Charles Murray‘s Losing Ground contains a most surprising claim:
[P]overty did not simply climb upward on our national list of problems; it abruptly reappeared from nowhere. In the prologue to this book, 1950 was described as a year in which poverty was not part of the discourse about domestic policy – indeed, as a year in which the very word “poverty” was seldom used. The silence was not peculiar to 1950. From the outset of the Second World War until 1962, little in the popular press, in political rhetoric, or in the published work of American scholars focused on poverty in America.
When Murray wrote these words, there was really no way to verify this climb. When I read this passage, I was fairly incredulous. Now, however, Google’s Ngram can check this quote in the blink of an eye. Result:
How wrong I was. Murray’s I-was-there account matches the data very closely. Use of the word “poverty” was in slow decline until about 1960. Then in a few years, the prevalence of the word rose about 70%, receding moderating in the early 1970s. The word’s rise resumed in the mid-80s, right around the time of Losing Ground‘s publication. Coincidence? I think not. Murray’s influence is so mighty, he single-handedly changed the words of the English-speaking world.
READER COMMENTS
wjshack
Jun 20 2019 at 5:21pm
Note that Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” was published in 1962.
Stephen Hicks
Jun 20 2019 at 7:47pm
Interesting. I wonder then if Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States, contributed significantly to the big upturn in the early 1960s.
Robert
Jun 21 2019 at 12:06am
Now people measure poverty and then talk about addressing “inequality.”
don bumpass
Jun 21 2019 at 11:37am
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=inequality&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=5&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cinequality%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cinequality%3B%2Cc0
Thaomas
Jun 22 2019 at 9:42am
I wonder if the development of the poverty rte measure is not a more likely cause of the increase in the use of the word. Of curse one could ask wny the index was developed in 1959 rather than 1949 or 1969.
Sol
Jun 24 2019 at 12:39pm
Would be interesting to see this graph juxtaposed with some graphs of measures of poverty…
nobody.really
Jun 26 2019 at 11:03am
I imagine that concerns for poverty (and more so for inequality) are superior goods–that is, something rich societies have the luxury of worrying about. In the depths of the existential threat of WWII, for example, concerns about “the least of these my brothers” go on the back burner.
And this may trigger an availability heuristic (the tendency to regard a phenomenon as more common if we hear about it more): We may expect to hear more discussions about poverty not in societies where everyone’s poor, but in societies when at least some people aren’t. And the more people aren’t poor, the more they may have the resources to focus on discussions of poverty–triggering a false impression that poverty is a growing problem simply because it’s a growing topic.
we might expect to find the greatest discussions in societies where LOTS of people are rich.
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