Explanations as to why poverty exists and persists over time have bedeviled observers for centuries and have not surprisingly given rise to enormous debates and arguments. All of the great religious creeds - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and all the rest - spend a good deal of time telling their followers what the more fortunate among them should do for the less fortunate, but they say little about why some people have more material wealth than others.
One reason for this absence may be that for most of the history of humankind, the vast majority of people were poor. Most societies consisted of a small wealthy elite and a large number of poor, with little in between, and one reason for this state of affairs lay in the energy available to produce goods and services. Most energy came from animate (i.e., animals, including human beings) sources of energy. Human beings dug the soil and /or often pulled a plow (or guided animals that did); the wealthy had slaves, and the poor did for themselves. Inanimate sources of energy (e.g., water power for a mill) were useful but limited. Poverty was simply a fact of life for the great majority of human beings up until the latter part of the eighteenth century, and explanations as to why that was the case - "the poor ye shall always have with you" - were largely fatalistic in nature.
But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Industrial Revolution changed everything. A whole litany of discoveries and inventions that took advantage of inanimate sources of energy - coal and steam in particular - meant that productivity could be multiplied many times over, and that goods and services previously affordable only by the wealthy started to become available to many more people as the cost per unit dropped. As the nineteenth century advanced and as a middle class began to emerge, it became possible for the first time to ask if poverty might be reduced and eventually eliminated as the Industrial Revolution really took hold and as more and more consumer goods and services at lower prices raised the standard of living for more and more people.
As these fundamental changes took place, competing explanations arose as to why everyone was unable to benefit. One school of thought saw poverty as deprivation - the poor were deprived of basic goods for one reason or another, generally inadequate monetary income. Another saw exploitation as accounting for inequalities in a society - industrial capitalism required that some percentage of people be poor so that the wealthy could thrive. Inequality was yet another explanation; the poor were poor relative to the conditions under which the majority of citizens live in a given society, often because of discrimination based on gender, age, race, class or ethnicity. Structural conditions were yet another; this explanation argued that certain laws or traditions in a society maintain certain groups in poverty by excluding them from education or from other means of improving themselves. Finally, there were cultural and/or individual explanations that argued that individuals (or members of a group) are poor because of certain attitudes or behaviors that they had.
These explanations - and the arguments between and among them - are still very much around as we move into the twenty-first century, as Frances Deviney of the Center for Public Policy Priorities discusses. For simplicity's sake, many scholars (and politicians) have distilled all of these explanations down into two: individualistic versus systemic explanations. The first sees poverty as an individual failing of some sort, arguing that if an economic system gives everyone the chance to do well, then an individual (or group) that does not do well has only itself to blame. In its simplest form, the poor are poor because they are lazy, unwilling to work, and want a hand-out. In contrast, the systemic explanation sees the economic system as imperfect and that some groups or individuals will not or cannot do well because of these imperfections. Thus the system needs adjustment before everyone can do well. In its simplest, the poor are poor because of the system, and nothing will or can change until the system can be changed.
The first of these is a more conservative explanation, stressing as it does individual responsibility and initiative; the role of the state was to stay out of the way and to let the free market economy operate. The second is a more liberal view since it emphasizes the need for the system to be improved; therefore the state has a definite role to play in correcting the shortcomings of the free market. And within the United States these two points of views have been debated for decades on a partisan basis; the Republican Party is associated with the individualistic point of view and the Democratic Party with the systemic.
The situation in Texas is somewhat different. Virtually all historians and observers agree that since it became a state, Texas and Texans have by and large embraced the individualistic perspective. From the late nineteenth century on, when the post-reconstruction constitution was ratified, Texas politics was dominated by the Democratic Party, but that party's ideology was a conservative perspective that stressed "rugged individualism" and a minimal role for the state. And as the Democratic Party became increasing liberal during the 1970s, Texas moved quickly away from its traditional alliance with the Democratic Party and became a Republican stronghold. (This history is discussed in the Texas Politics chapter on political parties. .
Texas thus clearly tends toward the conservative side, but as we have noted, boiling complex social and economic problems down to facile explanations does not provide a complete or especially useful basis for coming to grips with poverty in the state. Rather than take a position on one side or the other, we shall instead examine some facts about poverty in the state that may give us a more comprehensive understanding of why poverty exists and persists in the state as it does.
