Why the poor stay poor? - Book Review

Civil Rights Journal, Wntr, 2002 by Roger Waldinger

Review of The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare, and Work by Haya Stier and Marta Tienda

The affluent society discovered the other America more than four decades ago. Ever since, the United States has been locked in debate over poverty and its possible causes and cures. For those who have been paying attention, the controversy is not only endless, but never quite seems to change. In the vision lying behind the war on poverty, the problem lay in the conditions that the poor encountered: change their circumstances, through job creation and training, and America's impoverished would seize the chance, moving ahead on their own. But in an echo of the old distinction between poor of the deserving and undeserving kind, some commentators insisted that the problem was rooted in the behavior and outlook of the poor themselves. Diminishing the penalties associated with poverty would do more harm than good: unless pushed to mend their ways, those who had internalized the "culture of poverty" would be unlikely to change.

Of course, the poverty debate was not just about the poor; it was also implicitly, often explicitly, about race. It was one thing to learn that poverty persisted in the hollows of Appalachia; quite another, it appeared, to be told that poverty afflicted a disproportionate number of African Americans, and even more so, those who lived in and around cities. Needless to say, arguments about the "culture of poverty" took on an entirely different tone when the poor people in question also turned out to be black.

In policy terms, it takes no scorecard to know who's won the debate, as the name of our last major piece of welfare reform--"Personality Responsibility Act"--tells it all. But outside the corridors of Congress, the discussion, albeit in muted terms, burbles on. For the moment, it may all have an academic feel, as the tide that rose during the 1990s eventually lifted many boats. But the ways of the economy often prove fickle: should America slip into a serious recession, then the fortunes of the poor may take a significant turn for a worse--but this time, with much thinner a safety net than before. In that case, the continuing considerations of experts will turn out to be relevant, assuming, of course, that anyone in power cares to ask for their advice.

As it happens, the experts really do have something to say. While ideology hasn't disappeared from the halls of academe, contemporary scholars have taken the pains to learn from their mistakes of their predecessors. They've also moved well beyond earlier, more simplistic formulations of the problem, understanding that the phenomenon is multidimensional, and its causes complex. Any number of factors increase the risk of falling into poverty: residing in central cities; lacking the educational credentials that employers want; having grown up poor; starting out life without two parents; membership in a group for which some white Americans might have considerable distaste, or, from a different point of view, that might have a preference for idleness over work. But the analytic difficulty derives from the fact that, in reality, these features are usually bundled together; the question is how to unpack the relationship, and then specify how one factor influences the next.

This is the agenda tackled by Stier and Tienda in their ambitious and important new book. To understand poverty, they argue, one needs to identify the routes by which people fall into that state. Events in an individual's life--a failure to finish high school; a teenage pregnancy; forming a family without marriage--make impoverishment a likely fate, at least for some period of time. But these events often occur in a context over which the individual has little control: after all, one doesn't choose one's own parents. Growing up in a poor household or one where there's only one parent increases all of the subsequent risk factors. And one misstep in the early stage of adult life and long-term trouble follows: you don't finish high school, and it's hard to get an adequate, stable job, producing an erratic work record that persistently makes you an unattractive recruit.

Stier and Tienda take this perspective and apply it to a set of data that is uniquely suited to explore their concerns. Poverty seems most intractable, and politically most explosive, in its big-city form. It is in that setting that Stier and Tienda find their most basic raw materials, drawing on William Julius Wilson's Urban Poverty and Family Life Study, a survey of 2,490 residents of poor neighborhoods in Chicago. Since poor neighborhoods house people of varying class backgrounds, that design choice is crucial, ensuring that the survey takes in the comfortably middle class, along with those Chicagoans living in circumstances that are the bleakest of the bleak. Design as well as the choice of place yield another axis of variation, as Chicago represents the emerging shape of American life, containing not just black and white, but sizeable populations originating in Puerto Rico and Mexico as well. To widen the focus and highlight any factors that might make Chicago a special, rather than exemplary case, Stier and Tienda bring in a large-scale, contemporaneous sample of urban residents nationwide. The two surveys provide a neat parallel, as both use current as well as retrospective data, allowing Stier and Tienda to trace the pathways by which earlier events led to the life course that their respondents eventually followed.