Unveiling the Persistence of Poverty
Understanding the Challenges, Empowering Change, and Building a Culture of Opportunity and Equality
Behavior Matters - Poverty is Not Intractable
We have a significant problem of poverty in the United States. There have been no meaningful changes in the poverty percentage since more accurate statistics were kept beginning in the late 1960s. The United States, by world standards, is a wealthy country. There are no excuses for so many people to be living in poverty. A 2013 UNICEF report ranked the U.S. as having the second-highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. Previously, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal-era program was initiated with some limited and temporary success. More recently, poverty alleviation efforts were instituted during the 2008 Great Recession that was very rushed and ill-conceived and executed with unmeasurable outcomes.
Many other government efforts have been initiated and promoted to decrease and eliminate poverty. However, the U.S. population of poor people in 1970 was 12.6%; it was 13.5% in 1990; in 2010, it was 15.1%; in 2019 it was 10.5%; and in 2023 it was 11.6%. There are now more than 38 million poor Americans. The U.S. government data demonstrates that the implemented government policies and programs have failed. These realities are unacceptable. It is time that we become bold and initiate a guided and measurable/accountable War on Poverty such as the one proposed by President Johnson in the 1960s.
Many special interest groups are always around to reap the benefits. It's time to face one of our most serious problems as a Country. We need to initiate a behavior-based evolutionary cultural change by implementing an intentional and scientific approach to create a social environment/culture that decreases the social causes of income inequality - unemployment, poor education, limited work skills, crime, poor parenting, drug addiction, incarceration, inadequate health (and health care), debt-traps, and many other social ills that are common among the poor. We propose that we have created a social environment that keeps the poor, poor.
We recommend Joan DeMartin’s Crime and Punishment essays for additional information and resources regarding poverty in America.
Clearly, the many unmeasured, therefore unaccountable and wasted, government poverty programs need to be replaced with a multi-faceted and comprehensive behavior-based war on poverty. We need to be bold again, like the initiative Johnson proposed. Our government programs have not made a significant long-term impact on poverty levels. In 2016, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned the United States that its high poverty rate needs to be tackled urgently. Not much is being done.
Why Poverty Has Remained Intractable in the United States
Michael Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States in 1962. It quickly became one of the most influential books of the 20th century. It appealed to the American conscience. The primary message was that poverty in the affluent society of the United States was both more extensive and more tenacious than most of us assumed. He wrote, “They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.” More than 60 years later, the many poor living in The Other America are still among us. Now, they are not all invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus no longer a matter of debate; what needs to be done is to change their social environment and promote positive behavior change. These are the primary issues and the focus of these essays.
Harrington argued that poverty in the U.S. was composed of a “separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” Poor Americans were not distinguished from affluent citizens simply by their lack of adequate income. Rather, they are people who have limited education, poor health and housing, and high levels of mental distress. We may also add other known factors about the life of the poor: single parents are usually raising multiple children alone, or in a dysfunctional and abusive relationship. Many parents are incarcerated. Violence as well as addiction and substance abuse is prevalent. Schools that serve the poor tend to be substandard. Dropout rates from those schools are high. Many children live life unsupervised, diets are poor, many times leading to significant health issues. Living in poverty is a web of problems, when one gets “solved,” and the others are left constant, there is little or no gain.
Harrington informed us that poverty would not be solved automatically by the expansion of the economy (such as the analogy used at the time, “a rising tide lifts all boats”). He also argued that poverty cannot be ended by telling the poor to “lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.” Harrington urged us, “Society must help them before they can help themselves.” He proposed that the United States needed to undertake a broad program of “remedial action” on behalf of the Other America. He called for a “comprehensive assault on poverty.” The portrayal of the poor in The Other America depicted lives characterized by harshness and brevity, primarily due to the circumstances they faced. They lacked such amenities of middle-class life as decent housing, education, medical care, nutrition as well as personal security. The life of the poor is reflected to include domestic violence, substance abuse, and living for the moment. Harrington described it as being a product of the culture of poverty, a judgment not on the poor as individuals, but on a society that has been indifferent to their social situation and personal needs.
It has been reported that John Kennedy read Harrington’s book. He then assembled a group of social scientists who were involved in the early discussions of anti-poverty legislation. The Other America brought at the time an end to “piecemeal thinking” about social problems in the Kennedy administration. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. LBJ took up the torch and in his State of the Union address in January 1964 pledged his administration to waging an “unconditional war on poverty.” Unfortunately, the time was not right then. Johnson and the administration were distracted by many domestic problems that fostered cultural division, mostly driven by the Vietnam War but also by the monumental and essential passage of the Civil Rights Act. He decided not to participate in the presidential elections. We will review the proposals of the Great Society in our future essays on poverty. The Great Society, unfortunately, died then. No other subsequent president has been bold enough to propose the eradication of poverty as we know it in the United States. It is time to do it again; this time applying a behavior-based scientific approach.
Harrington argued that poverty was a problem that is not easy to solve. He convincingly demonstrated that everything in the lives of the Other Americans conspires to keep the poor, poor.
Understanding Eviction's Devastating Impact
Mathew Desmond, professor of sociology at Princeton, published Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). He argued that the United States is the richest country on earth and has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. He studied eight families from Milwaukee who were having problems paying the rent during the 2017 financial crisis. He focused on describing the relationships and interactions among landlords, tenants, and judges. Desmond concluded, “Eviction [acts] as a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.” In his book, he describes and illustrates the psychological, legal, and discriminatory aspects of eviction and how it is intertwined with poverty. His fieldwork was described by sociologist David Harding as “a clear illustration of the causal relationship between eviction and the vicious cycle of poverty.” Harding, in his review of the book, also proposed “that conditions such as domestic violence and drug abuse are likely symptoms rather than causes of poverty.” In his review, he concluded, “it is unlikely for Desmond to drastically change the lives of his subjects only with a few incidences of intervention.” We wholly concur with this wise observation. Desmond’s book received numerous awards including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Let’s consider the social costs of eviction. Katha Pollitt in The Guardian (April 7, 2016) wrote, “It puts incredible stress on families. It prevents people from saving the comparatively small sums that would let them stabilize their situation. They are always starting from scratch, losing their possessions in the chaos of removal, or putting them in storage and losing them when they can’t pay the fees. An eviction on your record makes the next apartment harder to get. Eviction damages children, who are always changing schools, giving up friends, toys and pets and living with the exhaustion and depression of their parents.” Pollitt also argues, “eviction destroys communities: when people move frequently, they don’t form the social bonds and pride in place that encourage them to care for their block and look out for their neighbors.” Most of us don't know the extent of the problems of being poor that exist in the United States. It is hell to be poor.
Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America (2023), is his most recent book. He set out to evaluate and define “why there is so much hardship in this land of abundance.” He proposed that evaluating and understanding “Why all this American Poverty?” requires a different approach. He proposed, “To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves.” In other words, we need to examine our own behavior and how our behavior sustains a culture/environment that keeps the poor, poor, because it benefits us. He describes his book as “how some lives are made small so that others may grow.” Those of us living in plenty benefit from keeping the poor, poor. We will address these issues in a future essay
A Call for Policy Reform
Desmond published an essay in The New York Times (March 9, 2023, and updated April 3, 2023). Desmond writes in his conclusion: “There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land.” His is an ethnographic study that deepens our understanding of life that most of us don’t know about - why poverty persists in America. A brief, but effective conscience builder. He demonstrates with effective data that: “A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them.” One of his observations included - "We've approached the poverty questions by pointing to poor people themselves when we should have been focusing on exploitation.” In other words, we have to focus on our behavior, individually and collectively.
Desmond also makes the case for how to eliminate poverty. His is a behavior-based approach based on sound moral values: “Ending Poverty will require new policies and renewed political movements to be sure. But it will also require that each of us, in our own way, become poverty abolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbor’s deprivation and refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.
The number of poor people in the U.S. is no longer debatable. In 2021, the most recent data estimated that 38 million people live at or below the poverty level. Some demographic scientists believe that poverty in the U.S. might be worse than it’s reported. We have the highest rate of poverty in the developed world. The extent of U.S. income and wealth inequality tends to be extreme compared to other industrialized countries. Why is this so? It is not because we fail to work hard. The fact is that compared to other countries, we have failed to implement science-based and measured/accountable policies and programs that focus on poverty reduction and prevention.
For example, the Nordic Model (particularly Iceland), places high emphasis on welfare to ensure a high quality of life for its citizens, access to the necessary services, and a sturdy social net. They offer free quality education, cost-free health care, and a robust pension system (we in the U.S. do not like to be taxed to accomplish improving the quality of life of those who are less fortunate). The Nordic Model works through a combination of "free market capitalism" and a tax-funded welfare system that includes education and job training. Iceland has one of the lowest poverty rates of industrialized countries. In 2021 the rate was 4.9%. It did hit 0% in 2017. Iceland has very high levels of education and access to healthcare that is subsidized by taxpayers. It has a fully funded occupational pension system. Strong trade unions and wage bargaining have helped promote equality and have kept poverty rates down. Iceland invests in its people but also has implemented the Borgen Project based on the belief that leaders of the most powerful nations on earth should be doing more to address global poverty (see https://borgenproject.org/).
David Brady, a sociologist, informed us, “Societies make collective choices about how to divide their resources. These choices are acted upon in the organizations and states that govern the societies and then become institutionalized through the welfare state. Where poverty is low, equality has been institutionalized (and practiced). Where poverty is widespread, as most visibly demonstrated by the United States, there has been a failure to institutionalize (and practice) equality.” Those countries that act proactively to ensure that few families fall below a minimum floor level, generally have much lower rates of poverty than those countries that take a more laissez-faire approach.
Poverty affects individuals across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, highlighting the widespread and systemic nature of this issue. The highest rate of poverty is observed among American Indian/Alaska Native and Black populations.
Source: https://www.kff.org/
Social policy can make a significant difference in reducing the extent of poverty in a given country. But it is individual and collective behavior change that will make the impact to promote equality and eradicate poverty in the U.S. The fact is that it also requires intent to change and act, as well as implementing a change-by-design approach. Individual and collective behavior, for the greater good, is what moves those policies into action and fruition. We need to start now. The next few essays will be an attempt to provide a framework as to how the science of behavior can facilitate an effective reduction in poverty by implementing a behavior-based cultural evolutionary process. We have to be cognizant that behavior change needs to be guided, measured, and accountable. This takes time.
Thank you for reading our Substack! Pass it on and see you soon,
Francisco I. Perez
Henry S. Pennypacker
Faris R. Kronfli
For those of you who are interested in delving deeper into this issue, we suggest:
H.S. Pennypacker & Francisco I. Perez - Engineering the Upswing: A Blueprint for Reframing Our Culture - 2022, Sloan Publishing. It can be bought at The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies bookstore (behavior.org) or at Amazon. All proceeds benefit the Cambridge Center.
Thank you. So is your Substack. It is time for people to learn but more important to act in order to reverse the gradual downward trend of our Culture in the U. S. We do thank you for your timely insights. Francisco.
Thank you for this enlightening writing on poverty. The books you mention are incredibly important to help understand poverty in America and are must reads for those who care. And thanks so much for recommending my newsletter!