|
| |
Childhood Poverty in America
From: Columbia University
| By:
J. Lawrence Aber |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Despite America's booming economy, one in five children in the United States lives in poverty. According to Larry Aber (right), director of the National Center for Children in Poverty, at Columbia University, America's child poverty is the highest in the industrialized world, and Great Britain's is next highest. In this interview with Fathom, Aber provides a glimpse into some uncomfortable facts revealed by his research on child poverty. |
 | |
| "In modern and complex societies, income is a way of gaining access to basic things." | |
Larry Aber: Americans think of poverty as the lack of resources to meet basic needs. We also tend to define poverty as income poverty--not having enough income or cash. There are two or three related ideas. One is deprivation. You can have cash but still be deprived of certain things because you do not have enough cash in a particular market. So some people can be house poor or food poor even if they are not cash poor, although usually people are cash poor. |
A related idea is inequality, income inequality. If you make a little bit of money in a country that has a lot of income, and you make a little bit of money in a country that has much more modest income, you may not be as far away from other people. So there is relative poverty--how poor you are compared with others--versus absolute poverty. |
A third idea is one of social exclusion. Income is not only supposed to help you meet you basic needs for food, clothing and housing; in modern and complex societies, income is a way of gaining access to certain basic things, ranging from education, to the ability to be transported somewhere you need to be, to access to cultural events. |
Fathom: How is poverty measured in the United States? |
Aber: In the 1960s, a home economist for the government tried to figure out who was poor in this country, and started to count them in a more rigorous way. Based on consumer surveys, she found that most medium- and low-income people in America spent about a third of their income on food. She also determined that back in the '60s it cost about $1,000 for a family of four to have a minimally adequate, nutritious diet. So she took that $1,000 and multiplied it by three, since most families spent about a third on food, and that became the poverty line back in 1963: $3,000 for a family of four. |
Today, adjusted for inflation, that is just about $17,000. If you're a family of four and your income is below $17,000, then you're living below the poverty line. |
Back in 1963, the other two types of poverty, relative poverty and subjective poverty, had the same figure. Relative poverty is about 50 percent of the median income. Back then the median income was about $6,000, and the poverty line was half of the median income. Today our national median income is closer to $40,000 or $41,000, so the poverty line is farther away from the national median income than it was back then. |
The final concept is subjective poverty. Through the years, survey researchers have asked Americans, "What does it take to barely get by in your community for a family of four? What is the minimum it takes?" Right now that national average is about $22,000. It ranges from the high teens to, in Connecticut, about $44,000. It varies. So I now have three different thresholds. The official government threshold is $17,000, the subjective threshold is $22,000, and half the median income is about $20,000 or $21,000. |
Fathom: What does it mean to live in poverty? |
Aber: That means that any family living below any of those thresholds cannot make ends meet. They do not have enough money to pay their rent or their mortgage, adequately clothe and feed their family, and a variety of other things like that. There have been breadbasket approaches now that say, "What does it take to really help families meet their minimum needs?" and that is up in the high 30s or $40,000. So families are doing without, postponing, borrowing, bartering, and consequently they are under an enormous amount of stress. |
Fathom: According to your research, one in five kids lives in poverty. Who are the poor? |
 | |
| "Poor children live in every community and come from every racial group." | |
Aber: Poor children live in every community and come from every racial group in the country. Most people, when they hear the words "child poverty" or they hear about poor kids, almost automatically put a black face on the child and give them an inner-city address. It is true that African-American and Latino children and inner-city children have rates of poverty that are much higher than the national average. Latino, African-American and urban kids' poverty rates range between 40 and 48 percent. Four kids out of 10 in those groups are poor. But if we were a nation just of white children, or a nation just of suburban children, we would have the highest child-poverty rate of any Western industrialized country. Sixteen percent of our white kids, and 17 or 18 percent of our suburban kids, are poor. So, while it is true that African-American, Latino and inner-city kids are poor, suburban and white kids are poor, too. Thus poverty is a structural problem in America. It is overrepresented among ethnic and racial minorities, but it is everywhere. Poverty has actually been going up faster among kids in suburbs and faster among white kids in the last 20 years than African-American and urban kids. |
Fathom: Are there other enduring myths about poverty? |
Aber: Most Americans believe that kids could not possibly be poor if their parents worked. But close to 70 percent of poor kids under 6 have parents who work full- or part-time. So most parents of poor kids are working parents. There is a growing understanding that you can be working but poor in America, and that work and poverty are not--unfortunately--antithetical. |
Fathom: What can we do to help eliminate poverty? |
Aber: I think one thing that we would like is for the educated public to be more aware of these issues. They could go to the National Center for Children and Poverty's website, NCCP.org, which is filled with information, facts and references. |
Citizens can also begin to ask their elected officials to pay more attention to child poverty. We did some polling to find out what Americans thought about these issues, and the majority of Americans actually now favor their government spending more of their time and more of their resources in reducing child poverty. They want child poverty to be a higher priority. But citizens' sentiment for that solution has not yet caught up with the policymakers. Active citizens--and this is not a partisan statement--Republicans, Democrats, Independents, regardless of party affiliation, can ask their elected and appointed officials to pay more attention to child poverty. |
Fathom: Do you feel that the political will exists in America to eliminate poverty? |
 | |
| "During the period of the time of most rapid growth in child poverty, we"ve had the least political will to do something about it." | |
Aber: I think that we go through cycles, and I think that the political will has not existed for a number of years. Back in the late '70s, the poverty rate for children was about two-thirds of what it is now. The poverty rate for young children has gone up nearly 40 percent in the last 20 years. The way it tends to go up is that it goes up during recessions and then levels off or declines a little bit during economic recoveries, only to go back up again during recessions and then to level off during recoveries. We had a recession in the late '70s, early '80s, a recession in the late '80s, early '90s, and during those periods of time child poverty went up. During the recoveries, it went down just a little bit. In this most recent economy, it went down a lot. But during the period of time of the most rapid growth in child poverty we had the least political will to do something about that, for a variety of reasons. |
One reason is that the country was worried about the big national debt and the growing deficit in our federal budget. And that made people cautious about social spending--a kind of way of putting it--or completely stingy about it, to put it another way. A second reason is that they felt that the system was broken in some ways; that, if the welfare system was rewarding idleness or did not reward hard work, we are putting money into a system that could be broken. And the third reason was a tendency on Americans' part to equate idleness with race. You cannot avoid confronting racial differences, racial misunderstandings and mistrust in thinking about the issue of poverty. |
 | |
| |
Next, if Americans think that poor people are idle and they misattribute idleness to race, they are not supportive of public policies at all toward alleviating poverty. They want people to get up and work. What has happened in the last five or six years, one of the silver linings to welfare reform, is that Americans now believe the system will not tolerate idleness, that everybody is supposed to work. There is the belief that the poor are also supposed to work--even though the majority of poor parents did work already--but now Americans believe that the system is making them do it, too. There is actually, I think, an increase in Americans' willingness and maybe even commitment to helping the poor. Everything I just said is backed by a bunch of survey data that people have been taking over the last period of time. For example, three years ago the Pew Center, which does a lot of survey research, asked Americans, "Would you be willing to support more programs for people in poverty?" and the split was about 45-45, yes-no. Today it is 52-36. There has been a very significant difference--from dead even to about 18 points--in people saying yes, they would be willing to do it. And we think they are saying that because they believe that poor people are trying to help themselves. And that is a critical feature to it. |
We still do not have a national commitment to reduce the child-poverty rate. I will contrast it to the other country in the Western industrialized world that has the next highest child poverty rate, our mother country, England. Great Britain has nearly as high a child poverty rate as we do. And last year Prime Minister Tony Blair made a national commitment to eliminating child poverty in 20 years and cutting it in half in the next 10. When a country can make that kind of commitment to a specific goal and politicians can be held accountable to that goal, I think there is a level of political will that we in America have not yet achieved. |
Fathom: Looking back at the twentieth century and ahead to the twenty-first, how have things improved for children in poverty, and how have they gotten more dire? |
Aber: At the turn of the twentieth century, it was certainly the case in America that a much larger percentage of children were poor than they are today, and that they lived under more extreme material conditions. If we used a simple income, or absolute income, definition of poverty, that would be the case. But it did not cost as much to participate in certain kinds of critical things in our society, so even though the income was lower, the cost of inclusion was also lower. Children could participate in things and families could provide access to their children for things that literally money could not buy back then. On balance, I think kids are better nourished, better housed, better educated, and all of those things are only good. |
But there are some children who might feel farther behind and more left out, less included, more excluded, and on a slower rate of growth than everybody else. If some children are advancing, but at such a much slower rate than other children and families who are skyrocketing, the possibility for growing in equality is the key thing that I think we need to be concerned about over the course of the twenty-first century. |
We made midcourse corrections as a nation in the early twentieth century; the entire Progressive Era grew out of a recognition that tuberculosis fed by poverty in the Lower East Side was going to affect people in midtown Manhattan, too. And there was a growing sense of interdependence and how the plight of the poor was going to affect the plight of the commonwealth. There is a different set of dynamics about that now. The specifics are different, but the larger challenge is the same. We have had a period of growing inequality--the dire situations of one part of our society threaten the health of all of us. What we need is a concept of self-interest properly understood, where we understand that it is in our individual and collective interest to do well by kids. |
I think that we are now entering a time that could become a new progressive era, a period of increased budget surpluses, a growing awareness of some of the needs--if they lead to a set of decisions about how to make new investments, how to make investments in families and children in different ways. While the unchecked tendency for growing income inequality is the greatest fear for the future, the greatest prospect for the future is that we may have resources and a set of ideas about how to invest those resources wisely to close that gap. |
|
| |
