The following is an excerpt from our March issue:

By: Jonathan Lindberg

There are really two kinds of books on poverty. The first are stories of sympathy. These books are meant to pull on the heartstrings. They come with pictures and usually offer guilt. There are protests, there are cries for utopia, but these studies offer little substance when it comes to actually dealing with poverty. The second approach is one of numbers. Poverty is a problem of economics. Forget the individual. The key to eliminating poverty is basic economics applied properly.

The End of Poverty, which was reviewed in these pages (09/05) falls into the second category. Despite its utopian title, economist Jeffery Sachs acknowledges poverty can never be eliminated. Still, with economics-done-right, extreme poverty (the one-billion souls in this world that live on less than one-dollar a day) can be greatly reduced. It is a book worth reading.

However, neither approach seems to tell the whole story. Either the individual is ignored, or they are elevated to the station of sainthood.

How the Other Half Lives (reprinted Barnes & Noble Books, 242 pages), written by New York Tribune reporter Jacob Riis during the height of the New York tenement epidemic of the late nineteenth century, offers a relevant look at the problem of poverty that is neither utopian nor cold. For this reason alone, the book is still read, though the tenements have disappeared. The book has recently been released in an updated edition, complete with introduction and notes.

The brilliance of Riis is his ability to remain detached from his characters, while at the same time deeply involved in their plight. Riis was the first to use images to heighten the feeling on poverty. However, his pictures (published in the new edition) are not syrupy and manufactured. They are raw. Riis was famous for refusing to give money to the begging poor. However, Riis was also known for providing food for children of families that were packed into suffocating tenements.

The man, like the poverty around him, was a study in paradoxes.

However, Riis understood the problem of poverty in a way which few are able. Poverty is more than a problem of economics; poverty is a problem of society. To put it blunt, poverty is our problem. It is this feeling, above all else, that emerges from his writings.

In perhaps the most poignant of chapters entitled, The Man with the Knife, Riis tells of a lower class worker from a New York tenement that every day would watch the carriages ride by, adorned in gold and filled with boxes fresh from department stores. One day, in a fit of rage, the lower class worker ran through that crowded street corner stabbing whomever he could.

Ignorant poverty is a problem to be sure, however, so too is ignorant wealth.

This is not to say Riis offers apologies for poverty and the crime that so often follows. In fact, much of How the Other Half Lives is devoted to describing the gangs of New York that ruled these neighborhoods burdened by tenements.

Though Riis does not offer apologies for the poor, he also refuses to offer apologies for the individual who flaunts their wealth, those impervious to the great needs around them. It is here that Riis describes poverty as a problem with society.

“Are you not looking too much to the material condition of these people,” a good minister said to me after a lecture last winter, “and forgetting the inner man?” I told him, “No! For you cannot expect to find an inner man to appeal to in the worst tenement-house surroundings.”

Poverty, which plagues entire zip codes in Memphis, dehumanizes the individual. It leaves them unable to see themselves, only their need. It tears-down their inner man.

Riis puts it like this, when it comes to addressing the need around, “You must first put a man where he can respect himself, for you cannot expect to find a sound core in rotten fruit.”