“Poverty”
Picking up on the comments on the last post.
The problem with Mead’s view of the world is that even if you got all the men who are unemployed and got them to work in the same types of jobs as men of comparable education and work experience and even somehow married them off to the mothers of their children, they’d still overwhelmingly be poor.
Most poor people in the US are in families that include workers. But the jobs aren’t regular enough, and don’t pay enough to lift people out of poverty. And even if they make more than the official poverty line, it’s still not enough to make ends meet. And it only takes one crisis — a sick kid, a car breaking down, a cold winter that makes the utility bill skyrocket — to make the whole damn house of cards fall down.
The folks at Inclusion argue that the problem with talking about poverty is that as soon as you start talking about "poor people" the image that jumps into most people’s mind is of dysfunctional teen parents in inner cities — of Random Family, rather than The Working Poor. And the comments here show that there’s some truth to that. But I’m still unconvinced that "social inclusion" is a viable alternative. I do think that talking about "job quality" is an important piece of the conversation, but it doesn’t provide the framework for talking about other solutions, like expanding the earned income tax credit.
May 1st, 2007 at 7:26 am
I just started with my third “little sister” through the BBBS program. This is the first instance in which the mother has a job, so I thought they’d be much better off than the previous families I’ve worked with. I’ve been shocked at how less better off they are. She’s a single mom with five kids, working full time at a low paying job. I don’t know how she does it. She’s not a dysfunctional inner city teen. She’s a woman just like me, who just happened to be born into different circumstances.
May 1st, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I get your answer about Mead: the solution of getting people into the paid workforce (in the jobs they are likely to get) is insufficient to solve poverty. I do not find that at all difficult to believe, and can see that it would pass an evidence-based standard.
But, what about the effects of the “cut-poverty” list you linked to? Do those interventions result in a measureable decrease of poverty?
I’ll admit that I am the most suspicious of the increase in the minimum wage. My suspicion stems from the fact that I think one-point interventions into the global marketplace for labor is unliklely to have the desired outcome. That is, does increasing the minimum wage decrease poverty, or does it increase hiring of non-regulated labor (black market, illegal immigrants) and outsourcing?
I’m more in favor of the earned income tax credit, which, applied properly, seems like it could use tax dollars to increase the value of working without changing the labor market as significantly. I also wish for some appropriate method of dealing with crises (though I don’t know what it is). Childcare & health support also seem like they go in the right direction. In sum, I tend believe (though I am open to education on the question) that working is the way out of poverty, and what we need to do to “cure’ it is to figure out ways to support people in doing work that raises them out of poverty.
bj
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:41 am
The economists’ line is: behavior you pay for, you get more of. Behavior you make costly, you get less of. I’ve read neither Random Family nor Working Poor, and maybe I should, though that won’t stop me spouting off… I’m with bj on looking to set the incentives in the system so it pays people to work and improve themselves. Minimum wage: I live in a wealthy area, and almost no one works for that – you can maybe pay $550 a month for a room on minimum wage, certainly not put food in any mouth other than your own. The illegals who hang around the paint store looking for day labor get $11 an hour at least, the local drug store pays high school girls $8.50 an hour to cashier. In a poorer area, where rent is lower, maybe upping the minimum wage has an effect, though it may also mean that some of the jobs are no longer offered, the marginal profit from another busboy doesn’t cover the wage. EITC puts the incentives in the right direction: you work, you get money, and the government tops it up. I believe that kids who grow up in a household where work happens, and it is the mechanism by which the adults get good things, will do better and attach to society better than kids who grow up in a household where work doesn’t happen and getting benefit checks is how adults get good things. On average, and I know that people get arthritis, shingles, go blind, husbands/fathers take up with popsies and vanish, parents get old and need care, and dependants need some propping up. But you can maybe have a Mead-ian system which pushes people to do as much as they can, and it seems to me that people who are under that kind of pressure will do better for themselves and for others than folks who, if they meet a criterion for aid, are then excused from further effort.
I read the Amazon listing for Random Family, and I’m going to plug a book I read three-four months ago: Blind Side, by Michael Lewis. It’s about the work an upper-middle class family did to get a kid from a random type family (a physical prodigy kid who weighs 354 lbs and is about 6 foot 6 and who is made by God for football) to a point where he can handle a high school curriculum, go to the University of Mississippi. This rescue effort was pretty much full time for two educated adults for several years. What kind of model can we imagine for the rescue of the eleven brothers and sisters his indolent and thriftless mother also bore, by several different fathers who vanished from their lives, and who aren’t attracting that kind of care because they aren’t obvious NFL material?
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Dave:
We agree on one general point, which I do believe lots of compassionate people find difficult to incorporate into their policy: behavior that is rewarded is reinforced, and behavior that is not rewarded is extinguished (though the psychologists said it first, and the value of reward, versus lack of reward, versus “punishment” all differ in their effectiveness, you need to account for timing of rewards, learned helplessness, and atypical brain function that interfere with the normal dynamics of the reinforcemnt process).
But, I think when we take this behavioral result, and try to use it within the economic/social domain, it’s a lot more complicated than “don’t give people money” or “put them in jail if they don’t have money.” (two of Mead’s solutions).
Going back to the other hand, though, compassionate people, who don’t want anyone to suffer have to think through the social consequences of the immediate compassion. That’s what I need the poverty relief folks to do get me on board.
I’ll also add that one of the things that makes this the most complicated of discussions is that it is the children who suffer for the decision making of their parents, and they have limited power to alter behavior themselves to obtain reward/reinforcment, without the asistance of adults.
I hope that I am not carrying around a stereotype of the poor in my head that is overly influencing my views on poverty, and I’ll try to look up your suggestions (working poor, right?).
bj
PS: Good luck with the move!