Race, social systems, and the creation of poverty

In our discussion today of the role of social systems in creating / limiting opportunities, I was terribly remiss in not  sharply naming race and racism as a motivating factor in the reduction of social policies and public supports to urban communities from the 1970s.  Yes, the retirement of social supports affected poor whites (in far higher numbers than we recognize) but from the 1970s social services and poverty were largely coded in reference to African Americans.  Race was critical in the shift in these policies and in the subsequent growth in income inequality.

And here's another article on the same subject from today's New York Times that I found fascinating.  It argues that long prison terms serve to assure that families and communities remain in poverty.

Prison and the Poverty Trap (excerpted here)

“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”

Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.
 When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.
 

Before the era of mass incarceration, there was already evidence linking problems in poor neighborhoods to the high number of single-parent households and also to the high rate of mobility: the continual turnover on many blocks as transients moved in and out.

Now those trends have been amplified by the prison boom’s “coercive mobility,” as it is termed by Todd R. Clear, the dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. In some low-income neighborhoods, he notes, virtually everyone has at least one relative currently or recently behind bars, so families and communities are continually disrupted by people going in and out of prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-eyed-as-contributing-to-poverty.html?pagewanted=2&hpw

The Minimum Wage Awards (The Strip By Brian McFadden, NYT, 2/17/2013)

Decline of the middle class - in numbers and in income.

Shirley's recent post asked whether the middle class was declining in numbers.  Yes, it is declining in numbers and also in income.  Here are some charts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/01/middle-class-america-charts_n_1847211.html#slide=1459758

"A lost decade for the middle class during which its income fell for the first time since World War II, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center."
Here are 3 of the 5 charts in the article.  What do you think?



 

Economic inequality and natural disasters (and snowstorms)

So class really is everywhere in our lives.  I've been thinking about how lucky I was to not have lost heat or hot water, to live in a city that can afford plows (unlike Central Falls and Woonsocket), to have a fridge full of food, and to have the ready cash to pay someone to dig out my car from the piles of packed and hardened snow created by the street plows.   But its not luck - except that trees did not fall on electricity lines near my house.  The rest of it is a measure of class privilege
Here is an article on economic inequality and natural disasters that caught my interest.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/10/29/1104111/economic-inequality-hurricanes/?mobile=nc  Posted just before Hurricane Sandy  Thinkprogress.org is a web site you might investigate

How Economic Inequality Makes Hurricanes More Deadly

By Zack Beauchamp on Oct 29, 2012 at 11:50 am 

While the Eastern seaboard braces for Hurricane Sandy, 65 people have already been killed by the storm in the Caribbean. The tragic death toll and accompanying widespread property damage are caused in part by poor infrastructure and poverty — problems that aren’t limited to the Caribbean. Indeed, America’s inequality problem is a key reason why natural disasters wreak such havoc inside the United States. That our stratified society makes storms more deadly is nearly universally believed by disaster experts. According to a paper by three experts at the University of South Carolina (Cutter et al.), “[t]here is a general consensus within the social science community” that some key causes of vulnerability to storms include “lack of access to resources (including information, knowledge, and technology); limited access to political power and representation; social capital, including social networks and connections; beliefs and customs; building stock and age; frail and physically limited individuals; and type and density of infrastructure and lifelines.” Inequality was, the researchers found, the single most important predictor of vulnerability to storm damage — variation in the wealth of individual counties alone explained 12.4 percent of the differences in the impact of natural disasters between counties.
The reasons for this are fairly clear — poorer communities have less resources to evacuate and prepare for storms, and also live in housing that’s less likely to be build to withstand nature’s wrath. As Kathleen Tierney at the University of Colorado puts it:

[Dimensions] of social class, including education and income, affect the ability to engage in self-protective activities across all phases of the hazard cycle. Educational achievements and literacy competence influence access to information on disaster risks and risk-reduction measures…The lack of affordable housing in U.S. metropolitan areas forces the poor to live in substandard housing that is often located in physically vulnerable areas and also to live in overcrowded housing conditions. Manufactured housing may be the only viable housing option for people with limited resources, but mobile homes can become death traps during hurricanes and tornadoes…disaster evacuation scenarios are also based on other assumptions, such as the idea that in addition to having their own transportation, households also have the financial resources to leave endangered communities when ordered to do so. This is definitely not true for the poor.

Other sorts of related inequalities also make the impact of storms worse. Cutter et al. found that black, Hispanic, and Asian communities in the United States were also more at risk from storms, as were communities dependent on one industry (like mining or fishing), ones with high percentages of residents living in mobile homes, and ones with high population density.