A tweet thread by the author...
My new article just got released in Science Advances today. The article is open access. I try to both describe the nature of America's "systemically high poverty" and review explanations of it.
By "systemically high" I mean U.S. poverty is (i) a huge share of the pop., (ii) a perennial outlier among rich democ's; (iii) staggeringly high for certain groups, (iv) unexpectedly high even among those who "play by the rules," & (v) pervasive across various groups & places.
I critique 3 prevailing approaches focused on the poor not poverty. First, behavioralists aim to "fix" the poor, but cannot explain macro-level variation, the causality bw behaviors & poverty is questionable, & wrongly focus on prevalences but neglect the more salient penalties.
Second, "dramatizing the poor" aims to elicit emotion and compassion through humanizing narratives. But, this approach overemphasizes unrepresentative groups of the poor, disproportionately focuses on symptoms rather than underlying causes, & downplays effective social policies.
Third, "culturalists" "fix" AND "dramatize" - claiming pathological culture -> counterproductive behavior -> poverty. This is "hopelessly endogenous", & suffers from selection biases & subjective biases, & lacks contrast against rival explanations & comparison groups.
Rather than these prevailing approaches focused on the poor, I advance political explanations aiming to explain America's systemically high poverty. According to political explanations, power, policies, and institutions are the pivotal cause of poverty.
Political explanations emphasize: (1) the essential role of social policy, (2) political choices to penalize risks, (3) power resources of collective political actors, and (4) institutions.
Over the past couple of years, I've been posting drafts of some of the figures that ended up in this piece. Here are a few of the ones I'd highlight now:
[charts]
Someone here posted a fascinating article about how China managed to urbanize without the development of massive, persistent slums. Of course, the solutions were political choices.
https://dongshengnews.org/en/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/
I haven't finished reading it yet, and I have some questions, but their willingness to sincerely analyze their particular circumstance and create policy that's at a sufficiently large scale to actually address working class problems absolutely amazes me. This is inconceivable in the US. Instead of something like a small tax break that's almost impossible to access and then saying vote for me because the other guy wouldn't have even made this useless gesture, China makes political choices to actually address problems.
