Half Changed World

A few thoughts in reaction to the long (and partisan) discussion of hunger, obesity and poverty at Asymmetrical Information (found via 11d).

Food is mindbogglingly cheap in the US today, accounting for a smaller portion of people’s overall budgets than ever before.  In fact, this is one of the big problems with the official definition of poverty.  Mollie Orshansky, who developed the measure in the 1960s, found that the average family spent about 1/3 of its income on food; the poverty measure was thus set at three times the cost of an economy food plan.

So why are some families struggling to buy food?  Because other necessities have gotten more expensive, especially housing.  Many low-income families spend 50 percent or more of their incomes on housing; if they don’t want to be evicted or have their gas shut off, they pay their rent and utility bills first and whatever is left over is available for food.

Is healthy food more expensive than unhealthy food?  Yes and no.  It’s certainly true that you can prepare nutritious and inexpensive meals, especially if you minimize use of meat.  But if you want quick and easy meals — and if you’re a busy parent at any income level, you want quick and easy meals — healthy food is a lot more expensive than fast food or a candy bar from the store on the corner.  And if you’re looking at a vending machine, the soda is usually half the price of the juice.  (And let’s not even get into the cost of organic food.)

It’s also true that food is an easy way for low-income parents to indulge their children (and themselves).  If you’re poor, you spend a lot of time saying No.  No, you can’t have that.  No, we can’t afford that.  No, you can’t go there.  McDonald’s is an affordable treat, something you can say Yes to.

The Thrifty Food Plan for a family of 4 (with 2 young children) is $434.40 and I honestly think that we spend less than that most months.  But we also eat out occasionally, which would blow that budget quickly.  I also know that it’s cheaper to buy food if you have enough money to buy in bulk and to stock up on groceries when they’re on sale, which we do. I’m thinking of tracking our groceries 100% for a month and seeing if we can stay under it.  Anyone want to join me?

Today’s book is Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.  It’s a sympathetic portrait of a group of people who represent pretty much everything society condemns about ghetto life — drug use, drug dealing, violence, teenage sex, welfare receipt, girls having babies with multiple boys and vice versa.  LeBlanc spent ten years with the members of one family — primarily Jessica, her brother Cesar, and his girlfriend Coco — tracking their lives in and out of jail, in the Bronx and upstate New York, following the tangled threads of their relationships, and describing their lives and their children’s.

I found it interesting to compare this book to Jason Deparle’s American Dream, which I discussed in October.  From the back covers, they sound very similar — both ethnographic studies of poor inner-city minority single-parent families.  But they’re actually quite different.  DeParle focuses on three women, but frequently pulls back to provide a broader context on their experiences and to discuss what their experiences imply about the success or failure of welfare reform.  LeBlanc’s narrative stays relentlessly fixed on her chosen individuals, and she carefully avoids providing any context for the choices of her subject.

Around HHS, there’s a lot of focus these days on "healthy marriage" as a solution to many of the problems faced by families like those discussed in this book.  And the advocates of this approach like to cite a statistic that the majority of unwed parents value marriage and hope to be married in the future.  Well, one of the things I took away from this book was that valuing marriage is sometimes the problem — these girls were often excited about having children with their lousy boyfriends because they thought it might get them to marry them.

As I read about the experiences of the children in this book, I got  angry.  A lot of them were just passed from house to house, left with whoever didn’t duck the responsibility.  Little or no attempts were made to curtail their exposure to adult sexuality, violence, or drugs.  Several of them were believed to have been sexually abused.  Even the women who prided themselves on their good parenting seemed more concerned with appearances — keeping the kids clean and groomed, buying them expensive clothing — than making them feel loved and protected.  I had to keep reminding myself that the "adults" in this book were hardly more than children themselves, and presumably hadn’t had any better experiences than they passed on.

Last week, following a reference in the NY Times magazine, I tracked down a remarkable study, the 40-year followup of the original Perry Preschool cohort.

The Perry Preschool study is famous among social policy researchers.  In the early 1960s, a sample of low-income African-American children who were assessed to be at high risk of school failure were randomly assigned to two groups, one of which received two years of high-quality preschool and one of which did not receive a preschool program.  The group that received preschool services scored higher on IQ and similar tests while in preschool and for a year or two afterward, but this achievement gap faded over time.  However, the group that received preschool services continued to score higher on school achievement tests and be more likely to complete school, more likely to be employed, and less likely to be arrested, even decades later.

The full report of the 40-year followup doesn’t seem to be available yet, but a summary report including Q and As is available on the web.  It’s a fascinating read, and makes some interesting points.

• Almost all of the impact on high school graduation is driven by the women.  84 percent of the women in the preschool group graduated from a regular high school compared to 32 percent of the non-program group.  (This is an impact so large as to be almost inconceivable — social service interventions typically move impacts by a few percentage points.)  The researchers suggest as a possible explanation that boys were more likely to be held back or assigned to special education because of behavioral issues, not just academic delays.
• Almost all of the cost savings, however, are driven by the reduction in arrest and incarceration, which is concentrated among the men.  The researchers estimate that each dollar invested in the Perry Preschool program returned over $17 — almost $13 for society as a whole, and $4 for the participants.  Of the return to society, 88% came from the reduction in crime.
• This study was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Head Start program, and is still cited as one of the main pieces of evidence in support of the program.  However, the researchers note that most Head Start programs are not as good as the studied program — especially in regard to the educational background of the teachers.
• The researchers also caution against using this study to argue for universal preschool.  They say that this study shows that "educational productivity in early childhood settings has a large influence on young children’s subsequent lives."  The Perry Preschool was dramatically more "educationally productive" than the homes and neighborhoods in which these poor kids would have spend their days otherwise.  But the researchers argue that neither home nor preschool settings are inherently more educationally productive.  So, while these children benefited greatly, "young children from educationally productive homes who attend less educationally productive early childhood programs would suffer negative effects on their development."

Today’s book is American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and A Nation’s Drive to End Welfare. It’s by Jason DeParle, who covered the "welfare beat" for the New York Times during the mid-1990s, when welfare reform was being debated. He eventually decided that he wanted to cover the story more in-depth than the pressures of a newspaper allowed and this book is the result.

It’s a terrific book — DeParle does a masterful job in moving back and forth between the broad strokes of welfare policy and politics, both in Washington DC and in Wisconsin, and the details of three women’s lives. I know a lot about welfare policy — it’s what I do professionally — and I learned some things I didn’t know, but it’s also very accessible for someone who doesn’t know anything about the subject. I think I should carry around a copy of it to hand to all the people who corner me at a party when they find out where I work and rant at me about welfare.

Reading the book made me very angry. Angry at the elected officials who were — and are — more interested in scoring political points off of each other than in making good policies. Angry at the organizations — some private, some "not-for-profit" — who took tons of money from the welfare department and spent a whole lot of it on fancy dinners and advertising and golf balls with the company name on them instead of on the people who needed help. Angry at the men who are almost totally absent from this story many of them in jail. And angry at the mothers for not doing more to protect their children — for drinking and doing crack while pregnant (the alcohol is probably the worse for kids) — for tolerating "friends" and "family" who literally took food out of their kids’ mouths.

The title of this book is bitterly ironic. Not only aren’t these women living the American Dream, they don’t seem to have much in the way of dreams, any hope that life could be better in the future. As DeParle notes, for all the talk of how welfare recipients are held down by a sense of "entitlement," what’s amazing is how little the women he talked to feel entitled to: not a job that pays a living wage, not a safe neighborhood, not a good school for their children. They’re survivors, and that’s both their strength and their downfall. When the welfare office screws up and cuts off their food stamps in error, or when someone steals their car, making it impossible to get to work, they cope. But they’re not doing much to make tomorrow better — either for themselves or their children.

It’s hard to know what policy conclusions to take from this book. The three women DeParle follows — Angie, Jewell and Opal — consistently deny that welfare reform mattered to them. And yet two of them were off of cash assistance and working for almost the entire period covered by the book, part of a huge overall trend. At the same time, their lives were only marginally better than before. DeParle and many others have suggested that part of the solution has to be get the men more involved — as a source of both emotional and financial support — but no one really knows how to do that. It’s a dilemna.

More later, but the official 2003 poverty data are out.

The child poverty rate in 2003 was 17.6 percent, up from 16.7 percent the year before (although, as my bosses are going to repeat endlessly today, lower than the 20.5 percent it was in 1996). The overall poverty rates are also up, but it’s all driven by the increase in child poverty — adult poverty was unchanged. Census says that the increase in child poverty is all driven by an increase in poverty among single-parent households — the poverty rate among married-couple households is unchanged.

Sigh.

Ok, it’s later. This data isn’t terribly surprising — the poverty rate typically goes up for a while after a recesssion, and everyone knows that this has been a particularly anemic recovery, especially on the job front. You can’t really blame it on welfare reform, as welfare never gave people enough money to get out of poverty. But it’s still depressing.

Here’s the graph that I like to show people when I talk about poverty and public policy.

[The image fit onto the blog on my computer, but I’ve heard that it’s being cut off on some — the link is http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/img/incpov03/fig10.jpg if it’s not showing up properly for you.]

What this tells me is that government really can make a difference — the huge improvements of the 1960s are driven by the War on Povery, including the expansion of Social Security to cover a much larger fraction of the elderly population. But there hasn’t been the willpower to fight child poverty in the same way.

Which leads me to the most important news story that you won’t read in your paper — The Incredible Shrinking Budget, by Gene Steuerle at the Urban Institute. It’s about the structural imbalance between Social Security and Medicare, which automatically grow to meet the need, and programs that serve kids, which have to compete for funding with everything else in the budget. And it’s about how those programs are going to get squeezed in the coming years between the Bush tax cuts (whose costs are back-loaded) and the needs of the retiring baby boomers. It’s only 8 pages, and everyone who cares about children should read it.