Ending Poverty in America

How to Restore the American Dream

John Edwards, Marion Crain, Arne L. Kalleberg, John Edwards, Marion Crain, Arne L. Kalleberg

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781595587329
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

An " engrossing collection of rigorously researched articles" from Elizabeth Warren, Jared Bernstein, William Julius Wilson, and more ( Publishers Weekly ). Can the wealthiest nation in the world do anything to combat the steadily rising numbers of Americans living in poverty—or the tens of millions of Americans living in "near poverty"? In this book, some of the country's most prominent scholars, businesspeople, and community activists answer with a resounding yes. Published in conjunction with one of the country's leading anti-poverty centers, Ending Poverty in America brings together respected social scientists, journalists, neighborhood organizers, and business leaders—both liberal and conservative—to tackle hot-button issues such as job creation, schools, housing, and family-friendly social policy, offering a template for a renewed public debate and a genuine effort to confront this urgent issue that undermines the long-term security of our nation. Contributors include: Jared Bernstein, Anita Brown-Graham, Carol Mendez Cassell, Richard Freeman, Angela Glover-Blackwell, Jacob Hacker, Harry Holzer, Jack F. Kemp, Ronald Mincy, Katherine S. Newman, Melvin L. Oliver, Dennis Orthner, David K. Shipler, Beth Shulman, Michael A. Stegman, Elizabeth Warren, William Julius Wilson.

PART ONE

CONFRONTING POVERTY AND DECLINING OPPORTUNITY

Although the federal government defines poverty according to a set of income guidelines, the chapters in Part I make clear that poverty is far more complex; its tentacles touch all Americans. It is not a category, but a continuum of economic insecurity, a lack of opportunity, and this suggests that solutions to poverty must be crafted with an eye toward universality.

In “Connecting the Dots” David Shipler describes how poverty looks from the bottom. The whole of poverty is much larger than the sum of its parts, much more insidious than a low income. Poverty is also a lack of assets and a mountain of debt, compounded by hardships as varied as those who are caught in its clutches. Health problems, poor nutrition, lack of affordable housing, difficulties with accessing transportation, and substandard education intertwine in the lives of the poor. Simply put, poverty is the absence of choices, a moment-by-moment hand-to-mouth existence that defies planning and saving; poverty is expensive. Shipler’s eloquent portrayal of the human face of poverty shows how the structural forces that shape poverty intertwine with the cultural forces that perpetuate it. Trying to address the many-headed hydra of poverty by cutting off only one of the heads is an incomplete solution; the hydra will simply grow another head. Shipler argues for gateways to multiple services to replace our existing system of separate silos and urges us to harness the best in ourselves to redress poverty.

In “Economic Mobility in the United States: How Much Is There and Why Does It Matter?” Jared Bernstein describes the permeability of the barriers between those traditionally described as poor, the working poor, and the increasingly insecure middle class. Tracking the economic progress of families across the life cycle, he shows how the gap between the richest and poorest Americans has widened at the same time that economic mobility has declined or stagnated in the United States, rendering attainment of the American Dream a myth for many families. Moreover, the legacy of poverty is so powerful that it would take a poor family of four almost 10 generations to achieve the income of a middle-class family: for the poorest Americans, class has become a form of caste. The story is worse for black families: downward mobility is increasing, and black individuals and families are more likely to stagnate in poverty or to fall into it. Bernstein attributes much of this to inherited wealth patterns and educational access and observes how the absence of social safety nets in the United States increases class-related disadvantage.

Elizabeth Warren details the growing instability of the middle class in “The Vanishing Middle Class.” Without a strong middle class there is nothing for the poor to lift themselves toward. Although the median middle-class income has risen in dollars, the increase is almost entirely attributable to working mothers’ entry into the labor force. Most middle-class families today bring home two paychecks; single-earner households have slipped down the class ladder. Even families with two labor-market participants are struggling, however, because fixed costs are rising. Warren documents the startling rise in expenditures on housing, medical insurance, transportation, child care, and taxes. She recommends innovation in credit rules to better protect the poor and the middle class from an aggressive and sometimes usurious credit marketplace.

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1

Connecting the Dots

David K. Shipler

Since September 11, 2001, we have been told that if only we had connected the dots, we might have foiled the plot. To fight terrorism, it seems, we have to draw lines among scattered facts until a complete picture emerges.

The same is true of poverty. To understand it and to fight it, we have to connect the dots. The far-flung problems that burden an impoverished American—housing and health, transportation and debt—may seem unrelated to one another, but they are all part of a whole, and they interact in surprising ways. Each element of vulnerability is worsened by the entire whirlwind of hardship.

WHAT IS POVERTY?

The federal government defines poverty very simply. If you were a single parent with three children and earned $19,874 in 2005, you were poor.¹ If you earned a dollar more, you were not. Naturally, working families at the bottom know very well that getting out of poverty is more complicated than showing a passport and crossing a frontier.

Poverty is not just income, and using a year’s income as the only index is like portraying a complex life with one still photograph. You may catch the essence, or you may miss the full ebb and flow of suffering and struggle. Poverty is not just income.

Copyright 2006 by David K. Shipler.

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Poverty is also debt. The wealthiest 10 percent of the country’s households had an average net worth in 2004 of $3.11 million, according to the Federal Reserve, up 6.1 percent from 2001. But the poorest 25 percent, whose assets equaled their debts in 2001, dropped to a net worth of minus $1,400 in 2004. In other words, they owed more than they owned.²

I met such a man while researching my book The Working Poor: Invisible in America.³ His name was Willie Goodell. While he was unemployed and without medical insurance, he never saw a dentist, so whenever he got a cavity and a tooth ached, he went to an emergency room. If you show up with an emergency, hospitals are required by law to treat you, but they can also bill you, so Willie ran up $10,000 in debt that he could not pay. Even after he got a roofing job, whose wage put him above the poverty line, his credit report was so bad that he couldn’t get a phone installed. Such is the way of debt, a burden of the past carrying a hard history into the present. It restricts the future by draining off options, stifling choice, and sapping a person’s power.

Poverty is a sense of powerlessness, often a learned helplessness in which choices seem absent. Today’s decisions appear deceptively small, without long-term consequences. The timeline of planning is relentlessly short, with little room for imagining that a deed done now will have benefit much later. A poor person on the edge of crisis is trapped in a perpetual moment of acute fragility.

Poverty is relative. A Vietnamese farmer who owns a water buffalo to plow his few acres of rice paddy is not poor in Vietnam. But a Mexican farmworker paid by the bucket of cucumbers he harvests, and crammed with five other men into the concrete cell of a miserable barrack in eastern North Carolina, is poor in America.

The working poor stand on the margins of an affluent society looking in, unable to enjoy the comfort to which they contribute. The single parent with three children, working a full 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, must earn $9.55 an hour to stay at the poverty line.⁴ This does not happen in many low-skilled jobs, no matter how essential to the economy they are. And so the man who washes cars does not own one. The assistant teacher cannot afford to put her own two children in the day-care center where she works. The woman who files canceled checks in the back room of a bank has a balance in her own checking account of $2.02.

The working poor harvest sweet potatoes in time for Thanksgiving. They cut trees in time for Christmas. The fruits of their labor are in our lives every day, yet we rarely see them. Even when we encounter them face-to-face stocking shelves in Wal-Mart or checking us out at the supermarket, we do not see them as whole people, and we surely do not see them as poor. They are hidden in plain sight, to borrow a phrase from Edgar Allan Poe.

The reason for their invisibility is that they wear their jobs like camouflage, blending into the American Dream, the American Myth, which holds that anyone who works hard can prosper. It is such an important myth in defining what we imagine to be our reality that Richard Wright called it “the truth of the power of the wish.”

THE AMERICAN MYTH AND ANTIMYTH

A society’s myths are often valuable, as is this one about the American Dream. It is useful because it sets a high standard, a lofty goal to which we aspire. And the gap between the goal and the reality is a gap that most Americans yearn to close. That is a noble yearning.

The myth has a judgmental side, however, for if it is true that anyone who works hard can prosper in America, then it must also be true that anyone who does not prosper does not work hard. So this myth is a coin with two sides: one an ideal, one a condemnation.

Alongside the myth stands the antimyth, which holds societal institutions, not individuals, responsible for poverty. The failures of public schools, private enterprise, and government programs line up to thwart even the most persistent ambitions of those who begin life as poor. So holds the antimyth.

The myth and the antimyth parallel the conservative Republican and the liberal Democratic sides of the debate over poverty. This is a sterile game of blame. Conservatives tend to see individuals and families as responsible for their own predicaments; liberals often fault the private sector and government alone.

But real people do not fit comfortably into such neat boxes. I’ve had trouble finding poor folks whose own behavior has not contributed something to their hardships: having babies out of wedlock, dropping out of school, doing drugs, showing up late to work or not at all. Yet it is also difficult to find behavior that has not somehow been inherited from the legacy of being badly parented, badly schooled, badly housed in neighborhoods where the horizon of possibility is so near at hand that it blinds people to their own potential for imagination.

Conservatives have their pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, the internal individual and family dysfunctions, and liberals have theirs, the external failed institutions. Imagine if, in this age of political stalemate between the extremes, conservatives who care and liberals who dare to listen would each bring their pieces of the puzzle to the table and assemble them all together. Then they would have a full picture of the problems of poverty. You cannot solve a problem without defining it, and if you don’t allow yourself a complete definition, you will never approach a thorough solution. Connect the dots.

In the 1950s anthropologist Oscar Lewis popularized the term “culture of poverty,” which has since been twisted into an epithet used by the Right to absolve the society of responsibility for the poor.⁵ But I don’t think that poverty is a culture. It is not an array of rituals, mores, and values passed down from generation to generation. It is, rather, an ecological system of interactions among individuals and families, on the one hand, and on the other, the environment of neighborhoods, housing, schools, government programs, and the private economy. Altering this ecology of poverty is not easy, but it is also not impossible.

THE ECOLOGY OF POVERTY

When asthma attacks brought an eight-year-old boy repeatedly to the pediatrics department of the Boston Medical Center, doctors prescribed the usual steroid inhalers, but they doubted that the treatment would work, for they knew from the mother that her apartment had a leaky pipe and wall-to-wall carpeting, perfect for mold and dust mites, features of poor housing that studies show can trigger asthma attacks. And in this case the boy was missing so much school that he was falling behind; the mother was missing so much work that she risked being fired.

A nurse wrote a letter to the landlord asking that the carpeting be torn up and the pipe be repaired. There was no reply. So a lawyer at the pediatrics department called the owner twice, and presto! The pipe was fixed and the carpet removed. The boy improved, and the mother saved her job.

The Boston Medical Cente...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE - CONFRONTING POVERTY AND DECLINING OPPORTUNITY
• PART TWO - THE FORCES UNDERMINING THE AMERICAN DREAM
• PART THREE - SPURRING BETTER JOBS AND CREATING HIGHER INCOMES
• PART FOUR - SHARING THE PROSPERITY THROUGH ASSET BUILDING
• PART FIVE - STRENGTHENING FAMILY AND COMMUNITY
• Conclusion: Ending Poverty in America
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page