes. Three factors played a major role here, according to
the panel that issued the report: first, because of its lopsided, inequitable income distribution,
the United States has a substantially larger number and proportion of the population living
in poverty; second, the United States harbors a “highly fragmented health care system,” with
poor primary care facilities and resources and a large uninsured sector of the population;
and third, Americans tend to be more individualistic, more risk-taking, and are less likely to
protect their safety—for instance, less likely to wear automobile seat belts, more likely to ride
motorcycles without helmets, more likely to engage in risky, unprotected sex, more likely to
get sick and die from illicit drug abuse. Hence, although all of my generalizations about the
poor versus the less poor with respect to deviance and stigma still apply, we should keep in
mind that with regard to matters of health and illness, the United States is less well-off than the
other affluent countries of the world.
Not only are Americans more likely to die of ill-health than are the residents of all the
other affluent nations on Earth, the nation’s children are less likely to reach the age of 19 than
are those of these high-income nations. A team of epidemiologists calculated that, in the
United States, the annual deaths per million children, from birth to age 19, is substantially
higher (6,500) than the average of the top-20 richest countries (3,800), more than twice as
high as the number for Japan (2,500), Sweden (2,700), Spain (3,300), and Italy (3,300). The
main causes? Guns, infant mortality, and car crashes (Thakrar et al., 2018; cited in Leonhardt,
2018). American laissez faire policies with respect to gun ownership and vehicle safety, along
with the country’s relatively stingy economic philosophy regarding health care, represent the
key explanatory factors here. The country has 21,000 “excess deaths” per year; that’s how
many more young people die in the United States than would be the case if its death rate were
at the statistical average of the other most affluent nations. This was not always true. In 1960,
the child mortality rate in the United States was below that of the other rich countries; in re-
cent decades, however, that rate has risen above the other affluent countries (Leonhardt, 2018).
Everyone recognizes that leprosy has historically attracted contempt, scorn, disgust and
horror. Although the stigma of HIV/AIDS has declined in recent years, Nyblade (2006) argues
that shame and discrimination still accompany the condition. Has the stigma of tuberculosis
disappeared? Not in some of the Third World countries of the world, although health workers
believe they can intervene in local settings to offset it (Macq, Solis, and Martinez, 2006). The
entire health-related stigma issue is based on the “experience of activists, people ‘in-the-field’
with experiential knowledge of intervention designed to mitigate suffering as a result of labe-
ling and discrimination.” These activists aim to remove stigma from the lives of the unwell in
order to “normalize” their lives. Stigma from which hospital patients suffer can be as debili-
tating as their diseases, and physicians have to battle on two fronts in order to overcome and
cure them. In response, a group of physicians and scholars formed the “International Consor-
tium for Research and Action Against Health-Related Stigma,” and the editors of the journal
devoted an entire issue of Psychology, Health & Medicine (August 2006, vol. 11, no. 3) to theCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
poverty and ill health punishing and stigmatizing experiences in themselves, the poor and the
sick get less of what life has to offer, including its government benefits.
Virtually all generalizations come with qualifications, and here’s an important qualification
about poverty and ill health: among the 17 most affluent, fully industrialized nations of the world,
Americans live the shortest, unhealthiest lives, and are most likely to be killed or injured by accident
and firearms homicide. In 2013, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine
released a report, entitled U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health, in-
dicating that the cumulative health and safety detriments added up to the conclusion that the
United States held the worst ranking among the world’s well-off nations with respect to health
and safety. Americans had the second highest rate of death from heart disease, second highest
for lung cancer, a rate of firearm homicide that is 20 times higher than the other countries,
and the highest with respect to diabetes. Three factors played a major role here, according to
the panel that issued the report: first, because of its lopsided, inequitable income distribution,
the United States has a substantially larger number and proportion of the population living
in poverty; second, the United States harbors a “highly fragmented health care system,” with
poor primary care facilities and resources and a large uninsured sector of the population;
and third, Americans tend to be more individualistic, more risk-taking, and are less likely to
protect their safety—for instance, less likely to wear automobile seat belts, more likely to ride
motorcycles without helmets, more likely to engage in risky, unprotected sex, more likely to
get sick and die from illicit drug abuse. Hence, although all of my generalizations about the
poor versus the less poor with respect to deviance and stigma still apply, we should keep in
mind that with regard to matters of health and illness, the United States is less well-off than the
other affluent countries of the world.
Not only are Americans more likely to die of ill-health than are the residents of all the
other affluent nations on Earth, the nation’s children are less likely to reach the age of 19 than
are those of these high-income nations. A team of epidemiologists calculated that, in the
United States, the annual deaths per million children, from birth to age 19, is substantially
higher (6,500) than the average of the top-20 richest countries (3,800), more than twice as
high as the number for Japan (2,500), Sweden (2,700), Spain (3,300), and Italy (3,300). The
main causes? Guns, infant mortality, and car crashes (Thakrar et al., 2018; cited in Leonhardt,
2018). American laissez faire policies with respect to gun ownership and vehicle safety, along
with the country’s relatively stingy economic philosophy regarding health care, represent the
key explanatory factors here. The country has 21,000 “excess deaths” per year; that’s how
many more young people die in the United States than would be the case if its death rate were
at the statistical average of the other most affluent nations. This was not always true. In 1960,
the child mortality rate in the United States was below that of the other rich countries; in re-
cent decades, however, that rate has risen above the other affluent countries (Leonhardt, 2018).
Everyone recognizes that leprosy has historically attracted contempt, scorn, disgust and
horror. Although the stigma of HIV/AIDS has declined in recent years, Nyblade (2006) argues
that shame and discrimination still accompany the condition. Has the stigma of tuberculosis
disappeared? Not in some of the Third World countries of the world, although health workers
believe they can intervene in local settings to offset it (Macq, Solis, and Martinez, 2006). The
entire health-related stigma issue is based on the “experience of activists, people ‘in-the-field’
with experiential knowledge of intervention designed to mitigate suffering as a result of labe-
ling and discrimination.” These activists aim to remove stigma from the lives of the unwell in
order to “normalize” their lives. Stigma from which hospital patients suffer can be as debili-
tating as their diseases, and physicians have to battle on two fronts in order to overcome and
cure them. In response, a group of physicians and scholars formed the “International Consor-
tium for Research and Action Against Health-Related Stigma,” and the editors of the journal
devoted an entire issue of Psychology, Health & Medicine (August 2006, vol. 11, no. 3) to theCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 119
topic. As we’ve seen, attaching a social stigma to conditions that are “not the person’s fault” is
tragically unfair—but it is an aspect of the human condition in that life itself is unfair. Every
one of us should struggle against injustice, but in order to do so, we must first recognize it.
The stigma of poverty and ill health is both unfair and manifestly true, and it is something
that must be recognized so that it can be combatted.
In this text, we’ve come across the contention that someone diagnosed as being infected
with the COVID-19 coronavirus has been stigmatized, deviantized—socially contaminated by
more than a medical condition. Here, I find it necessary to elaborate on this point. In Decem-
ber 2019, residents of the Chinese city of Wuhan began noticing that some of their friends, rel-
atives, and neighbors were falling ill; clearly, the symptoms indicated an outbreak of an illness
of unknown cause. In January 2020, medical specialists in that city identified the illness as
caused by a novel coronavirus belonging to a family of viruses that included SARS, AIDS, and
Ebola. In March 2020, the virus had spread worldwide to the point where the World Health
Organization (WHO) upgraded the outbreak from a national epidemic localized to China to a
global pandemic. Within a matter of weeks, Pfizer, a pharmaceutical firm, submitted a nearly
150-page protocol or proposal that spelled out the process by which they would “evaluate
the safety, tolerability, immunicity, and efficacy” of a Pfizer-developed vaccine to immunize
healthy individuals against COVID-19. At this writing, the medical profession is adminis-
tering vaccines that several pharmaceutical companies have developed, a truly astoundingly
speedy production of a medication that will, quite literally, save millions of lives.
At this writing (August 2021), the nation-wide, seven-day running average of COVID-related
deaths stands at 350 and is rising, mainly as a result of the emergence of the newly evolved
Delta variant. The number of deaths as a result of COVID came in waves. They began tak-
ing off just before April 2020; by May, this figure had shot up to well over 2,000, but by
June, it dropped to roughly 600, though it rose again in July to about 1,000, then declined
again to 750. By October, it had risen again, this time to a high of over 5,000. In July, the
number had declined to under 300, at which point it began rising again. Slightly over 99%
of COVID-related deaths are of unvaccinated individuals, which should (but doesn’t) give
the uninoculated pause when they utter the line, “Nobody can tell me what to do.” Delta,
the experts say, “is different.” It can “break through” inoculation in a way that the earlier
strains can’t. The “hot spots” for the greatest number of deaths are in the poorest counties of
the poorest states—Missouri, Arkansas, all of Louisiana, parts of Texas, southern Mississippi,
Alabama, and Georgia, and in Florida and Kentucky (Belmonte, 2021). COVID deaths are
preventable; inoculation and mask-wearing cut the likelihood of infection by multiple times,
but the refusenicks are also the disease’s most vulnerable hosts. Once again, we see that dis-
ease and poverty are linked, and, to repeat the main point, any disease state constitutes a form
of deviance or wrongdoing.
Sadly, in the months after the pandemic struck the United States and residents of the coun-
try began to sicken and die, some Americans pointed a finger of blame at Chinese nationals and
Chinese-Americans as being responsible for the spread of the disease. During the fall of 2020,
in Brooklyn, two assailants “slapped an 89-woman in the face and set her shirt on fire.” In
the following January, “while on his morning walk in San Francisco,” an 84-year-old man was
brutally attacked. A month later, while waiting in line outside a bakery, a 52-year-old woman
was “violently shoved and blacked out” and had to be rushed to the hospital. Although exac-
erbated by what Donald Trump referred to as the “Chinese Flu” (others called it “Kung flu”),
Anti-Asian racism is as scabrous. In 1871, a white mob hanged “nearly 20 Chinese immigrants
in makeshift gallows in Los Angeles.” In 1930, “hundreds of white men roamed the streets
of Watsonville, Calif., looking for Filipino farmworkers for days before killing a man.” After
the War in Vietnam, the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) “tried to drive Vietnamese-Americans out of
Texas by burning their houses and boats,” clearly a symptom of anti-Vietnamese sentimentCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
topic. As we’ve seen, attaching a social stigma to conditions that are “not the person’s fault” is
tragically unfair—but it is an aspect of the human condition in that life itself is unfair. Every
one of us should struggle against injustice, but in order to do so, we must first recognize it.
The stigma of poverty and ill health is both unfair and manifestly true, and it is something
that must be recognized so that it can be combatted.
In this text, we’ve come across the contention that someone diagnosed as being infected
with the COVID-19 coronavirus has been stigmatized, deviantized—socially contaminated by
more than a medical condition. Here, I find it necessary to elaborate on this point. In Decem-
ber 2019, residents of the Chinese city of Wuhan began noticing that some of their friends, rel-
atives, and neighbors were falling ill; clearly, the symptoms indicated an outbreak of an illness
of unknown cause. In January 2020, medical specialists in that city identified the illness as
caused by a novel coronavirus belonging to a family of viruses that included SARS, AIDS, and
Ebola. In March 2020, the virus had spread worldwide to the point where the World Health
Organization (WHO) upgraded the outbreak from a national epidemic localized to China to a
global pandemic. Within a matter of weeks, Pfizer, a pharmaceutical firm, submitted a nearly
150-page protocol or proposal that spelled out the process by which they would “evaluate
the safety, tolerability, immunicity, and efficacy” of a Pfizer-developed vaccine to immunize
healthy individuals against COVID-19. At this writing, the medical profession is adminis-
tering vaccines that several pharmaceutical companies have developed, a truly astoundingly
speedy production of a medication that will, quite literally, save millions of lives.
At this writing (August 2021), the nation-wide, seven-day running average of COVID-related
deaths stands at 350 and is rising, mainly as a result of the emergence of the newly evolved
Delta variant. The number of deaths as a result of COVID came in waves. They began tak-
ing off just before April 2020; by May, this figure had shot up to well over 2,000, but by
June, it dropped to roughly 600, though it rose again in July to about 1,000, then declined
again to 750. By October, it had risen again, this time to a high of over 5,000. In July, the
number had declined to under 300, at which point it began rising again. Slightly over 99%
of COVID-related deaths are of unvaccinated individuals, which should (but doesn’t) give
the uninoculated pause when they utter the line, “Nobody can tell me what to do.” Delta,
the experts say, “is different.” It can “break through” inoculation in a way that the earlier
strains can’t. The “hot spots” for the greatest number of deaths are in the poorest counties of
the poorest states—Missouri, Arkansas, all of Louisiana, parts of Texas, southern Mississippi,
Alabama, and Georgia, and in Florida and Kentucky (Belmonte, 2021). COVID deaths are
preventable; inoculation and mask-wearing cut the likelihood of infection by multiple times,
but the refusenicks are also the disease’s most vulnerable hosts. Once again, we see that dis-
ease and poverty are linked, and, to repeat the main point, any disease state constitutes a form
of deviance or wrongdoing.
Sadly, in the months after the pandemic struck the United States and residents of the coun-
try began to sicken and die, some Americans pointed a finger of blame at Chinese nationals and
Chinese-Americans as being responsible for the spread of the disease. During the fall of 2020,
in Brooklyn, two assailants “slapped an 89-woman in the face and set her shirt on fire.” In
the following January, “while on his morning walk in San Francisco,” an 84-year-old man was
brutally attacked. A month later, while waiting in line outside a bakery, a 52-year-old woman
was “violently shoved and blacked out” and had to be rushed to the hospital. Although exac-
erbated by what Donald Trump referred to as the “Chinese Flu” (others called it “Kung flu”),
Anti-Asian racism is as scabrous. In 1871, a white mob hanged “nearly 20 Chinese immigrants
in makeshift gallows in Los Angeles.” In 1930, “hundreds of white men roamed the streets
of Watsonville, Calif., looking for Filipino farmworkers for days before killing a man.” After
the War in Vietnam, the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) “tried to drive Vietnamese-Americans out of
Texas by burning their houses and boats,” clearly a symptom of anti-Vietnamese sentimentCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
120 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
“across the United States” (Wang, 2021, p. A21). Scapegoating Asians for causing the pan-
demic bears a lineage as scabrous and ignominious as any historical persecution, and demon-
strates that the stigmatized party doesn’t have to do anything wrong to attract stigma.
Summary
Achievement-oriented societies tend to stigmatize the poor; the vast majority of Americans
hold success dear, and that is a value which the poor have failed to attain. Even in societies
with democratic, equalitarian ideals, shame and humiliation are likely to accompany poverty.
For the most part, the affluent, taken as a whole, feel superior to the poor who, in turn, tend
to feel inferior to the rich. Hence, putting aside the relationship between income and engaging
in deviant behaviors, being poor is, by itself, a deviant condition. Yet, with only a few exceptions,
very few sociologists have discussed poverty as a form of deviance. Still, some sociologists and
social commentators have discussed the stigma of poverty, including Malthus, Marx, and En-
gels, Weber, and, more recently, Matza, Lerner, Sen, Reyles, and Wacquant. For the most part,
they have emphasized that the well-heeled construct a rationale for their good fortune as well
as explanations accounting for the ill-fortune of the poor. Throughout the world, to varying
degrees, the poor feel self-conscious about presenting themselves before persons better-off
than themselves, sensing that they are, in comparison, less worthy human beings. Being at
the bottom of the heap results in marginality, powerlessness, social exclusion, and a feeling of
shame. Wacquant adds that the powerful have generated the means of further marginalizing
the poor by disproportionately incarcerating them, which results from greater police surveil-
lance and higher rates of common or street crime. Researchers have measured income levels
and degrees of poverty in complex ways. Though these figures are fairly precise, each yields
slightly different numbers and percentages of the population as poor. Roughly one American
out of seven is officially living poverty; unofficially, many more are simply poor.
The shrinking and, in some places, collapsing of the industrial economy has contributed to a
hollowing-out of a substantial number of once-prosperous American cities, mainly in the “rust-
belt” Midwest, which once depended on manufacturing. In addition, deindustrialization has
reduced the “rippling out” effect of jobs and income, further impoverishing rural areas of the
country that were poor to begin with. It’s not clear which is the chicken and which the egg, but
states with the lowest levels of education also tend to be the poorest, and states with the highest
per capita levels of education are also those with the highest income levels. Over time, in the
United States, inequality in income distribution is growing. The old adage, “The rich are getting
richer and the poor are getting poorer,” is very close to the truth and it is becoming more true
over time. In relative terms, the rich are earning an enormously larger percentage of the country’s
total GDP while the income that the poor are earning represents a shrinking share, even though
the total economic pie is immense and yet, in recent years, stagnating. Among the 20 or 30
wealthiest countries of the world, that is, those with the highest per capita GDP, the United
States has the greatest (or close to the greatest) income inequality. (Its wealth inequality is higher
than that of any other industrial country on Earth.) In contrast, in the small, affluent countries of
northern Europe (along with the countries of the former Soviet empire), income is distributed in
the most equalitarian fashion; in contrast, in the less affluent countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin
America—with a very small wealthy elite and a huge, extremely poor majority—the economies
distribute income vastly less equitably than is true of the United States. Still, the distribution of
wealth is a parallel but somewhat different story.
About half of the American population believes that the poor are responsible for their own
poverty; in effect, they blame those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy for their eco-
nomic condition. The other side of this coin is that roughly half believes that factors beyond
the control of the poor caused their economic circumstances. For much of the population,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
“across the United States” (Wang, 2021, p. A21). Scapegoating Asians for causing the pan-
demic bears a lineage as scabrous and ignominious as any historical persecution, and demon-
strates that the stigmatized party doesn’t have to do anything wrong to attract stigma.
Summary
Achievement-oriented societies tend to stigmatize the poor; the vast majority of Americans
hold success dear, and that is a value which the poor have failed to attain. Even in societies
with democratic, equalitarian ideals, shame and humiliation are likely to accompany poverty.
For the most part, the affluent, taken as a whole, feel superior to the poor who, in turn, tend
to feel inferior to the rich. Hence, putting aside the relationship between income and engaging
in deviant behaviors, being poor is, by itself, a deviant condition. Yet, with only a few exceptions,
very few sociologists have discussed poverty as a form of deviance. Still, some sociologists and
social commentators have discussed the stigma of poverty, including Malthus, Marx, and En-
gels, Weber, and, more recently, Matza, Lerner, Sen, Reyles, and Wacquant. For the most part,
they have emphasized that the well-heeled construct a rationale for their good fortune as well
as explanations accounting for the ill-fortune of the poor. Throughout the world, to varying
degrees, the poor feel self-conscious about presenting themselves before persons better-off
than themselves, sensing that they are, in comparison, less worthy human beings. Being at
the bottom of the heap results in marginality, powerlessness, social exclusion, and a feeling of
shame. Wacquant adds that the powerful have generated the means of further marginalizing
the poor by disproportionately incarcerating them, which results from greater police surveil-
lance and higher rates of common or street crime. Researchers have measured income levels
and degrees of poverty in complex ways. Though these figures are fairly precise, each yields
slightly different numbers and percentages of the population as poor. Roughly one American
out of seven is officially living poverty; unofficially, many more are simply poor.
The shrinking and, in some places, collapsing of the industrial economy has contributed to a
hollowing-out of a substantial number of once-prosperous American cities, mainly in the “rust-
belt” Midwest, which once depended on manufacturing. In addition, deindustrialization has
reduced the “rippling out” effect of jobs and income, further impoverishing rural areas of the
country that were poor to begin with. It’s not clear which is the chicken and which the egg, but
states with the lowest levels of education also tend to be the poorest, and states with the highest
per capita levels of education are also those with the highest income levels. Over time, in the
United States, inequality in income distribution is growing. The old adage, “The rich are getting
richer and the poor are getting poorer,” is very close to the truth and it is becoming more true
over time. In relative terms, the rich are earning an enormously larger percentage of the country’s
total GDP while the income that the poor are earning represents a shrinking share, even though
the total economic pie is immense and yet, in recent years, stagnating. Among the 20 or 30
wealthiest countries of the world, that is, those with the highest per capita GDP, the United
States has the greatest (or close to the greatest) income inequality. (Its wealth inequality is higher
than that of any other industrial country on Earth.) In contrast, in the small, affluent countries of
northern Europe (along with the countries of the former Soviet empire), income is distributed in
the most equalitarian fashion; in contrast, in the less affluent countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin
America—with a very small wealthy elite and a huge, extremely poor majority—the economies
distribute income vastly less equitably than is true of the United States. Still, the distribution of
wealth is a parallel but somewhat different story.
About half of the American population believes that the poor are responsible for their own
poverty; in effect, they blame those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy for their eco-
nomic condition. The other side of this coin is that roughly half believes that factors beyond
the control of the poor caused their economic circumstances. For much of the population,Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 121
many see unemployment as shameful, and welfare, even more so; for most of us, begging is
the bottom of the economic barrel—it is highly stigmatizing. The possession of good health,
likewise is a valued commodity, and in affluent capitalist societies—especially the United
States—the poor have less of it than the affluent. As a result of leading shorter, unhealthier
lives, the poor are stigmatized even further and disvalued by the well-off, and by members of
their own ranks as well. In this sense, the sick, especially the unhealthy poor, are stigmatized,
held in disrepute. In the United States, as well as in some other affluent countries such as
France and the United Kingdom, poverty is strongly correlated with race and ethnicity; the
poor are substantially more likely to belong to racial and ethnic minorities than is true of the
affluent; looking at the equation from the other side of the telescope, African Americans are
much more likely to be poor than is true of whites. Most experts believe that racism against
African Americans remains a major cause of economic inequality in the United States. In ef-
fect, many whites regard Blacks as deviants and treat them accordingly. Racism is a stain on
all democratic societies that is difficult for many American whites to wash away, even when
they encounter affluent persons of African descent.
Account: Interview with a Busker, a Formerly Homeless Man
I meet Matthew, a formerly homeless man, who’s now a busker or public performer, in Washington
Square Park; after a chat, we agree to get together, a few days later, at a diner. We go to a booth but the
waiter directs us to a two-person table. “That’s a family table,” the waiter explains. Matthew complains
that families can be two people. I say they’re a business, they have to make money, but he’s still annoyed.
The two cups of coffee cost $3.30 and I give the waiter a $5 bill and tell him he can keep the change, so
they’ll leave us alone for a while. I begin the interview but when the restaurant fills up, I figure they’d
like us to leave and put paying customers at the table and suggest we move outside. Matthew says that
restaurant always gives him a hard time anyway, so he’d just as soon leave. On the street, I ask him
questions and do my best to write down his answers. Then we go to the Fifth Avenue church where some
of his friends are sleeping, and finally to Washington Square Park and sit on a bench where we complete
the interview.
EG: How did you get into this line of work?
M: It comes from tragedy. My family lived in Queens. My Dad was a monster. I stole a yo-yo
from a store when I was five. My father found it on my dresser. He took me into the base-
ment and got an electrical cord, the kind with two strands of rubber-covered wire. He
ripped it in two, tied my hands with one of the strands and stripped the rubber off the
end of the second one so that he exposed the bundle of metal filaments, and he whipped
me with that. I had giant welts on my back. I couldn’t even reach back to soothe or rub
or even touch the wounds. I still have the scars. At school, the nurse discovered the welts
and my teacher told me that if I came to school like that again, the authorities will have
my Dad arrested. After that beating, I ran away a lot. I became a chronic runaway. As
soon as somebody—a cop, somebody from social services—brought me back, couple days
later, I ran away again. After enough of these incidents of me running away, social services
sent me to [a juvenile facility]. It was a coed institution … for kids with problems. The
amazing thing is, I managed to graduate from high school. I think at the school, they just
wanted to push me out, so each year they advanced me to the next class. But I couldn’t go
home. I couldn’t stand to be with my father. The one good thing about him is he worked
his ass off. He was a good provider. Years later, I was talking with my Dad, complaining
about how he treated me. He said, “Aw, Matthew, it wasn’t so bad.” I really lit into him.
I said to him,” you fucked me up, Dad! You fucked me up!” And he did. I’ve still got a rage
about his abuse. The rage I felt toward my Dad, it’s always been with me.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
many see unemployment as shameful, and welfare, even more so; for most of us, begging is
the bottom of the economic barrel—it is highly stigmatizing. The possession of good health,
likewise is a valued commodity, and in affluent capitalist societies—especially the United
States—the poor have less of it than the affluent. As a result of leading shorter, unhealthier
lives, the poor are stigmatized even further and disvalued by the well-off, and by members of
their own ranks as well. In this sense, the sick, especially the unhealthy poor, are stigmatized,
held in disrepute. In the United States, as well as in some other affluent countries such as
France and the United Kingdom, poverty is strongly correlated with race and ethnicity; the
poor are substantially more likely to belong to racial and ethnic minorities than is true of the
affluent; looking at the equation from the other side of the telescope, African Americans are
much more likely to be poor than is true of whites. Most experts believe that racism against
African Americans remains a major cause of economic inequality in the United States. In ef-
fect, many whites regard Blacks as deviants and treat them accordingly. Racism is a stain on
all democratic societies that is difficult for many American whites to wash away, even when
they encounter affluent persons of African descent.
Account: Interview with a Busker, a Formerly Homeless Man
I meet Matthew, a formerly homeless man, who’s now a busker or public performer, in Washington
Square Park; after a chat, we agree to get together, a few days later, at a diner. We go to a booth but the
waiter directs us to a two-person table. “That’s a family table,” the waiter explains. Matthew complains
that families can be two people. I say they’re a business, they have to make money, but he’s still annoyed.
The two cups of coffee cost $3.30 and I give the waiter a $5 bill and tell him he can keep the change, so
they’ll leave us alone for a while. I begin the interview but when the restaurant fills up, I figure they’d
like us to leave and put paying customers at the table and suggest we move outside. Matthew says that
restaurant always gives him a hard time anyway, so he’d just as soon leave. On the street, I ask him
questions and do my best to write down his answers. Then we go to the Fifth Avenue church where some
of his friends are sleeping, and finally to Washington Square Park and sit on a bench where we complete
the interview.
EG: How did you get into this line of work?
M: It comes from tragedy. My family lived in Queens. My Dad was a monster. I stole a yo-yo
from a store when I was five. My father found it on my dresser. He took me into the base-
ment and got an electrical cord, the kind with two strands of rubber-covered wire. He
ripped it in two, tied my hands with one of the strands and stripped the rubber off the
end of the second one so that he exposed the bundle of metal filaments, and he whipped
me with that. I had giant welts on my back. I couldn’t even reach back to soothe or rub
or even touch the wounds. I still have the scars. At school, the nurse discovered the welts
and my teacher told me that if I came to school like that again, the authorities will have
my Dad arrested. After that beating, I ran away a lot. I became a chronic runaway. As
soon as somebody—a cop, somebody from social services—brought me back, couple days
later, I ran away again. After enough of these incidents of me running away, social services
sent me to [a juvenile facility]. It was a coed institution … for kids with problems. The
amazing thing is, I managed to graduate from high school. I think at the school, they just
wanted to push me out, so each year they advanced me to the next class. But I couldn’t go
home. I couldn’t stand to be with my father. The one good thing about him is he worked
his ass off. He was a good provider. Years later, I was talking with my Dad, complaining
about how he treated me. He said, “Aw, Matthew, it wasn’t so bad.” I really lit into him.
I said to him,” you fucked me up, Dad! You fucked me up!” And he did. I’ve still got a rage
about his abuse. The rage I felt toward my Dad, it’s always been with me.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
122 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
EG: So, when you took off, how did you get around? How did you travel?
M: The way I’d get around, I’d hitchhike. People would pick me up, they’d give me rides.
And somewhere along the way, I picked up playing the guitar, and I discovered that I
was damn good at it. The first time I took off, I went to Florida. I made crazy money on
the road. I’d play for truckers on Highway 80 and right off, I made $200. I know how to
work people; I learned how to be entertaining. But the more I did it, the smarter I got
about where to stop and where not to stop. When you’re on the road, the last thing you
want to do is to stop in the major cities. There are a lot of crazy people in big cities who
could hassle you, harm you, or rob you. And if you’re not familiar with the city, you don’t
know where to go, where it’s OK to sleep, where there’s a campsite or something, or if
it’s safe. So I’d ask the truckers to let me off at a truck stop 30 miles from Chicago, or if
they were going further, I’d stop in the rest area after Chicago, stuff like that. The police
leave me alone, they don’t hassle me, and they’d often even help me out. I’d say, I’m not
from around here, I’m traveling, I have ID. Officers would stop and help you find a place
to sleep. Or they’d say, we want you out of here in the morning. Sometimes, the police
would take me to a church where there’s a gazebo, or they’d give me a voucher for a soup
kitchen or a luncheonette where I could get a meal. I’d often stand at a ramp, holding up
a sign that would say, “Traveling.” I never hopped trains; you never know what’s going to
happen to you on trains. All the camp sites I’ve slept in when I was traveling, I can still
see what they look like in my mind. They haven’t changed that much in 25 years. One
guy I met took me into the woods. He had a castle back there made of blankets and ropes.
But things happen, you know.
EG: When you were young, traveling on the road, did anyone ever try to abuse you?
M: For over 25 years, I’ve been in every kind of situation you could imagine. That old story
about being picked up by women who want to go to the nearest motel and have sex with
you is a fairy tale, it’s a myth—it never happened to me. But, yeah, queers have picked me
up and tried to mess with me. That’s not that unusual for a gay guy to come on to you. It
isn’t always safe. I was very cute when I was young. I had black hair and freckles all over
my face. I looked like Alfalfa, the character in “Our Gang.” You know, living on the road
is very lonely. Most of the time I’d be by myself. But you sometimes get rides from strange
people. Out West there’s a lot of Christians who give you rides and try to convert you
to the faith. Once, I got a ride from an elderly Black couple—snow-white hair, in their
70s, the works. As I was about to get out, the man grabbed my arm with a really strong
grip—that man may have been old, but he was strong—and he said in this deep, strong
voice, “I hope you’re taking Jesus with you!” He wouldn’t let go of me. He told me to start
praying. What could I do? I lowered my head in prayer and went along with it. Once, I
hitched through an area of [a particular city] I knew was gang-infested. I found a place to
sleep in the woods in my mummy sleeping bag, with the hood over my face, and I woke
up in a hospital, getting an MRI. They said to me, “Do not move, sir.” Later, I figured
out what had happened was that someone punted my jaw. Kicked me in the face, broke
my jaw, then hit me over the head, and sent me to the hospital. They didn’t take anything
from me. My jaw had to be wired up and I had a tingling sensation in my leg and I’m now
left with a kind of numbness there. I definitely sustained nerve damage and it’s with me
still. But people also did a lot of things for me. People would take me to a hotel and let
me stay there. I was in [a city in] North Dakota, playing outside a supermarket. I propped
up a sign and made $400 in two hours. The whole congregation of a church was letting
out and walking by. But after a while, a cop told me to stop playing, and I did. My signs
would read “Hungry” or “Traveling,” things like that. You can do well on the road. You
would not believe the number of times I’ve just found money lying on the ground. One
time I was in a church in St. Louis and the pastor said, let’s give you a bus ticket home. ICopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
EG: So, when you took off, how did you get around? How did you travel?
M: The way I’d get around, I’d hitchhike. People would pick me up, they’d give me rides.
And somewhere along the way, I picked up playing the guitar, and I discovered that I
was damn good at it. The first time I took off, I went to Florida. I made crazy money on
the road. I’d play for truckers on Highway 80 and right off, I made $200. I know how to
work people; I learned how to be entertaining. But the more I did it, the smarter I got
about where to stop and where not to stop. When you’re on the road, the last thing you
want to do is to stop in the major cities. There are a lot of crazy people in big cities who
could hassle you, harm you, or rob you. And if you’re not familiar with the city, you don’t
know where to go, where it’s OK to sleep, where there’s a campsite or something, or if
it’s safe. So I’d ask the truckers to let me off at a truck stop 30 miles from Chicago, or if
they were going further, I’d stop in the rest area after Chicago, stuff like that. The police
leave me alone, they don’t hassle me, and they’d often even help me out. I’d say, I’m not
from around here, I’m traveling, I have ID. Officers would stop and help you find a place
to sleep. Or they’d say, we want you out of here in the morning. Sometimes, the police
would take me to a church where there’s a gazebo, or they’d give me a voucher for a soup
kitchen or a luncheonette where I could get a meal. I’d often stand at a ramp, holding up
a sign that would say, “Traveling.” I never hopped trains; you never know what’s going to
happen to you on trains. All the camp sites I’ve slept in when I was traveling, I can still
see what they look like in my mind. They haven’t changed that much in 25 years. One
guy I met took me into the woods. He had a castle back there made of blankets and ropes.
But things happen, you know.
EG: When you were young, traveling on the road, did anyone ever try to abuse you?
M: For over 25 years, I’ve been in every kind of situation you could imagine. That old story
about being picked up by women who want to go to the nearest motel and have sex with
you is a fairy tale, it’s a myth—it never happened to me. But, yeah, queers have picked me
up and tried to mess with me. That’s not that unusual for a gay guy to come on to you. It
isn’t always safe. I was very cute when I was young. I had black hair and freckles all over
my face. I looked like Alfalfa, the character in “Our Gang.” You know, living on the road
is very lonely. Most of the time I’d be by myself. But you sometimes get rides from strange
people. Out West there’s a lot of Christians who give you rides and try to convert you
to the faith. Once, I got a ride from an elderly Black couple—snow-white hair, in their
70s, the works. As I was about to get out, the man grabbed my arm with a really strong
grip—that man may have been old, but he was strong—and he said in this deep, strong
voice, “I hope you’re taking Jesus with you!” He wouldn’t let go of me. He told me to start
praying. What could I do? I lowered my head in prayer and went along with it. Once, I
hitched through an area of [a particular city] I knew was gang-infested. I found a place to
sleep in the woods in my mummy sleeping bag, with the hood over my face, and I woke
up in a hospital, getting an MRI. They said to me, “Do not move, sir.” Later, I figured
out what had happened was that someone punted my jaw. Kicked me in the face, broke
my jaw, then hit me over the head, and sent me to the hospital. They didn’t take anything
from me. My jaw had to be wired up and I had a tingling sensation in my leg and I’m now
left with a kind of numbness there. I definitely sustained nerve damage and it’s with me
still. But people also did a lot of things for me. People would take me to a hotel and let
me stay there. I was in [a city in] North Dakota, playing outside a supermarket. I propped
up a sign and made $400 in two hours. The whole congregation of a church was letting
out and walking by. But after a while, a cop told me to stop playing, and I did. My signs
would read “Hungry” or “Traveling,” things like that. You can do well on the road. You
would not believe the number of times I’ve just found money lying on the ground. One
time I was in a church in St. Louis and the pastor said, let’s give you a bus ticket home. ICopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 123
said, oh, no, I’ll hitchhike. The trick is you tell the cops that you’re going the furthest spot
from where you are. If you’re in California, you say you’re going to New York; if you’re in
New York, you say you’re going to California. I have a tent site right here in New York,
just off Fifth Avenue. You won’t believe it. I’ll show it to you later; we can walk right
to it. I love New York. I have friends here. I see my Mom in Queens. I see my mom for
about a month every year. The problem is, I don’t make one-quarter as much playing in
the subways here as I do out West. But I’ve made a lot of money. Once, a guy gave me a
thousand dollars to buy a guitar with it. It costs $600, and I wanted to return the rest,
but the guy who gave it to me, he said I could keep it. This guy raced cars. All these suc-
cessful farmers, when they’re not farming, they race cars. Yeah, I made excellent money.
EG: What about your present housing situation?
M: Here, in New York, I played at Strawberry Fields [a spot in Central Park that commem-
orates the life and death of John Lennon]. A woman saw me and she said, if you sleep
here for five days straight, we can find you a place to stay…. They gave me a key and they
have very strict rules. They want you coming in [at night, to sleep]. They take away your
knives. You have to go to meetings three times a week. Then there’s a structured program
that you have to go to and forms you have to fill out. After you’ve gone through all this,
and you’re approved, you’re allowed to stay; if you’re lucky, they find you an apartment
that’s yours. They give you choices, but you can only turn down one choice. The apart-
ments are all over—Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn. It could be in the Bronx. Well, I have
friends living in the Bronx, that’s OK. I have lots of documentation—my birth certificate,
records, stuff like that—and I literally can prove 25 years of homelessness. They help
you with everything. They help get you a job, they help you with the rent—they pay
three-fourths of the rent and you pay a quarter of it. This will all be settled in a couple of
months. Then I’ll have my own place.
EG: That’s quite a nice deal. Really sweet.
M: Yeah. I’ve been through a lot. I love my brothers—the other guys that are on the street, the
ones that have lived through a lot of things I’ve had to deal with—but the fact is, I have
priority because of my 25 years and most of them don’t. My package of application mate-
rials at the house is complete. Everything’s been agreed upon. The place I’d live [Matthew
names a particular facility]. It’s amazing I got the place. I didn’t know anything about
all these procedures. My counselor and the other people who work there had to walk me
through it. Asking me to sign a lease is like asking you to pick up a 1,000-pound boulder.
EG: But you deserve it.
M: Yeah, like I said, I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been offered places to stay, but there’s been
a catch. I was picked up by a guy once in California who told me I could stay at his place
all I wanted, all I had to do was to take care of his marijuana plants. Sounds like a good
deal, doesn’t it? Pot is legal in California. But the thing is, you can grow six plants, and
this guy had 600. I kept seeing helicopters flying overhead, so I took off. A guy like this,
his land is registered in a phony name, they can’t trace him, he gets off scot-free, and
you’re left holding the bag—you get arrested and go to jail, not him. California is great
if you’ve already made your money, not for people like me. And camping on the road is
no picnic, let me tell you. I was camping out one time in Iowa, out in a field, and I woke
up covered in six inches of snow. Another time, a guy picked me up and we were talking,
and I noticed some leather stuff on his dash. Something wasn’t quite right, so I asked him
to drop me off. I could see through his window as he was pulling out, he was jerking off
[makes a motion with his hand]. One guy, he picked me up, we had something to eat at a
diner, and then, later, there was a turn-off, and I said, this is my spot, why don’t you drop
me off right here? And he didn’t want me to—I could tell by the tone of disappointment
in his voice. I had to get really angry and yell at him. I had no idea what he wanted to doCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
said, oh, no, I’ll hitchhike. The trick is you tell the cops that you’re going the furthest spot
from where you are. If you’re in California, you say you’re going to New York; if you’re in
New York, you say you’re going to California. I have a tent site right here in New York,
just off Fifth Avenue. You won’t believe it. I’ll show it to you later; we can walk right
to it. I love New York. I have friends here. I see my Mom in Queens. I see my mom for
about a month every year. The problem is, I don’t make one-quarter as much playing in
the subways here as I do out West. But I’ve made a lot of money. Once, a guy gave me a
thousand dollars to buy a guitar with it. It costs $600, and I wanted to return the rest,
but the guy who gave it to me, he said I could keep it. This guy raced cars. All these suc-
cessful farmers, when they’re not farming, they race cars. Yeah, I made excellent money.
EG: What about your present housing situation?
M: Here, in New York, I played at Strawberry Fields [a spot in Central Park that commem-
orates the life and death of John Lennon]. A woman saw me and she said, if you sleep
here for five days straight, we can find you a place to stay…. They gave me a key and they
have very strict rules. They want you coming in [at night, to sleep]. They take away your
knives. You have to go to meetings three times a week. Then there’s a structured program
that you have to go to and forms you have to fill out. After you’ve gone through all this,
and you’re approved, you’re allowed to stay; if you’re lucky, they find you an apartment
that’s yours. They give you choices, but you can only turn down one choice. The apart-
ments are all over—Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn. It could be in the Bronx. Well, I have
friends living in the Bronx, that’s OK. I have lots of documentation—my birth certificate,
records, stuff like that—and I literally can prove 25 years of homelessness. They help
you with everything. They help get you a job, they help you with the rent—they pay
three-fourths of the rent and you pay a quarter of it. This will all be settled in a couple of
months. Then I’ll have my own place.
EG: That’s quite a nice deal. Really sweet.
M: Yeah. I’ve been through a lot. I love my brothers—the other guys that are on the street, the
ones that have lived through a lot of things I’ve had to deal with—but the fact is, I have
priority because of my 25 years and most of them don’t. My package of application mate-
rials at the house is complete. Everything’s been agreed upon. The place I’d live [Matthew
names a particular facility]. It’s amazing I got the place. I didn’t know anything about
all these procedures. My counselor and the other people who work there had to walk me
through it. Asking me to sign a lease is like asking you to pick up a 1,000-pound boulder.
EG: But you deserve it.
M: Yeah, like I said, I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been offered places to stay, but there’s been
a catch. I was picked up by a guy once in California who told me I could stay at his place
all I wanted, all I had to do was to take care of his marijuana plants. Sounds like a good
deal, doesn’t it? Pot is legal in California. But the thing is, you can grow six plants, and
this guy had 600. I kept seeing helicopters flying overhead, so I took off. A guy like this,
his land is registered in a phony name, they can’t trace him, he gets off scot-free, and
you’re left holding the bag—you get arrested and go to jail, not him. California is great
if you’ve already made your money, not for people like me. And camping on the road is
no picnic, let me tell you. I was camping out one time in Iowa, out in a field, and I woke
up covered in six inches of snow. Another time, a guy picked me up and we were talking,
and I noticed some leather stuff on his dash. Something wasn’t quite right, so I asked him
to drop me off. I could see through his window as he was pulling out, he was jerking off
[makes a motion with his hand]. One guy, he picked me up, we had something to eat at a
diner, and then, later, there was a turn-off, and I said, this is my spot, why don’t you drop
me off right here? And he didn’t want me to—I could tell by the tone of disappointment
in his voice. I had to get really angry and yell at him. I had no idea what he wanted to doCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
124 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
to me or what, but after he let me out, when I was standing by the side of the road, all of
a sudden—WHOOSH!—I felt this rushing, flooding sensation in my body. I practically
fell over. I think he had drugged me in the diner. Whatever it was, it was something he
put in my drink. What did he want? I don’t know. Steal my guitar. Do harm to me. I have
no idea. I put this all on YouTube…. I talk about it.
EG: You know, I’ve been listening to you talk, and I like your voice. It has a rough, raspy edge,
kind of a cigarette-smoking voice. Earthy.
M: I don’t sound like that at all when I’m singing. My voice sounds a lot like Paul McCarthy.
Sweet, light, lyrical. You know, my father was a singer. He performed for Donald Trump.
And the thing of it is, when he died, Trump didn’t even send my mother a condolence
card.
EG: That’s cold. That’s mean. What was your relationship with your mother like?
M: My mother’s a saint. As I said, I see her for about a month at a time every year. She tells me,
“Matthew, one day, you’re going to have to grow up. You have to have a place to stay. Why
don’t you live here?” I say I can’t, I’ve got to move on, but I love you, Mom. You know,
my Mom had seven kids. I was the oldest, and I was the only one she had to worry about.
She has reason to be proud of the other six, but I gave her nothing but trouble. I’m hop-
ing that’s going to be different now that I’ve got my own place. [We’re now at the Fifth
Avenue church where Matthew shows me where there are several homeless men sleeping.
We’re leaning against the low, black, iron fence that divides the church and its grounds
from the sidewalk.] This is not a well-known spot. The pastor lets some of us sleep here.
You see those boxes there, by the door? [Matthew points to the location.] There’s a guy
there who’s sleeping behind them. He’s not too smart. He’s sleeping on a stone surface.
That’s bad for your health. It drains your body. Some guys sleep all night right on the
ground. Your body needs rest. You don’t get it sleeping on a hard, cold surface. Me, I
use full camping gear when I sleep out. You can’t sleep on the ground or on stone. You
must put cardboard in between yourself and the ground. Sleeping on concrete makes
your bones ache, promotes arthritis. Cardboard stops that. An old traveler’s trick. It’s
not natural to sleep on the ground. Concrete pulls energy out of your body. You see the
bushes there, underneath the tree? [Points.] There’s a guy sleeping in there. The camera
right up there records who comes in and who goes out…. You know, you can buy a tent
for less than $250, and it won’t be waterproof, but if you spend $18 for a couple of tarps,
you can make it waterproof. But you have to dry it out otherwise it’ll mold and mildew.
One of the most important things when you’re on the road traveling is a mummy sleeping
bag. When I’m on the road, I always bring along a magic marker and an Exacto knife to
make signs. One time I was in Indiana and I couldn’t get a ride for nothing. Turns out
there had been a string of car-jackings there. So when I found out, I made up a sign that
read: “Artist—Not Carjacker.” I got rides right away. Once I was next to a McDonald’s
and I made up a sign, “McHungry,” and people bought me meals. One sign I made up was
“Please Read—Traveler, Down on My Luck, I Work for Food or a Possible Bus Ticket.”
EG: Do you have a savings account?
M: No.
EG: You live from day to day?
M: You know, my strongest motivator is when I run out of money. When I’m flat broke. Then
I know I have to go out there and play. That’s when I make the most money….
EG: I’m impressed by your courage. Your daring. I couldn’t do that. I have to know there’s a
mattress I can land on. I never had enough confidence in my intelligence to get me by. I
always knew I had to have an education to get a job. I couldn’t rely on just my ability. I
needed to feel secure. I worked for 40 years and was never out of work. That would drive
me crazy, living from day to day, not knowing if I have a job or not.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
to me or what, but after he let me out, when I was standing by the side of the road, all of
a sudden—WHOOSH!—I felt this rushing, flooding sensation in my body. I practically
fell over. I think he had drugged me in the diner. Whatever it was, it was something he
put in my drink. What did he want? I don’t know. Steal my guitar. Do harm to me. I have
no idea. I put this all on YouTube…. I talk about it.
EG: You know, I’ve been listening to you talk, and I like your voice. It has a rough, raspy edge,
kind of a cigarette-smoking voice. Earthy.
M: I don’t sound like that at all when I’m singing. My voice sounds a lot like Paul McCarthy.
Sweet, light, lyrical. You know, my father was a singer. He performed for Donald Trump.
And the thing of it is, when he died, Trump didn’t even send my mother a condolence
card.
EG: That’s cold. That’s mean. What was your relationship with your mother like?
M: My mother’s a saint. As I said, I see her for about a month at a time every year. She tells me,
“Matthew, one day, you’re going to have to grow up. You have to have a place to stay. Why
don’t you live here?” I say I can’t, I’ve got to move on, but I love you, Mom. You know,
my Mom had seven kids. I was the oldest, and I was the only one she had to worry about.
She has reason to be proud of the other six, but I gave her nothing but trouble. I’m hop-
ing that’s going to be different now that I’ve got my own place. [We’re now at the Fifth
Avenue church where Matthew shows me where there are several homeless men sleeping.
We’re leaning against the low, black, iron fence that divides the church and its grounds
from the sidewalk.] This is not a well-known spot. The pastor lets some of us sleep here.
You see those boxes there, by the door? [Matthew points to the location.] There’s a guy
there who’s sleeping behind them. He’s not too smart. He’s sleeping on a stone surface.
That’s bad for your health. It drains your body. Some guys sleep all night right on the
ground. Your body needs rest. You don’t get it sleeping on a hard, cold surface. Me, I
use full camping gear when I sleep out. You can’t sleep on the ground or on stone. You
must put cardboard in between yourself and the ground. Sleeping on concrete makes
your bones ache, promotes arthritis. Cardboard stops that. An old traveler’s trick. It’s
not natural to sleep on the ground. Concrete pulls energy out of your body. You see the
bushes there, underneath the tree? [Points.] There’s a guy sleeping in there. The camera
right up there records who comes in and who goes out…. You know, you can buy a tent
for less than $250, and it won’t be waterproof, but if you spend $18 for a couple of tarps,
you can make it waterproof. But you have to dry it out otherwise it’ll mold and mildew.
One of the most important things when you’re on the road traveling is a mummy sleeping
bag. When I’m on the road, I always bring along a magic marker and an Exacto knife to
make signs. One time I was in Indiana and I couldn’t get a ride for nothing. Turns out
there had been a string of car-jackings there. So when I found out, I made up a sign that
read: “Artist—Not Carjacker.” I got rides right away. Once I was next to a McDonald’s
and I made up a sign, “McHungry,” and people bought me meals. One sign I made up was
“Please Read—Traveler, Down on My Luck, I Work for Food or a Possible Bus Ticket.”
EG: Do you have a savings account?
M: No.
EG: You live from day to day?
M: You know, my strongest motivator is when I run out of money. When I’m flat broke. Then
I know I have to go out there and play. That’s when I make the most money….
EG: I’m impressed by your courage. Your daring. I couldn’t do that. I have to know there’s a
mattress I can land on. I never had enough confidence in my intelligence to get me by. I
always knew I had to have an education to get a job. I couldn’t rely on just my ability. I
needed to feel secure. I worked for 40 years and was never out of work. That would drive
me crazy, living from day to day, not knowing if I have a job or not.Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class 125
M: Well, if I just keep playing, I know there’s a mattress I can land on. I’ll never go hungry
because I can go to a subway and earn 50 bucks. I always have enough to eat because I can
play. And when I earn the $50, that’s when I go home. I earn enough to get by. You can
busk anywhere. When the cops come and ask you to leave, you do it.
EG: Have you ever been arrested?
M: [Laughs.] Lots of times! Mainly when I was a kid. Petty larceny mostly. I’m not crazy or
anything—I didn’t rape anybody, I never committed felonies. It was things like shoplift-
ing. And I never stole from friends. Once, a cop found me with a few joints and I spent a
couple of nights in jail. I don’t do any of that any more. You know what convinced me?
Ten nights in the slammer. I said I never want to do this again. And I didn’t. I’d had
enough of all that cold, hard steel.
EG: In addition to singing other people’s songs, do you write and sing your own songs?
M: I’ve written a thousand songs. I’ve even copyrighted 30. But what I really like is per-
forming. None of my songs are great. Some are pretty good. They’re good but not great.
I talked to a producer once—he produced the John Lennon’s Double Fantasy Album—
and he said he’d listen to my stuff, read my songs, maybe produce a record, something
like that. Nothing happened. I never heard from him again. A music producer can steal
your ideas—he doesn’t have to steal your exact words. Heck, I’ve performed in the clubs
around here—Café Wha? Blue Note. Bitter End. I asked another guy, another music
producer, why, if people like my music so much, why I can’t get a record produced? He
said, “You know, Matthew, listening to music live is different from listening to a tape or
reading the lyrics of a song. You see someone, you hear them, you’re looking at them, and
it all sounds a lot better live than it does when you’re not there. Take away the presence of
the performer and it’s not so entertaining.” I should have tried harder, I should have really
tried to get my music produced and marketed, but I didn’t. So instead of making millions
on my records, I’m playing in subway stations making 50 bucks to get enough to eat….
EG: What do you imagine your life to be like five years from now? In 6 to 8 years?
M: (looking off in the distance and clearly seriously thinking about his answer and registering
some emotion in his voice): I haven’t been with a woman for quite a while. The thing I
thought about when they TB-tested me for my qualifications for the apartment was that
for years I hadn’t had sex at all. But I do want a relationship. I want to love a woman and I
want her to love me. I don’t want kids or anything like that. But I’ve been on the road for
25 years and it’s almost impossible to have a relationship when you’re traveling through
towns where you stay for such a short period of time. Women don’t want to hitch-hike or
sleep in the mud or snow or on a cardboard bed. Now that I have my own home and I’m
living in an apartment, what I want most is to fall in love—that’s what I really miss. I
could spend the rest of my life with a woman I loved! I miss love!
EG: That would be terrific. A strong, committed relationship is important.
M: I’d also like to have a job. Counselor or something. Maybe I could go to college and get
a degree in counseling. I’d like to help people. Turn troubled kids’ lives around. My life
changed—why can’t I help them change theirs?
EG: Sounds really good.
Questions
Matthew is poor, presumably, poverty can be explained, so what is his story? Why is he poor?
Should our explanation be personal or structural? Do any theories of poverty help us under-
stand Matthew’s situation? What would pull him out of poverty? Do you believe he’ll get on
his feet, find a job, keep his apartment, and have a relationship with a woman? If so, what
do you think turned him around? Why did he change? Would he make a good counselor ofCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
M: Well, if I just keep playing, I know there’s a mattress I can land on. I’ll never go hungry
because I can go to a subway and earn 50 bucks. I always have enough to eat because I can
play. And when I earn the $50, that’s when I go home. I earn enough to get by. You can
busk anywhere. When the cops come and ask you to leave, you do it.
EG: Have you ever been arrested?
M: [Laughs.] Lots of times! Mainly when I was a kid. Petty larceny mostly. I’m not crazy or
anything—I didn’t rape anybody, I never committed felonies. It was things like shoplift-
ing. And I never stole from friends. Once, a cop found me with a few joints and I spent a
couple of nights in jail. I don’t do any of that any more. You know what convinced me?
Ten nights in the slammer. I said I never want to do this again. And I didn’t. I’d had
enough of all that cold, hard steel.
EG: In addition to singing other people’s songs, do you write and sing your own songs?
M: I’ve written a thousand songs. I’ve even copyrighted 30. But what I really like is per-
forming. None of my songs are great. Some are pretty good. They’re good but not great.
I talked to a producer once—he produced the John Lennon’s Double Fantasy Album—
and he said he’d listen to my stuff, read my songs, maybe produce a record, something
like that. Nothing happened. I never heard from him again. A music producer can steal
your ideas—he doesn’t have to steal your exact words. Heck, I’ve performed in the clubs
around here—Café Wha? Blue Note. Bitter End. I asked another guy, another music
producer, why, if people like my music so much, why I can’t get a record produced? He
said, “You know, Matthew, listening to music live is different from listening to a tape or
reading the lyrics of a song. You see someone, you hear them, you’re looking at them, and
it all sounds a lot better live than it does when you’re not there. Take away the presence of
the performer and it’s not so entertaining.” I should have tried harder, I should have really
tried to get my music produced and marketed, but I didn’t. So instead of making millions
on my records, I’m playing in subway stations making 50 bucks to get enough to eat….
EG: What do you imagine your life to be like five years from now? In 6 to 8 years?
M: (looking off in the distance and clearly seriously thinking about his answer and registering
some emotion in his voice): I haven’t been with a woman for quite a while. The thing I
thought about when they TB-tested me for my qualifications for the apartment was that
for years I hadn’t had sex at all. But I do want a relationship. I want to love a woman and I
want her to love me. I don’t want kids or anything like that. But I’ve been on the road for
25 years and it’s almost impossible to have a relationship when you’re traveling through
towns where you stay for such a short period of time. Women don’t want to hitch-hike or
sleep in the mud or snow or on a cardboard bed. Now that I have my own home and I’m
living in an apartment, what I want most is to fall in love—that’s what I really miss. I
could spend the rest of my life with a woman I loved! I miss love!
EG: That would be terrific. A strong, committed relationship is important.
M: I’d also like to have a job. Counselor or something. Maybe I could go to college and get
a degree in counseling. I’d like to help people. Turn troubled kids’ lives around. My life
changed—why can’t I help them change theirs?
EG: Sounds really good.
Questions
Matthew is poor, presumably, poverty can be explained, so what is his story? Why is he poor?
Should our explanation be personal or structural? Do any theories of poverty help us under-
stand Matthew’s situation? What would pull him out of poverty? Do you believe he’ll get on
his feet, find a job, keep his apartment, and have a relationship with a woman? If so, what
do you think turned him around? Why did he change? Would he make a good counselor ofCopyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
126 Poverty and the Hierarchy of Social Class
street people? What about a successful song-writing career? Where, would you guess, is he
going from here? Do you think that his friendship with street people will help or hinder his
success? If a specific theory best explains why Matthew lived on the street and traveled around
the country without a job for 25 years, what explanation might account for the fact that he
then settled down, got a place to live, perhaps got a job? Do you think he has an accurate
assessment of what his future will be like? How do you feel about using an interview like this
to illustrate an unconventional person’s life situation?Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution
street people? What about a successful song-writing career? Where, would you guess, is he
going from here? Do you think that his friendship with street people will help or hinder his
success? If a specific theory best explains why Matthew lived on the street and traveled around
the country without a job for 25 years, what explanation might account for the fact that he
then settled down, got a place to live, perhaps got a job? Do you think he has an accurate
assessment of what his future will be like? How do you feel about using an interview like this
to illustrate an unconventional person’s life situation?Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis
Review Copy – Not for Redistribution