Poverty Is a Crime
50 million Europeans, the invisible face of poverty, and the question of who is responsible.
When I was at school, our teacher gave us an assignment.
The subject was a sentence: “Poverty is a crime.”
We had to develop an argument either for or against it. I don’t remember what I wrote. I don’t even remember whether I agreed or disagreed.
I have a vague recollection that the expression was associated with the Puritans, although I may be confusing its origins with the ideas surrounding it.
What I do remember is the question itself.
At the time, it was just another school assignment. Something to think about, discuss, and eventually put down on paper.
Yesterday, I came across a piece of news that brought that sentence back to me.
According to Dan Jørgensen, the European Commissioner for Energy, nearly 50 million Europeans are unable to heat their homes adequately because of high energy prices.
Fifty million.
I stopped at that number.
Italy has a population of roughly 59 million. Imagine almost an entire country unable to heat its homes adequately.
And what does that actually mean?
It means spending winter evenings in a cold living room, wearing extra layers of clothing indoors, trying to sleep in a bedroom that never quite warms up.
But it also means something less visible.
Cold homes are not just uncomfortable. They can contribute to respiratory infections and worsen asthma and other chronic conditions, potentially leading to additional medical expenses and time away from work.
The number becomes even harder to accept when I start putting faces to it.
The woman who cleans the offices in my building, whom I sometimes meet in the lift when I arrive at work.
The man at the supermarket checkout.
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The student working hard to pass university exams.
Children. Older people. People who get up every morning, go to work, study, look after their families and try to live ordinary lives.
I don’t know their financial circumstances. I don’t know whether their homes are warm.
But any of them could be among those fifty million.
And that is what unsettles me most: poverty is not always visible. It doesn’t necessarily announce itself. It can be sitting next to us on the train, standing behind a supermarket checkout, or sharing the same lift.
Fifty million is not an abstraction.
It is fifty million lives, each with its own worries, obligations, hopes and daily compromises.
When did poverty become something we associate with personal failure?
We are accustomed to explanations that place responsibility on the individual.
You should have studied harder. You should have found a better job. You should have saved more. You should have made different choices.
There is always something the poor could supposedly have done differently.
And perhaps this is why poverty is so uncomfortable to look at. Because acknowledging it means questioning the reassuring idea that our lives are entirely the result of our own decisions.
Yet we keep asking people to justify their poverty, almost as if they had to prove that they deserve our compassion.
I eventually came across the work of Henry George, an American economist who gave a speech entitled The Crime of Poverty in 1885. His argument was that being poor was not itself a crime. Rather, poverty could be the consequence of a social system that allowed wealth and opportunity to be distributed so unequally.
More than a century later, I wonder how much we have really changed the way we look at poverty.
This winter, millions of Europeans will have to make choices that most of us would rather not imagine: whether to turn up the heating, whether to spend money on food or warmth, whether to tolerate another cold evening at home.
And I keep thinking about that number.
Fifty million.
I don’t know what I would have written in that school assignment today.
But I know that I would find it much harder to treat the subject as an abstract exercise.
If poverty is a crime, why are we so often looking at the people who suffer from it instead of looking at the conditions that make it possible?
