Poverty exists because exploitation of others has benefits for the dominant.

This makes the country’s stalled progress on poverty even more baffling. Decade after decade, the poverty rate has remained flat even as federal relief has surged. How could this be? Part of the answer, I learned, lies in the fact that a fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. To understand why, consider welfare. When welfare was administered through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, almost all of its funds were used to provide single-parent families with cash assistance.[12] But when President Bill Clinton reformed welfare in 1996, replacing the old model with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), he transformed the program into a block grant that gives states considerable leeway in deciding how to distribute the money. As a result, states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars. Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.

Desmond, Matthew. Poverty, by America (p. 28). Crown. Kindle Edition. 

One of the big reasons that poverty continues to exist at the scale it does in the US is corruption. Most of the money intended to help poor families gets siphoned off by state legislators and executives for things like Brett Farve’s volleyball stadium at his daughter’s college in Mississippi, the state with the highest rate of child poverty.

What kind of a thought system contributes to this kind of mismanagement and immorality? What kind of thinking leads to human suffering and harm even when resources are available to ameliorate the situation?

The thinking that leads to this kind of dysfunction is based at the egocentric/exploitive stage in the Spiral Dynamics model which is about dominance of the strongest for the benefit of self and one’s immediate group. This way of thinking is considered normal around ages 3 - 7 when adults attempt to teach egocentric children the skills of cooperation and sharing for mutual benefit and facilitate their development to the next stage which is ethnocentric thinking which champions the welfare of the group with which one  identifies and belongs. 

Poverty exists in the United States because the developmental level of the majority of the population has been arrested at this egocentric stage. The thinking and behavior is about “me and mine” rather than “us and ours.”

The egocentric thought system can be thought of as narcissistic and in the US is admired and supported by the majority of the population who elected in 2016 a sociopathic narcissist to be their president. He immediately gave tax cuts to the richest 10% of the population and denigrated poor people as rapists, drug dealers, and people who came here from “shit hole” countries. It is this kind of thinking which leads to the poverty in the United States which is concentrated in the southern states where human enslavement has been the basis for their economic development from the founding of their state and continues today.

The likelihood of poverty rates changing in these states is low as long as the thought system of the people who elect their governmental leaders does not mature to higher levels. The esteem for the rich and disdain for the poor must change if the belief system and consequent behavior is to change. 

As we have learned from the civil rights era, the best way to bring about social change is not in changing beliefs but in changing behavior. Behavior is changed when the consequences for behavior changes with new sets of rewards and punishments. Behavior often has to change before beliefs change because new behavior facilitates the development of new thinking. 

Corruption often is rewarding and therefore there is an incentive to engage in it. Martin Luther King, Jr. said he realized that he could not change the attitude of racists. What he was attempting to do was make discrimination illegal. Social change occurs when the incentives for behavior changes. Poverty exists because those in power make money exploiting human resources. This exploitation takes many forms but the dynamic is the same based on a thought system which thinks that dominating others for one’s own benefit is desirable.

Editor’s note: This is one of several articles on poverty and the social welfare system in the United States.