Transcript:

The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

Carol Jenkins

Hello, and thanks so much for joining The Invisible Americans Podcast with Jeff Madrick and Carol Jenkins. We address the travesty of child poverty here.

Jeff Madrick

There are nearly 13 million children living in serious material deprivation in America, and we don't see them. They are our invisible Americans, and we plan to change that.

Carol Jenkins

A couple of words about us. The podcast is based on Jeff's book, Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty. He's an economics writer, author of seven and co-author of another four books on the American economy.

Jeff Madrick

Carol is an Emmy-winning journalist, activist, and author. Most recently, president of the ERA Coalition working to amend the constitution to include women.

Carol Jenkins

We are longtime colleagues and friends.

The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

Carol Jenkins 

In today's episode, we talk with the three authors of a sweeping comprehensive look at past and present poverty in our country. Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America, tells us where the poorest live today and why they describe the most disadvantaged places as former internal colonies, where mass exploitation of human labor took place, thin cotton tobacco, as a result, think rural America today. 

Kathryn Edin is a professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Director of The Bendheim-Thomas Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. Luke Shaefer is a Professor and Associate Dean at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and director of Poverty Solutions. And Timothy Jon Nelson is Director of Undergraduate Studies, and a lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. 

Here's the conversation Jeff and I had with them recently, about their five years of on the ground research embedded in America. Kathryn, Luke, and Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. We feel as if you're a part of The Invisible Americans family, Kathryn was the very first interview that we did, we insisted that we needed her to start off our project. Luke was an amazing presenter at our first convening at Roosevelt House. And Tim, be careful, our eyes are on you next, but I want to start with a dedication because that was unusual. Talk to us about Charles Johnson, Ida B. Wells, the people that you thank, who did research 100 years or more beyond your work? How did that dedication come about?  

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

It was interesting. We were doing fieldwork for this project when the pandemic hit. And the only thing we could do is read books about these places. And we discovered that very on the ground deep listening research we were doing in these places had also been done 100 years ago. And this scholarship had been lost mostly but was phenomenal. So Charles Johnson, incredible work all over the south focusing on tenants and their children and their experiences in these communities. Allison Davis wrote a book, Deep South, one of the most searing, almost an exposé on life in Natchez, Mississippi in the 1930s. 

We had Ida B. Wells, who did extensive research into the lynchings that were almost continually occurring across the south until she had to leave Memphis for Chicago for fear of her life, but did incredible documentation of the circumstances surrounding many of the lynchings in the 1930s. They became our teachers. And our work became an extension of this wonderful, detailed work that had gone before us.

Timothy Jon Nelson 

The other two that we dedicate to are Paul S. Taylor, who is a field economist working in Texas and really documenting a lot of the Mexican American experience. And also James Brown in Appalachia, studying the Peachtree Creek community.

Carol Jenkins 

It's so interesting. Luke, did you want to add to this debt to 100 plus years of research that got lost?

H. Luke Shaefer 

I think just reiterating what Kathy said about the incredible rigor of these studies, I mean, Charles S. Johnson studies in the Cotton Belt, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of respondents and incredibly in depth work and the rigors with which Ida B. Wells documents what's going on with lynchings and really sort of names that it is the ultimate tool in the fight for economic power and the dominance of whites and the community she's working in, and she gets run out of her home community, and she can never come back when she reports on it. I think just being humbled and inspired by these folks and wanting to make sure that their voices are very prominent in this work and think that we're trying to come along and do them proud. And in the tradition of work on America's most disadvantaged communities.

Jeff Madrick 

Well, what I find surprising about the book, and how revolutionary it is, really, is you all work with child poverty definitions, which mostly were wrapped around cash, not necessarily but mostly. And then you move to this idea that poverty is not the issue, but disadvantage is the issue. And I think all of you had that in mind, actually, when you only use the poverty line as your principal measure of poverty. So what drove you, it's almost as if you're abandoning the poverty line, I say, the person who keeps using the poverty line, though, I didn't read a lot and wrote a lot about how inadequate the poverty line measure is. Why don't we talk a little bit about what drove you to begin to understand the poverty line itself was inadequate?

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

Well, I think that really came out of our work on $2.00 a Day, we became part of the poverty wars. Not willingly, but we were like, wow, nobody can agree on what these numbers mean. But it also was very clear to us that poverty is only a weak way of getting out what we really care about, which is well-being. We made up this measure 65 years ago, in order to capture something on the ground. And so we have all these well measured, other direct metrics of wellbeing. And so we wanted to keep, and we do keep the poverty line in our index. But we added in these health and mobility measures as well to make it multifaceted. And I think in each case, each of the indicators tells you something different. 

For example, South Texas has pretty good mobility rates. They’re about at the nation's average, but very, very high poverty and very high child poverty. In other places like Marion County, South Carolina, the poverty rate isn't extraordinarily low, but the rate of mobility, the number of lower birth weight babies in the very short life expectancies really put that highlight the disadvantage and a place that might have been missed if we had just used poverty. But on this point about disadvantage. We were asked to study places, not people for this project, and kids don't get to choose where they grew up. So the term disadvantage implies that someone's being held back unfairly. It's really a moral term. And we thought that was right, since we were studying how his life chances were shaped by the places in which they were growing up in but really didn't have a lot of choices.

Carol Jenkins 

Yeah, and for us concentrating on child poverty, the fact that low birth weight is one of the defining factors was very striking to us. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

H. Luke Shaefer 

Yeah, we thought of it, our measures of health. And as Kathy says, we loved having different data from many different data sources, and you can really triangulate and get an understanding of what's going on in the community. And also thinking of the poverty rate is really problematizing the circumstances of an individual and wanting to broaden that out and understand our challenges. A disadvantage is really community level and how we're all implicated with our health measures. We thought of low infant birth weight being sort of your circumstances of life and health at the beginning of life. And we pair that with life expectancy. So you know, looking at length of life sort of health at the end, so we thought they were a nice pairing together but having low infant birth weight in there as a proxy just for a whole host of challenges. We have really come to appreciate how much of a person's life chances are impacted and shaped by that first year of life and prenatal period. And so there's a lot of reason to think about what policies we as a nation can be putting in place to level the playing field. Often when we think of leveling the playing field, I think in our heads, we're starting a lot later than in the womb and in the delivery room.

Carol Jenkins 

We were thrilled to hear that you're offering $1,500 to every woman who is expecting a child and then $500 for the child's first year, which will be an extraordinary assist. 

H. Luke Shaefer 

Thank you. So that's in Flint, and Flint is one of the most disadvantaged places. And really, you can see a lot of the same stories playing out in Flint that we write about in the book. And in the mechanisms, as we talked about in the book, why do places stay persistently poor for so long. 

Jeff Madrick 

Maybe Tim could summarize your new index, which includes poverty, but some of these other factors you're talking about.

Timothy Jon Nelson 

So there's five different indicators, and there was a lot we could choose from. So we tried to narrow it down to make it capture as much dimensionality as we could, with the simplest way to go about it. So there's two measures of poverty, actually, the official poverty measure, and deep poverty, which is at 50%, of the poverty line. And all of this, by the way, is measured at the county level, or the 500 largest cities. So that captures, as Kathy likes to say, the cyclical sort of aspect of poverty, which rises and falls with the economy. And then we have a couple of health measures, low weight, the proportion of infants born with low birth weight, and also life expectancy in a particular place. And those kind of capture what long spells of poverty do to the body to the house that actually get under the skin. And then finally, we use the measure of social mobility that's already been referenced that Raj Chetty and his colleagues developed to capture the chances that a child born low income will achieve middle class or even upper class status by the time they're 30. 

We didn't have a good way to weight these, there's no obvious way to do that. So we put them all into a machine learning formula called principal component analysis. And so what you get from that is basically a spreadsheet in which the 3,618 units, which are counties and cities, are numbered from one to 3,618. With the lower numbers being the most disadvantaged places, and the higher numbers being the most advantaged. And then if you go to our website, you can see an interactive map of every county in the US and the 500 largest cities with shaded and so you could really see the geographical clustering of disadvantage and advantage across the United States.  

Jeff Madrick 

What was your major conclusion?

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

Well, three scholars of urban poverty had a big surprise. Places like Flint, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Rochester, New York, Gary, Indiana, the most disadvantaged places are overwhelmingly rural, and they cluster really in five regions. Central Appalachia, which is Eastern Kentucky, and Western West Virginia, extremely disadvantaged place. The PD region, really the old tobacco belt, cotton stretching from Virginia through North Carolina into that eastern tip of South Carolina, then the massive Cotton Belt, these are the cotton growing counties. In fact, 60 of the top 100 most disadvantaged places are in the Cotton Belt alone. So this is our largest region. South Texas, especially the Winter Garden, this is an area most Americans don't know very much about but at one point, this region produced 80% of the country's spinach. And then of course, our native nations and 20 of our most disadvantaged places have reservation lands in them. 

I grew up in rural America, and I always said I was never going to study rural poverty, but we did. And we sent ethnographers into these places to embed to live in these communities, to talk to people, hear from them, participate in community life. And we began just like Charles Johnson and James Brown and Ida B. Wells had done. But then we too began to embed in these places to the extent possible, given our teaching responsibilities and really started to learn from these communities, and what they told us, I think, was a striking set of stories about why it is these places, this map led us to a very peculiar group of places. Why these places had so much in common and were so different from the rest of the United States.

Carol Jenkins 

You point out that it's the places of human exploitation, that these were the company towns. My uncle was a miner in Birmingham, Alabama, company town house on all of that deprivation and that the beginning of that is now determining the lives of so many people who still live in those areas. But the interesting find also is that we always think of Appalachia as white rural, and your book, your research uncovered something else. Tim, do you want to talk about that?  

Timothy Jon Nelson 

So there were quite a few African American miners who came up, maybe fleeing the tenant, sharecropping, in places like Alabama, didn't tend to stay in Appalachia that long, except for some families, probably headed north to more urban industrial opportunities. But it is not a completely white place. You're absolutely right. And so one of the questions that we had and doing this work is that because they aren't on the surface, so very different, why are these the places to end up being so disadvantaged today? So we did kind of a deep dive into history, and as you said, each of these places was built on a single commodity economy, requiring lots of labor. And one legacy of these places is that there's sort of a thin layer of the middle class of professionals, with lots of working class folks. And they kind of started out that way, and have really continued that way, even though the underlying economics has obviously changed quite a bit.  

Jeff Madrick 

What would be interesting to people, I think, in general, is that you call this colonialization. That we had colonies within the nation. And we don't quite think of colonies that way. I think that would contribute to bad social infrastructure, unequal education and some of the other [INAUDIBLE]

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

Yes, that's right. These were colonies but colonies within our own borders, right? Where the logic was one of extraction and exploitation, but you don't see the degree of extraction and exploitation anywhere else in the United States, than you do in these places. It is a whole different order of magnitude. And because the small local elite had to keep the masses of laborers down, they developed these highly segregated school systems with five-month school years. We continue to have DNF rated schools in these regions, as you say, a tradition of violence that began with keeping people from being socially mobile, and being able to leave [INAUDIBLE] higher wages somewhere else, led to very low rates of social mobility that sparked violence today. 

There is a tradition of corruption in these places that went way back to how you cheated your tenants at subtle up time as to how you stole their votes, prohibited them from voting, bought their votes, even in Central Appalachia. So there was a tradition of corruption that pervades these places, even today and keeps new industry from wanting to come into these places. There's also been evidence of what we call the invisible hand. Systemic racism and government policy, especially evident in times of disaster now exacerbated with climate disaster, which is much more common in these places than in other regions of the United States. And as Carol said, just plain social reproduction.  These were company towns, and the way they've gone about trying to reinvent themselves, since King Cotton bowed to mechanization and foreign competition has really been through recreating the company town by luring some big employer from Milwaukee. So in all of those ways, the structures that supported these internal colonies have persisted even when the crops are no longer.

Jeff Madrick 

That's a fascinating contribution to American history you make, it seems almost inadvertent, starting with poverty and then discovering characteristics of America that most of us don't get taught in social studies.  

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

 Luke can speak to this. Luke, was it inadvertent?

H. Luke Shaefer 

Well, I do think it was from the way we go about our research. We think of it as iterative mixed methods. And as you all know, from our first book, we tried to combine large scale data with on the ground observation. And this one we really added to that, we, in our teams were in communities for long periods of time, we participated in community life as well as did interviews. And then we looked at history. So historical analysis was really, I think the piece that we added this time around. And that really brings home the extent to which the problems that we experienced today, they didn't appear out of thin air, they all have long historical legacies. And we can take poverty rates today. And we can put them in a regression model predicting them with things like the number of lynchings in a community from over 100 years ago, the rates of enslavement, the rates of segregation in 1900, or 1910. And we can predict with this disturbing amount of precision, what poverty rates will be in the present day. 

And so I look at history in a different way. So there had been books, scholarship on each of these places. I hope the one of the major contributions we've had is trying to link their stories together. So the stories have absolute unique features in each place. But the overarching story that Tim told of, a place that was dominated by a single industry controlled by a small number of people that required a large labor force, and where every aspect of social and economic life was patterned around sort of reinforcing that social order. It's broader, and it links these regions together. And to get it your question, Jeff, once we connected it to thinking of these as internal colonies, when you look at a lot of the research around the world, it really fits. You see challenges with separate and unequal schooling, you see challenges of government corruption, in places that were colonialized, sort of holding those places back. Every single one of the mechanisms plays out in these other places around the world. So we feel really good about that argument.

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

I just wanted to add just a little tag there. So what we did with history in the field work, the ethnographies, we tried to figure out what specific mechanisms tied the past to the present. And we identified these mechanisms. Nowhere else was this as extreme violence. These are the most violent places in the nation, the most corrupt places in the nation, they've seen the most destruction of their social infrastructure, the sort of the institutional life of community that builds social bonds, and on and on. But we also explored the most advantaged places which are in the Upper Midwest, it's very interesting. And you could literally see the opposite thing, go on lowest rates of violence, least segregated schooling, the least government corruption, the strongest social infrastructure, this kind of features of community life. What we learned, I think, is that the index works in reverse, just as well as it does to identify the least advantaged places. It's striking that we really do tell two stories in this book. And that gave us much greater confidence in our results.

Carol Jenkins 

Well, it's a fantastic contribution. And you all have mentioned the word corruption several times during our conversation, and I love how you try to put to rest as you call it, the centuries old notion that poor people just don't want to work. And that’s the problem, as opposed to corruption, or ineptitude. And your solutions are interesting of like, let's not go through local governments where the money is eaten up or corrupted somehow. Talk to us a little bit about that, of how you see the future. It seems like that's the solution based on the Child Tax Credit success.

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

Give the people themselves, the citizens. 

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Carol Jenkins 

Exactly, the citizens. Kathryn, tell us? 

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Dr. Kathryn Edin 

Well, I'm gonna turn this one over to Tim.

Timothy Jon Nelson 

Well, it's interesting, I think people in far off places like Washington, look at a community like Clay County, Kentucky and say, Oh, well, they're all the same. We don't understand the political distinctions and the class structure. And that if we just send money to local elites, we just have this assumption that they'll know what to do with it and do what's best for everyone. And so one of the big surprises of this book was to find out, really, and the corruption peace was not something we were expecting. But in a lot of places, you can't trust local elites. Now that's maybe harsh to say, and there's some exceptions to that, and so on. But it really made me appreciate when the war on poverty, trying to find maximum feasible participation among the actual poor folks and how hard that was, for a lot of the local elites to implement because it undercut their sort of open pockets that the money was going into first.

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

Yeah. You mentioned, Carol, that in these deeply corrupt places where slate after slate of the entire city government is ending up in federal prison on corruption charges, including cavorting with drug dealers to bring opioids into these communities, that when you say to poor people, ‘Hey, tell us what you think needs to be done in this committee,’ they pointed the behavior of poor people almost uniformly. Oh, it’s those people, this is the laborers, right? They don't know how to behave. They just don't want to work. And so even in these places where there's just this obvious problem holding this community back, that the community leaders are participating in. The community narrative is all about the behaviors of the poor. 

Jeff Madrick 

We talk about that a lot. So besides moving everybody to the upper Midwest, what are some other specific solutions that you suggest? That's kind of Kennedy's idea, move everybody to where things are good.

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

I think that would be a political and social disaster. We actually tried that in the 1940s and 50s, with the great migrations that occurred from all of these regions, been there and done that. But anyway, Luke.

H. Luke Shaefer 

With our last book, obviously, it was right in line with what you've all been talking about families. And you can see that that gets more uniformly distributed across the nation and does better at getting the families in those very poor places. So especially federalized benefits, like the Child Tax Credit, where states can be more or less restrictive, that's clearly the way to go. But we do think that there needs to be more done to address circumstances and these communities in particular. We really don't want to come back and look at this map in another 100 years, or have those who come after us write another book about this persistence. So it is not a book of a single solution, because the challenges are multifaceted. But I do think that there are lots of possibilities for people to think differently about how we would approach tackling some of these solutions. So something as simple as figuring out how we support local journalism that in every one of our cases are what brought these scandals to light. 

In terms of education, there's a really strong evidence based policy of paying starting teachers more. So we are fan of strategies that put in a salary minimum for starting teachers, there's a really solid evidence base around that. And that can have very strong equity impacts and raising teacher salaries the most and the poorest districts that tend to pay the least. And then investing in social infrastructure. So we really came to this through our respondents, especially in Kentucky. You said kids get into drugs, because there's nothing else to do. And we didn't take it seriously. But we decided there's something to this. And I think philanthropies could do a lot in investing in public places, public spaces and communities, whether it's libraries, splash parks, bowling alleys, barber shops, these places where people can congregate and make connections and have that positive impact, connecting with other people. So it is a daunting set of tasks. We don't pretend to have all of the answers on this particular challenges. But I think there's a number of things where communities and philanthropies can have ideas of where to start, both from policy and through private help.

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

The scale of this problem is massive. We need to launch a new war on poverty but one that relentlessly focuses on the places of greater need and something you know, sort of a Marshall Plan is what we need. We really need regional expertise and hitting all fronts at once. Greenwood, Mississippi wants to bring in a bunch of industry, it's got to fix the fact that all the white kids go to the Segregation Academy started by the founder of the White Citizens Council. Right? They've got to fix the fact that the public schools are DNF rated. So in some ways, this needs to be a multi pronged attack on poverty in these regions. And you might say, ‘Gee, move them all to Midwest,’ but the Midwest will have something to say about that. 60% of black people live in these areas, 44% of Hispanics, but I don't think we can forget them, I think we need to face them head on.

Carol Jenkins 

So after five years, at least of working on this project covering 14 states and creating the new index, the disadvantage index and the deep [INAUDIBLE] disadvantage, a question to each of you, as we close out in terms of your hope and your optimism or your thinking about—I know that we say we don't want to be here 100 years from now, but how optimistic are you that we will for the nearly 13 million children living in this country in poverty make some sort of changes?

Timothy Jon Nelson 

I've been very encouraged, actually, by the response that we've gotten so far, to the book from people in government, people in nonprofits. I was just in Nebraska, speaking to a policy institute up there and Nebraska turns out to be one of the most advantaged places with lots of counties at the upper end of the index. And they were very receptive to understanding what's happening in other parts of the country. And I think it also sort of opened their eyes to the idea that they do have it pretty good compared to other people. And really, were concerned that things would even out. I think one of the history lessons of a place like Nebraska, is that the Homestead Act of 1862, created a situation of shared more equal wealth, which persists today. And obviously, we can't recreate the Homestead Act. But we can think of that principle going forward of how equally to share the wealth that this nation has in abundance.

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Carol Jenkins 

 Luke?

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H. Luke Shaefer 

I think I'm also hopeful because of the great leaders that we met in each one of these communities. I think we saw significant evidence that people were interested in moving beyond old barriers and the old ways of doing things and lamenting those really. So there's huge amounts of history to overcome. But in each place, there are inspiring people that we write about in the book, who are really trying to think differently, and practically to move forward. And I think that's the starting point. So I wouldn't say we're well on our way, but the pieces for real change are there.  

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

That's why we call those people our Hometown Heroes, and many of them come from the ranks of the have-nots. They've gotten out, they've gone to college, graduate school, they become expert in their fields, but they're choosing to come home and invest now in their home communities. And we see them as the future of these places. 

In terms of hope, I love to tell two stories. One, one of my mentors, William Julius Wilson, wrote a book showing that it was worse to be poor, and live in a poor neighborhood than it was to be poor and live in a mixed income neighborhood. Write his book, The Truly Disadvantaged, changed housing policy profoundly. We don't build high rise, public housing anywhere. We try to get people into communities where they can thrive, but he's one of my heroes. Second, David Ellwood. My dean, when I was at the Harvard Kennedy School. He had a little idea about how to support the working poor. He gave a paper at the National Governors Association, Bill Clinton rushed the stage, Clinton was elected President, Ellwood joined the administration. And in Clinton's first speech, he announced this new program called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is, of course, now our nation's largest anti-poverty program. 

So it's our job to be ready, to have the ideas and the passion. I mean, you all are role models in that respect as well. We're so encouraged by your work and to wait for the opportunity to have that bold idea that suddenly catches on. We can do it. We showed we could do it during the pandemic. And so there's no longer a question of how but if.

H. Luke Shaefer 

Kathy and I were co authors with many other colleagues on this paper that built on some work that Jeff had really made possible before that. Our papers set the framework for how you could convert that child tax credit to a fully refundable, advanced paid monthly $250, $300 per kid. So we're writing that paper in 2016, as we're grappling with $2.00 a Day. I happened to include it in my packet when I was going up for promotion. And always remember, one of the reviewers came back and said, I guess it's fine for Professor Shaefer and his colleagues to talk about things that can never happen here in the United States. If that reviewer is listening, then I have a few things I can't say publicly. But more broadly, I would say things can happen and change can happen. And I know we didn't get the Child Tax Credit permanently, but we're in an extremely different place from where we were before. People like Jeff and Rosa DeLauro and so many really started talking about this Irv Garfinkel going back to the 60s. So change can really happen in dramatic ways. 

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Jeff Madrick 

I'm glad you said that, because when I researched my book, I ran into academics all the time, who said this could never happen.

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

And they were wrong.

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Jeff Madrick  

And they were wrong.

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H. Luke Shaefer 

It can never happen until it happens. 

Carol Jenkins 

Until it happens. Kathryn, Luke, and Tim, thank you all so much for being with us today.

Dr. Kathryn Edin 

Thank you, Carol and Jeff.

H. Luke Shaefer 

Pleasure.

The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John

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Jeff Madrick 

History will judge the nation's decency in various ways, one of them will surely be the well-being of all its children. American neglect of its poor children is both inexplicable and deplorable. By basic measures, it has the highest child poverty rate among rich nations in the world. A generation of careful academic research has shown how damaging this has been to children's cognition, health, nutrition, and future wages. We are dedicated to restoring a bright and optimistic future for all children, in this land long celebrated for equal opportunity.

Carol Jenkins 

Thanks so much for joining us on the Invisible Americans Podcast available wherever you get your podcasts, but we urge you to visit our website for transcripts, show notes, research and additional information about our guests and their work. That's www.theinvisibleamericans.com. Please follow us on social media and our new YouTube channel. And our blog posts are up on Medium as well as our website. That's www.theinvisibleamericans.com Jeff and I will see you the next time.

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The Invisible Americans theme by Bridget St. John