Poverty lines at the bottom and greed in high places

According to ancient received wisdom there are three kinds of official untruths: lies, damned lies and statistics. The government deals in all three, of course, but is especially proficient in the last. There is a vast army of statisticians on the permanent Federal payroll. Among other numbers they gather with an indefatigable energy are those documenting poverty in this country. The United States Department of Health and Human Services calculates and monitors an official "poverty level" set at a specific dollar figure, which it publishes with the following prudential footnote: "The poverty guidelines are sometimes loosely referred to as the 'federal poverty level,' but that phrase is ambiguous and should be avoided, especially in situations (e.g., legislative or administrative) where precision is important." It takes a while to compile these inexact and imprecise numbers and the most recent ones I could find apply to calendar year 2001. In that year, an American family of four was considered impoverished, in contexts where precision is unimportant, if they had less than $17,650 per annum, except in Alaska, where they could be imprecisely indigent, not to mention quite chilly, with as much as $22,069. The laws of thought require us to believe that American families were not impoverished if their income rose above that level.

How and whether a family of four in Mercer County, N.J. (say) could actually shelter, feed and clothe themselves with an income of about half the Princeton University comprehensive fee are mysteries falling outside the ambitions of this column. What is of interest to me is that a government agency makes an honest effort, however inadequate or imprecise, to calculate and document what might be described as a socially acceptable minimum for the material resources of our citizens.

Hence there is something approaching a national social consensus concerning at least an approximate graph of penury — that is, of having too little money for the social conscience to abide. There is much talk of a vague sort about the dangerous and incremental "gap between the rich and the poor." Yet we have no instrument mapping the boundaries of opulence, let alone for calculating what I shall call the "federal super-surfeit level" — that is, for having way, way more money than is socially conscionable.

Until last week I had never heard of Mr. Richard Grasso, the now former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Turn about is fair play; I freely acknowledge that even today it is unlikely Mr. Grasso has ever heard of me. He certainly must have other things to think about at the moment anyway, since he has just been forced to resign his lucrative job, for the reason that it was in fact too lucrative. Although he does have something stashed away for a rainy day and will not be faced with eating the husks that the swine refuseth, he has nonetheless experienced a mighty and public humiliation.

It is important to grasp that Mr. Grasso has done nothing "wrong." He had broken no law. Raking in obscene amounts of money falls under the ban of no "controlling legal authority," if you recall the marvelous double-talk of Albert Gore, if you remember Albert Gore. All Mr. Grasso did was to negotiate a "compensation package" of roughly a 140 million dollars. His bosses, the board of directors of the NYSE, thought this was appropriate recompense for such an important job so ably performed. They ought to know, since they all were major executives of major enterprises of the sort in which the going rate for a CEO is slightly more than 10 million a year. That was the figure that The New York Times came up with some time ago when in the wake of the Enron fiasco they did a comprehensive survey of major executive salaries. With specific regard to Mr. Grasso and the NYSE there were of course other malodorous features of professional activity involving likely conflicts of interest and a slovenly confusion of the entrepreneurial and the regulatory, but at bottom the Titans of Wall Street had to give way before the force of a public ethical consciousness that, however torpid and flaccid from want of exercise, finally gagged. The man was simply getting too much money, period. It was not a question of law. It was not the Politics of Envy, let alone a revolutionary gesture toward a Socialist redistribution of the nation's wealth. It was embarrassment. And since what would embarrass these guys would shame your average Duroc hog to death, we may at last be moving toward some vague and informal consensus concerning a "federal super-surfeit level." It is so far very inexact and it definitely ought not to be used in situations (e.g., legislative or administrative) where precision is important. But maybe we are beginning to think that in a decent society no one's daily wage ought to be much more than twice the annual income of an family of four living well above the poverty line (outside of Alaska). Who knows? In time we might even approach a shared concern for folks under the poverty line. John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.