Changing Life, Changing Lives
Over the past forty years I have lived in, worked in, and visited nearly all the lowest income one hundred counties in the United States, and many of the areas of Canada and Mexico with the same economic woes. I have talked with thousands of people from these areas about their local issues.
I have also talk with thousands who did not live in or really know these areas personally, but were officially responsible for some area of life within them. Some of these were politicians, bureaucrats, business operatives, religious executives, and the life. Needless to say, there was no unanimity regarding the reasons for local poverty.
There was not even consensus about what constituted poverty. All three nations track income status of local areas in some way. But even within the tracking mechanisms of the nations there are vast differences in the concept of what constitutes poverty. In some instances it is set as a personal income that is below a certain percentage of the mean or median national income. In others it is a family income.
Sometimes other factors are thrown into the mix, such as the value of housing, number of children, money spent on education, etc. At some state or tribal levels, the only awareness of poverty has been a matter of personal experience.
In any case, it has not been unusual to discover that a state or province has a sense of the meaning of poverty that is far different from that of the census or economic core, even if based (supposedly) on the same data.
So you can understand that there are, as well, widely varying opinions on the causes of poverty, whether something should be done about it, and if so, what? I have been amazed by people at the state or province level who told me to stay out of their business. One bureaucrat (a representative of the Office of the Governor) in New Mexico spoke glowingly of his work at Mora, probably the lowest income county in North America over the past five hundred years. Then he ordered me to stay out of the county. He said the people there might become confused about who was responsible for "rescuing" their economy.
When I visited Mora a couple weeks later, a local businessman, a leader in the Presbyterian congregation, just snorted. He suggested that in lieu of having outsiders come in and help the community build an economy the old fashioned way by spending money, the state could just come in and buy out his business every week or so. Then there would be no question about who was responsible.
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