Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream

Introduction

Marion Crain and Arne L. Kalleberg

DEFINING POVERTY

What is poverty? Who are the poor? Statisticians and government define poverty according to income and wealth. In 2005, 37 million Americans—about one in eight people—lived below the income poverty level, defined as $19,874 for a family of four. Almost 13 million were children under 18. A disproportionate number are African American and Hispanic: about a quarter of African American families and about a fifth of Hispanic families are poor. The income gap between the rich and the poor is growing as well: in 2005 the top 20 percent of U.S. households received over half of all income, while the bottom 20 percent of households received only about 3 percent of total income.¹

Wealth inequalities are also on the rise: in 2004 the top 1 percent of households by income held more than a third of all net worth and financial assets. Approximately 80 percent of stock is held by the top 10 percent of wealthy households; the poorest 40 percent of households own less than 1 percent of all stocks. Although homeownership rates are rising across the population, Hispanics and African Americans continue to lag behind whites: fewer than half of Hispanic and African American families owned homes, compared with almost three-quarters of white families.²

Over 46 million Americans (about 16 percent of the population) lacked health insurance coverage in 2005, and the number continues to rise. Of children under age 18, 8.3 million lacked health-care coverage (about 11 percent of this age group). African Americans and Hispanics constitute a disproportionate share of the uninsured. Most Americans obtain health insurance through employment, yet the percentage of employers that provide coverage is decreasing; less than 60 percent of Americans enjoyed employer-sponsored coverage in 2005. Over 27 million workers are employed with no health insurance. Most of the uninsured are concentrated at the bottom of the income distribution.³

But the poor are not statistics. They are human beings—our neighbors, our children, our fellow Americans. Poverty is not a sustainable condition that the more well-to-do have the luxury to turn away from. In the words of Barbara Ehrenreich, poverty in America is a state of emergency.⁴

WHAT BECAME OF THE AMERICAN DREAM?

The statistics just outlined are alarming enough in their own right, but the greatest loss for all of us is confidence in the American Dream, defined as having a good job, being able to retire in security, owning a home, having affordable health care, and a better future for [our] children.⁵ A survey conducted in August 2006 found that 51 percent of the workers surveyed believed that their children would be worse off economically than the current generation. Indeed, only 38 percent believed that they themselves were better off financially than they had been four years previously, and 29 percent believed that their fortunes had declined .⁶ Poverty thus represents a poverty of opportunity, as well as a poverty of circumstance. It eats away at what is most uniquely American: the American Dream.

WHAT CAUSES POVERTY? TWO STORIES

There are two general views about why some people are poor and others are economically secure. In the first story, people are poor because of their individual characteristics. Proponents of this view focus on the socioeconomic attributes and individual behavioral tendencies of the poor, emphasizing the culture of poverty that sets them apart from other Americans.⁷ The poor have shortcomings such as inadequate education or skills, poor motivation to work and other negative attitudes or habits, or inability to form stable families. These attributes make it difficult for them to obtain and hold jobs that pay wages sufficient to meet their economic needs and those of their families. Compared with the nonpoor, those classified as poor are also disproportionately nonwhite and more likely to be immigrants, more likely to have relatively little education, and more likely to be in families that are headed by single women.⁸

A contrasting view sees poverty as a structural feature of a capitalistic economy that is rooted in the institutions of society. According to this story, attributing the causes of poverty to the characteristics of individuals is blaming the victims for their poverty and economic distress.⁹ Poverty is not attributable to the deficiencies of individuals, but rather to social factors that are beyond their control; these social conditions are public issues, not personal troubles.¹⁰ The structural factors that contribute to poverty and economic stress include the proliferation of low-wage, low-skilled jobs; poor schools and inadequate investment in training and skill formation; lack of access to higher education; residential segregation; discrimination in labor, credit, and housing markets; and so on.

The relative importance of these two explanations—inadequate individual human and social capital versus structural features, especially a lack of well-paying jobs—has been the subject of considerable debate among social scientists, politicians, business leaders, and others concerned about the problem of poverty and economic distress. Policy proposals aimed at alleviating the situation of the working poor are generally framed around one or the other of these two explanations for the causes of poverty. The first explanation suggests a need for programs that improve the skills, attitudes, and other attributes of the poor. By contrast, the second explanation points toward the need to create higher-paying jobs, remove barriers produced by discrimination, and enhance educational access for all.

As with most such debates, each of these views is partially correct and thus also partially wrong. Poverty and economic distress result from a complex interaction between the structure of society and the economy, on the one hand, and characteristics of the people who live and work in them, on the other. For example, lack of education and skills limits the opportunities people have for getting jobs that pay living wages. The existence and persistence of low-wage jobs, in turn, reduce the chances people have of obtaining jobs that pay living wages despite their educational attainments, and reduce their motivation for obtaining the skills necessary to qualify for high-paying jobs.

David Shipler describes vividly the complexity of the factors that are responsible for creating and maintaining poverty in America:

[P]overty is a constellation of difficulties that magnify one another: not just low wages but also low education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just poor housing but also poor parenting, not just the lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households.... The troubles run strongly along both macro and micro levels, as systemic problems in the structure of political and economic power, and as individual problems in personal and family life.¹¹

ANTIPOVERTY PUBLIC POLICY

The shifting conceptions of what constitutes poverty and who is poor or economically distressed have dictated historically the shape of antipoverty public policy. Early antipoverty programs divided the poor into two groups: the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. The fault line between the two was the reason for their inability to work. The deserving poor—those temporarily out of the waged labor force through the vicissitudes of labor-market shifts, age, injury, or disability—were the beneficiaries of an uncontested host of government programs aimed at providing a social safety net, including unemployment insurance, disability insurance, old-age insurance, and Medicare insurance.¹² By contrast, the undeserving poor, variously referred to as the underclass or the welfare poor, were assumed to be unable to support themselves through work because of their personal or moral shortcomings. Disproportionately female, minority, and unemployed, the undeserving poor were seen as an other group—an anomaly amid prosperity. Their many interrelated problems, including dysfunctional family structures, low levels of education and literacy, substance abuse, criminal behavior, hypersegregation, and widespread unemployment, were regarded as qualitatively different from those of the working or middle classes. They were the recipients of income-based programs, including welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid insurance.

By the mid-1990s antipoverty policy had begun to emphasize minimizing the social and economic dependence of the poorest Americans upon government programs. The politics of welfare reform spawned legislation—the 1996 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—that pressed welfare recipients into the workforce and turned the administration of welfare programs over to the states. These programs, like the early years of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, emphasized labor-supply policies that involved direct interactions with the poor and were designed to help them move into the paid workforce or upgrade their skills and motivation to work through education and training programs.¹³

It soon became apparent, however, that paid labor-force participation was not necessarily an escape from poverty. Most of the poor in the United States live in working families.¹⁴ One in four people who work full-time, year-round, still earn less than the amount of money needed to keep a family of four above the poverty threshold.¹⁵ The labor-supply programs that accompanied the shift from welfare to work were not successful in alleviating poverty: The bulk of former welfare recipients moved into the ranks of the working poor, finding employment at low-wage jobs with few benefits.¹⁶

Poverty and economic insecurity were thus revealed as a continuum rather than a dichotomy, with the barriers between the underclass, the working class, and even the middle class far more permeable than was once believed. The working poor and the middle class found themselves facing variants of the same problems that plague the underclass: they work, but at jobs with too little wage income, too little job security, too few opportunities for advancement, and too few health insurance or retirement benefits. They depend upon poorly functioning public schools and inadequate child- and day-care systems, face soaring housing and transportation costs, and stagger under a rising debt load. They survive on the edge. The economic devastation in the wake of job loss, medical crises, the loss of one income from divorce, or natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina) can easily push them off their precarious perch.

In short, labor-supply programs have proved inadequate to address the phenomenon of a working poor; there remains a need for labor-demand policies that increase the quality of the jobs available.¹⁷ Quoting Shipler again:

There is no single variable that can be altered to help working people move away from the edge of poverty. Only where the full array of factors is attacked can America fulfill its promise.... Relief will come, if at all, in an amalgam that recognizes both the society’s obligation through government and business, and the individual’s obligation through labor and family—and the commitment of both society and individual through education.¹⁸

POLICIES TO RESTORE THE AMERICAN DREAM

Policies to restore the American Dream must accomplish several tasks. If economic insecurity exists along a continuum with highly permeable boundaries between the poor and the nonpoor, programs that further opportunity for all are crucial. Direct government assistance through income-based programs should be a strategy of last resort. Instead, we need to create jobs that pay living wages, and to prepare people for these jobs. In addition to policies targeted at the labor market and the workplace, we need policies that promote strong families and that strengthen our communities in both rural and urban areas. The government plays a central role in adopting these kinds of policies and encouraging employers to do so. Nevertheless, policies to help low-wage workers and families in economic distress would be more likely to be enacted if they were encouraged by strong unions.

In this book we reject the false choice between the competing explanations of cultural poverty and structural poverty, recognizing that both have explanatory power. People fail to achieve the American Dream both because they do not have opportunities to obtain jobs that pay living wages and because they do not have the skills and abilities to take advantage of the economic opportunities generated by the economy when it is expanding. We adopt the broadest possible definition of poverty and emphasize proposals for policy reform that create opportunity not only by improving jobs, providing income supports, and encouraging savings, but also by strengthening the community and family institutions that mediate economic opportunity (schools, social supports for youth, community organizations, and family structure).

This book outlines a variety of policies that are likely to be effective in alleviating poverty and helping to restore the American Dream for millions of people. Given the urgency of these issues, we emphasize concrete solutions, not theoretical debates. The chapters are authored by eminent social scientists, but also by practitioners who have experience putting policy prescriptions into action.

Part One defines the what and who of poverty: the underclass, the working poor, and the middle class who stand on increasingly shaky ground. It describes the day-to-day experience of the poorest Americans, the growth of the working poor, and the disappearance of the middle class. Part Two outlines the why of poverty—the causes and forces that polarize income and wealth in America. Parts Three, Four, and Five address the how, exploring potential levers for change and proposing concrete reform strategies in three core areas: the labor market and work supports, asset-building programs, and programs designed to build social capital by strengthening family and community. Many of these chapters also include sidebars that describe particular aspects of the policy reforms we discuss or outline how successful programs in each area function.

The concluding chapter, authored by Senator John Edwards, outlines a strategy to end poverty and to restore the American Dream. Drawing upon the chapters in this book, he connects the what, why, and how of poverty and economic distress. He suggests the contours of a new direction in poverty policy that offers a multipronged approach that addresses the many facets of this complex and persistent problem in American society.

NOTES

1 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Poverty Thresholds 2005, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld/thresh05.html. See also Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern, Poverty: 1940s to Present, in Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy, ed. Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 1:33–45 (defining poverty and describing major trends).

2 Wealth Inequality Between Rich and Poor Is Growing, EPI Analysts Say in New Book, Daily Labor Report (BNA), no. 167, August 29, 2006, A-10.

3 Census Bureau Says 46.6 Million Americans Lacked Health Insurance Coverage in 2005, Daily Labor Report (BNA), no. 168, August 30, 2006, D-15.

4 Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 214.

5 ‘American Dream’ Out of Reach for Most Workers, Survey Says, Daily Labor Report (BNA), no. 169, August 31, 2006, A-12. The survey results are available at http://www.changetowin.org/features/the-american-dream-survey.htm.

6 Ibid.

7 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

8 Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Sylvia Allegretto, The State of Working America, 2004/2005 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005: 340–43).

9 William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage Books, 1976).

10 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).

11 David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Knopf, 2004), 285.

12 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Research, in Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy, ed. Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 2:585–91.

13 Timothy J. Bartik, Jobs for the Poor: Can Labor Demand Policies Help? (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).

14 William P. Quigley, Ending Poverty as We Know It: Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 73.

15 Mishel, Bernstein, and Allegretto, State of Working America, 2004/2005.

16 Katz and Stern, Poverty: 1940s to Present, 33, 45.

17 Bartik, Jobs for the Poor.

18 Shipler, Working Poor, 11, 300.

PART ONE

CONFRONTING POVERTY AND DECLINING OPPORTUNITY

Although the federal government defines poverty according to a set of income guidelines, the chapters in Part I make clear that poverty is far more complex; its tentacles touch all Americans. It is not a category, but a continuum of economic insecurity, a lack of opportunity, and this suggests that solutions to poverty must be crafted with an eye toward universality.

In Connecting the Dots David Shipler describes how poverty looks from the bottom. The whole of poverty is much larger than the sum of its parts, much more insidious than a low income. Poverty is also a lack of assets and a mountain of debt, compounded by hardships as varied as those who are caught in its clutches. Health problems, poor nutrition, lack of affordable housing, difficulties with accessing transportation, and substandard education intertwine in the lives of the poor. Simply put, poverty is the absence of choices, a moment-by-moment hand-to-mouth existence that defies planning and saving; poverty is expensive. Shipler’s eloquent portrayal of the human face of poverty shows how the structural forces that shape poverty intertwine with the cultural forces that perpetuate it. Trying to address the many-headed hydra of poverty by cutting off only one of the heads is an incomplete solution; the hydra will simply grow another head. Shipler argues for gateways to multiple services to replace our existing system of separate silos and urges us to harness the best in ourselves to redress poverty.

In Economic Mobility in the United States: How Much Is There and Why Does It Matter? Jared Bernstein describes the permeability of the barriers between those traditionally described as poor, the working poor, and the increasingly insecure middle class. Tracking the economic progress of families across the life cycle, he shows how the gap between the richest and poorest Americans has widened at the same time that economic mobility has declined or stagnated in the United States, rendering attainment of the American Dream a myth for many families. Moreover, the legacy of poverty is so powerful that it would take a poor family of four almost 10 generations to achieve the income of a middle-class family: for the poorest Americans, class has become a form of caste. The story is worse for black families: downward mobility is increasing, and black individuals and families are more likely to stagnate in poverty or to fall into it. Bernstein attributes much of this to inherited wealth patterns and educational access and observes how the absence of social safety nets in the United States increases class-related disadvantage.

Elizabeth Warren details the growing instability of the middle class in The Vanishing Middle Class. Without a strong middle class there is nothing for the poor to lift themselves toward. Although the median middle-class income has risen in dollars, the increase is almost entirely attributable to working mothers’ entry into the labor force. Most middle-class families today bring home two paychecks; single-earner households have slipped down the class ladder. Even families with two labor-market participants are struggling, however, because fixed costs are rising. Warren documents the startling rise in expenditures on housing, medical insurance, transportation, child care, and taxes. She recommends innovation in credit rules to better protect the poor and the middle class from an aggressive and sometimes usurious credit marketplace.

1

Connecting the Dots

David K. Shipler

Since September 11, 2001, we have been told that if only we had connected the dots, we might have foiled the plot. To fight terrorism, it seems, we have to draw lines among scattered facts until a complete picture emerges.

The same is true of poverty. To understand it and to fight it, we have to connect the dots. The far-flung problems that burden an impoverished American—housing and health, transportation and debt—may seem unrelated to one another, but they are all part of a whole, and they interact in surprising ways. Each element of vulnerability is worsened by the entire whirlwind of hardship.

WHAT IS POVERTY?

The federal government defines poverty very simply. If you were a single parent with three children and earned $19,874 in 2005, you were poor.¹ If you earned a dollar more, you were not. Naturally, working families at the bottom know very well that getting out of poverty is more complicated than showing a passport and crossing a frontier.

Poverty is not just income, and using a year’s income as the only index is like portraying a complex life with one still photograph. You may catch the essence, or you may miss the full ebb and flow of suffering and struggle. Poverty is not just income.

Copyright 2006 by David K. Shipler.

Poverty is also debt. The wealthiest 10 percent of the country’s households had an average net worth in 2004 of $3.11 million, according to the Federal Reserve, up 6.1 percent from 2001. But the poorest 25 percent, whose assets equaled their debts in 2001, dropped to a net worth of minus $1,400 in 2004. In other words, they owed more than they owned.²

I met such a man while researching my book The Working Poor: Invisible in America.³ His name was Willie Goodell. While he was unemployed and without medical insurance, he never saw a dentist, so whenever he got a cavity and a tooth ached, he went to an emergency room. If you show up with an emergency, hospitals are required by law to treat you, but they can also bill you, so Willie ran up $10,000 in debt that he could not pay. Even after he got a roofing job, whose wage put him above the poverty line, his credit report was so bad that he couldn’t get a phone installed. Such is the way of debt, a burden of the past carrying a hard history into the present. It restricts the future by draining off options, stifling choice, and sapping a person’s power.

Poverty is a sense of powerlessness, often a learned helplessness in which choices seem absent. Today’s decisions appear deceptively small, without long-term consequences. The timeline of planning is relentlessly short, with little room for imagining that a deed done now will have benefit much later. A poor person on the edge of crisis is trapped in a perpetual moment of acute fragility.

Poverty is relative. A Vietnamese farmer who owns a water buffalo to plow his few acres of rice paddy is not poor in Vietnam. But a Mexican farmworker paid by the bucket of cucumbers he harvests, and crammed with five other men into the concrete cell of a miserable barrack in eastern North Carolina, is poor in America.

The working poor stand on the margins of an affluent society looking in, unable to enjoy the comfort to which they contribute. The single parent with three children, working a full 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, must earn $9.55 an hour to stay at the poverty line.⁴ This does not happen in many low-skilled jobs, no matter how essential to the economy they are. And so the man who washes cars does not own one. The assistant teacher cannot afford to put her own two children in the day-care center where she works. The woman who files canceled checks in the back room of a bank has a balance in her own checking account of $2.02.

The working poor harvest sweet potatoes in time for Thanksgiving. They cut trees in time for Christmas. The fruits of their labor are in our lives every day, yet we rarely see them. Even when we encounter them face-to-face stocking shelves in Wal-Mart or checking us out at the supermarket, we do not see them as whole people, and we surely do not see them as poor. They are hidden in plain sight, to borrow a phrase from Edgar Allan Poe.

The reason for their invisibility is that they wear their jobs like camouflage, blending into the American Dream, the American Myth, which holds that anyone who works hard can prosper. It is such an important myth in defining what we imagine to be our reality that Richard Wright called it the truth of the power of the wish.

THE AMERICAN MYTH AND ANTIMYTH

A society’s myths are often valuable, as is this one about the American Dream. It is useful because it sets a high standard, a lofty goal to which we aspire. And the gap between the goal and the reality is a gap that most Americans yearn to close. That is a noble yearning.

The myth has a judgmental side, however, for if it is true that anyone who works hard can prosper in America, then it must also be true that anyone who does not prosper does not work hard. So this myth is a coin with two sides: one an ideal, one a condemnation.

Alongside the myth stands the antimyth, which holds societal institutions, not individuals, responsible for poverty. The failures of public schools, private enterprise, and government programs line up to thwart even the most persistent ambitions of those who begin life as poor. So holds the antimyth.

The myth and the antimyth parallel the conservative Republican and the liberal Democratic sides of the debate over poverty. This is a sterile game of blame. Conservatives tend to see individuals and families as responsible for their own predicaments; liberals often fault the private sector and government alone.

But real people do not fit comfortably into such neat boxes. I’ve had trouble finding poor folks whose own behavior has not contributed something to their hardships: having babies out of wedlock, dropping out of school, doing drugs, showing up late to work or not at all. Yet it is also difficult to find behavior that has not somehow been inherited from the legacy of being badly parented, badly schooled, badly housed in neighborhoods where the horizon of possibility is so near at hand that it blinds people to their own potential for imagination.

Conservatives have their pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, the internal individual and family dysfunctions, and liberals have theirs, the external failed institutions. Imagine if, in this age of political stalemate between the extremes, conservatives who care and liberals who dare to listen would each bring their pieces of the puzzle to the table and assemble them all together. Then they would have a full picture of the problems of poverty. You cannot solve a problem without defining it, and if you don’t allow yourself a complete definition, you will never approach a thorough solution. Connect the dots.

In the 1950s anthropologist Oscar Lewis popularized the term culture of poverty, which has since been twisted into an epithet used by the Right to absolve the society of responsibility for the poor.⁵ But I don’t think that poverty is a culture. It is not an array of rituals, mores, and values passed down from generation to generation. It is, rather, an ecological system of interactions among individuals and families, on the one hand, and on the other, the environment of neighborhoods, housing, schools, government programs, and the private economy. Altering this ecology of poverty is not easy, but it is also not impossible.

THE ECOLOGY OF POVERTY

When asthma attacks brought an eight-year-old boy repeatedly to the pediatrics department of the Boston Medical Center, doctors prescribed the usual steroid inhalers, but they doubted that the treatment would work, for they knew from the mother that her apartment had a leaky pipe and wall-to-wall carpeting, perfect for mold and dust mites, features of poor housing that studies show can trigger asthma attacks. And in this case the boy was missing so much school that he was falling behind; the mother was missing so much work that she risked being fired.

A nurse wrote a letter to the landlord asking that the carpeting be torn up and the pipe be repaired. There was no reply. So a lawyer at the pediatrics department called the owner twice, and presto! The pipe was fixed and the carpet removed. The boy improved, and the mother saved her job.

The Boston Medical Center now has five full-time attorneys in its pediatrics department. As doctors have learned that lawyers can help treat disease caused or worsened by conditions of poverty, the idea has caught on, and nearly 40 clinics in the country now use attorneys.

Housing is a key link in the chain reaction of hardships that afflict poor families. Lisa Brooks, who was a single mother when I met her, lived through a domino effect of startling difficulties, one after another, that began with the interaction between her bad housing and her son’s asthma.

She was just 24, but she wore weariness on her face as if every year of her young life had been multiplied by her ordeals. Paid $8.21 an hour as a caretaker in a group home for mentally ill adults, she was covered by medical insurance. But she couldn’t afford to save anything; every dime that came in went out. When she had to move into a drafty wooden house, her son’s asthma grew worse.

Twice, when he couldn’t breathe, he had to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital. For reasons that Lisa was never able to unravel, her insurance paid for the emergency room but not the ambulance charges, which amounted to $240 one time and $250 the next. Lisa could not pay them either, not all at once, so they went on her credit report.

With that bad credit rating, she was denied a mortgage to improve her housing by purchasing a mobile home. When her old car died (she needed one to get to work), and a dealership ran a credit check, it came up so negative that the salesman said that he couldn’t offer her a car loan. So she ended up at a sleazy used-car lot that didn’t check her credit but charged her 15.747 percent interest on a loan. A low wage thus led to a bad house, to a sick child, to a poor credit rating, to a car loan with exorbitant interest. Connect the dots.

Housing, then, is more than a place to live. In a perverse way, it can also contribute to malnutrition. Many low-wage working families without government subsidies—no public housing, no Section 8 vouchers that help pay private landlords—have to spend as much as 50 to 75 percent of their incomes on rent. In a tight, high-rent housing market there is no way families can economize to squeeze that part of their budget. They have to pay the rent, they have to make the car payment, they have to pay for auto insurance, electricity, telephone. These bills come due relentlessly, and the penalties for deferring them are unacceptable.

The part of the budget that can be squeezed is for food. If you spend time in malnutrition clinics, as I have, and you talk to parents who bring in their underweight, developmentally delayed children for treatment, you will quickly discover that virtually all of them are struggling on the private housing market, without subsidies. They are skimping on food because they don’t have enough cash, the food stamps they may get are inadequate, and they are not earning enough in wages to sustain their children adequately.

There are other reasons for malnutrition, including the junk-food inventories of stores in poor neighborhoods, inadequate knowledge of what foods are nutritious, allergies that cannot be avoided because parents cannot stock and test a variety of foods, or work schedules that shuttle children among multiple caregivers who don’t monitor a toddler’s intake. High rents loom especially large, however: a 2005 study of nearly 12,000 low-income households in six cities found an increased incidence of underweight children in families without housing subsidies.⁶

Malnutrition that occurs in the last trimester of pregnancy or the first two or three years of childhood can cause lifelong cognitive impairment. Longitudinal studies have found that even if children get proper nutrition later, the early deficit does lasting damage. That, in turn, affects school performance and life opportunities. Older children who go to school hungry do not do well either. Learning is discretionary, says Dr. Deborah Frank, head of the Boston Medical Center’s malnutrition clinic, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure. ⁷

I asked youngsters in inner-city schools what percentage of the time they did not understand what the teacher was saying. Their answers were shocking: 25, 50 percent. I wondered how those children could bear spending hours every day, days every week, weeks and weeks every year sitting in classrooms where half of what was said was not getting through. There would be no pleasure in learning, no joy of discovery or mastery, no sense of competence. Who would stay in school after years of such an experience? Is the high dropout rate any great surprise?

There are many reasons that children drop out besides cognitive impairment and malnutrition. But it is important to see the interactions and to recognize that as the federal government plans to reduce housing subsidies even further, malnutrition and school performance are bound to worsen. Connect the dots.

PERSONAL AND FAMILY PROBLEMS

Internal obstacles often seem insurmountable to folks in poverty, and chief among them is a corrosive sense of incapacity. If you have failed in school, failed in relationships, and failed in job after job, you don’t suddenly expect to succeed.

One evening, at a halfway house for recovering drug addicts within sight of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., a group of men talked among themselves about their search for jobs. They were tough. They had survived the crack wars in Washington. Many had lived on the streets. A few had been in prison. Yet the emotion they talked about feeling as they looked for work was fear. They were afraid to apply. They were afraid of being asked about their police records. They were afraid of being rejected. And a couple even said that they were afraid of being accepted into jobs they did not think they could do.

At a couple