Poverty of the Imagination
An image from a pamphlet produced by the Chilean government of Eduardo Frei in 1969 promotes cooperative labor as the way to modernize the countryside. The pamphlet, “Relato de un Campesino” (A Peasant’s Tale), is subtitled “La gran pelea entre lo nuevo y lo viejo,” (The great struggle between the new and the old), reflecting anxieties about development and economic change. The government intended for the illustrated pamphlet to bring the peasantry into the process of development.”
In the last decade or so, people around the world have been having a global debate about income and wealth inequality. Seventy years ago, there was a similar conversation that was focused on poverty. The issues of poverty and inequality are obviously related but not identical. (The economist Branko Milanovic tells a story of being at Davos one year and finding that its wealthy attendees were eager to talk about poverty, because they felt they could be part of the solution, while they wanted nothing to do with talking about inequality, because it implicated them as part of the problem.) But one thing that these two conversations have in common is that both debates brought together anxieties about the relationship of economic output to political order. Today, some worry about whether high inequality makes political polarization likely and encourages “populist” figures that erode democratic systems. In the 1950s, many of that era’s thinkers were preoccupied with the possibility that poverty would lead people to support Communism.
My current research seeks to understand the debate that took place during the early Cold War. I am looking at the social sciences of poverty and inequality, from anthropology to sociology to economics, and considering how different schools of thought got institutionalized, or implemented, or failed to do so. I’m using the era’s wealthiest and most important foundation—the Ford Foundation—as a central hub, so that the book will double as an exploration of the Foundation’s activities in Latin America in that era. The title of the work—Poverty of the Imagination—expresses a double meaning. Poverty is of course very real, but the varying ways of explaining and understanding it existed also as bodies of knowledge too, and ones that were sometimes quite limited. The chapters of the book explore different approaches to the problem, including modernization theory, dependency theory, the culture of poverty hypothesis, marginality theory, and neoliberalism.
For example, it was “modernization” theory that was most closely embedded in the approach of the Ford Foundation. The Foundation began disbursing large grants in 1950. Formulating an approach as the Korean War was getting underway, it shared perspectives (and personnel) with the U.S. government. Its first president in this era was Paul Hoffman, straight from administering the Marshall Plan in Europe. It defined its mission expansively, but essentially sought to improve living standards around the world, and, by doing so, diminish the appeal of Communism.
The “modernization” theorists were an interdisciplinary group of social scientists in the United States, whose analysis of the world situation was that the societies were on an essentially similar trajectory towards the “modern,” which they assumed was best exemplified by the United States, with its combination of democratic politics and an economic directed towards the satisfaction of consumer wants. Opposed to this were the “traditional” societies of the world, which were pre-scientific in their understanding. In between were “transitional” groups—a dangerous phase, thought the modernization theorists, because of the possibility that they would choose the deviant modernization of Communism rather than what they assumed was the proper one. The modernization theorists assumed that the way to get the “good” outcomes were to train elites that would guide their societies in the right directions. The Ford Foundation funded their work, and, in turn, their work justified the kind of grants that the Ford Foundation offered: to agricultural programs that would increase crop yields, for example, or to university departments that could train talented students who might take on key leadership roles in democratic governments.
Modernization theory’s inherent anti-totalitarianism made it attractive to some. One frequent partner for the Ford Foundation and U.S. scholars, for example, was the Italo-Argentine sociologist Gino Germani, who diagnosed not Communism but Peronism in Argentina as a kind of modernization-gone-awry. But other schools of thought challenged modernization theory either from the left (such as dependency theory, which situated the problem with underdevelopment in global capitalist relations of production) or the right (such as neoliberalism, which situated the problem of underdevelopment as a lack of insertion in global capitalist relations of production). Other ideas that I cover, such as the culture of poverty and marginality theory, emerged in specific contexts, influencing the War on Poverty in the U.S. and the Christian Democrats in Chile, respectively. In the end, the book will help make sense of how developmentalist projects of the 50s and 60s foundered, leaving the field to neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s. Because this is a historical work analyzing the practices of different fields—sociology, anthropology, and economics—it requires transdisciplinary thinking.
Latin America remains the most unequal region of the world. (Although some sub-Saharan African countries have moved ahead of countries like Brazil and Guatemala on the individual country rankings, where they used to lead.) Most countries in the world fall within some sort of band on the scale of the global distribution of wealth. The poorest residents of the United States are still relatively well-off, by global standards, even if they don’t have enough money to live a dignified life by the standards of where they live. But in Brazil, say, or Mexico, you can find people who are as poor as any on the planet, and people who are as rich as any on the planet. That makes economic inequality one of its defining characteristics. I hope that this project will help make sense of why that is so, and explain how previous schemes that hoped to change frequently had the effect of reinforcing it.
About the Author
Patrick Iber is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. He writes frequently for publications including The New Republic, Dissent, and Nueva Sociedad.