Social Exclusion

A poignant example of how children in a rich Western democracy (in this case, Canada) experience poverty as social exclusion:

Members of Parliament beginning historic hearings into a national poverty plan heard a poem from North Bay schoolchildren Thursday on how being poor excludes them from what so many of their friends enjoy.

“Not going to McDonald’s, getting Santa Fund baskets, missing birthday parties, no camping, no hot dog on hot dog day, no hockey, pretending you forgot your lunch,” were some of the ways the kids defined poverty in their poem, Being Poor.

It was submitted Tuesday as a written brief by income security expert Richard Shillington and then read at televised hearings Thursday by NDP MP Martin as MPs grappled with coming up with an official poverty measurement Canada might adopt.

“I'm going to talk now about programs, but before that I've given the committee a poem, Poverty Is from children in North Bay,” Shillington said. “These are not economists. They will not talk about before-tax, after-tax; they will talk about what it's like to be a child living in poverty. What I want you to notice is they're not talking about malnutrition, they're not talking about housing, they're talking about social exclusion. That's what they see. If this committee chooses to think about poverty, they will think about social exclusion.”

Martin, whose motion led to the national hearings, said: “Shillington has it right. Kids figure poverty out by kindergarten. We may need a combination of factors to measure poverty but above all we need a plan with targets that leaves no one behind - not the kids, not their parents or their families. We need a poverty plan that ends this exclusion of so many Canadians and newcomers which means they lead less than productive lives.”

One aspect of the Krugman Poverty is Poison op-ed that hasn't been commented on yet in these pages is the neurological research he cites:

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

This initially raises at least two questions for me: 1) if poverty is the causal factor, is it income poverty or something more multidimensional?; 2) is it relative poverty (ie, inequality) or "absolute poverty"? Going back to the original Financial Times article, Half Changed World suggests it might be the latter.

Krugman quotes this sentence from the Financial Times article: “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.”

Two things are striking in that sentence:

1) The "with low social status" part of that sentence suggests that it's relative poverty, not material deprivation, that causes the stunted neural development. ....

2) It suggests that stress is the main connection between poverty and poor child outcomes, not lack of educational experiences or the other things we talked about last week.

Unfortunately, the AAAS presentations that this statement is based on don't seem to be available online. Some of the speakers have other papers available, but they're pretty technical, so it may take a while before I have the energy to work through them.

I don't know much about the research on kid's brains—other than the research I've conducted on the brain of my own 11-month old son, that is—but it's worth noting there is considerable research on the adverse effect of relative deprivation and social status on adult health. Some of the most compelling evidence comes from studies conducted by Michael Marmot, Angus Deaton, and others. John Cassidy's New Yorker article arguing for replacing the current U.S. poverty measure with an inequality-based measure includes a good discussion of some of this research, and the ways in the stress caused by economic and social subordination might damage the immune system.

All of which leads me to another point, while I have no doubt that inequality/low socioeconomic status can harm children, it may actually be even more "poisonous" to adult health and well-being. If this is the case, it cautions against over-reliance on anti-poverty strategies that are narrowly targeted on disadvantaged children.

... I've still got the same shot at getting hired for a low-wage job as a black man with the same credentials but no criminal record, as Devah Pager and colleagues find in this working paper:

Sending trained testers with equivalent resumes to apply for entry-level jobs revealed a strong racial preference among employers in New York City. We find evidence that employers are twice as likely to prefer white applicants to equally qualified blacks. These results are robust to a variety of tester and experimental effects. The testers' field notes suggested that employers did not obviously view black job applicants as less skilled, as other researchers have found. Instead, employers tended to rule out black applicants by holding them to a higher standard than their white counterparts. Employers were also more likely to steer black workers into lower jobs, and out of jobs involving customer service.

....

The magnitude of the penalty of blackness is underscored in its comparison with the penalty of a criminal record. A black applicant with a clean record fares no better that a white applicant recently released from prison. These results are consistent with Pager's (2003) results from Milwaukee, though the inference is stronger here where whites with criminal records applied for the same jobs as blacks with clean records. A criminal record is indeed a significant barrier to employment; but the stigma of race poses a barrier equally as large. The findings of discrimination presented here are particularly striking in light of the fact that the testers in this study in many ways represented a best-case scenario for low-wage job seekers. The testers were college educated young men with effective styles of self-presentation. Though posing as high school graduates with more limited skills, these young men stood well above the typical applicant for these low wage jobs. The effects of race among individuals with fewer hard and soft skill advantages may well be larger than what we estimate here.

An editorial on poverty measurement in Tuesday's NYT rightly argues that the official poverty measure is broken and needs to be replaced with a better measure. But they're wrong to argue a set of alternative measures developed by a National Academy of Science panel more than a decade ago are the best replacement.

The NAS measures are an improvement on the current one, and elements of the NAS approach should be adopted (like counting the EITC and certian non-cash benefits, and subtracting work-related costs like child care). But the primary poverty measure should be an inequality-based measure, similar to the measures used by other wealthy nations, that sets the threshold for income poverty at a percentage of median income.

In an article published last year in the New Yorker, John Cassidy got it right:

Rather than trying to come up with a subsistence-based poverty measure about which everybody can agree, we should accept that there is no definitive way to decide who is impoverished and who isn’t. Every three years, researchers from the federal government conduct surveys about the number of appliances in the homes of American families. In 2001, ninety-one per cent of poor families owned color televisions; seventy-four per cent owned microwave ovens; fifty-five percent owned VCRs; and forty-seven per cent owned dishwashers. ....
....

Consider a hypothetical single mother with two teen-age sons living in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, a neighborhood with poor schools, high rates of crime and unemployment, and few opportunities for social advancement. The mother works four days a week in a local supermarket, where she makes eight dollars an hour. Her sons do odd jobs, earning a few hundred dollars a month, which they have used to buy stereo equipment, a DVD player, and a Nintendo. The family lives in public housing, and it qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. Under the Earned Income Tax Credit program, the mother would receive roughly four thousand dollars from the federal government each year. Compared with the destitute in Africa and Asia, this family is unimaginably rich. Compared with a poor American family of thirty years ago, it may be slightly better off. Compared with a typical two-income family in the suburbs, it is poor.

The concept of relative deprivation was first described by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations,” in a passage on the “necessaries” of daily life:

"By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England."

We also need to call the measure something other than poverty, but that's another issue.

As we've not been shy about noting in these pages, before policy advocates and the foundations that fund them once again declare a "war on poverty" they need to engage in a serious and open debate about whether returning to the poverty framework is the most strategic approach to take to the issue of disadvantage and inequality in 21st-century America. For anyone who wants to engage in this debate, Beyond Child Poverty: The Social Exclusion of Children, published in 2002 by the Institute for Child and Family Policy at Columbia, needs to be required reading. I received a copy when I was working at CBPP, and relied on it heavily in writing a discussion paper in 2005 on the relevance of social inclusion for U.S. policy.

Funded by the Ford Foundation—kudos to Helen Neubourne—the volume and the conference that led to it were explicitly framed as part of an effort to "reframe the current child poverty debate, and to stimulate a new and broader discussion of child well-being." In their introduction, Alfred Kahn and Sheila Kamerman note:

There are several compelling reasons to explore an alternative concept of assessing child well-being. The first is a fast-growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of the conventional measure of income poverty used in the United States. A second reason is that the "poverty" framework has apparent limits in rallying the public will required to mount policies that can lift families out of poverty.

They also summarize the thoughts of University of Wisconsin (go Badgers!) prof Maria Cancian on the advantages and disadvantages of poverty and social exclusion:

... [poverty's] disadvantages include:

• Some problems with regard to how it is measured
• Substantial variation in consequences of poverty for different individuals and groups
• The existence of deprivation among the non-poor, not only the poor
• A "blaming the victim" focus.

The advantages of the social exclusion concept include the development of a strategy that could grow from a reframing of the problem; a potentially more sympathetic response; and possibly improved analyses of causes and solutions. Social exclusion creates a context for a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary perspective that may lead to improved politics.

I'm not sure if the book is still in print—regardless it should be made available for free as an e-book, we'd happily host it on this site—but Kamerman and Kahn wrote an issue brief in 2003 that provides a great summary.

I have two very mild critiques of the volume: 1) I think the focus on children is too narrow, especially given that the task at hand involves simply getting social exclusion into the US vocabulary; and 2) the volume is quite academic—a reflection of an invite list to the conference that was limited almost exclusively to social science types who work in what Thomas Kuhn calls the "normal-science" mode. A broader, non-child-focused discussion is needed right now, one that includes not only academics and wonkish analysts, but also communications experts, bloggers, people who write for popular magazines and newspapers, and community-based organizers, people like John Cassidy of the New Yorker, Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect, and Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center come to mind.

PS: Since I mentioned Kuhn, it's worth remembering that:

The majority of the scientific community will oppose any conceptual change, and, Kuhn emphasizes, so they should. In order to fulfill its potential, a scientific community needs to contain both individuals who are bold and individuals who are conservative.

Via Natalie B, here's another dissent from the UNICEF report finding that US and UK kids are worse off than kids in other rich nations. I don't agree with this one much more than I do with Wade Horn's, but I give it credit for being a lot of fun to read. Here's a taste:

Neglected? Deprived? Those living below the poverty line are one thing, but the majority of UK adolescents are, if anything, spoiled brats. I would challenge anyone to fill a small car park with British 15-year-olds (from any social class) who don't own a mobile phone. It is also debatable whether our children are as 'disenfranchised' as depicted in the report. At one point, we're breathlessly informed that 'only 81 per cent of them really like school' (only?). But never mind that. When listening to British children talking about the spiritual wasteland that is their existence, those nice Unicef people with their clipboards failed to include the most crucial factor of all - the contrary bolshie nature of the people they were talking to; the fact that British teenagers have always loved nothing more than to pose, bitch, rebel, slag everything and everyone off, and blow endless anti-establishment raspberries.

Now you know why punk rock was born in Britain rather than Denmark.

Like Horn, the author criticizes the use of a relative measure of poverty, arguing that this choice of measure: "... conveniently ignored the fact that most of our children live the life of Master Brooklyn Beckham compared with children in less economically stable nations." But if it's really true that UK children generally live the "life of Master Brooklyn Beckham"—not that I know exactly what that means—then that only strengthens the case for a relative poverty measure. The UNICEF report after all isn't comparing children living in rich nations with children living in poor nations, it's comparing children living in rich nations with one another. And, for this purpose, as for measuring poverty generally in rich nations, a relative measure of poverty—one that essentially measures inequality and social exclusion, rather than trying to equate US/UK poverty with sub-Saharan poverty—is exactly the right measure.

PS: For more on why relative poverty measures are better, make sure you read John Cassidy's excellent New Yorker article on the subject.

In an earlier blog this week, I noted the new UNICEF survey of child well-being in 21 rich nations that found children in the U.S. and U.K. faring worse than children in the other 19 nations. The report hasn't got much coverage here, although Wash Po, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer have the AP story on their sites. In the Inquirer's version of the AP story, I noticed this at the end:

Wade Horn, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the study's standard of measuring poverty differed from that of the United States.

A family of four is defined by the United States as living in poverty if its combined income is less than $20,650 a year. The poverty threshold used by the report was $35,000 a year for a family of four, he said.

"I think when you try to compare nations in a report like this, you tend to ignore so many other factors specific to those nations that the comparison becomes somewhat meaningless," Horn said.

While it's true that the United States has held on to an outdated and arbitrary method of measuring poverty for its official poverty statistics—a method that no other well-off nation uses—this point is of little relevance to an assessment of the UNICEF report's merits. UNICEF used a standardized measure of poverty, a poverty measure that is almost always used by researchers in reports making cross-national comparisons of poverty in well-off nations. If the report had used the flawed US poverty measure and compared that figure to the standardized poverty numbers used by all the other nations, then we'd have a problem. But that's not what UNICEF did—it compared apples to apples, instead of apples (the poverty measure everybody else uses) to a raisin (the miserly and old version that the US continues to use).

Another problem with Horn's response is that the overall rankings of well-being in the study are based on 40 different indicators in six different dimensions of well-being. Poverty is only one of these indicators (and it's only one of five measures used to assess the dimension of material well-being). Regardless of what one thinks about the poverty measure, those 39 other measures add up to a very persuasive case that the overall dismal ranking for the US paints an accurate picture.

It isn't clear what Horn is getting at by his comment that "cross-national comparisons tend to ignore many other factors specific to nations." Some conservatives (but not necessarily Horn) have suggested that higher poverty rates in the United States relative to other well-off nations are due to cultural diversity. But this begs the question of what cultural diversity has to do with poverty—and why, in a country that is the world's richest, we shouldn't expect broadly shared prosperity, regardless of one's race or ethnicity. Immigration is another explanation one sometimes hears, but conservatives often underestimate the extent of immigration and cultural diversity in many other well-off nations. High levels of international migration and cultural diversity are global trends, not U.S.-specific ones.

In his HHS bio, Horn notes his "life-long commitment to the well-being of children." Since I know he's sincere about that commitment, I urge him to take a closer look at the UNICEF report. There's no reason why kids in the United States shouldn't be faring as well or better than kids in Sweden, Poland, France, Greece or the rest of the nations on the UNICEF list—and Dr. Horn has got another two years to do something about it. That is, if he's willing to make some changes in his prescriptions.