The Dynamics of Poverty: Why Don’t “the Poor” Act Collectively?

Where the poor form a majority or near-majority, why don’t they vote themselves to power in democracies? In Madagascar, Mozambique, Mali, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, and Bangladesh, where the poor constitute 71, 70, 64, 56, 53, 52, and 50 percent of the population, respectively, why don’t poor groups emerge and take power democratically? Even in countries where the poor form a smaller but still sizable part of the population—such as India (29 percent), Ecuador (35 percent), and the Philippines (37 percent)—why are the politics of poverty not more emphatic, potent, and visible? Traditionally these questions have been answered by referring to factors that create divisions among the poor, such as caste, religion, or tribe; but there is also a more fundamental basis of division, emanating from the separate relationships that different poor people have with poverty itself. Not everyone who is poor was born into poverty. New research shows that large numbers of poor people have fallen into poverty within their lifetimes. Their relationship with poverty is qualitatively different from that of people who have been chronically poor. Different trajectories into and out of poverty define different relationships that produce different identities and interests among subgroups of poor people. Apart from those who have newly fallen into poverty and those who are persistently poor, a further subgroup consists of upwardly mobile poor people on the cusp of escaping poverty. Members of each of these subgroups have quite