Childhood Poverty
It must be mysterious to many Americans that the richest nation in the world has not been more aggressive about reducing child poverty.
By most important methods of measurement, American child poverty is the highest in the developed world — including most of Western Europe, England, the Nordic counties, and Japan. Maybe Americans don’t think about this at all. A large bloc of America is simply permanently poor.
Is America so insensitive to the lack of opportunities afforded its poor children? Are these children inherently incapable, as many claim? A large proportion is black or brown, after all. Is it the deep racist assumption that there is there too little that can be done constructively for them?
In this brief piece, I will discuss another idea that academics proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, which is a prominent cause of poverty in the minds of conservatives but also some progressives.
Examining Spanish-speaking subcultures in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and New York City, the celebrated sociologist Oscar Lewis proposed that poor societies develop restrictive social habits that reinforce poverty and often make its continuation inevitable. This they call the “culture of poverty.”
In America, this culture of poverty, when combined with cash welfare payments, creates a debilitating form of dependency. Parents won’t work. Children don’t believe that finishing their schooling will help provide them with jobs someday. Stealing, selling drugs, and joining gangs are their preferences. The public often finds such thinking a scapegoat, easy to blame the poor, especially if they are black.
The liberal New Yorker writer Ken Auletta claimed in his book The Underclassthat ghetto life is utterly different than life in the rest of America.
Nicholas Lemann wrote in The Atlantic that as apart of all black life is, “ghetto life is a thousand more times so.” The culprit was out- of- wedlock births, according to the and other liberal writers like Pete Hamill.
But serious long-term research showed different results. The wonderful poverty economist Alice O’Connor wrote that one of the singular achievements of serious long-term poverty scholarships was that both poverty and welfare were “transitory, amenable to a better system of income support.”
The most recent such system has been the Child Tax Credit, available to all poor children without conditions. In 2021, it cut child poverty by roughly half. But it was discontinued by Congress. This is a subject we will return to in this podcast.
