It's SUPER TUESDAY... well, not technically, but it's Tuesday, and wouldn't it be super to talk more politics?
The politically correct line
There is a certain element of political correctness I never quite accepted about the proper way to reference problems. The first time I remember suspecting I was an unwilling player in this game was in college when I felt uncomfortable every time my professors said 'socioeconomic status'. My discomfort wasn't an issue with the phrase's intended use, it just felt like for our purposes in Economics classes it was a lie, or at least a sleight of hand, and I didn't immediately know why this was the accepted method. It felt to me like a blanket term that described anything bearing no resemblance to a comfortable middle class lifestyle. I understood the term was meant to capture a range of factors that influenced social standing, but it seemed to me that for the analysis we were doing separating 'poverty level' from these other considerations would have made for better work than lumping everything under a more comfortable phrase. Eventually, I figured out that playing the game was better than inventing an opponent, and simply went along with the terminology until I forgot my freshman objection.
I thought back to those days recently when Bernie Sanders officially suspended his presidential bid. The one thing I never understood about Bernie was why he didn't just say his campaign goal was to end poverty. He should have said it, over and over, until typing 'poverty' into Google would return his website. To his credit, Uncle Bernie did say a lot of things that would move us much closer to the ideal, he even said he wanted to end child poverty, which is an important subset of poverty, but he never stated the big idea so simply, so clearly, as others have done. And it's not like the point missed him, he understood that even in the context of significant human rights failures poverty reduction by any government is an accomplishment worth lauding.
Folks, most voters are in favor of candidates who promise to end endless conflicts. It's a good strategy because democracies are, or so at least the theory goes, not designed for prolonged states of war. Well, we've had troops on the ground since Lyndon Johnson declared war in 1964. Are we winning? I wonder what the effect on Bernie's campaign would have been had he simplified his message. I'm going to lift everyone above the poverty line. I'm going to end poverty, we're going to end, we're going to win the war on poverty, and end the poverty line. We're going to erase the line. Erase the line! Obviously, I can't be sure if this would have made any difference (and since he's so old, it's possible he invented the poverty line, making him an unlikely advocate for its end - erase the line? I wrote the damn line!!). But what I suspect is that since it took me so long (four plus years) until I realized he was the closest thing I'll probably ever see to a pure 'end poverty' candidate, it's likely there are others still out there who never realized it, and never will, so I suggest future candidates get in the habit of stating their line in the simplest possible terms.
Simplicity is often vastly underrated, especially by those who wrestle with complex problems until they pin down complex solutions. Sanders always came across to me as a complex thinker so I suppose it's possible he made a deliberate decision to base his campaign message on, well, his messages. If that was the case, then maybe he forgot that it takes people a long time to come around to new ideas, whether that be as simple as a wearing a face mask against a pandemic, or as complex as imagining a brave new world. In the real world, even one variable can be confounding, and if it doesn't line up with what we know, we find it hard to cross the line and besides, most lines are impossible to cross anyway.
But wouldn't it be something, a brave new world, where poverty is treated like a true emergency? Perhaps with firetrucks delivering food, rent, and smart phones to those who've briefly awoken into the nightmare of the American dream? I'll stay patient for now, I guess four more years at least, because I learned how in college, in fact I learned it from this kid I once knew, his problem was that he couldn't figure it out, he couldn't figure out why all the smart people around him wrote 'socioeconomic status', filling it into every blank space above the poverty line, until one day he saw that if you need the line, you'll fall in line.
