Matt Yglesias

Family Stability Matters, Not Clear That Marriage Does

I got some pushback on yesterday’s post about Nordic family structure, well summed-up by RS who wrote “unmarried biological parents in northern Europe are more likely to stay together to raise the kid than married parents in the US. Jencks, Ellwood, and more recently Cherlin have written about this.”

Swedish dad in Södermalm (my photo available under cc license)

I don’t disagree with this. I just think it’s important to remember who’s who, what’s what, and where’s where in this argument. In the United States context you often hear it said that what we need to do to help kids is encourage their parents to be married. I think the experience of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway pretty clearly debunks that. On the other hand, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway don’t at all debunk the idea that having both of your biological parents heavily involved in your life is extremely helpful. But the issue isn’t marriage or non-marriage, it’s family dissolution. Non-married couples can stay together, and married couples can break up.

What’s more, it is worth looking at the cases of the UK and Iceland. Both of these countries really do have more one-parent households than the United States and still achieve substantially lower child poverty rates and more social mobility. I’m happy to dismiss Iceland as a bit of an odd case—and tiny anyway—but that doesn’t apply to the United Kingdom. The key thing there, frankly, is that the Blair and Brown governments decided that child poverty is a scandal and they were going to do something about it. And whatever other failings they had, they succeeded in reducing child poverty by a large margin. CAP’s Half in Ten project aimed at reducing child poverty by 50 percent in ten years is, in part, inspired by these Blair/Brown successes and shows you can do a great deal of good without reengineering people’s relationships. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing right now in the United States is a recession whose impact outpaces the anti-poverty efforts of the Obama administration.

New Uninsurance and Poverty NUmbers

New news about old economic reality: “The U.S. Census Bureau said the number of uninsured Americans increased in 2008 to 46.3 million, compared to 45.7 million in 2007. The bureau also said the U.S poverty rate of 13.2% in 2008 was an increase from 12.5% in 2007.”

And of course economic conditions were better in 2008 than they are today in 2009. The good news is that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is keeping at least six million people out of poverty so things aren’t as bad as they might have been.

Homeless Schoolkids

There’s a great piece in the NYT about the challenge facing school districts burdened with a surging number of homeless kids:

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.

The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.

There’s a lot we could do in the United States to improve the quality of education that kids coming from troubled households receive. But it’s an inherently challenging enterprise, far beyond the task of teaching to kids who have a stable home to reliably return to every night. And there’s also a lot we could be doing to directly cut down on the number of children in poverty.

Poverty Will Always Be With Us Until We Do Something About It

Charles Krauthammer scoffs at the idea of spending money on ensuring that poor people have health care with the observation that “Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us” so we might as well spend our money on space exploration. Ezra Klein says “That’s true. But the degree to which they’re with us is directly dependent on where we spend those billions.”

I think even that concedes too much. I wish this chart actually started at zero, but the point should be clear either way. It shows the poverty rate in the United States:

What happened? Well, public policy happened. In the 1960s, federal domestic programs got more ambitious, especially with regard to senior citizens. And the poverty rate went down, with the declines concentrated among the seniors who were the main targets of the spending. The extent of poverty is very much subject to our control. Disease, presumably, really will always be with us. But still, polio isn’t with us anymore. Nor is smallpox.

Albert Hirschman wrote a book called The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Of the three, I think “futility” is the most pernicious and in some ways the easiest to knock down. It sounds very wise to observe that problems are unsolvable. But even though change is hard, it’s very much possible.

The War on Poverty: Now With Demographic Details

Brendan Nyhan sends me a link to this chart which shows the changes in poverty rate in more detail than the graph I posted this morning.

As this makes clear, the big sustained drop in poverty has been among senior citizens. And I think that should be no surprise as Medicare is the largest and most sustained Great Society program. The scope of Social Security was also expanded a lot during the 1950s and I believe it was made more generous during the 1960s. It also seems that you can’t claim any substantial Great Society success in terms of reducing the poverty rate among working-age people, aged 18-65. For kids, it looks to me like you had some meaningful progress that’s since been partially reversed by the changing demographics (for ideas on how to create new reductions in child poverty, check out CAP’s Half in Ten program).

So to be charitable to critics of the “war on poverty,” I think you can say that even though the Kennedy/Johnson years were a big success in terms of reducing poverty, the specific initiatives undertaken by the Office of Economic Opportunity were not at the forefront of this success.

The War on Poverty Was an Enormous Success

Ezra Klein mentioned this briefly yesterday in the course of a larger critique of a Robert Samuelson column, but it should be said as clearly and loudly as possible that conservative assertions that “the ‘war on poverty’ failed” are dead wrong. Consider the small matter of the poverty rate:

You can see two clear trends here. One is that macroeconomic performance makes a big difference. From 1982 on to the end of the Reagan administration, the poverty rate declined steadily in lockstep with economic growth until along came a new recession. The other is that policy makes a big difference. During the years of the post-war liberal consensus, poverty went down a lot. And during the Reagan years, poverty never plumbed the depths seen in the seventies or in the Clinton years. And the cause of this relatively high poverty rate even during the Reagan growth years is precisely that Reagan believed the war on poverty had been a failure and did nothing to promote anti-poverty policies.

Fortunately, it seems that these days the public is willing to support more aggressive anti-poverty measures.

Food Snobs in the Soup Kitchen?

Julie Gunlock complains at NRO that “food snobs” are ruining America by serving unduly fancy food at soup kitchens. It’s actually rare that conservatives get to combined their hatred of poor people with their hatred of “cultural elites” in a single argument, so Gunlock gets so busy dishing out the sarcasm that she can’t quite seem to deliver the “so what?” point where we see who is being harmed by this alleged trend.

But more perniciously, throughout the piece she runs together the idea of soup kitchens being too “snobbish” about what food they serve with the idea of soup kitchens being health-conscious about the food they serve. This is an important distinction to make, however. When people can’t get enough to eat, they become malnourished. The point of charitable food assistance is to help people avoid that fate. That means, however, that it’s foolish to ignore the nutritional content of what you’re serving. Oftentimes, the situation is so dire that you can’t afford to fuss too much about this. People in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa are teetering on the brink of starvation and need food by any means necessary. But fortunately for us, even in this economy the United States is not a drought-ravaged, famine-stricken, war-torn, malgoverned third world state. We’re not facing imminent mass starvation. So it’s eminently sensible for people trying to bring food to those in need to be paying attention to the differential health impact of different meals.

SC Governor Fiddling While State Burns

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has emerged as the current economic crisis’s greatest sadist, not just refusing to help victims of economic distress in his state, but going the extra mile to ensure that the federal government can’t help people either. Some say this is just a cynical play for Republican presidential primary votes, but it seems to me to reflect a very authentic strain of Dixie conservatism that simply takes a vindictive attitude toward the poor. You saw a lot of this in the Depression, when the locus of resistance to New Deal programs that transferred wealth from the prosperous northeast to the poor south was actually in the South.

Here’s John O’Connor’s account in The State of anti-Sanford protests and Sanford’s reaction:

“Tent city is obviously people trying to make a political point,” Sanford said. “I get it. But it doesn’t make it true.”

Sanford should know, said Sheheen, adding Sanford has a history of publicity stunts.

“Things like this pale in comparison to bringing pigs to the State House,” as Sanford once did to decry pork-barrel spending, Sheheen said.

According to the latest Center for American Progress analysis of state-by-state unemployment numbers by Heather Boushey and Nayla Kazzi, South Carolina has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation (behind Michigan) at 11 percent. Take a look at the state’s rapidly deteriorating labor market conditions:

Back in 2007, before this spike in the unemployment rate, 15.1 percent of South Carolinians—and 21 percent of South Carolina’s children—were living below the poverty line. That was above a national average of around 13 percent. But, again, the unemployment rate has almost doubled since then so that’s sure to be a serious undercount of how many people in Sanford’s state are facing a dire situation.

Poverty is Bad for Kids’ Brains

Some interesting new research on the poverty cycle:

Children raised in poverty suffer many ill effects: They often have health problems and tend to struggle in school, which can create a cycle of poverty across generations.

Now, research is providing what could be crucial clues to explain how childhood poverty translates into dimmer chances of success: Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, leaving children with impairment in at least one key area — working memory.

Not only is poverty incredibly bad for children, but a really large proportion of American children are impoverished. To be specific, in 2007 back before the recession 18 percent of America’s kids were below the poverty line, a number that must be pushing past twenty given the current circumstances. We could dramatically reduce this number with relatively small levels of expenditure, and our failure to do so is creating a serious threat to our future.

Also take a look at these interesting comments.

Kristof Gets Education Mostly Right, Slights Importance of Poverty

I thought yesterday’s Nicholas Kristof column hit almost all the right notes on the issues afflicting American education. He flagged the critical research by Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz on the importance of improved performance from the school system to our future prosperity and the prospects for a decent mount of equality. And he rightly tags investments in early childhood education and using better methods of assessing and rewarding teacher effectiveness as keys to improvement.

But this part I didn’t like:

Perhaps we should have fought the “war on poverty” with schools — or, as we’ll see in a moment, with teachers.

For one thing, the war on poverty did a lot to improve education. If you don’t like how our current K-12 system is serving the disadvantaged, just ponder what it would look like without any Title I or IDEA. Our Johnson-era policy initiatives had their shortcomings, just as our school system has its shortcomings, but real improvements were made in this period that have made a lot of people better off.

But more importantly, it’s just incredibly frustrating to see this kind of effort to frame the country as facing a zero-sum choice between improving the performance of the school system and directly targeting poverty and related issues. Clearly, though, these are synergistic concerns. You can’t wait to make the schools better until we’ve gotten poverty down to Nordic levels. But when kids are hungry, that makes it harder for them to learn in school. When kids are sick, that makes it harder for them to learn in school. When kids live in violence neighborhoods, that makes it harder for them to learn in school. When kids’ mental development is being impaired by lead poisoning, that makes it harder for them to learn in school. When mom’s too exhausted after working two shifts to make ends meet to help her kids with their homework, that makes it harder for them to learn in school. This stuff isn’t brain surgery. And there’s ultimately no substitute for directly tackling these problems.

Poverty and the Recession

Ben Furnas and James Kvaal on the kind of dramatic increases in poverty that we’re facing absent a very robust recovery program:

More than 12 million Americans are at risk. The number of people living in poverty will rise by 12.4 million by 2010—including 3.8 million children—if the unemployment rate reaches 11 percent, according to our analysis based on a methodology developed by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. And more than 7 million people will fall into deep poverty, living below half of the poverty line.

Dramatic increases in poverty are consistent with past recessions. The number of people living in poverty grew by 9 million between 1979 to 1983, and it grew by 8 million between 1989 and 1993.

The weak job market will also raise the number of people without health insurance. A percentage-point increase in unemployment could raise the number of uninsured by 1.1 million. If unemployment rates rise according to Moody’s projections—increasing from 4.6 percent in 2007 to 11.1 percent in 2010—more than 7 million people will likely lose their health insurance.

With stimulus, things will still be bad but not as bad as they might otherwise become.

Child Poverty in America

I’d like to think that most Americans are just too insular to realize that our child poverty rate is absolutely off the charts in international terms, even when compared to other high-immigration Anglophone countries, to say nothing of the Nordics:

The alternative to people just not knowing is the idea that people just don’t care which, frankly, is an upsetting possibility I’d prefer not to believe in.

Note that if we allow this to continue, we’re going to keep slipping in terms of our relative educational attainment, and over the long run average American living standards will slip further and further behind those in northern Europe (and depending on how you look at leisure time, the rest of Europe as well). There are things we could do to get more out of our school system, but ultimately it’s inconceivable to me that we’ll ever get a first-rate levels of educational attainment with these kind of child poverty rate — it basically guarantees that portions of the system will be overburdened by too many children with too many problems. That’ll be fine for those getting the long end of the hyperinequality, but it’s sad to see the extent to which we’re slouching toward that future without any public acknowledgment of it or debate about the wisdom of our priorities. You would think that something like being by far the world leader in child poverty would dominate the political agenda — instead you never see it mentioned.

Time for a link to half in ten.

Financial Literacy and Literacy

Interesting article in The Economist about an economist who goes to volunteer teaching financial literacy to poor women.

This sort of thing is an under-examined subject. It’s clear from everyone who looks at it that a huge proportion of the people who can least afford to be making bad decisions about their personal finances are doing so, and they’re doing so in large part because they don’t really understand the decisions they’re making or the options available to them. Finding ways to increase the knowledge base of this part of the population would significantly improve their economic prospects, their ability to be good parents to their children, etc. How to get that done is less clear. But one thing I would say is that these issues are an under-appreciated cost of the bad job America does of educating poor children. Basic math and literacy skills aren’t the same as financial literacy. But financial literacy is built out of reading stuff (terms of contracts, fine print on ads, etc.) and doing a little math with it. And an awful lot of people lack “financial literacy” because they’re basically illiterate:

That’s from A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults and though there’s some sign of improvement the absolute levels are bad. An example of “basic” level quantitative literacy is “comparing the ticket prices for two events” and they’re saying 22 percent of the public isn’t up to the challenge. An example of “intermediate” level quantitative literacy is “calculating the total cost of ordering specific office supplies from a catalog.” An example of “basic” prose literacy is “finding in a pamphlet for prospective jurors an explanation of how people were selected for the jury pool.”

Lacking these kind of basic prose and quantitative literacy skills doesn’t just hurt your potential earnings as a worker, it makes it extremely difficult to make your way financially through a complicated world. Of course if these skill deficits were distributed randomly throughout the population it might not be so bad — people could just ask a friend for help. But they’re not distributed randomly — instead you have communities of people with only minimal ability to amass the factual information they need to make informed decisions about what to do with their time and money.

Ending Child Hunger

Hilzoy suggests universal free breakfasts for children at school would be a good anti-poverty policy at a time when we’re expecting a sharp rise in the poverty rate due to the recession. I agree and, indeed, this is one of the five points in the five point plan to end child hunger that Joel Berg and Tom Feeedman released the other day for PPI.

This isn’t really an issue I think about much, but when you stop to consider it the long-run social and economic costs of child hunger and malnutrition are incredibly large relative to the low cost (in historical and global terms) of food in the contemporary United States. Hungry kids wind up having problems in school (understandably) and the consequences to them personally and to the country at large of that skill deficit persist for decades. And that’s to say nothing of contemplating the public health issues in play.

Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day and all good bloggers are supposed to write about poverty. I thought I’d direct attention to CAP’s report from last year about how to cut the poverty rate in half over the next ten years. It’d cost money, but at the same time the report notes that:

Poverty imposes enormous costs on society. The lost potential of children raised in poor households, the lower productivity and earnings of poor adults, the poor health, increased crime, and broken neighborhoods all hurt our nation. Persistent childhood poverty is estimated to cost our nation $500 billion each year, or about four percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

This kind of human capital calculation isn’t the reason to try to fight domestic poverty (it’s the right thing to do!), but it’s an important part of understanding why the admittedly high price of effective anti-poverty policy isn’t too high a price. Accepting a sky-high poverty rate winds up burdening our education system, our public health system, and our criminal justice system and ultimately harming most everyone. There’s no good reason to be complacent about this.

More Great Society

With regard to the post below, commenter rab wants to know: “If Matt’s intent is to ‘debunk’ a ‘myth’, maybe he should address some of the reasons why people think the Great Society programs were a failure first.”

Sure. I don’t think this is too difficult. There were tons of domestic policy shifts undertaken under the “Great Society” rubric. Taken as a whole, the package was extremely successful. But several Great Society initiatives were either poorly designed or else outright failures. At around the same time there were political backlashes against cultural liberalism and liberal approaches to things like crime and national security. As a result of those backlashes, conservatives moved into political ascendancy. One of several consequences of this is that the “Great Society” concept has come to be identified with the unpopular elements of the Johnson-era domestic agenda — AFDC, “maximum feasible participation,” etc. But the Great Society programs that made the biggest difference — notably Medicare, Medicaid, and Title I federal aid to education — remain so extremely popular that conservative politicians don’t dare mount frontal assaults on them.

No Poverty Plan from McCain

Today’s census numbers remind us that 37.3 million Americans live below the poverty line. That’s a lot of people, and a pretty hefty swathe of our overall population. Most Americans, of course, don’t have a “poverty plan” to change that fact. But most Americans probably do think it’s a problem that so many of our citizens have so few resources, and probably expect that if they were president it’s the kind of thing they’d try to do something to change. But not John McCain! Brian Levine observes that while McCain’s website asserts that he “understands the importance of investing in key industries such as space” it doesn’t say anything about poverty. I would further note that fully eighteen percent of American children are below the poverty line. McCain does claim, now and again, to be interested in improving educational attainment in the United States. But while there are certainly things we can do to improve education outcomes for poor kids, we also have a substantial body of research showing that poor kids would do better in school if they weren’t so poor. This, in turn, links back to our long-run economic performance. So it’d be nice to have some sort of program on these issues.

UPDATE: For more on the new numbers, see these takes from Katie Campbell at PPI and Michael Ettlinger here at CAP.

UPDATE II:  Bonus joke — given that McCain only resides in four of his eight homes, holding on to the rest as investment properties, maybe he could let some homeless people live in the remaining four and call it a poverty plan.

Are Interdistrict Transfers The Answer?

There’s been a spate of interest recently among progressives in doing more to promote the availability of “interdistrict transfers” that would let students shift out of their current public school and into a different school in a different district. The idea would be to do something to undue the unfair consequences of our current arbitrary system of district boundaries. Education Sector decided to take a look at the potential for this idea and has now released a report on the subject that’s fairly skeptical. As Erin Dillon explains, “To our surprise, we found that interdistrict choice on a large scale is unlikely to benefit a large percent of students – only 10 to 20 percent are likely to find a better school option.”

Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, makes a number of points in response to argue that this is likely an underestimate. I would also only observe that “only” is doing a lot of work in the phrase “only 10 to 20 percent are likely to find a better school option.” A different phrase would be “as many as 10 to 20 percent would likely find a better school option.” If I were a member of one of the 10-20 percent of families who could be helped by these measures, I’m not sure I would find their inefficacy for the other 80 percent of the population to be a very compelling reason to poo-poo the possibilities here. The public school system, by its nature, is very fragmented so lots of positive steps don’t help most kids and so you just kind of need to spoon more and more stuff on the plate.

Today in Statistics

Hot new data on poverty, income, and health insurance fresh out from the Census Bureaus’ Current Population Survey today.