Selections from the paper: Read the whole thing, and draw your own conclusions about just how badly economic opportunity in America is misrepresented for political gain.
Selections from the paper:
U.S. poverty is often viewed as confined to highly disadvantaged risk groups or concentrated inner city poor neighborhoods. The reality, however, is that high poverty is common across groups and places (38). Figure 6 shows the poverty rates for several groups and places. Again, these rates are compared against the cross-national median overall poverty rate. Poverty is especially high among those under aged 18 and 65+, in the South, central cities, and rural areas. However, U.S. poverty is also above the cross-national median among working-aged adults (18 to 64), among both adult women and men, in all four regions, and in large cities (i.e. Metropolitan Statistical Areas), moderate cities (>100,000), and the suburbs. Therefore, U.S. poverty is systemically high partly because it is high across groups and places.
Figure 7 reveals that such stereotypical groups are actually a small share of the population in poverty. Among those in poverty, the share in single mother households (18.5%) is much smaller than the share in coupled working-aged households (29.4%). Only about 2.1% of poor people are in young single mother households. Among those in poverty, about three times more are in employed than jobless households (57.2% versus 19%). There are also more than two times as many poor people in households led by someone with at least a high school degree than someone without (58.2% versus 24.8%). Ethno-racial minority adolescents are perhaps the most dramatized poor. However, Black and Latino adolescents amount to only 3 and 5.5% of people in poverty. Black and Latino adolescents in the highly studied inner cities are merely 1.4 and 2.3% of people in poverty. Far fewer are in poor neighborhoods. People with multiple risks (e.g., low educated, jobless, and young single mothers) are frequent in this literature. However, there are more than four times as many poor people with zero or one risk versus those who have 2+ risks (80.3% versus 19.7%). Last, a crude estimate is that about 4% of the population in poverty is homeless. This estimate uses the national point in time count for 2019 and follows Evans and colleagues [(79), p. 924], “the point-in-time estimate understates annual exposure by a factor of almost four.”
The reality is that people in poverty look similar to the United States as a whole. If one were to construct a composite “typical” poor person in the United States based on the most common populations in multiple categories, it would be a white, 35- to 45-year-old woman, with a high school education, in a coupled and employed household with no children, and living in a metropolitan area in the South. It is important to stress that acknowledging the reality of the population in poverty should not downplay that, as Figs. 2 and 3 show, Black and Latino children have staggeringly high poverty. However, concentrating so disproportionately on such groups misrepresents the typical people in poverty.
Figure 8 also overlays markers for the actual U.S. minimum, median, and maximum poverty rates. This shows that the high actual poverty rates of the United States fall almost exactly into line with the model’s predicted poverty rates. The United States has systemically high poverty because it has low social welfare spending. The United States is always in the upper left part of the figure. This confirms the United States is a perennial outlier, both in terms of high poverty and low social welfare spending. This demonstrates that one will misunderstand poverty if one only studies the United States.
Pineda-Hernández and colleagues (141) analyze 24 developed countries from 1990 to 2015. They demonstrate that centralized collective bargaining systems, greater bargaining coverage, and higher unionization significantly reduce working-age poverty after taxes and transfers. They conclude that this is mostly because of the political strength of these power resources in promoting more generous social policies.
This pattern holds across U.S. states as well (37, 101, 140). Using the PSID 1976–2015, VanHeuvelen and Brady (142) provide the first individual-level longitudinal analysis of household-level union membership and state-level unionization and poverty. Both union membership and state unionization have statistically and substantively significant negative relationships with relative and anchored working and working-aged poverty. Household union membership and state unionization significantly negatively interact, augmenting the poverty-reducing effects of each. Higher state unionization also spills over to reduce poverty among nonunion households. These powerful effects of unions are notable because, as VanHeuvelen and Brady write, “American poverty research largely neglects labor unions.” Compared to the enormous attention on eviction for example, I conjecture that low unionization is a more salient cause of poverty.
Read the whole thing, and draw your own conclusions about just how badly economic opportunity in America is misrepresented for political gain.
I'm glad I'm finally reading about unionization in the news, our country has demonized unions long enough, and we need to play catch up with less workaholic countries. The number of people willing...
I'm glad I'm finally reading about unionization in the news, our country has demonized unions long enough, and we need to play catch up with less workaholic countries. The number of people willing to undervalue themselves, allow themselves to be overworked and underpaid is still way too high.
I'm not qualified to talk about labor unions in depth, but I agree with the author's conjecture that their absence in the workplace in the United States is a cause of poverty. My impression is...
Therefore, U.S. poverty is systemically high partly because it is high across groups and places.
The United States has systemically high poverty because it has low social welfare spending.
I'm not qualified to talk about labor unions in depth, but I agree with the author's conjecture that their absence in the workplace in the United States is a cause of poverty. My impression is that this has been pretty well established in the literature but rejected or misunderstood in the media. There's something to say here about disinformation from powerful actors. Ironically, anecdotally, having spent a lot of time both in cities and the country, I have generally observed that the people who would benefit from unionization the most are the least likely to recognize its benefits—or at least the least likely to openly support it. A difficult situation to resolve.
"Social welfare" is a broad term. To me, this means readily apparent social programs like healthcare, rent-controlled housing, and public transportation. But it also means implicit cultural guidelines for lifestyle that make poverty unlikely, which are indirect incentives the government can reinforce slowly or quietly: tax credits, infrastructure, zoning, etc.
We live in an expensive culture, where expensive (and, strictly, unnecessary) lifestyle choices are structurally reinforced by the built environment and the resulting inaccessibility of resources. It's not that the United States doesn't allocate a budget toward, say, transportation; it's just allocated in a way that encourages a fiscally inefficient lifestyle. We build highways, whose individual costs are high because they are shifted directly to the user (at minimum, ownership and maintenance of a personal vehicle, plus fares); and we neglect public trains, whose individual costs are low (at most, fares) because overall costs are collective, not individual.
To me, car culture has always been the biggest example of this quiet government incentive for expensive living morphing into a kind of internalized idolization of what is, "under the hood," an inefficient, poverty-susceptible lifestyle: a decades-long marketing campaign to solidify the automobile—an expensive asset—as not only the de facto form of transportation, and a desired one, but actually a prerequisite for work. When we disproportionately cut down forests to build low-density exurban housing and idolize a lifestyle which necessitates an hour-long automobile commute, it is predictable that people become both tangibly and emotionally reliant on the car as a lifestyle asset.
Considering the automobile is most households' second expense (after housing), this is not an insignificant cultural phenomenon. 92% of households have access to an automobile; that's cool and all, woohoo advanced economy, but speaks to the broad acceptance of expensive lifestyles as default (making poverty more likely for a given individual) and the ambivalence about changing it through collectivized government initiatives which make poverty unlikely. This is not a universal constant but rather a societal decision we have collectively made by supporting the proliferation of car-centric infrastructure, even though a well-designed collective (public) transportation system matches the benefits of an individualized, car-centric one at both a lower individual and collective cost, externalities accounted for. The relative efficiency (in, say, vehicle miles traveled per capita) and long-term societal benefits of public transportation are well established in the scientific literature.
The article's comments about the "average" poor person suggest that the systemic, population-wide poverty we see in the United States is very much a matter of concern for the "middle class" who are able to afford such luxuries. But as the article alludes, the people hit the hardest are those with the fewest resources.
Anyway, that's just the example that comes to mind because I'm concerned with transportation, and it's a perspective that is strangely omitted from (or only lightly touched on) in academic work surrounding poverty, probably because cars have become so embedded into our culture.
One could make similar remarks for many or most of the machines in our daily lives, perhaps the increasing expectation to own a smartphone instead of relying on public services like internet access at libraries. This is what I mean about "accessibility": the more resources we lock behind devices or institutions that have a high individual cost, the less those resources are allocated to people who need them, and the more poverty ensues.
Selections from the paper:
Read the whole thing, and draw your own conclusions about just how badly economic opportunity in America is misrepresented for political gain.
I'm glad I'm finally reading about unionization in the news, our country has demonized unions long enough, and we need to play catch up with less workaholic countries. The number of people willing to undervalue themselves, allow themselves to be overworked and underpaid is still way too high.
I'm not qualified to talk about labor unions in depth, but I agree with the author's conjecture that their absence in the workplace in the United States is a cause of poverty. My impression is that this has been pretty well established in the literature but rejected or misunderstood in the media. There's something to say here about disinformation from powerful actors. Ironically, anecdotally, having spent a lot of time both in cities and the country, I have generally observed that the people who would benefit from unionization the most are the least likely to recognize its benefits—or at least the least likely to openly support it. A difficult situation to resolve.
"Social welfare" is a broad term. To me, this means readily apparent social programs like healthcare, rent-controlled housing, and public transportation. But it also means implicit cultural guidelines for lifestyle that make poverty unlikely, which are indirect incentives the government can reinforce slowly or quietly: tax credits, infrastructure, zoning, etc.
We live in an expensive culture, where expensive (and, strictly, unnecessary) lifestyle choices are structurally reinforced by the built environment and the resulting inaccessibility of resources. It's not that the United States doesn't allocate a budget toward, say, transportation; it's just allocated in a way that encourages a fiscally inefficient lifestyle. We build highways, whose individual costs are high because they are shifted directly to the user (at minimum, ownership and maintenance of a personal vehicle, plus fares); and we neglect public trains, whose individual costs are low (at most, fares) because overall costs are collective, not individual.
To me, car culture has always been the biggest example of this quiet government incentive for expensive living morphing into a kind of internalized idolization of what is, "under the hood," an inefficient, poverty-susceptible lifestyle: a decades-long marketing campaign to solidify the automobile—an expensive asset—as not only the de facto form of transportation, and a desired one, but actually a prerequisite for work. When we disproportionately cut down forests to build low-density exurban housing and idolize a lifestyle which necessitates an hour-long automobile commute, it is predictable that people become both tangibly and emotionally reliant on the car as a lifestyle asset.
Considering the automobile is most households' second expense (after housing), this is not an insignificant cultural phenomenon. 92% of households have access to an automobile; that's cool and all, woohoo advanced economy, but speaks to the broad acceptance of expensive lifestyles as default (making poverty more likely for a given individual) and the ambivalence about changing it through collectivized government initiatives which make poverty unlikely. This is not a universal constant but rather a societal decision we have collectively made by supporting the proliferation of car-centric infrastructure, even though a well-designed collective (public) transportation system matches the benefits of an individualized, car-centric one at both a lower individual and collective cost, externalities accounted for. The relative efficiency (in, say, vehicle miles traveled per capita) and long-term societal benefits of public transportation are well established in the scientific literature.
The article's comments about the "average" poor person suggest that the systemic, population-wide poverty we see in the United States is very much a matter of concern for the "middle class" who are able to afford such luxuries. But as the article alludes, the people hit the hardest are those with the fewest resources.
Anyway, that's just the example that comes to mind because I'm concerned with transportation, and it's a perspective that is strangely omitted from (or only lightly touched on) in academic work surrounding poverty, probably because cars have become so embedded into our culture.
One could make similar remarks for many or most of the machines in our daily lives, perhaps the increasing expectation to own a smartphone instead of relying on public services like internet access at libraries. This is what I mean about "accessibility": the more resources we lock behind devices or institutions that have a high individual cost, the less those resources are allocated to people who need them, and the more poverty ensues.