Working
hard and barely gettin' by,
that's
the American way.
Working
less and gettin' filthy rich,
that's
the American Lie.
-- Emerald A. Behrens
The rich just keep getting
richer. So quotes the Forbes article by Kerry A. Dolan and Luisa
Kroll in Inside The 2014 Forbes 400: Facts And Figures About
America's Wealthiest, after a time of deep recession in modern
American history. According to that same article, those rich people
saw an increase of their wealth rise $270 billion from 2013 to 2014.
According to the article,
Wealth and Inequality written by Sarah Glazer (CQ
Researcher), 10 percent of America's wealthiest controlled half
of the nation's income in 2012, with foreign tax havens that shelter
trillions of dollars.
These new statistics have
been compared to the Gilded Age, a time of unprecedented prosperity
and great inequality in America. It also raises questions on whether
this unanticipated wealth increase comes at the expense of the
disappearing middle-class and how it will ripple out to the overall
financial situation and joblessness problem in the nation.
As economists and social
activists struggle to defend or raise awareness about this issue,
what's interesting to note is how the rich perceive themselves in
their new lofty height of elite supremacy in America.
Many of those in their
gilded, economically advantaged plutocracy see themselves as
self-righteous individuals whose family values, upbringing and moral
character have helped them realize the American Dream. These people
have the justification of their immense wealth as proof of their
(some would call it god-given) placement in the societal
stratosphere. This elite standing allows them to look down upon the
poor, the non-workers, the dependents of society, and reprimand them
for their lazy, unskilled and nonproductive ways.
Surely the poor deserve such
reprimanding since they are neither productive, as perceived by their
lack of wealth, or motivated as perceived by their dependency?
Unfortunately, much to the
chagrin of the extremely wealthy these outwardly depreciating views
are not only negative and full of bigotry, they're also incorrect.
It is a sad truth that
poverty has been around in America since the country was founded yet
it's surprising that in this day and age of technological advances
and previously unheard of wealth, where trillions of dollars
circulate through our economy, there's still the issue of poverty.
As the economic crisis in
2008 and previous decades have shown, when the government suffers
from lack of funds, those dependent on the government for their
funds, suffer more and oftentimes these security buffers are not
enough to alleviate the threat of poverty.
Sasha Abramsky's book, The
American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, is a
testimony from interviews of the many who suffer on the margins of
society, too poor to be counted as below poverty level, some of whom
are living in slums of urban cities and in rural colonias
(encampments) without running water or electricity.
It's proof that Michael
Harrington's illumination of the issue of poverty in 1962 with the
book, The Other America, hasn't changed the problem of poverty
much.
Many in America still fall
under the poverty line, despite having a job. Barbara Ehrenreich's
book, Nickel and Dimed follows her own investigative journey
behind the scenes of the working poor whose full-time jobs as
housekeepers, waitresses, hospice workers and Wal-Mart employees,
don't pay enough to keep them out of poverty. Eherenreich writes that
most people are trapped in their low-wage jobs, unable to climb the
ladder of success due to restrictions of location (such as not having
a car, or picking a job close to home). Employees have limited
options and have little control over the kinds of jobs they get. One
major factor in these jobs which makes a worker so helpless is the
loss of self-respect and civil rights, as Ehrenreich cites her
experience with purse searching bosses, drug testing, and degrading
employment personality tests that asks the employee if they "find
it hard to stop moods of self-pity". (59) It is a vicious cycle
where low-wage workers suffer more than economic hardship, they
suffer social stigma too. It is a "culture of extreme
inequality" where the corporate decision makers and bosses look
down upon their workers. In the chapter, Evaluation,
Ehrenreich points out, "For reasons that have more to do with
class--and often racial--prejudice than with actual experience, they
tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they
recruit their workers." (212)
These full-time low-wage
workers who are not by any means lazy or unskilled are what some
would call, the deserving poor, those who deserve an extra hand up
through government incentives, tax breaks, or an extension of welfare
benefits. As Michael B. Katz describes in his book, The
Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation With Poverty,
"Today they are most often referred to as the working poor and
in recent years they have elicited sympathy and support from public
programs." (3)
However, there are those
considered the undeserving poor, those who supposedly bring poverty
unto themselves. These people are viewed as: lazy, possessing
questionable morals, having inadequate parental backgrounds: born of
single-mothers, non-married or divorced parents, unskilled, or
mentally unfit for society.
There has been much talk from
conservative and liberal groups on how to deal with these so-called
undeserving poor but not many bi-partisan solutions have resulted.
Many reforms in the past seeking to eradicate poverty were put in
place during Lyndon B. Johnson's time with the War on Poverty crusade
that was later criticized by conservatives. In order to put these
plans in place it was important to count how many people needed it
and how much they needed. Thus a system of counting a poverty level
had to be made.
According to the article
Framing the Poor by Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner, poverty
has historically been measured by income. In 1961, the poverty line
was established by multiplying by three the minimum income required
for a basic diet. Inflation, changing incomes and other factors have
altered this formula, though current formulas are more accurate. (33)
The chart study of the
poverty gap used in Framing the Poor, shows that the gap has
increased since the 1970's, more than twice since the 1960's in fact.
In the authors' words, "The poor have gotten poorer." (35)
With so many more government
programs in place to help the poor now, the question of why poverty
still exists is a conundrum for major economists. Conservatives (and
their rich counter-parts) are eager to answer that global economies
have created more competition in job markets along with higher
technological careers that require more than a high-school diploma to
apply, thus creating an uneven employment field for many Americans.
Conservatives are also quick to point out that the government has
wasted "Trillions" of dollars in welfare programs designed,
as they say, to help the "welfare queens" and "cheaters"
of the system.
Robert Rector along with
William Lauber, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote a
disparaging account of how the government wastes "Trillions"
of U.S. taxpayer dollars in, America's Failed $5.4 Trillion War on
Poverty. (Katz 198)
Rector, along with
many conservatives, cite the collapse of the marriage culture, the
breakdown of the family and other social ills, as contributing to the
problem of poverty. Rector was a major player in the 1996 federal
welfare reform legislation which required those on welfare to work in
order to get their benefits. Another popular target on the cause of
poverty in America, as cited by Rector's profile on the Heritage
Foundation website, is immigration.
What the Heritage Foundation
neglects to mention (as with many other conservatives) is the racial
profiling, single-mother blaming and overall bigotry that colors
their rhetoric when it comes to their reform measures.
The biggest shame in America
in regard to social inequality has been the issue of race and its
connection to poverty. With the history of slavery, indentured
servitude of women in the early American colonies and harsh treatment
of Native Americans, this nation of freedom and liberty for all has
hardly lived up to its constitutional promise. Race still plays the
biggest role in regard to poverty and its stereotypes in connection
to welfare have yet to wear off.
Black welfare queens.
Promiscuous women with many children. Single-mothers. Fathers likely
in jail or on the street selling drugs. These are all the conceptions
of those on the welfare system, particularly people of color. It's no
coincidence these ideas have been fostered and enforced by the white
elite.
According to Michael B. Katz'
chapter, Poverty and the Politics of Liberation, Social
Darwinism beginning in the late 1800's became the scientific argument
in favor of good breeding stock, as described later in
eugenics (29-38), which was the leading vogue of social politics
concerning the poor in the 1900's. As the poor, namely immigrants and
those of foreign blood were seen as inferior, blacks fit this new
role as the undesired race. Under the guise of birth control (and
many other supposed illnesses such as hysteria), sterilizations were
performed for women deemed mentally ill and unfit to have children.
Many of these were most
likely involuntary and Katz writes of one 1920's court case in
Virginia where the sterilization order on a woman was challenged but
overturned, upholding the statute that allowed sterilization "within
the police power of the state... and that it did not constitute cruel
or unusual punishment." (37) During World War II, with the
knowledge that the German Nazi's supported eugenics to further their
agenda of racial superiority, the popularity of eugenics waned.
However, involuntary sterilization would remain in America well into
the post-world war era, much to the horror of civil rights
proponents.
Involuntary sterilization of
Black women was a rude awakening to the existing racial hatred that
remained after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights
movement. In September 1973, Triple Jeopardy, a magazine
published by the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) in the 1970's,
focused on the plight of black women in the U.S. who were being
involuntarily sterilized, based on the legacy of eugenics. (Katz 91)
According to Dorothy Roberts
Killing the Black Body, 5,000 black women during the 1930's
and 1940's were sterilized under the diagnosis of being mentally
deficient in states that still recognized eugenics in their laws. In
1980, cites Roberts, 700,000 sterilizations took place under the form
of birth control. She states, "It was a common belief among
Blacks in the South that Black women were routinely sterilized
without their informed consent and for no valid reasons."
Government reimbursement to surgeons under Medicaid acted as
financial incentives to perform such unnecessary surgeries, even
though these had a "greater risk of killing the patient".
(Katz 91-92)
Little has changed since then
regarding the belief that Black women are the major recipients of
welfare and that they have too many children, as conservatives are
always pointing out as the epidemic of single-motherhood and the
curse of dysfunctional families (mainly blacks and immigrants) are to
blame for America's poverty crisis.
It's largely ignored by the
conservative rich finger pointers that many welfare, single-mothers
are white, particularly those in the mid-west, south, and Appalachia
region.
Location also defines a
person's poverty level, from upbringing to schooling and employment,
where you live determines how poor you are. In Stephen J. Scanlan's
paper, "Mined" for Its Citizens? Poverty, Opportunity
Structure, and Appalachian Soldier Deaths in the Iraq War,
Scanlan uses a spatial inequality framework on poverty and connects
it to research on the military and society. Drawing sources from
websites that lists the casualties of the Iraq War, Scanlan gathered
information about the soldiers' hometown and found a disproportionate
number of them from Appalachia, noting also the employment
opportunities there and how it may have affected military
recruitment.
Some of the most startling
findings include facts that, "The hometowns of Appalachian
soldiers dying in Iraq have poverty rates nearly 30 percent higher
than the rest of the country." (55) As a poor region, employment
would be lower, as well as educational opportunity.
Most people looking for
better conditions would have to move to another area (if they could
afford to do so), or look for existing work that may not pay a living
wage. In a region such as Appalachia, where mining and manufacturing
may be the only jobs available, there is limited opportunity for
anything else and these jobs are considered high-risk when it comes
to health and livelihood for families.
Also, according to Scanlan,
these jobs have not increased wages or reduced unemployment or
poverty. Retails jobs that are available, don't pay enough and are
not prevalent enough for the citizenry to escape the poverty of the
area. As a result, the citizens are being "mined" by the
military and with limited opportunity for employment or education, a
career in the Army, Marines or Navy is seen as an attractive
alternative to poverty, especially with promises of GI benefits
including a paid ticket to college. However, many of these recruits
never live to see these promised benefits and as proven by the
results, a disproportionate number have died overseas, as stated,
"Appalachia has a higher rate of soldier deaths from the Iraq
War than the United States as a whole...". (56)
Education as a way out of
poverty and as a path to employment is the most sought after goal.
For those who can afford it, a degree is a ticket to higher pay and
better employment. For those who can't afford it, there is financial
aid and Affirmative Action, which remains disputed. But what if
getting an education is not the ticket to better employment? What
happens when education fails in its goal for employment?
Barbara Ehrenreich visits
this new hard truth in uncertain economic times (before the downturn
of 2008), to see what happens to people who have Master's Degrees and
still can't find a job in her second book dealing with poverty and
inequality, Bait and Switch The (Futile) Pursuit of the American
Dream.
Ehrenreich puts herself in
the middle of a white-collar job search, along with those who have
finished college, started families, saved for retirement and have
done everything right, except for being fired. For these people
who've never been on welfare, never exhibited "laziness"
and have done an "above and beyond" job, it's a harsh
reality of economic uncertainty when the job you've sacrificed your
life for betrays you. In the Conclusion, Ehrenreich states
that many CEO's profited from firing their employees. "...by
eliminating other people's jobs, top management can raise its own
income." (224) In the end, these former employees have to start
all over and it's a tough climb back to the top again, some never
make it but must content themselves with low-wage jobs that may not
be temporary. Ehrenreich states this new trend in her chapter,
Downward Mobility, where many have found "survival jobs"
and although no longer unemployed, their new job has no chance of
upward mobility. "...in a society where worth is measured
entirely by income and position, downward mobility carries a sense of
failure, rejection and shame."(210) For those who've spent over
twenty years in a white-collar job, entering the new job market as an
"older person" brings shocking revelations of
discrimination and existing ageism in our society.
As Ehrenreich finds out, she
can't even find a job. After going through job coaches, job fairs,
job make-overs, job seminars and even Christian job searches, it's
surprising that a person with a Ph.D. and background in writing can't
land a descent employment spot.
For those recent graduates
entering the job field, competition is high and most rural towns
where these students hail from suffer the condition of "brain
drain" (Scanlan 46), where higher-employment jobs in other
cities or even other states, lure those with higher-education to
other locations.
Those who do graduate with
higher-education degrees find themselves entrenched in student loans,
with thousands of dollars in debt increased with any medical bills
and previous debt they suffer from. Even finding a full-time job
after graduation is a herculean task and many stick with part-time
jobs that can't pay off their debt.
This reality goes against
rich conservatives who say all you need is a good education and a
good job to reach the middle class and if you're lucky reach the very
wealthy top. Ron Haskins, former White House advisor to Republican
President George W. Bush, published his book Creating an
Opportunity Society (2009) with Isabel Sawhill, which was covered
by Sarah Glazer who wrote in the CQ Researcher that, "Haskins
stresses the role of personal responsibility. In 2009, he analyzed
census data to see how adult Americans were doing if they followed
three norms of modern society: finish high school, get a full-time
job, and wait until age 21 to get married before having children.
Young adults who followed all three had only a 2 percent chance of
winding up in poverty and a 74 percent chance of reaching the middle
class, he found." (Glazer 344)
Of which young adults who
followed this formula isn't clearly stated, nor are the statistics he
uses to back this claim up. It's hard to know how Haskins analyzed
the census data to find his claim out but there isn't always a right
way to analyze data as economists stills struggle with how to
calculate poverty and there are many ways of reading statistics.
In Kip Hagopian and Lee E.
Ohanian's paper The Mismeasure of Inequality, the authors find
other studies reporting about income inequality misleading and their
paper seeks to correct these issues using the Gini coefficient (also
Gini index). They state the Gini coefficient is the most common
methodology used in measuring income inequality, where "The
figure of merit for the Gini coefficient for income inequality ranges
from zero to I.0, where zero represents total equality (all persons
have identical incomes) and I.0 represents total inequality (one
person has all of the income)." (4) The authors compare the Gini
coefficient to other European nations and contest that better
measures of living standards are not income, but consumption.
Although, according to Julie
A. Litchfield's article, "Inequality:
Methods and Tools." (1999) published on the World
Bank website, whose mission is to end extreme poverty and promote
shared prosperity, the Gini coefficient is the most commonly used
measure of inequality but it varies when the distribution varies. The
Poverty Analysis page, Measuring Inequality, states, "If
a society is most concerned about the share of income of the people
at the bottom, a better indicator may be a direct measure... ."
(http://go.worldbank.org/3SLYUTVY00) The Gini coefficient has been
criticized by some as misleading and too easy to oversimplify.
It is curious that Hagopian
and Ohanian include "income from underground economy" as
part of the lower-income household. It does not specify what kind of
underground economy provides an income along with bartering.
Although the authors quote
that "46 million Americans live below the official federal
poverty line" they stress that they have "a somewhat higher
standard of living than is commonly believed", quoting another
report from a 2009 American Housing Survey showing that poor
households: own a home, have air conditioning, a color TV, a
refrigerator, stove and oven, a car or truck, microwave oven, DVD or
VCR, satellite connection and dishwasher. (11)
The authors stress they are
not making light of the poor but that poor by their definition needs
to be redefined. Though they state that there isn't a clear consensus
among economists about why inequality in the U.S. is higher than
other industrialized countries, they present their own findings about
what makes people poor and incomes suffer. "Differences in
individual ability and preference (defined as capacity and desire to
earn), age, globalization... [and] the substantial influx of
low-skilled, low-income immigration into the U.S. workforce over the
past 30 years." (12-13) While they argue that what makes incomes
greater is, greater economic freedom, lower aggregate taxes, less
stringent regulation, entrepreneurship, and technology.
Since Kip Hagopian and Lee E.
Ohanian are from the conservative right (citing sources from the
Heritage Foundation and where Ohanian is a senior fellow at
Stanford's Hoover Institution), they support anti-tax measures
against the rich, saying that they disagree that public policy should
address the issue of inequality through income distribution. The
usual argument is that billionaires such as Sam Walton (Wal-Mart) and
others have contributed much to the economy and growth of America.
They claim that enacting policies based on "value judgements"
is counterproductive and that even a small increase in taxes ("taxes
on capital income") would bring down labor productivity, wages
and living standards. Instead of trying to tax the rich, the authors
claim, it is more important to fix a broken K-12 education system.
(18-19)
It is interesting to note in
the paper how many times the argument shifts from taxes to
educational values which are seen to be broken and how immigrants and
those who are unskilled and have no "desire to earn" are to
blame for income disparity. The rich are not to blame, for in a
Capitalist society, earning a billion dollars a year is a sign of
success, not a crime. Yet it's curious to see how reluctant the rich
are to share their earnings, having contempt for those who don't make
nearly enough as they do, and how they support many reports and
studies that show how the poor aren't really that poor. They put much
money into conservative think-tanks, private schools and Republican
parties that share they same "family values" and
anti-government spending "fiscal conservative" ideas they
do, raising an alarm to any hint of tax increase or unfriendly
business environments with government regulations and oversight. If
being rich isn't a crime in this country, why are the rich people so
reluctant to share the wealth or have any government oversight?
Perhaps it is because the means by which the rich get rich, isn't all
that family value friendly after all.
Forbes magazine article, John
Paulson Pays A High Price For His Adventure in South African Gold,
written in 2014 by Tim Treadgold, shows the ugly side of Capitalism
in America and those that profit from the suffering of others.
Paulson, a billionaire fund manager of Paulson & Co. is described
by Treadgold as, "a man who played the sub-prime crash of 2007
to perfection, making billions of dollars for himself and clients of
his fund-management business, Paulson & Co." (Forbes.com)
While many lost their homes
and were thrown into poverty, people like Paulson made more money,
billions of dollars, at the poorer people's expense. Banks were given
government bail-outs and a hidden world of corruption was unveiled
within banks, where bank employees were given commissions for every
loan they signed a customer onto, whether or not that customer could
afford to pay off that loan. Many people years later are still
suffering from the effects of that horrible scandal, which happened
because government oversight was lifted and banks were given free
reign over the loans they controlled.
But Paulson's scandal doesn't
end there as Treadgold goes on to describe how the billionaire
botched his gold investment in South Africa, a region of destitute
people, where horrendous working conditions exist alongside the
history of apartheid. The company which Paulson has a stake in,
AngloGold Ashanti, was accused of human rights violations in the
scope of $2.1 billion dollars by Council on Ethics, The Government
Pension Fund Global, in a report to the Ministry of Finance in
June 2012, "due to an unacceptable risk that the company’s
operations may cause severe environmental damage and contributes to
serious or systematic human rights violations."
(http://www.regjeringen.no)
The Council on Ethics was
established by Royal Decree [Norway] 19 November 2004 and provides an
evaluation of whether investments in specified companies are
inconsistent with the ethical guidelines. It is also of particular
note that this council has strict measures of ethical responsibility
and has a List of Excluded Companies that are excluded from
the Government Pension Fund's investment universe. Companies that
"violate fundamental humanitarian principles", conduct
"sales of weapons and military equipment to Burma",
"Manufacture tobacco" and conduct "Behavior that is
considered to involve contributing to grossly unethical conduct"
are listed. Under that last section, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (31 May
2006) is listed along with companies committing malfeasance: Boeing
Co. (Production of nuclear weapons), Phillip Morris Cr AS., and
Phillip Morris International Inc. (Production of tobacco).
Such ethical violations are
not always present with multi-billion dollar companies, their CEO's
and their investors but it's a problem that the country of Norway has
seen fit to address and raises the question of whether the United
States of America should also have a list of companies that violate
human rights and ethical standards, and whether more regulation is
necessary.
Those that push for more
regulation argue that companies need to be responsible for the harm
they do and mitigate the damage, either with harsh fines,
imprisonment of CEO's who knowingly commit these crimes or with a
complete shutdown of the companies. For those whose interests rely on
the corporate powers for profit, where corporate entities enjoy the
same rights as an individual before the law, they argue that
punishing the corporations goes against the American ideals of
freedom, prosperity and Capitalism.
However, in a country that
values Capitalism, prosperity and freedom, it remains to be seen who
gets to realize these ideals and who doesn't, namely the poor who are
left out of the political process altogether. Those living on the
margins can't even vote, because they posses neither a living
residence, drivers license (mandatory to have in order to vote in
some states), or means to vote by transportation or time off work.
How can they be expected to change a system so throughly built
against them?
As Katz notes in The
Undeserving Poor, "poverty is, in part, a problem of power."
(135) It is hard to feel empowered when you struggle to make ends
meet, when you're working all hours of the day and night to provide
for your family and are still not able feed them, when you've lost
your home and have nowhere to go, when you're living on the streets
and people look down upon you. Being poor is disempowering and it's
hard for an individual or their family to feel as though they can
make a difference when they've lost every form of security and
support they had relied on.
Many public programs have
been put in place as a security buffer for those less fortunate in
hard times but many have been taken off the agenda due to budget
cuts.
In Sasha Abramsky's chapter The
Wrong Side of the Tracks (135-136),
during 2012, states were allowed to mandate men and women, claiming
unemployment insurance while applying for jobs, to take a drug test
in order to access their insurance benefits. Many families seeking to
be considered for
welfare must pass a series of applications, tests and forms proving
by their income and tax level that they deserve
help and must go through red-tape bureaucratic measures by city,
county, state and federal assistance programs.
Abramsky notes
with sarcasm that banks rarely have to go through such red-tape in
order to get their bailouts from the government, that people who rely
on Medicare and Social Security are not required to piss in a cup,
and that conservatives against welfare use much of the so-called
Socialist handouts such as Veteran Administration benefits, Medicare
and Social Security.
Yes, there are people who cheat the system
(just as the banks and billionaires cheated America) but denying help
to the many because of a small number of unlawful individuals is both
cruel and demeaning. This rhetoric of punishing the poor assumes that
all poor people are
vagrants looking for hand-outs, yet this is what is commonly heard on
most conservative news talk shows, funded by the billionaires who own
them, and even in common platform debates with Democrats and
Republicans. The sad truth is, what the media says about the poor can
affect government action.
Framing
the Poor
by Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner, shows a correlation to how the
media perceives poverty versus what the government does about it.
Starting with the 1960's when the War on Poverty was put into action
through 2008, when the economy took a drastic hit, Rose and
Baumgartner follow newspaper stories, presenting statistical models
concerning aspects of poverty, government action and spending and
conclude that, "The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or
lazy drives public policy." (22)
America's optimism and
prosperity after World War II, drove the idea that hard work was all
one needed to succeed and that all opportunities were available to
those who applied themselves to task. Even women were included, as
images of Rosie the Riveter brought a new image of can-do attitude
for women who found a somewhat broader field of employment available
then.
But poverty still loomed in the background of all this
celebration with Michael Harrington's book, The
Other America,
which showed that millions of people suffered and were left out of
the so-called optimism of the day. In those times, the poor were to
be pitied, to be brought up from their lowly level to an acceptable
living standard. They were seen as unwilling victims, not
participants in their own misery but as sufferers from external
conditions of which they had no control over. Public sympathy
overflowed then and the government responded with the War on Poverty.
Turbulent times however changed this mindset, along with the
Vietnam War and thousands of returning wounded veterans, to a more
conservative and discriminating view of poor people. The poor became
the undeserving lot, those who for too long drained the prosperous
economy of America, and became the unwanted population with their
breeding and propagation of loose morals and kin. Terms such as,
"lazy", "dysfunctional", "dependent"
and the ever-popular "welfare queen" were the new
descriptions of the poor. The poor became a separate race (in more
ways than one with regard to racial discrimination) and were not
worthy of the middle-class America that was seen as the ultimate
picture of conformity with the suburban house, family wagon filled
with 2.5 children and dog. Government views followed suit and began
to limit assistance and proceeded to re-vamp former welfare measures,
such as the welfare reform of 1996.
The stereotypes of poverty
and its causes are still misrepresented today in the media but a
surprising group of educated people lending their own conclusions as
to what causes poverty has raised the question of whether poverty is
in our genes. As Katz points out "neuroscience and epigenetics
have fostered the emergence of a new version of poverty as a result
of individual biology." (Katz 269)
For
Kids, Self-Control Factors Into Future Success
(NPR), explains a study showing that self-control in childhood can
make the difference between getting a good job or going to jail in
adulthood. Nancy
Shute, host of Morning Edition, interviewed Professor Terrie Moffitt
of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, who studied 1,000
young people since birth, and published her study of childhood
self-control in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The
transcript shows the dialogue between the host and interviewee.
SHUTE:
Social scientists say three things matter for success in life: I.Q.
family socio-economic status, and self-control. Only one of those
things is easy to change, and it's self-control.
Katz
debunked the myth that I.Q. matters, noting that race is often a
comparison to such tests, including skewed scientific statistics
easily manipulated by those with conservative agendas. (Katz
35)
SHUTE: But the children who struggled with self-control had
problems as young adults.
Prof.
MOFFITT: We found that they were more likely to have a criminal
conviction record.
SHUTE:
They were also more likely to be poor or to be single parents.
Prof.
MOFFITT: And finally, we found that the children with low
self-control had great difficulty in their 30s with financial
planning.
SHUTE:
That means they were more likely to be in debt, have bad credit or
have declared [sic] bankruptcy.
Moffitt
and Shute's discussion of these problems: single-motherhood, bad
financial planning, drug-use, criminal convictions and poverty, as a
result of childhood self-control issues puts too much blame on the
child and on the parent who must oversee their child's actions to
make sure they don't end up a single-mother, on drugs, who spends too
much and as a result, becomes poor and in jail. The correlation
between a child's self-control and their future adult decision making
skills seems a bit contrived, as if a child's destiny were
pre-ordained by the choices they made at four-years-old.
What
isn't discussed in the interview is how Professor Moffitt reaches her
conclusion through a supposed thirty-year-study of these children.
But similar studies have been conducted with very little changes in
the result and also very little proof that what a child does at
four-years-old can affect their living situation at thirty-years-old.
The study, Self-Control
And Impulsivity In Children: Multiple Behavioral Measures
(Forzano, L. B., et al.), meant to measure impulsivity, self-control
and gratification delay in children with a barrage of tests
concerning food, is mainly a self-serving test showing no conclusive
evidence that the behavior shown by the children at the time leads to
bad behavior later in adult life or that these children suffered from
the listed consequence of impulsivity such as:
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; American Psychiatric
Association, 1994), substance abuse, borderline personality disorder
and impulse-control disorders such as gambling.
In a previous
test by Reynolds and Stark in 1986, 132 children in grades 4-6 were
"divided into two groups based on teacher referrals (the
referred children were said to lack self-control and behave
impulsively)." (Forzano, L. B., et al. 427) This already sets
the test up with children perceived as having impulse control
problems, rather than doing a blind study which would be more fair.
Basically the test consists of an adult presenting a marshmallow to a
kid, telling them if they wait a number of minutes and not eat the
marshmallow while the adult is gone, they'll get more marshmallows
later. A similar test was done with non-humans. Gender, age and
time-wait correlation were compared but again, no conclusive results
could be made to predict impulsivity in these children or that it
would lead to crime, only the conclusion that self-control is
greatest in humans, lower in rats, and lowest in pigeons. Given more
options and actual control children could
have more self-control. It ends with the phrase, "Again, each of
these explanations warrants further research." (442)
If it
sounds like a re-hash of the eugenics myth, it probably is.
Trying
to predict the occurrence of crime committing individuals among
children is a strangely Orwellian task and one that hints of the Nazi
experiments during WWII when they tried to prove scientifically that
Jews were inferior to Germans (Katz 38). Having a pre-ordained
prescription for failure and one that is a precursor to poverty is
unsettling in the scientific realm which should put more use of its
monies to solving the problem of real
poverty in America.
What makes a person commit crime is a
complicated question, often times though it's tied to poverty and the
circumstance by which they live. Looking at the prison systems in
this country can tell you a lot about poverty. There are more prisons
in this country than colleges or universities.
Sasha Abramsky
writes that, "In fact, in most states, it costs about as much
money to keep someone in prison for one year as it would cost to send
that person to an Ivy League university." (241)
The
overcrowding situation in the many prisons we have leads to
non-violent incarcerated individuals being let out onto the street
when there's no more room for them.
According to Abramsky,
America has quintupled its incarcerated population since the early
1970's... and [sic] houses far more nonviolent inmates than any other
country on earth... ." (241)
Those former prisoners are left
with no job, no housing and no means of changing the situation, other
than going to a shelter or living on the street. Many homeless are
former incarcerated people who have found it hard to re-enter the
society that put them behind bars.
Abramsky quotes the 2012
Department of Justice finding that, "a spell behind bars can
reduce a person's future earnings by 40 percent." (241)
Also,
a disproportionate number of incarcerated people are black and
hispanic/latino people which puts an added disadvantage on those
looking for work based on discrimination and installs a deep sense of
mistrust in those former prisoners who know the government system is
out to get them, which makes it harder for them to ask for assistance
from welfare or other programs.
Discrimination against black and
hispanic/latino people is a sad factor of today's poverty, as quoted
by Sasha Abramsky in The
Nation,
"a disproportionate share of the nation’s poor are
African-American and Latino. More than a quarter of blacks and
Latinos live below the government-defined poverty line (about $11,000
per year for an individual, $23,000 for a family of four), compared
with 12 percent of Asian-Americans and slightly less than 10 percent
of whites." (12)
These injustices have sparked the uprising
of the 99% also known as The Occupy Wall Street protesters, who are
still protesting inequality in both income and prejudice in America's
streets. But as the media spin has so often shown, what's out of
sight is out of mind for most policy makers who are controlling the
shots and the conversation has drifted to other subjects, mainly that
of the ongoing wars overseas.
With
today's limited economy, marginal job-improvement number and
engrossment in the many wars overseas, it remains to be seen how much
an issue (or priority) poverty is in the current state of affairs.
President
Obama's Address to the United Nations General Assembly at the United
Nations General Assembly Hall in New York City, on September 24th,
2014, stated:
America
is committed to a development agenda that eradicates extreme poverty
by 2030. We will do our part to help people feed themselves, power
their economies, and care for their sick. If the world acts together,
we can make sure that all of our children enjoy lives of opportunity
and dignity.
It's a
promising speech and one that holds a lot of optimism for the future
but like all public statements, it's a vague and limited framework
for government action. If America, the country of greatest prosperity
and opportunity in the world, cannot provide for its own citizens in
regard to basic living standards of food, shelter and security, how
can our country be an example of prosperity and policy to others?
There's still a long way to go before the problems of poverty
can be solved but the prejudice against poor people which remains
today is a sad reminder of how little we've come to realizing the
American Dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for all
our people.
* * *
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.
* * *
Author’s Note:
This was a school paper I did at Diablo Valley College for English. My topic was poverty and over the course of this assignment I learned a lot which enforced my belief that poverty in this country (USA is counted as one of the richest countries in the world), is morally, financially and inexcusably wrong.
Any errors in this writing are mine… except for the stupid formatting that isn’t my fault but rather the result of blogger’s inept pasting method.
