The Political Economy of Poverty: Institutional and Technological Dimensions
The latecomer to the poverty problem is apt to conclude that poverty is a phenomenon of recent occurrence and discovery. Not over a decade ago we were being told that we were in a new era. Danger came not from too little but from superfluity, as one critic asserted.' The industrial economy had made goods so plentiful that we lived in a period of mass culture. The time was rapidly approaching when we would all be on one plane of living. Individual differences, tastes and standards would be reduced to one mass level. Already one could not tell the difference between the executive in his Brooks Brothers suit and the working man in his mass-produced imitation. The Cadillac in which the executive arrived at the office could hardly be differentiated from the Chevrolet in which the worker arrived at the plant.2 Although Professor Galbraith's The Affluent Society challenged this point of view, the book, because of its unfortunate title, was interpreted by those who run while reading as giving an economic authentication to the superfluity argument. In a sense, it did. In order to effectively contrast the shabbiness of the post office with the glitter of the night club, Galbraith did give many readers the impression that private expenditure was now for superfluities. This was undoubtedly an unanticipated effect of The Affluent Society. Other readers, perhaps slower but more perceptive, got from the book a different message. Thus, in a most peculiar sense Galbraith's The Affluent Society may be looked upon as the last shot fired in the superfluity argument and at the same time the opening shot in the war on poverty. The economic complacency of the 1950s has given way before a flood of articles and books pointing to some or all aspects of poverty in the American economy. It is doubtful that we have had such an outpouring of literature on the matter of poverty in the midst of plenty since the era of the "muckrakers."' The economic neophyte, whose counter-