Cycles of Poverty are Circular

I regularly teach a frosh-level Social Problems course. The students give several presentations and submit several papers. One "concept" shows up so often that I've added a bullet in my syllabus specifically to forbid it: the Cycle of Poverty. Poverty is, no doubt, cyclical in the sense that it is passed down over and over again from generation to generation. When my students invoke this phrase, however, they do so in a way that dismisses the actual causes of poverty. In effect, "the cycle of poverty" is a tautological argument. Why are black kids disproportionately poor? "Because their parents are poor." Why are their parents poor? "Because their parents were poor" ad infinitum. Why is the sky blue? "Because it reflects the ocean." Why is the ocean blue? "Because it reflects the sky." By this logic, poverty is intractable, and students can either throw their hands in the air and walk away or they can propose interventions that are far more likely to address the immediate consequence of poverty without actually confronting its causes. Sure, poverty is cyclical, but what was its prime cause? Black kids may be disproportionately poor because their parents were poor, but their grandparents may have been poor because they were denied affordable housing (e.g. Redlining) or because they were restricted from upward mobility through threats of violence (e.g. Jim Crow) etc. Part of teaching that social change is possible is getting students past the notion that "this is the way things are because this is the way things have been" mentality. I'm not certain what the cultural source of this thinking is, but it's insidious.

Public Defenders for All

Imagine if our criminal justice system had no private attorneys, only public defenders. Anyone who is accused of a crime would be represented by lawyers who are assigned and paid by the state. I think the outcry against this would be predictable, and in that outcry are ironically the arguments for why it is necessary. A typical argument against it might go something like this: by requiring me to accept a public defender for my defense, the state essentially requires me to accept substandard representation and limits my chances for an advantageous outcome. Do you see it there? If you don't want to be forced to use a public defender because you believe they aren't as effective but the system currently grants public defenders to those who cannot afford private counsel, the system is by definition unjust as it offers justice only to those who are affluent enough to afford it.

There are two solutions to this. First, we could make it so that no one is so poor that they couldn't afford a private attorney should the need arise. (This isn't really a solution at all, though, because legal representation would still be stratified, with those who are more affluent being able to afford, on average, attorneys with better training, experience, and resources than those who, while not poor, are still relatively worse off.) Second, we simply force all defendants to use randomly assigned defenders who are paid by the public. There are definitely discussions to be had about, perhaps, more stringent requirements for those lawyers and ways to ensure adequate resources (e.g. paralegals and discretionary funds), but other issues, like the paucity of lawyers currently serving as public defenders and the motivating factors that lead public defenders to encourage their clients to accept plea agreements, would solve themselves as lawyers would either become public defenders or give up their practices and increased resources and changing norms would reduce plea incentives.

These same principles, however, apply just as well to other kinds of justice outside the criminal justice system, schools for example. How can we justify private schools? (Religious education might seem like an exception, but religious institutions are still bound by the same educational standards and tend to do surprisingly little actual religious education. The religious indoctrination could more efficiently be done outside of regular school hours, say on Sunday mornings. Hey, we could call it "Sunday School!") How can we justify private medical insurance? Private security?

Dual Readings: Unemployment in a Rustbelt Town

A friend pointed me toward this piece recently. (I've written a lot in the past on this place.) What struck me, however, is that as I read the piece as a critique of the Whirlpool corporation, friends who work for Whirlpool and other stakeholders read it instead as a praise for the corporation. I find that pretty telling of the state of affairs there.

Chicago, Schools, and Segregation: A Misunderstood Solution?

Chicago is closing a bunch of schools that they allege are being underutilized. It's an emotional issue to say the least. (This video seems to be going viral.) One reason that it is so emotional is that the schools that are targeted appear to disproportionately serve poor and non-white students. I understand people's concerns about endangering students by forcing them to travel further to get to school, often through violent areas, and ideally, the students should attend quality schools as close to their homes as possible. However, the argument that a school that has been made inefficient because it was abandoned by elites should be protected seems backward to me. Couldn't closing those schools be a way to integrate de facto segregated schools? What an interesting model for change, to close any school that has a disproportionately disadvantaged student body and force those students into adjacent school districts that are disproportionately advantaged. There would be nowhere to hide for those trying to "escape" "bad" schools (e.g. white flight); they should simply be forced to improve the schools they have. In other words, the root of the problem is not that the schools are being closed but that they have been put in such a precarious situation by privileged families following a short-sighted notion of self-interest.

Am I missing an important part of this story here either theoretically or practically? Admittedly, this a complicated social issue on which I am not an expert.

"On the Other Side It Didn't Say Nothing"

This blog critiques fascists.

If you haven't been, you should watch Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl.

Cf. global warming.

In Point of Fact: Drug Testing Welfare Recipients

This picture showed up a few times in my Facebook feed today with the caption, ‎"'Like' if you think drug testing should be mandatory for welfare recipients."

I think I need to address this issue. To be clear, what I write below is nothing new or innovative. I'm indebted to others for most of these insights and attempt to cite them liberally below. My intent is basically just to present some evidence and arguments against such a practice. There are, I think, essentially two major points to consider.

First, where there are laws that require drug testing of welfare recipients, we see surprising results: recipients test positive for drug use at lower levels than are estimated for the larger population. While it is estimated that about 9% of those in the U.S. use illegal drugs, only 2% of welfare beneficiaries in the State of Florida tested positive in the opening months of that program. There is no evidence to suggest that welfare beneficiaries abuse drugs at any higher rates than non-beneficiaries, and if anything, there is some evidence that they do so at lower rates. Even more, the cost-savings of the program are dubious at best.

Second, we often wrongly think of "welfare" as benefiting "others," forgetting that nearly all of us (yes, you!) receive benefits from the government. We regularly make this mistake because most of us benefit from what is called the "submerged state," those less-than-visible benefits from the tax code or from subsidies for private organizations to do aid. When a representative sample of people in the U.S. were asked if they had "ever used a government social program," 57% said they had not. Followup questions about programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction, student loans etc. revealed that 94% of those who had denied using programs had benefited from at least one. In all, 96% had received some government benefit (and the other 4% were mostly too young to qualify for most of those programs, yet). Moreover, fully two-thirds of government tax-expenditure benefits went to the wealthiest 20% of those in the U.S. (Nearly a quarter of those benefits went to the wealthiest 1%!) Part of the issue is the difference between so-called entitlement benefits and tax-expenditure benefits. Entitlement benefits disproportionately benefit the poor and are distributed as cash (actually EBT) directly via government agencies that are still largely brick-and-mortar; tax-expenditure benefits disproportionately benefit the middle class and the rich and are distributed as income tax deductions indirectly via a paper or electronic form. It's easier to ignore the benefits one receives from the government when checking a box on TurboTax as opposed to standing in line at an imposing building with the letter's "U.S." etched into the facade. Unless you are prepared to supply a urine sample every time you deduct your mortgage payment or claim your kids as dependents or, here in Georgia, allow the HOPE Scholarship to pay for you college education, perhaps you should rethink testing the poor for their more meager benefits.

We really must ask ourselves one fundamental question: why is drug-testing welfare recipients attractive? If you believe that the state should not subsidize people's drug use, then you should have no problem with testing all people who receive benefits from the state, not just the poor. If you believe that it is the poor who are more likely to use drugs, the evidence just isn't in your favor.

--

h/t Office Hours
h/t Sociological Images
h/t The Global Sociology Blog

Implications of the Opt-In Medicaid Expansion

I've been sitting on this for a while, but here is a table I threw together, expanding on some data presented on the Economix blog:

What strikes me are all the high-poverty states at the top of the list who have Republican governors who are likely to reject the Medicaid expansion now that it is optional.

--
NOTE: RI's governor is a liberal independent so marked blue.
DATA:

Updated on Mearsuing Poverty

It looks like I was wrong. The Census Bureau clarified its new poverty stuff here. In short, the threshold is set anew, based in part on food, clothing, shelter, and utilities expenditures. Good. I'm still skeptical about this "near poverty" business, though. Perhaps some of you out there with more time on your hands can help me out.

Setting and Resetting Boundaries

The New York Times tried to summarize the changes to the way that the federal government is counting the poor. These changes, however, are still based--as far as I can tell--on an anachronistic threshold that does not accurately reflect how people spend their income. (For a good explanation, see this post over at Sociological Images.) Yes, controlling for things like cost of living and government benefits is a good thing, and we should absolutely continue to include these things in the measure, but the poverty line itself should be set much higher to reflect the lived reality of people today. Since most of the people whom these improved measures move out of poverty are moved not into affluence or even comfort but only into "near poverty," we can assume that a revised poverty threshold would return these people correctly back into the ranks of the impoverished.

I really can't let this go either:
According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, poverty should evidently be defined by whether one owns an Xbox. This is absurd. People have made the same argument about cell phone ownership, forgetting that cell phones and their calling plans today can often be less expensive than landline service. Moreover, it's pretty extreme to argue that the poor are less deserving of recreation than those who are better off. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation should not be trusted--and the New York Times should know better than to quote them uncritically. They freely admit to exist not to pursue truth per se but to pursue the truths that fit with their conservative, free market views.

Mothers Against Matriculating and Driving: On Leaving Your Car Home

Many colleges are trying to discourage students from bringing cars to school with them and for a number of reasons, including safety, environmental, and parking concerns. This got me thinking about many of the problems in my own community and on our campus that we'd need to overcome to make something like this work. Below are four constraints we would need to tackle.

First, we would need to address the ongoing business sprawl that is displacing/bankrupting business in the downtown district and relocating/establishing business north of the city center on the heavily trafficked US-441. Ideally, we would discourage the ongoing sprawl that has caused so many of these problems and encourage businesses to open in places that are accessible to larger parts of the local population without the need to drive to them. Short of this, we could make the 441 business corridor more pedestrian-friendly. As it is now, driving on 441--let alone trying to walk or ride--is a harrowing experience. People tend to illegally use the center turning lane as a merging lane, but even when obeying traffic laws, it is a relatively unsafe as demonstrated by a sharp increase in traffic accidents at the intersection in front of the local Walmart. According to one of our local newspapers, the Baldwin Bulletin, addressing this string of accidents, "MPD Chief Woodrow Blue said that there is a simple solution for the problem. 'Basically, people need to slow down and pay more attention,' he said. 'Otherwise, the same thing will continue happening.'" It is exactly this type of ineffectual leadership that cannot be tolerated if we want a safer community. City officials should take active steps to reduce accidents, not simply tell people to drive better. Two fixes to the problem of 441 would be to put in protected bike lanes and sidewalks.

Second, we should develop a city-wide infrastructure of bike lanes and, even more basically, sidewalks. Even in the downtown district and around campus, there are places that are unsafe for pedestrians. For example, my wife and I live in a condominium complex just a half-mile walk from campus/downtown. Our complex, however, was built without sidewalks. To get out of the complex on foot, one has to literally walk into oncoming traffic via a blind vehicular entrance. A second example is on a road that is just south of campus, on which there are several student-inhabited apartment complexes. This road is completely absent of sidewalks, even though hundreds of students must walk on the road to get to athletic events and classes every day. By laying and maintaining sidewalks, people will be encouraged to walk instead of drive.

Third, a major problem that our community has yet to address is the complete lack of a public transportation system. I have absolutely no idea how the folks who live in the Section 8 housing around town, many of whom presumably do not own cars, get to their jobs, the grocery store, or to doctors appointments. The college now owns a small fleet of shuttle buses that run daily to get students from their apartments, dorms, and satellite parking lots to campus. If a student body of less than 6,000 can do this, certainly a city/county of 46,000 could pull it off. Again, however, this would not be necessary if businesses were planted within walking/biking distance of people's residences. (I've posted on mixed use zoning before, though.)

Fourth, the college could encourage the development of our campus culture and improve the local economy by discouraging our students from running back home to their parents on the weekends as is often the practice here (instances of which are often called "suitcase colleges"). There are a couple ways to do this. We could simply forbid underclasspersons who live in campus housing from bringing their cars with them. This was my experience as an undergraduate, and while I was somewhat ambivalent about the requirement at the time, in retrospect, it kept me on campus and forced me to make many new friends (particularly to make friends with older folks who owned cars and could drive me to the liquor grocery store). Granted, this type of policy can be pretty difficult to justify in a place that seems to be 40 minutes away from anything resembling a cultural experience and fully two hours away from Atlanta, the suburbs of which are home for most of our students and where the airport is. It would be great if they extended the light rail system down to us, but by simply expanding the newly implemented Connect by Hertz campus car rental service, the college could remedy much of this fear of isolation. The city could, also, up the cost of a parking ticket, which is right now set at the utterly ignorable price of $10 for staying longer than two hours in a designated spot. Where I went to graduate school, the equivalent ticket today is $25. (This one really shouldn't be a tough sell to a cash-strapped local government.)

Addressing these four problem areas would not only benefit our relatively privileged students but also the absolutely impoverished local population. Really, everyone wins.

--
UPDATE: The New York Times has a related story today.

More Parent-blaming: Structure Matters

Buried at the end of this NYTimes piece on whether we should blame parents for their children's failures at school is this little gem: "And we need to acknowledge that the root problem is poverty." Sometimes, when a kid shows up hungry at school, it's because mom and dad can't afford breakfast. Sometimes, when a kid didn't finish his homework, it's because mom and dad work nights and weren't there to help or encourage. Sometimes, when mom and dad don't show up to parent/teacher conferences, it's because asking for time off of work to make such a meeting would mean risking losing their job. Not everyone is afforded the same privileges of a solidly middle-class lifestyle.

A Further Thought on Benton Harbor

There is a causal problem with the notion that communities like Benton Harbor are in such bad shape economically and otherwise because of a lack of pride. The arrow actually points the other way: civic pride is the result of political-economic wellbeing.

Night of the Living Dead Argument: Culture on the Rampage (wonkish)

(Sorry about the title. I'm on a bit of a zombie-movie kick these days.)

The NY Times has declared that 'Culture of Poverty' Makes a Comeback. Cue the nausea.

It's not so much culture per se that angers me but culture as a sacred cow. Those who argue for a strong program of culture are actually arguing that culture be put on a pedestal, that it be made untouchable. In effect, culture becomes an independent variable in the truest sense of the term, that is, disconnected from other causes or influences. I am not arguing that culture should never be a right hand variable (RHV), only that it is ignorant to argue that it should primarily be an RHV.

This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.

As if this is an argument for culture? Quite to the contrary, this is an argument for structural changes (i.e. economic decline).

All that aside, the Times article itself is poorly written tripe that fails to capture the nuances of the academic debate.

"Don't worry. I'll take care of the lightning; you just take care of your pop."

Mayor Bloomberg is trying to disallow people from using food stamps to buy sugary drinks (e.g. Coca Cola) as a way to fight obesity which is largely seen as a rising health problem in the U.S. A number of studies have provided evidence that those with lower socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to be obese. While obesity disproportionately affects those who use food stamps, is it just for us to limit poor folks' access to soda but not more affluent people? A better response to the obesity epidemic would be to address the structural constraints that limit poor folks' access to healthier foods. Even better than that would be a legitimate attempt to eliminate poverty itself.