Thomas Sowell's "Poverty Pimps" Poem

Sometime during my social work doctoral education at Indiana University, a disenchanted PhD student introduced me to the term “poverty pimp.” The general meaning seemed to be that we future social work professors were training to make a good living from the poor. I have lately been moved to investigate that term, and have come up with a few items that may flesh out its meaning.

A key source may be Thomas Sowell (1998), whose Poverty Pimps’ Poem reads as follows:

Let us celebrate the poor,
Let us hawk them door to door.
There’s a market for their pain,
Votes and glory and money to gain.
Let us celebrate the poor.
Their ills, their sins, their faulty diction
Flavor our songs and spice our fiction.
Their hopes and struggles and agonies
Get us grants and consulting fees.
Celebrate thugs and clowns,
Give their ignorance all renown.
Celebrate what holds them down,
In our academic gowns.
Let us celebrate the poor.

In remarks preceding that presentation, Sowell referred to his “fellow-economist Walter Williams,” whom Sowell said had calculated the amounts spent annually on poverty alleviation. Sowell concluded that those amounts far exceeded what it would have cost to simply give America’s poor people enough cash to lift them above the poverty line.

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