Tag Archives: poverty

Considering the English character and how the government might push citizens into certain actions

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How governments should push or encourage their citizens to perform certain actions is a tricky question. Governments can use financial incentives, cajoling, and brute force, among other options.

The Economist makes the suggestion that “Britain has good reasons to seek a fresh debate on poverty and social mobility.” But in having this debate, it is suggested that the government consider the “English character”:

In the early 1950s a sociologist called Geoffrey Gorer set out to solve the mystery of England’s “character”. To be precise, how had the English gone from being a thoroughly lawless bunch—famed for truculence and cruelty—to one of the most orderly societies in history? Just over a century before, he noted, the police entered some bits of Westminster only in squads of six or more “for fear of being cut to pieces”. Popular pastimes included public floggings, dog-fighting and hunting bullocks to death through east London streets. As late as 1914, well-dressed adults risked jeering mockery from ill-clad “rude boys”, and well-dressed children risked assault. Yet by 1951, when Gorer surveyed more than 10,000 men and women, he could describe an England famous worldwide for disciplined queuing, where “you hardly ever see a fight in a bar” and “football crowds are as orderly as church meetings”. In a book, “Exploring English Character”, Gorer decided that two keys unlocked the mystery: the mid-19th-century creation of a police force of citizen-constables, and the curbing of aggression by “guilt”…

The squabble [between liberals and conservatives] is a waste of breath. Material poverty and character both matter. What is more, they are often linked. Bad choices can worsen poverty; and it is harder to make good choices when life is grim. A more useful debate about character would involve pondering this. How far can the judgmental analyses of the past be applied in modern Britain?…

In most British communities (and more for good than ill) disgrace is a greatly weakened force these days. Mr Cameron’s supporters talk of “libertarian paternalism”, or nudging people to make better choices. Perhaps that will work, though the “tough love” of the past involved sharp prods, not nudges. As each new government discovers, the English are a stroppy lot, and hard to help. It’s not their fault: it is in their character.

A few thoughts about this:

1. I tend to like discussions of character, whether this involves a country or a community or a group. This transformation Gorer described from the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s is remarkable – from public violence to public disgrace.

2. But discussions of character can be very difficult to have because it requires summarizing ideas about large and diverse groups. Governments try to apply regulations to broad swaths of people and this can run into trouble. Making claims about all of the people in poverty in England can lead to negative and unfair stereotyping.

3. How many people in England, or other countries, want to be nudged to “make better choices”? Perhaps the key is to do the nudging without letting anyone know that there is nudging taking place.

Last resident out of Cabrini-Green high rises

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Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune chronicles the sage of the last family to move out of the 1230 N. Burling building, the last occupied high-rise at Cabrini-Green. Here is how Schmich sums up the legacy of the housing project:

Cabrini, with its history of murdered cops and slain children, was the housing development that came to symbolize the squandered hope of them all. It was a Chicago name known to the nation. It was also unique, sitting as it did on prime land near downtown and the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods…

In Cabrini’s heyday, 15,000 people lived in its white high-rises, red high-rises and brick row houses. Born as a hopeful haven for the poor, it devolved by the 1970s into an oasis of poverty in which guns-gangs-drugs melded into a single demon…

Whether life has changed for the better for the majority of people who have moved out remains a question, but the neighborhood is clearly better.

As the era of the public housing high-rise winds down, now we can turn and see if newer forms of public housing development or aid, such as mixed-income developments or Section 8 vouchers or other options, are better in helping people leave poverty.

How location, particularly living in the city, affects health

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Two sociologists argue that location, particularly living in poor neighborhoods in large cities, can lead to more negative health outcomes:

“When trying to understand a person’s health and well-being, we believe that their zip code may be just as important a number to their physical health as their blood pressure or glucose level,” Fitzpatrick says in a statement.

Fitzpatrick and Mark LaGory of the University of Alabama at Birmingham have authored, “In Unhealthy Cities: Poverty, Race, and Place in America,” about high-poverty urban neighborhoods and the health of Americans…

For example, there have been numerous studies on how a concentration of fast-food restaurants in poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods impacts the health of the residents, while other studies show many of these poor neighborhoods may not have a single grocery store offering fresh, nutritious food or safe places to exercise.

“Some parts of the city seemed to be designed to make people sick,” the authors say.

These conclusions are not surprising though they may contribute to the growing field of the sociology of wellness. I particularly like the last quote: “Some parts of the city seemed to be designed to make people sick.” This leads to a question: how could cities or neighborhoods be designed to make people healthy?

Reading about this reminded me about some of the rationale used by some of the first suburban residents in England and the United States. Among other factors, the suburbs were said to be healthier and have cleaner air. The big city, particularly by the late 1800s, was viewed as dirty and crowded. The single-family home allowed families to spread out and take in more of the country air.

I would be curious to see if this study, or other studies, could provide estimates of life expectancy for people with similar socio-economic status living in different locations.

Quick Review: More than Just Race

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This book, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, is the latest monograph by William Julius Wilson. I read this several months ago and haven’t reviewed it yet because I have been thinking about its approach and conclusions. Here is my quick take:

I am still not quite sure to make of this book. I ultimately think that it is too short and doesn’t spend upon time seriously doing what Wilson claims he wants to do: explore how structure and culture interact and affect poor inner-city neighborhoods. The book is written in a series that seems to be for a popular audience and it seems that Wilson is just limited in space and perhaps how academic the work can be and the number of studies he can cite. Additionally, although Wilson cites some interesting recent research (including Move To Opportunity research) involving cultural values, Wilson still sides with structure (his primary research focus for years) in the end though he suggests culture plays some role.

I contrast this book with what I heard at a culture and poverty panel at the American Sociological Association meetings in August in Atlanta. I felt that panel took culture much more seriously – indeed, several of the scholars were sociologists of culture who are trying to bring this growing subfield to a point where it can be recognized as having something important to add to discussions about poverty. This discussion featured some research in progress but these scholars seemed to put structure and culture on a more equal footing.

Of course, this is an emerging field of work. After research in the 1960s from people like Daniel Moynihan and Oscar Lewis were said to be “blaming the victim” when discussing culture and the role of values and norms in poor neighborhoods, structure was the primary focus for several decades when studying poverty. Wilson’s book may serve as an entry point or guide to the discussion of culture and poverty but those who seriously want to delve into the issues will need to look into other works.

(I might also quibble with Wilson’s definition of culture, the collection of values, norms, behaviors, traditions, etc. of a group. This leaves culture as a more passive phenomenon. I would prefer to use this definition when thinking about the sociology of culture: “processes of meaning-making.”)

Still issues regarding welfare and poverty to be solved

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Even though the welfare debate in America has been limited recently (or perhaps people think it was a relic of the Clinton presidency), several new books have been published challenging the idea that there are not problems still to be solved. One of the books found that those who were once on welfare but then took jobs did not come out ahead:

But Stretched Thin challenges this supposed success story. Even in the prosperous economy of the late 1990s, it shows, finding a job was not usually a ticket out of poverty. Co-authors Sandra Morgen, an anthropologist, and Joan Acker, a sociologist, both at the University of Oregon, and Jill Weigt, a sociologist at California State University, San Marcos, surveyed more than 900 people, most of them white single mothers, who were taken off the rolls in Oregon or denied welfare benefits in early 1998. They found that more than half — 55 percent — wound up taking jobs that paid wages at or below the poverty line. Two years later, the authors found, nearly half still had family incomes below the poverty line.

If the goal of the welfare reform was to help people move permanently out of poverty, these books suggest there is a lot more work to do. And now with more Americans living in poverty, this could be the time to start working on the complex set of challenges.

Mapping poverty rates by county across the US

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A story about the recently released figures regarding poverty in the United States includes a nice map from Mint.com that show poverty rates by county. The map shows higher rates of poverty in Louisiana, Mississippi, some parts of Texas and New Mexico, Appalachia, some of the middle parts of the southern Atlantic states, and some pockets in the upper Great Plains.

This map shows the proportion of residents who are living in poverty; while the national rate is now about 1 in 7 Americans is under the poverty line, 25% or more of residents in these locations live in poverty. Many of these counties are more rural counties. The map would look different if it were mapping the absolute number of people living in poverty – then you might see a shift toward some larger metropolitan areas.

While areas of concentrated poverty in the city get a lot of attention, what is going on in some of these more rural areas? How did poverty rates shift over the last couple of decades in these locations?

The difficulty of defining culture

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The term “culture” can be tricky to define – as is evidenced in a story from the New York Times about culture and poverty. One writer tries to sum up the definition and the argument:

The important thing is, you can’t isolate culture as one element of a society and change it without changing anything else. You can’t ignore the roles racism, lack of fundamental necessities, and social isolation play in shaping culture, and you can’t use it as a convenient way to blame poverty on the individuals who suffer from it.

While I would agree that it is difficult to separate culture from other areas, sociologists of culture tend to stress that culture is “patterns of meaning-making.” All people do this: develop narratives and ways of understanding their surroundings.

What seems to be the new wave of research is looking at how culture and structures (such as unemployment, isolation, lack of opportunity) interact with and influence each other.

More poor people now in suburbia

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American suburbs are often imagined as homes to primarily the middle and upper classes. However, new figures from the US Census suggests the number of poor people living in suburbs continues to grow:

The analyses of census data released Thursday show that since 2000, the number of poor people in the suburbs jumped by 37.4 percent to 13.7 million. That’s faster than the national growth rate of 26.5 percent and more than double the city rate of 16.7 percent…

Cities still have higher poverty rates — about 19.5 percent, compared to 10.4 percent in the suburbs. But the gap has been steadily narrowing. In a reversal from 2000, the number of poor people living in the suburbs now exceeds those in cities by roughly 1.6 million.

Analysts attribute the shift largely to years of middle-class flight and substantial shares of minorities and immigrants leaving cities in the early part of the decade for affordable housing and job opportunities in the suburbs. After the housing bust, their fortunes changed, throwing millions of people out of work.

To recap: in terms of absolute numbers, there are more poor people living in suburbs than in large cities. As a proportion of the population, cities have higher percentages of poor people compared to suburbs. And the number of poor people in suburbs has grown more since 2000 than the number of poor people in cities.

On one hand, these figures should challenge the typical images of suburbia as a wealthy paradise. On the other hand, there have always been some poor and working-class people in suburbs – this is nothing new, suggesting the typical image has always been somewhat wrong.

What will be interesting to watch is how suburban municipalities respond to the growing number of poor people.

More discussion about teaching “The Wire” at Harvard

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The class revolving around the television show The Wire in the Harvard Sociology Department continues to draw attention. Here is a quick summary of the some of the public discussion:

In a Boston Globe editorial, Eugene and Jacqueline Rivers, co-founder of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition and Harvard University doctoral student, respectively, wrote in support of the class:

One of the most difficult challenges confronting intellectuals is how to discuss the relationship between race and poverty in Obama’s “post-racial” America…”The Wire” can usefully serve as a non-partisan political resource for engaging the issues of race and poverty.’

The two add that the show is smart and creative, and that it can lead to discussion about programmatic responses to systematic inequality in the inner city.

On the opposite end of the spectrum stands Ishmael Reed, a professor at University of California-Berkeley who also contributed an op-ed on the subject to the Globe.

Reed believes that professors like Wilson are more concerned with using “hot courses built around sensational popular culture like hip-hop and crime shows as a way of filling seats in their classroom,” than with seriously examining race and class relations. Reed contends that the show is riddled with stereotypes, and should not be utilized in a university setting.

I would be curious to hear about the outcomes of the course, both for students and faculty.

What these comments about this particular class are hinting at is that there is disagreement about how to best teach courses about race, poverty, and social class. There are numerous resources professors can draw upon, including a wealth of ethnographic work from the last twenty years.

Learning about race from the South

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The Christian Science Monitor has a story about seven lessons that can be learned about race from the South. Here is the list: “recognize how far we’ve come,” “talk about race like a Southerner,” (#3 is not listed in a heading but is something like “see the benefits of frequent interaction between blacks and whites”), “Blacks love Southern opportunity,” “don’t stereotype whites,” “segregation by any other name…,” and “keep moving forward.”

One thing that caught my attention: #6 discusses segregation in the North, a region which supposedly has been more favorable to blacks. Several academics dispute this notion:

“The concept of Southern exceptionalism has obscured a lot of American history and a lot of Southern history, and it’s time to put that to rest and understand how deeply interrelated America and the South is, and how much the two have always resembled each other,” says Larry Griffin, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of “The South as an American Problem.” “For decades and decades, the South’s legacy has been the basic trope that permitted white Americans [to excuse] themselves from all racial guilt and project it to the American South.”

A group of historians – including Mr. Sokol and the University of Michigan’s Matt Lassiter – are revisiting how the North and South diverged after the Civil War. One of Mr. Lassiter’s findings is that Northern segregation happened largely by the same kind of government decrees that enshrined segregation in the South.

“The North has been a freer place, in some ways a better place [for blacks], but on the level of spatial segregation, structural inequalities, and poverty, [the North] is no better than the South and is, in many cases, worse,” says Sokol.

Sociologist James Loewen has also tackled this subject in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Loewen found that in the North between 1890 and 1940, blacks were forced out of many communities, often by informal “sundown laws” that required them to be out of a community by sundown or suffer the consequences.

An interesting article in a country that has difficulty discussing race and dealing with the consequences of a racialized society.