Some twenty years ago Robert K. Merton applied the notion of functional analysis to explain the
continuing though maligned existence of the urban political machine: if it continued to exist,
perhaps it fulfilled latent - unintended or unrecognized - positive functions. Clearly it did. Merton
pointed out how the political machine provided central authority to get things done when a
decentralized local government could not act, humanized the services of the impersonal
bureaucracy for fearful citizens, offered concrete help (rather than abstract law or justice) to the
poor, and otherwise performed services needed or demanded by many people but considered
unconventional or even illegal by formal public agencies.
Today, poverty is more maligned than the political machine ever was; yet it, too, is a persistent
social phenomenon. Consequently, there may be some merit in applying functional analysis to
poverty, in asking whether it also has positive functions that explain its persistence.
Merton defined functions as "those observed consequences [of a phenomenon] which make for the
adaptation or adjustment of a given [social] system." I shall use a slightly different definition;
instead of identifying functions for an entire social system, I shall identify them for the interest
groups, socio-economic classes, and other population aggregates with shared values that 'inhabit'
a social system. I suspect that in a modern heterogeneous society, few phenomena are functional
or dysfunctional for the society as a whole, and that most result in benefits to some groups and
costs to others. Nor are any phenomena indispensable; in most instances, one can suggest what
Merton calls "functional alternatives" or equivalents for them, i.e., other social patterns or policies
that achieve the same positive functions but avoid the dysfunctions.
Associating poverty with positive functions seems at first glance to be unimaginable. Of course, the
slumlord and the loan shark are commonly known to profit from the existence of poverty, but they
are viewed as evil men, so their activities are classified among the dysfunctions of poverty.
However, what is less often recognized, at least by the conventional wisdom, is that poverty also
makes possible the existence or expansion of respectable professions and occupations, for
example, penology, criminology, social work, and public health. More recently, the poor have
provided jobs for professional and para-professional "poverty warriors," and for journalists and
social scientists, this author included, who have supplied the information demanded by the revival
of public interest in poverty.
Clearly, then, poverty and the poor may well satisfy a number of positive functions for many
nonpoor groups in American society. I shall describe thirteen such functions - economic, social and
political - that seem to me most significant.