The Poverty Paradox: Review

By Mark Robert Rank

The titular paradox is poverty in the USA, the largest and one of the richest countries in the world.  Compared to other rich countries the USA has much more and worse poverty than almost any other.  Professor Rank dissects the causes and has some suggestions, few if any of which would fly with the modern Republican Party.

Rank proposes what he calls the structural vulnerability hypothesis.  That means that political policies and economic circumstances punish the poor and make it harder to escape poverty.  Bad schools and bad neighborhoods promote poverty and make it hard to escape.  The US ranks high on the inequality scale and low on the social mobility scale.

Rank argues that a major driver of poverty in the US is blame the victim thinking, the idea that if persons are poor, it is their own fault.  Much poverty can be traced to lack of social capital: education, other saleable skills, disability, poor health, or access to employment opportunities.  Unlike other developed countries, the US does not have universal health insurance.  As a result, Americans are more likely to suffer from preventable disabilities and because the US locally funds education, expenditures per pupil are much lower in poorer districts than wealthier ones.

So what does he think should be done about it?  There are some obvious targets of opportunity. One of them is universal health insurance, assuring all citizens access to health care.  Another one would be junking our venerable but outmoded reliance of schools on local property taxes, which produce enormous disparities in educational dollars per student.  A critical unmet need in this country is affordable housing.  We have tax policies which subsidize housing for the upper middle class and the rich, but very little for the rest of America and especially the poor.  The final idea I will mention is expansion of the negative income tax.  It is too skimpy and too restricted.

Needless to say, all these are opposed by the Plutocratic classes and their political minions, mostly but hardly exclusively, Republicans.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec...
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st...
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more