I’m a procrastinator I’m well-acquainted
with the instant gratification monkey
and when dr. Raja was presenting and
showed the cookie I had an immediate
very strong desire to go get a cookie
right now and I had no desire whatsoever
to get a carrot so my talk today is
called poverty in the United States
whose poor why and what we can do about
it and there we go here in Buffalo New
York a city is being reborn
we’re rediscovering our downtown and our
waterfront developers are rushing to
build luxury apartments and yet over
half the stilled Rijn in the city are
living in poverty you can find similar
stories in cities across the United
States which is both the wealthiest
nation in the world and also a place in
which one out of every five children is
living in poverty can you have a
renaissance if it leaves so many people
behind can a nation be great when it is
so unequal today we’re going to talk
about who’s poor why and what we can do
about it so let’s start by asking who is
living in poverty imagine that you are a
photographer for Time magazine the
editor calls you because she wants to do
a cover story based on the latest census
figures which show that over 40 million
people are living in poverty in the
United States finally in the most
typical poor family that you can she
says and will put them under cover so
our job now is to find that typical
family where should we go to look for
them a city a suburb or a rural area if
you entered a city or rural area you’re
wrong there are more people in poverty
that live in the suburbs should the
typical impoverished family for our
cover story be white black or Hispanic
according to census figures the most
typical race
would be what should we be looking for a
large family or a small one average
family living in poverty has only one or
two children how much education will
that typical parent in poverty have
should we be looking for a high school
dropout or someone with a diploma turns
out that most people living in poverty
have at least a college high school
diploma and many have at least some
college all right now we’ve got our Time
magazine cover
it’s a white mom with one or two kids
living in the suburbs with a high school
diploma hanging on her wall now imagine
that we ask all Americans to close their
eyes and picture a family living in
poverty are they seeing the same picture
that we are why do we have such
erroneous views about poverty one reason
is stereotyping but another reason is
that when we think about poverty we tend
to think about the places and groups
where the poverty rate is highest in
other words we confuse what is
disproportionate with what is typical
because it is true that poverty rates
are higher among people in cities than
people in the suburbs it’s just that
today many more people live in the
suburbs than in the cities so even
though the poverty rate is lower in the
suburbs the total number of impoverished
people is high so let’s take a
metropolitan area with a million people
in it
of whom 300,000 live in the city and
700,000 in the suburbs even if the
poverty rate in the suburbs is only 10%
while the rate in the city is 20% there
will still be 70,000 poor people in the
similarly it is true that the poverty
rate among African Americans is
two-and-a-half times higher than that of
white 26% compared to 10% but there are
200 million whites in the United States
and only about 41 million blacks so
there are still almost twice as many
whites living in poverty as blacks
which helps to explain why our typical
person living in poverty might look
something like this
when we think about poverty and how to
reduce it we need to keep both things in
mind what is typical along with what is
disproportionate
if you were designing a program to serve
people in need it would be important to
realize that most of your clients live
in the suburbs at the same time you
would also want to realize that the city
was suffering from a much higher poverty
rate than any individual suburb was now
let’s ask why are people living in
poverty when we asked a question of why
it matters a great deal whether we’re
talking about individuals groups or
societies to understand why let’s do a
quick thought experiment imagine that
there are 100 of you in the classroom
today and that none of you had breakfast
or lunch you are very very hungry made
only hungrier by dr. Rajas presentation
but it so happens that I brought with me
a bushel of 90 apples 100 of you 90
apples I empty the bushel on the floor
and you and an explosion of hunger games
like activity grabbed the apples
sadly you ten in the back row did not
get any apples you’re suffering from
Apple poverty now examine each of you as
individuals to learn why you did not get
an apple just to make you feel what
and try and figure out what I can do to
help it turns out that one of you has a
sprained ankle so for you I provide a
nice bandage and physical therapy
one of you suffers from narcolepsy you
were actually asleep during my talk so
for you I prescribe a powerful medicine
well you over there you have some
motivational issues you were just not
feeling the Apple challenge for you I’m
assigning a life coach now let’s agree
that each one of these interventions is
successful and the next time I empty out
the 90 apples each of the ten folks in
back muscles through the scrum and gets
an apple have I solved our Apple poverty
problem no ten people still did not get
an apple so I go back to the drawing
board and it occurs to me that maybe
there was something about those ten
people as a group that explained why
they didn’t get apples yes the group of
ten back there was seated farthest away
from the apples there was a structural
disadvantage that they had so next time
I dumped out the ninety apples I put you
all in a circle and I dropped the apples
they the exact center so you all have a
precisely equal chance but do we still
have a problem that’s right we still
have only 90 apples for a hundred people
so ten people will still go hungry our
first two approaches turned out to have
more to do with which people got the
apples than with how many people got the
apples beyond any individual factors
keeping people from getting the apples
beyond the group inequalities we need to
solve a systemic problem a macro problem
more people than apples one solution has
to do with distribution I can cut all
the apples into sections and give
everybody nine-tenths of an apple or I
could make applesauce and ladle it out
in equal bowls that way no one will get
a whole Apple but no one will go hungry
either
another type of solution is about
growing the pie in this case the apple
pie I could find a way to bring 100
apples instead of 90 now let’s pause
here
for a moment and translate our Apple
game back into the world of public
policy let’s use it to frame our answers
to the question why are people living in
poverty one way to answer that question
is to look at individuals as we did when
we asked about the ten people in the
back row this lens can be helpful for
example when we are asking why did two
brothers who grew up in exactly the same
circumstances but one ended up in
poverty and one did not maybe one worked
harder maybe wanted more talent maybe
one just had better luck they differed
as individuals this individual lense is
also helpful if we’re trying to help a
person get out of poverty or avoid it in
the first place what advice would you
give your teenage child about how to
avoid poverty stay in school and get as
much education as you can that radically
reduces your chances of living in
poverty stay out of trouble with the law
don’t take out too much debt this is all
very good advice but it doesn’t address
the problem of some groups having unfair
advantages let’s imagine two young
people who follow all our advice and now
they’re out applying for jobs except
that one is black and one is white well
study after study has shown that when
researchers send out identical resumes
except that half have white sounding
names and half have black sounding names
the white names get call backs and far
higher rates than the blacks this kind
of discrimination which remains
prevalent in employment but also in
education housing healthcare criminal
justice and every other facet of our
social life helps to explain why
african-americans have twice the poverty
rate of whites but remember even when we
move from the individual to the group we
are still talking about which people not
about how many people are living in
poverty to zero in on this distinction
let’s talk about education education is
the single best way for an individual to
avoid being poor but when it comes to
the macro level
education is a surprisingly weak factor
why think about the job market here in
western New York about one-third of the
jobs that we have are low wage jobs in
the service sector with a median income
of less than $26,000 a year these are
people working as cashiers food servers
daycare workers nursing home aides
they’re all doing important work vital
to our economy but many of them are not
earning enough to keep a family out of
poverty now let’s say that every single
one of those workers earned a PhD well
we have eliminated poverty No
somebody still needs to do all those
jobs and if the jobs paid poverty level
wages then the people who work them will
be living in poverty 7-eleven will not
pay a cashier more because she has a PhD
in economics it’s as simple as that
education is better at predicting which
people live in poverty than how many to
understand our Apple example at the
macro level we have to look at how many
apples are being brought and how they’re
being shared to understand poverty at
the macro level we need to look at how
many living wage jobs there are and how
the wealth that they create is being
shared it’s this society-wide lens that
helps us to understand why the poverty
rate goes up and down how did we cut
poverty among senior citizens
dramatically in the 1960s it wasn’t that
senior citizens as individuals made
better choices it was that we changed
national policy to raise their incomes
with programs like Social Security and
cut their expenses with programs like
Medicare it’s also this policy level
that helps us to understand why
countries with similar economies can
have vastly different poverty rates why
is it that the child poverty rate in
Denmark is less than 3% while in the
United States it’s over 20% Denmark in
the US have made different policy
choices about how to share their apples
now let’s talk about solving poverty the
good news is when it comes to
understanding poverty at the macro level
it’s surprisingly simple
solving poverty is not like curing
cancer or sending people to Mars because
poverty is in many ways a
straightforward problem means that your
income is too low and your expenses are
too high and so reducing poverty means
choosing public policies that raise
people’s incomes and lower their
expenses let’s talk first about raising
incomes the key to income for most
people is wages and there’s some tried
and true ways to raise wages one is to
raise the minimum wage the current
federal minimum wage is 725 an hour
that’s very low in the late 1960s the
minimum wage was worth over $10 an hour
in today’s dollars since then it has
been eroded by inflation if we recovered
those losses by raising it back to where
it was we would bring thousands of
families out of poverty but when we
think about raising incomes remember
that not everyone can work many people
are temporarily or permanently disabled
and whether they live in poverty will
depend in large part on how much public
assistance we provide to them the
federal program we have for people who
are permanently disabled is SSI
Supplemental Security income in 2015 the
annual SSI payment for a single person
was eight thousand eight hundred dollars
the federal poverty line was eleven
thousand seven hundred dollars in other
words our public policy is that people
are permanently disabled should live in
poverty that is not a fact of nature or
a fact of life it’s a decision that we
as a society have made but poverty is
not just a question of income it’s also
a question of expenses think for a
minute about the biggest items in your
household budget things like housing
utilities food transportation and
childcare the cost of these items is
affected not just by the private market
but also by public policies so if we
want to lower people’s expenses we can
lower their expenses for the things that
come out of their basic household budget
an easy one is taxes by lowering the
amount that low income people pay in
their income
taxes we can boost people out of poverty
the program that does that is called the
Earned Income Tax Credit it lifts 10
million people out of poverty each year
other programs like food stamps lower
the cost of food affordable housing
programs lower the cost of rent but it
turns out that the United States spends
much less on these programs than other
countries and that’s why we have such
high poverty rates compared to those
other countries alright let’s wrap up
with what we’ve learned about poverty
the first is that the typical family
living in poverty in the United States
is not who many of us thought it was
it’s a white mom with a high school
diploma and one or two kids living in
the suburbs the second is that certain
groups suffer disproportionately from
poverty and that that fact comes from
discrimination today in a long history
of discrimination in the past and
finally we learned that when it comes to
the causes of poverty it matters whether
we focus on individuals groups or
societies to determine whether we’re
talking about which people live in
poverty or how many and when it comes to
that big question how many people are
living in poverty why are there over 40
million people living in poverty in the
United States today it’s a matter of
public policy choices it’s not that we
don’t know how to solve poverty it’s
that we’ve chosen not to we lack the
political will and that means that it’s
up to all of us to help generate that
political will and demand that our
elected leaders make reducing poverty a top priority after all