Reconsidering the Culture of Poverty (ToTN)

[Recursion]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130701401

From yesterday's Talk of the Nation. I found this interesting (this is from the transcript):

No, no. And so the researchers are very careful to try and show the diversity of experiences, and so on. I think there's another thing happening in our society that probably the research is very slow to take up, and that is that inner-city poverty is actually declining.

The greatest poverty in America - and this may surprise some of the listeners - is actually in the suburbs, for one. It's in some rural, isolated areas. So, for example, West Virginia has the second-highest poverty rate of any state, almost 20 percent.

And it's also being reproduced by some of the fastest growing economic industries - so health care, the service sector, entertainment. The areas of greatest job growth are also the ones that are not paying a living wage. So people who come there end up being impoverished over the long run.

So it's a far different world than when Moynihan was looking at the core inner cities and seeing a minority population that was isolated. Today, we just have a much more complicated landscape.

[SocialistLez]

1. Abt that "areas of greatest job growth" not paying living wages

This was mentioned in the Mother Jones issue I received yesterday.

I'd love to press Congress on raising the minimum wage or have more cities/states pass living wage laws.

[Igel]

2. Sad edition of the show.

They could have said something interesting. They failed to.

They talk about persistent poverty--and then all the callers are those who display not persistent, but situation-dependent poverty. The closest was the guy talking about non-traditional families, but instead of why they wound up like that and why they failed to prosper as the kids aged the complaint was about government support.

The inner-city poverty quip is unrelated to persistent poverty overall. It merely shows that Moynihan's observation might not be applicable today, or perhaps is applicable but needs to be trivially altered--a lot of poor folk moved and were moved as the result of gentrification to the inner portion of the outer rings of cities. The follow-up is that there are likely to be multiple cultures of poverty. That, of course, is not likely to be a very useful line of research unless somebody untangles the different elements of the various cultures to find commonalities and what factors are contributive and which are unrelated to poverty.

Having poverty (re)created by low-paying jobs is also quite possibly unrelated to persistent poverty. Persistent poverty is related to a lot of social dysfunctions, from higher crime, broken families, failed schools, greater debilitating drug and alcohol use, reduced social mobility (etc., etc., etc.). We have the term "persistent poverty" because it contrasts with simple poverty. Poverty itself is the simple lack of money and can be transient or long-lasting. Factor out persistent poverty and the social dysfunctions attached to the simple lack of money are sharply reduced.