Utopia for Realists

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change,”35 the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. Elsewhere he continued, “It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”36

Greg Duncan, a professor at the University of California, calculated that lifting an American family out of poverty takes an average of about $4,500 annually – less than the Cherokee casino payouts. In the end, the return on this investment, per child, would be:

•12.5% more hours worked

•$3,000 annual savings on welfare

•$50,000–$100,000 additional lifetime earnings

•$10,000–$20,000 additional state tax revenues

According to his conservative estimates, eliminating poverty actually generated more money than the total of all casino payments through reductions in crime, use of care facilities, and repetition of school grades.11

A British study discovered that the costs of poverty among children in England top £29 billion ($44 billion) a year.12 According to the researchers, a policy to eliminate poverty “could largely pay for itself.”13

Compare it to a new computer that’s running ten heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors, and eventually it freezes – not because it’s a bad computer, but because it has to do too much at once. Poor people have an analogous problem. They’re not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.

There’s a key distinction though between people with busy lives and those living in poverty: You can’t take a break from poverty

From Australia to England and from Sweden to the United States there is an entrenched notion that poverty is something people have to overcome on their own.

Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce

What, then, is the cause of mental-health problems among the poor? Nature or culture? Both, was Costello’s conclusion, because the stress of poverty puts people genetically predisposed to develop an illness or disorder at an elevated risk.8

Correlations between poverty and mental illness had been drawn before by another academic, Edward Jarvis, in his famous paper “Report on Insanity,” published in 1855