Tag Archives: poverty

“The Poor You Have Always With You”

A few statistics about my state of Indiana (the state that Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence brags is “a state that works”); these are facts that should “afflict the comfortable” and motivate the rest of us to support policies that will “comfort the afflicted”:

According to the latest Census numbers: More than 1 in 3 Hoosiers remain below self-sufficiency despite increased employment, 21.5% of Indiana’s children live in poverty, and the number of Hoosiers in poverty persistently hovers around one million.

A report on the Status of Working Families in Indiana 2015, issued by the Institute for Working Families, puts the information in an Infographic including state SNAP & TANF responses to poverty, and highlights what it calls the “21st Century Job Swap” from high & middle-paying to low-skilled, low-income jobs by industry;

The June data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Indiana has a 108,400 jobs deficit when population growth since the recession is factored in.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that Indiana ranks #30 in child well-being, having slipped 2 spots relative to other states since 2014.

Women are doing even worse than children in national rankings: Indiana is dead last in Work & Family rankings, 39th in Employment & Earnings, 37th in Poverty & Opportunity, and Indiana received a D- in the National Partnership’s Expecting Better report, “the most comprehensive analysis to date of state laws and regulations governing paid leave, paid sick days, protections for pregnant workers and other workplace rights for expecting and new parents in the United States”

Despite the fact that the minimum wage cannot support even a single adult in any county in the state, Indiana’s legislature has not only refused to raise that wage– but has preempted the authority of cities and counties to do so (or to provide paid leave, or enact environmental regulations, etc.)

To add insult to injury, in 2015, Governor Pence diverted three and a half million dollars of desperately needed TANF funds to  anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

There is much more, but rather than get bogged down in the details of one state’s inability to raise living standards–an inability that, unfortunately, is not unique to Indiana–we “comfortable” Americans need to ask ourselves some hard questions, beginning with one posed by eminent economist Robert Samuelson in a recent column for the Washington Post: Is ending poverty impossible?

Samuelson begins by pointing out that neither Presidential candidate has focused on the poor. Clinton’s proposals to decrease inequality are aimed primarily at the middle class, and Trump’s tax cuts would benefit the rich and upper middle class.

Samuelson cites two reasons for ignoring the plight of the truly poor: Poor people don’t vote (they are a disproportionate percentage of nonvoters); and there is no consensus on anti-poverty policies. (That shouldn’t come as a surprise; these days, when there is consensus on anything, that’s a surprise.)

The lack of will to attack poverty can be traced to attitudes about the poor and lack of faith in government. Americans’ widespread suspicion that social welfare recipients are “playing the system” (despite reams of data to the contrary) can be traced all the way back to Fifteenth Century English Poor Laws that forbid “giving alms to the sturdy beggar.” A bastardized Calvinism reinforced the belief that people are poor because they are disfavored by God, probably because they are morally defective. (Or, to use George W. Bush’s more recent formulation of that patronizing analysis in promoting his Faith Based Initiative, because the poor “lack middle-class values.”)

If we ever get serious about eliminating poverty, we will need to do two things, and neither will be simple or easy. We will need to marshal armies of community organizers who can persuade poor people to vote (despite the formidable barriers to their votes put in place by legislators who would not benefit from their participation); and we will need to educate the “comfortable” about the reality of poverty–and especially about the plight of the millions of hard-working Americans who put in forty hours or more a week for wages insufficient to sustain them.

Unless we can do those two things–and not so incidentally, fix our gridlocked political system–the poor will always be with us.

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Fascinating!

On the original Star Trek series, when Mr. Spock was confronted with a new and unexpected bit of information, he would raise one Vulcan eyebrow and intone “fascinating.”

I don’t have a Vulcan eyebrow, but “fascinating” was my reaction to a 2013 academic paper written by Johannas Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, with the not-very-sexy title “Household Response to Income Changes: Evidence from an Unconditional Cash Transfer Program in Kenya.”

Stop yawning, because this is important. And fascinating.

In the U.S., lawmakers (and not just right-wing ones) have long taken a punitive approach to the poor. Even self-labeled “compassionate conservatives” like former President George W. Bush have proposed programs that would “help welfare recipients develop middle-class values.” (Because clearly, if you are poor, you must be morally defective.)  American attitudes toward the needy have their roots in 15th Century English Poor Laws that prohibited “giving alms to the sturdy beggar.”

American social welfare programs built on that model have numerous, demeaning—and costly—restrictions on eligibility. After all, if “we” don’t watch “them,” they’ll cheat us hardworking taxpayers.

Most recently, a number of state legislators have piled on; convinced that any assistance allowing recipient discretion would “obviously’ lead to imprudent choices, they have even passed rules about what welfare recipients can buy at the grocery store with their food stamps.

Imagine what would happen if we simply sent poor people some cash! (Um…perhaps like Social Security…?)

Well, it turns out we don’t have to imagine it; an NGO called “GiveDirectly” has been doing just that in Kenya. GiveDirectly chooses beneficiaries at random; the only criteria is income below poverty level. The organization is rigorously evidence-based, and the paper I came across is one of several independent research projects examining the results.

So what happened?

Recipients spent more on health and education. Alcohol and tobacco expenditures did not increase. The researchers found

no evidence for an increase in tension within households, no significant spillover effects on non-recipient households, and no general equilibrium effects at the village level, with the single exception that we observe an increase in female empowerment at the village level. Together, these findings suggest that simple cash transfers may not have the perverse effects that some policymakers feel they would have, which has led for a clear policy preference for conditional cash transfers or in-kind transfers.

I came across this article because I have recently become aware of psychological studies connecting poverty with a host of deleterious psychological consequences, and I was exploring the literature reporting on those consequences for a book I’m writing. (I had previously understood the link between insecurities of various kinds and social unrest, but I was unaware of this particular line of research.)

As an article in New America Weekly reported, the human brain has specific reactions to any form of scarcity; it seems that cognitive capacity can only be stretched so far. This has been dubbed the “bandwidth tax,” shorthand for the proposition that scarcity inhibits the brain’s ability to focus on multiple tasks. This isn’t a big surprise to anyone who has agonized over whether to use her limited funds to buy baby formula or see the pediatrician.

Interestingly, the levels of stress associated with poverty can be assessed physically; people produce a “stress hormone” called cortisol, levels of which can be measured.

Haushofer and Shapiro measured them.

Transfer recipients experience large increases in psychological well-being, and several types of transfers lead to reductions in levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Apparently, cash transfers to desperately poor people are followed by increased access to education and medical care, and lowered levels of a stress hormone that interferes with good decision-making.

Fascinating.

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Double Whammy

A friend from Wisconsin often shares news reported in that state’s media. Most recently, he sent me an article reporting on the troubling results of research into poverty and public health.

Malia Jones is an assistant scientist and social epidemiologist working in Wisconsin. As she notes, her conclusions about increases in poverty despite the economic recovery are consistent with those reached by other scholars.

We didn’t look at explanations for that but other people have, and I think what’s happening is that people at the low end of the economic spectrum are not benefiting from recovery. They’re really being left behind. So inequality is increasing in the face of an expanding economy.

Jones’ work is one more confirmation that, as she says, low-income Americans are being left behind. But her analysis didn’t stop there, and her discussion of both the immediate and long-term implications requires attention.

In short, poor children in America are getting a “double whammy.”

Jones notes that the number of children living in poverty has increased since the Great Recession, and that the existence of children living in poverty is not only a humanitarian issue, but also a critical public health issue. As she points out, exposure to the myriad problems that accompany an impoverished childhood can lead to a lifetime of disability.

It’s those kinds of stressors like housing insecurity, not being sure if there’s going to be food for dinner, living in a crummy neighborhood with violence, those stressors can impair normal brain development.

Impaired brain development often leads to behavioral outcomes; as anyone who has taught in a low-income area can attest, it affects school performance in a variety of ways. Children of poverty often lack the opportunity or means to develop the sorts of skill sets common among middle and higher income students. That, in turn, affects later access to jobs, trapping such children in a cycle of poverty.

Living in poverty also increases the likelihood of poor health. Living in poverty is a major risk factor for obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and even premature death.

It seems unconscionable that the United States would ignore the lifetime health effects of poverty on poor children who are already living in sub-optimal and stressful conditions.  Even the self-satisfied and clueless scolds who insist that poor people just need to work harder can’t hold children responsible for their impoverished situations.  Surely, even the adamant opponents of Obamacare, Medicaid and other efforts to make health care affordable can’t believe that it is either moral or economically reasonable to deprive children of adequate medical attention.

And surely, even self-described fiscal conservatives must realize that the long-term costs of neglecting the most basic needs of poor children are far higher than the costs of timely intervention.

Why is it that American public policy choices so often make me think of the adage: penny wise, pound foolish?

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The Pope’s Encyclical

Constitutional lawyers who work on issues of equal rights are familiar with the concept of “disparate impact,” a term describing laws that are facially neutral but nevertheless have a very different effect upon citizens who are differently situated. Sometimes that different impact is intended; often it is not.

What brought that bit of “legalese” to mind was this recent headline in the New York Times: “Pope Francis to Explore Climate’s Impact on the World’s Poor.”

The article began by discussing a meeting between high-level representatives of the U.N. and the Pope:

Mr. Ban, the United Nations secretary general, had brought the leaders of all his major agencies to see Pope Francis, a show of organizational muscle and respect for a meeting between two global institutions that had sometimes shared a bumpy past but now had a mutual interest.

The agenda was poverty, and Francis inveighed against the “economy of exclusion” as he addressed Mr. Ban’s delegation at the Apostolic Palace. But in an informal meeting with Mr. Ban and his advisers, Francis shifted the discussion to the environment and how environmental degradation weighed heaviest on the poor.

The encyclical—which has since been formally issued–includes an economic critique of the way in which global capitalism, while unquestionably helping lift millions out of poverty, has also facilitated both the exploitation of nature and vast inequities among people—even people living in the same countries. That message makes the encyclical a distinctly political document, no matter how forcefully the Vatican insists that it is intended to be a statement of theology, not politics.

The ultimate effect of the Pope’s encyclical is as impossible to predict at this point as is the ultimate outcome of climate change, but the Pontiff has raised two issues that are seldom recognized in the heated debates over climate policy: the interrelated nature of the policy decisions we make and the social and economic systems we institutionalize; and the wildly disparate impact of those decisions and systems on those who are “differently situated,” as lawyers might put it.

The term “privilege” is usually connected to a descriptor like “white” or “male,” but we might also consider what privilege means for other kinds of diversity in the context of global climate change. We also tend to think of poverty as the absence of money and material goods, but poverty includes many other deficits, including an individual’s ability to withstand or recover from incidents of violent weather (Katrina, anyone?), to cope with economic changes and job losses linked to climate change, and eventually, the means to move away from newly uninhabitable locations.

Viewed in this way, “privilege” may mean having access to the resources needed to deal with economic and ecological upheavals, and “poverty” may describe those whose life choices are far more dramatically limited.

Whatever else the encyclical does or does not accomplish, it illuminates an underappreciated characteristic of inequality—susceptibility to disparate impact.

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Public Transportation Matters

One of the more galling recent debates in Indiana’s dysfunctional General Assembly was over the question whether Indianapolis could ask its own citizens whether we want public transportation enough to tax ourselves to support it. The Grand Poobahs of our legislature were reluctant to allow us that measure of self-government, but after restricting the scope of our decision-making, they finally authorized a referendum.

There are lots of reasons why public transportation is essential to urban America’s economic vitality and quality of life. Frequent, reliable and attractive public transportation reduces traffic congestion, improves air quality and saves citizens’ money. Businesses that employ lots of entry-level workers rely on transit to get employees to and from work. And of course, low-income folks, the disabled and the elderly are particularly dependent upon public transportation.

A new study from Harvard adds social mobility to the list.

The research found that access to good, reliable transportation is “the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty.” In fact,

The relationship between transportation and social mobility is stronger than that between mobility and several other factors, like crime, elementary-school test scores or the percentage of two-parent families in a community, said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the researchers on the study.

For most middle-class folks, good public transportation is an amenity–an attractive convenience of urban life that is unfortunately missing in central Indiana.

For poor folks, it’s an escape route.

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