.@fordschool - Kathryn Edin和Luke Shaefer - 每天2.00美元。在美國幾乎一無所有的生活 (.@fordschool - Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer - $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)

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>> Hello everybody.
Good afternoon.
And welcome.
I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean here
at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
And I couldn't be more delighted to see all of you here
with us this afternoon.
Today's event would not have been possible
without generous support from the National Poverty Center
and its interim chair, Sandy Danziger.
I also want to thank the School Social Work
for cosponsoring today's event.
I know that many students from social work are here
with us, very welcome.
We're delighted that you're here with us, too.
We're pleased to be joined by some senior members
of the university administration, Tim Lynch,
who is the university's general counsel.
And Lisa Rudgers who's Vice President
for Global Communications.
We're delighted that both of you are here with us as well.
Well, thank you for coming here to join us,
to learn from the School of Social Work
and the Ford School's own Professor Luke Shaefer
and coauthor Kathy Edin.
They presented their work which you were about to hear
about in Washington DC,
to multiple audiences of policymakers.
And I know that they are going to explore some
of the really important policy issues and implications
of the research that they have been doing with us here today.
Luke and Kathy's book, "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing"
in America, has been featured in the Atlantic,
the New York Times, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune,
and I could go and on.
It has received considerable very well deserved attention.
[ Applause ]
So all of the press
and policymaker attention is really noteworthy
but most importantly it really amplifies a crucial finding
in Luke and Kathy's book.
And that is that there are 1.5 million American households
living in poverty and extreme poverty,
and that that number is increasing.
That's really a striking number and something
that should really garner a lot of our attention.
During years of on-the-ground research throughout the country,
Luke and Kathy have documented families who are struggling
under these extreme conditions, connecting a very real face
to that shocking data.
Luke and Kathy will delve further
into the research methods and findings during their talk.
But first, I wanted to tell you a little bit more about them.
Luke's research focuses on the effectiveness
of the US social safety net in serving low-wage workers
and economically disadvantaged families.
Luke has pursued policy advocacy at both the state
and the national levels.
And prior to coming to Ann Arbor, he participated
in Chicago's anti-poverty policy initiative successfully helping
to raise the Illinois minimum wage and expand access
to health care, access to health care to low income families.
With Kathy, he recently presented their poverty research
to the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
He is an associate professor at the School of Social Work
and he very recently joined the Ford School faculty this year,
we're delighted to have him on board.
Kathy Edin is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor
at Johns Hopkins University, where she specializes in study
of people living on welfare.
Over the years, Kathy's books have tackled very tough
and important social challenges, including making ends meet,
how single mothers survived on welfare, and low-wage work
with current dean of the School of Social Work, Laura Lein.
And doing the best I can fathering
in the intercity with Timothy Nelson.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development,
the National Institutes of Health,
and the National Science Foundation,
among others have founded-- have funded her poverty research.
She's a trusty of the Russell Sage Foundation, and she serves
on the Department of Health
and Human Services advisory committee for poverty to search,
for poverty research centers at several universities,
including here at Michigan.
Last year when she became a member of the National Academy
of Sciences and the American Academy of Political
and Social Sciences as well.
So Kathy, thank you much for traveling
and joining us here today to share your work
with Luke with our community.
Just a quick note about today's format,
Luke and Kathy will make their presentation
and then welcome questions from the audience.
Beginning at about 4:40 p.m.,
members of the Ford School staff will walk up and down the aisles
to collect your questions.
You should have received a card when you came in.
Please white your questions on that card.
If you are watching us online, please twit your questions
into us using #policythoughts.
So, after the program, "$2.00 A Day", will be available
for purchase and signing in the Great Hall.
And I hope you will stay with us to continue the conversation
and also to have your books signed by Luke and Kathy.
And so, with no further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Luke
and Kathy to the floor.
[ Applause ]
>> Thanks Dean Collins for such a warm
and personal introduction.
I'm going to start with a story
because a story is how we got here.
Sometimes graduate students want to know how you come
up with ideas for research.
My failproof recipe is to spend a lot of time with folks
out in the field and this was very much a story
of how just immersing yourselves in your daily life with lots
of poor people, allows you to see something new.
So, as Dean Collins mentioned, at the beginning of my career,
I spent six years running
around the country interviewing low-income single mothers
about their budgets with the dean in School
of Social Work, Laura Lein.
And because of that experience,
I kind of have a mental calculator in my head.
If we go at a dinner tonight, I might look at you
and suddenly say, "So how do you make ends meet?"
That kind of became a habit over those early years.
I had gone on after welfare reform
that was published in 1997.
I just studied the family and study the working poor.
But in 2010, I came to Baltimore to study the lives of a group
of people, my colleagues
and I had been following since the mid-1990s.
These were young people who had been zero to seven
in the mid-'90s all born in public housing
and we've been following their lives over the years
to see how they would turn out.
And so, in 2010, as they were reaching adulthood,
I came to Baltimore.
And I-- you know, I started hanging out in the neighborhood
and of course several and many of these young people were
in fairly disadvantaged circumstances.
But one day I went and visited the home of Ashley.
Ashley lived in the Latrobe Homes with her mother,
her brother, elderly uncle and sometimes a cousin.
And she had just a baby.
The baby was two weeks old.
When we arrived at the house, Ashley was visibly [inaudible].
She looked depressed.
She was, you know, holding her baby over her shoulder
but she was having a hard time adequately supporting her
baby's head.
Of course, there's only-- there's hardly any furniture
in the house and so Ashley sat out on the only chair
in the kitchen and I sat on the floor
and she just gave me the perfect purview into the kitchen.
This is an old trick I learned from Dean Lein, you know,
she was always looking in the kitchen cabinets
to see what was in there.
And I quickly notice there was no food in the house,
nor was there any baby formula.
When I began asking Ashley, of course, how she made ends meet,
what I quickly learned is
that there was not cash coming to the household.
Nobody had a job.
Nobody was getting anything from [inaudible].
In fact, nobody in the family was even getting food stamps.
What they did have was housing subsidy.
So I started wondering, you know, is this is thing?
Are there a group of people who might claim something from the
in kind safety net but have no cash?
So I kind of tucked that thought in the back-- in my back pocket.
And in the next day, we kind of invented a [inaudible]
to revisit Ashley because we were concerned
about her and the child.
We said, you know, Ashley,
we need to ask you few more questions.
Can we come back tomorrow?
And she said yes.
So, we gave her the $50 upon leaving, that we gave respond
at the end of an interview.
And the next day when we returned,
we met her at the door.
She was on her way out.
She's forgotten we were coming.
She had gotten home perm.
She looked terrific.
She no longer looked depressed.
She had kind of spring in her step.
She had gone down to the local Goodwell, which is just
down Broadway Avenue from the Latrobe Homes
and bought a new pantsuit.
And in fact, she was on her way to search for work.
It was her-- her confidence had been restored, you know, $50,
isn't that much money.
But for Ashley, it seems to be the difference
between really being despondent and sort of unable to function
and to get that kind of confidence encouraged
about and search for work.
So, this prompted a second thought which--
and this by the way, ended up being the arc of the book.
What was it about cash that was so special?
She had a house in subsidy.
But something about cash, just a little bit
of cash seems to be transformative.
And if it was true, there were a whole group of people living
with virtually no cash in America, you know,
since the advent of welfare reform.
And we did-- you know, we did learn that this story was linked
to welfare reform that we're living on virtually cash
in America's most advanced industrial country
or in the world's most advanced industrial country.
What does that look like?
And what were the implications for the well-being
of families and children?
So, it just so happen-- and this was pure serendipity
that I visited the School of Social Work
and given a talk a year before.
And Luke and I had cooked up a plan for him to come to Harvard
as a visiting professor.
So that fall-- I think it was an 8 o'clock,
one morning in Cambridge, I was teaching at Harvard at the time.
Luke came to my office.
I told him the story of Ashley.
I said I want to know if this is thing.
I knew enough about Luke to know that he was one
of the nation's experts
on [inaudible] data set called the Survey of Income
and Program Participation, which was in fact the best data set
to really answer the question of whether, there been a rise
in a form of destitution in America that was so deep,
we didn't even think it existed
and had actually never even looked to see if it was there.
And Luke can take the story from here.
>> Well, I think of that first date, an 8 a.m. meeting,
it's unclear if Kathy actually remembered I was coming.
[ Laughter ]
But we had a terrific time.
And she said, gee, I just wish, you know, I was visiting all
of these homes and I wish there were some data set
where we could see, was there some sort of trend
over the past 15 or 20 years of more families surviving
on virtually no cash income.
Now, the SIPP is a large scale nationally representative data
set conducted by the US [inaudible].
They go out and they interviewed tens of thousands of households
and they asked lots of very specific questions
about different income sources.
So it does the best of any source that we have
at capturing the income of the poor.
And all of these surveys have the challenge of sort
of missing some income, underreporting of income,
people might not want to tell you about sources.
But we know that to SIPP is the absolute best choice,
and so we thought it was the right place to start.
And so Kathy likes to say that within a day, I was back,
I think it was about a week, where--
and we started to sort of search around for some benchmark
of virtually no cash income, how do we operationalize that.
And as all my students know as I would say,
if you have to find an arbitrary line, use somebody else's.
So, we use the world bank's metric of $2 per person per day
and we wanted to see, could you see a trend among household
with children and we're going to include all the cash coming
in through odd jobs, though work,
we're going to include gifts from families and friends,
all that that's reported.
And we're going to see if there's a trend
over the last 15 years or so and more families experiencing this.
And then we're going to include SNAP.
Food stamps now called the SNAP.
And we're going to say, what if you treated food stamps
as a dollar-- SNAP as a dollar of cash.
And we're going to tell you why we actually think you can't do
that for this specific population as we go on but we'd
at least get a sense for what kind of impact of the safety net
if we have it today, was happening.
So in about a week, we had this trend line to deal with,
and I think it was maybe a little more dramatic.
Then we are initially expecting.
So, there's branch in line is households with children
who are reporting cash incomes of no more
than $2 per person per day in any given month.
And you can see it goes from about 636,000 as of mid
through 1996, that's just before the1996 welfare reform was
implemented, to about 1.5 million households
with three million children as of 2011.
So that's more than a doubling.
Perhaps, even a larger increase
than we were necessarily expecting.
If you add in food stamps and you count a dollar food stamps
as a dollar of cash, that's the blue line.
And you can see right there the incredible impact
that this program is having
at a very the bottom, at the very bottom.
It's virtually the only safety net that we have left and--
but even so, you can see-- even if you count food stamps,
that blue line only looks good relative to the top line.
We're still talking about an 80% increase even
when you count SNAP as cash over this period of time.
So, we actually release the Sheldon Danziger here
at the Ford School.
Told us to go ahead and release something,
so it was a five-page policy,
probably the shortest thing you ever written.
And it ended up getting some attention
but it really raises a lot of more questions
and we had answers, right?
What does it look like to live on $2 per person per day?
Is this really just maybe noise in the data, you know?
Our people-- is it just underreporting of income
or something screwy going on with [inaudible].
So, we started to do two things.
The first was we wanted to look for other sources,
large scale data that might say, you know, is this a trend
that we can see in the population as a whole?
Can we externally validate what we see in the set
with these other sources of data?
And the second thing was to start to try find families,
thinking that the proof is really you know, right there.
Could we find families that look like that?
And if we could, what do their lives look like?
You know, how did they get into these circumstances,
and what did they do to survive?
So, starting just with the large scale data, one thing is
that the SIPP is a longitudinal survey so we could look overtime
and we wanted to know where these spells families living
on $2 per person per day.
Were they short spells of family,
sort of experiencing a month or two months at a time,
or was it really a story about longer spells?
And what we could see when we look longitudinally is actually
the biggest increase was among these longer spells
that we call chronic spells, families who are living
for at least 7 in as much as 12 months under this low threshold
over the course of the year.
And it's more than a tripling, right?
So, it outpaces the growth in the monthly estimate.
We knew SNAP was a big part of the picture, right?
It's this buffer that we have.
And we looked in the SNAP administrative records.
So if you to go down to the technical appendix
of the annual reports that they release,
you can actually tally the number of households
with children who are reporting
that they have no other cash income except SNAP, right?
So no actual cash coming into the house.
So we plotted that.
That's the dash line against the boxes
from our most recent estimates and you can see we lined
up really well in 1996 and 2005 and across this whole spectrum.
And actually, when I saw these first two lines,
I took the rest of the day off.
Because you virtually never see two sources of, you know,
entirely different data line up that closely.
And then the SNAP, they'd actually starts to outpace us,
so you see that it's going up to an even a greater extent
than our comparable $2 a day estimate.
As we started to get into the qualitative work,
we saw that housing instability with a major piece of this.
And so, we knew that the nation's public schools
in about the mid-2000s, started recording of the number
of homeless children, these are children
without a permanent place to live.
Across the schools, we would assume
that this is an undercount.
So, here I sort of plotted the same-- this trend line for you
and some of you can probably figure out in 2005,
2006 what accounts for that spike, it's a Hurricane Katrina,
and everything that went on there.
But you can see a very similar sort of trajectory, right,
of increasing numbers of the children at sort
of a similar pace and extreme poverty, I'm sorry,
without permanent place to live.
And then, if you go to Feeding America, they have reports
that they list every few years that captures a number
of unduplicated Americans who have benefited
from private emergency food programs.
Now, again, this is not a directly comparable number
but we thought if what we are seeing
in extreme $2 a day poverty was actually something
that was happening on the ground,
we would probably see an increase here too in a number
of families seeking emergency food assistance.
And you can see at 2009, it goes up dramatically, right?
And that's the effect of the great recession.
But again, that sort of dwarfs actually a fairly sizable
increase as of 2005.
Between 1997 and 2005, this goes up by
about four million American,
more Americans seeking emergency food assistance.
So, across a series of indicators, right,
using both nationally representative survey data
and the administrative records and reports
from our charitable organizations,
we can see a consistent story
of deteriorating circumstances among poorest
of the poor families in the United States.
>> So what do this mean?
We decided, in order to continue our collaboration,
we needed to actually go back to households like Ashley's.
And in order to understand four pivotal questions,
who falls into extreme poverty, what's it like, you know,
what's the texture of daily life like, how do you survive,
and what are really the implications for families
and children of a level of poverty this deep?
So, we were inspired I think both as young people by the work
of Michael Harrington.
And as you know, he kind of went on the road and exposed poverty
in various places across the United States.
Our site selection was actually driven by the SIPP.
So, we show-- we chose sort of what we feel
as the quintessential American Central city.
I apologize to Detroit and Ann Arbor,
but we felt that was Chicago.
And so we began our exploration there,
kind of a typical American city if there is such a thing
as a typical American city.
We also wanted to find a town
that had been really a boom town in Harrington's time.
But he had since hit the skids and we landed in Cleveland,
Ohio where I lived for three summers and kind of fell
in love with the city.
I actually have a T-shirt that says, "Cleveland is my Paris"
that I wear proudly, and bumper sticker.
But we also saw in the SIPP that there was this clustering,
the slight clustering of the $2 a day poor
in the region [inaudible] called the south east.
This is of course Appalachia and the Deep South.
So, we choose a site in Appalachia, the Johnson City,
Tennessee area of Eastern Tennessee.
What was interesting about this site is it even deeply poor
in Harrington's time.
But had since seen a bit of a rebound
but still had deep pockets of poverty.
And finally, we went to what one rider has called the poorest
place on earth, the Mississippi Delta.
Is Bethany Patton here?
Can you stand up?
Bethany Patton brought us the Mississippi Delta,
so thank you Bethany.
[ Applause ]
Through her experience as a TFA, she was able
to make amazing connections for us
so that we can do in-depth work in the poorest place on earth.
As you can imagine, this was quite an adventure.
But, I want to take a step back for a second and talk
about the fact that we make the claim, that what we see
in the growth of $2 a day poverty,
is intimately connected to welfare reform.
Now, at its peak in 1994, AFDC, the Aid to Families
with Dependent Children program, the precursor of TANF, right,
served about 14 million people about 10 million adults,
5 million children, OK?
But currently, that number is dramatically lower.
So today we only have about four million people on the rules,
under three million children,
just about one million adults by latest count, OK?
So, the Center for Budget
and Policy Priorities constructs a measure of the TANF
to poverty ratio to give a sense
of how many eligibles are actually able to access TANF.
And of course TANF is the Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families Program.
It's the program that replaced welfare
when welfare is reformed.
So that number was at about 68% percent in 1996.
And I just heard an update from Donna Pavetti [assumed spelling]
that the current number is 23% percent today, OK?
Now, when I say there are million adults left
on the rules, what's really crucial to understand over
and above that is that half
of those are adults are in only two states.
These are the states with the most vibrant welfare systems,
although those systems have also atrophied dramatically.
And these are the states of New York and California.
So once we take out those adults,
we only have a half million adults on the welfare rules
across the rest of the country.
So, if you didn't need that as evidence,
that TANF is essentially in receivership
in the United States or to use the title of our chapter,
"Welfare is dead", you need to come with us to Chicago
where we met Madonna Harris.
And Madonna was living with her daughter Brianna, kind of moving
across a group of homeless shelters
and truly desperate straights.
One weekend, while I was hanging out with Madonna and Brianna,
there's absolutely no food in the house.
The shelter wasn't just serving any kind of meals.
All they had was a half a gallon of spoiled milk
in the refrigerator, the inspiration
for the cover of the book.
And I said to Madonna, "Why don't you just go to TANF?"
She said, "Oh, haven't you heard?
They aren't giving that out anymore."
And we heard this again and again and again.
The notion, that welfare was dead, OK?
So, we then went to Johnson City,
Tennessee where we met a young couple,
Jessica and Travis Compton.
And if you read the [inaudible] in the Atlantic,
Jessica is the plasma donator of that we feature.
And this young couple was truly desperate.
They had gone months without work.
In fact, as we talk, each time we visited, Travis was sitting
at the window looking for the sheriff to come
and evict the family from the home because they were
so far behind on the ramp.
When I said-- maybe I think, Luke, it was you who said.
I said, "Travis, what about welfare?
What about TANF?"
And Travis looks stunned and said, "What's that?"
Now, some of our respondents had heard of TANF or welfare.
One such person was Ray McCormick [assumed spelling],
who steadfastly had resisted going to the welfare office
because she felt that she was a worker and she didn't think
that this was something workers did unless they were
truly desperate.
But that point came.
And Ray did finally go down to the TANF office.
And when she came back, her report is
that she had been rejected and told, honey,
there are so many poor people, we just don't have enough
to go around, you need to come back next year.
And there are more and more examples of states and locales,
even local welfare offices that are engaged
in these so-called soft diversions,
to keep people from the world.
And in Q and A, we can talk
about why TANF offices might be motivated to do that.
Wow. Luke will fix it.
But if you want even more evidence
that welfare is truly dead in the minds of the $2 a day poor,
all you have to do is go back to the SIPP.
So we followed children over the course of the year,
and we looked at whether those children had any adult
who was claiming even a penny from TANF or any adult
who is engaged in the formal labor market.
And what we saw here was truly stunning.
Like only 1 in 10 of these households was claiming even a
penny from TANF over the course
of a calendar year while 70% had an adult in the labor market.
OK. So, this is really important.
This told us something.
This told us this was not a story of a group of people
who were sort of fundamentally separated, you know,
from the mainstream who were, you know, sort of set apart.
But these were families for the most part who are really trying
to hang on to the ragged end of a low-wage labor market
that had become badly degraded.
And as we begin of course delving into the evidence
on this, we learn that the bad jobs of yesterday,
even the bad jobs in the days of welfare reform were far better
than the truly bad jobs of today.
>> So these-- the families who we talked
to really envision themselves as workers
as Kathy says and want to work.
It's a core, you know, with many like Ray McCormick.
He was a very serious sort of opposition to applying for TANF.
But it was really a combination of the unstable jobs
that were there available to them.
We saw many examples of unsafe work conditions,
not getting enough hours as a core dilemma
of the $2 a day poor as well as we work fluctuations,
the number of hours going from say, 10 in 1 week to 20
in another week or 30 down to 20.
And lots of examples of clear labor law violation sometimes
called wage set in the case
where somebody might have actually got an overtime,
not being paid for overtime, or people being asked
to clean a hotel room as a hotel maid before they clock in
or clean up the store after they have clocked out.
So you have a lot of instability in the jobs
and you can think of, you know,
most of our folks says it's those
at the very bottom only having access to the jobs
that maybe nobody else wanted.
But they might be able to survive
that if they had a stable personal life that can sort
of make up for some of us.
But in the case of our families, we would often see sort
of the interaction of unstable work opportunity combined
with unstable family life.
So you'd see volatile living arrangements, right?
A large degree of overlap with the number of children
who our doubled up, not having a permanent place,
not knowing are they' going to be able to stay,
and often actually subject to a fair amount of risks
in these circumstances.
And in the case of these families--
and I want to be clear, we don't think this is a story
about the poor in general, but among those at the very bottom,
they're often sort of seemed to be situated in a social network
of family and friends that are at best unsupported
and at worst downright harmful.
So, to give you two examples, Jennifer Hernandez,
when we met Jennifer, she was a living--
had been living for 10 months in a succession
of homeless shelters in Chicago with her kiddos, Caitlin
and Cole, nine and seven years old.
And she was actually just about to be asked
to leave the homeless shelter that she was in because most
of these places, if you don't find a job,
you are actually asked to move on.
And Jennifer was incredibly good at finding the resources
that are relatively affluent, city like Chicago has
to offer struggling families, but she had no idea
where the next place they're going to stay was.
And she couldn't stay with family for some
of these reasons I just mentioned,
they've been an extremely abusive situation
in the recent pass, but she was able to find a job
at Chicago City Custodial Services,
a small family cleaning company on the South Side.
And when she started the job, she really liked it.
She loves the actually the ability to go in
and clean a room and had made a visible differences in that day.
I think a lot of-- many of us like about our jobs.
And it was going well and she appreciated the structures.
She would say, "My mental health challenges were [inaudible]
when I'm working and I have the structure."
But when she started the work, it was really a lot
of corporate apartments, right between leases,
maybe consultants coming in and out or office bases in the loop,
but as the Chicago winter set in, she found herself going more
and more to foreclose homes on the South Side of the city
and the West Side of the city especially.
And there's a large industry around getting all
of these foreclose abandon homes back and ready for resale.
And she was at the very bottom, I think, of this industry.
So you can imagine going into these homes.
There's been no lights, there's no heat
and particularly, there's no water.
So they would come in and they never know what to expect
as she said, "You know, sometimes, we wonder,
is there going to be a drug den when we get inside,
is there going to be family that's squatting there.
Is everything going to be-- have been ripped out of the,
you know, anything of value have been ripped out of the unit
by scrappers have come in.
And, you know, even ripped open the walls and take some
of the piping, the toilets, the tile off the walls."
And then she would find
that they were cleaning in coats obviously.
She'd go down to the Salvation Army and sort
of grab another coat to wear.
But maybe, the thing that did it for her was the water.
So, everyone knows water is an important piece of the puzzle.
And so, there's no water at these places.
They've had to bring their own buckets in
and so they would come in,
but you might imagine these places she says
where really dirty, a lot of cleaning had to be done.
So after a half of an hour or 45 minutes,
maybe the water we get is black, of no use at all and they'd have
to dump out the water and go to the nearest neighbor
who might have an faucet or go to the nearest gas station
and go, you know, [inaudible] contact and go into the bathroom
to refill the heavy jugs and then carry them back
to the cleaning inside and maybe repeat these a couple times.
So, Jennifer was an asthmatic and she has little kids
and so she started to get sick, she had a few asthma attacks
but she find she was susceptible to viruses,
you know, cleaning in the cold.
And everyone, I have small kids, 6 and 2.
Everyone knows when you get sick, your children get sick
so she starts to call in more and more and her boss starts
to see her as not a reliable employee
so then her hours start to tick downward.
And she makes this decision where she says, "You know what,
I'm barely getting 10 or 15 hours a week now and I have
to call off some of those sometimes.
I need to quit this job,"
because she got housing subsidy that cut them stable.
She's going to have that for a couple more months
through the family homeless shelter.
"I need to quit this job and get healthy and start looking
for the next one because how long it's going take me
to find a next job."
So, despite conditions like that though, there remain the sort
of real attachment to work and the desire to work so think
of Ray McCormick in Cleveland
who I think Kathy maybe mentioned.
Ray was about 23, 24 when we met her, she'd been abandoned when--
by her mother when her father died at 11.
And one thing that you would probably not notice
about Ray right away is that she actually has lost all
of her teeth because she have some sort of dental disease
and had never gotten dental care and so,
all of her teeth were gone, but she was incredibly skilled
at sort of covering that up.
So whenever she laughs, the hand went right over the mouth.
She worked to Walmart.
Her last employment was at Walmart as a cashier.
And she wanted to be the fastest cashier in the store
so she have this technique where she would actually--
she knew to be the fastest cashier, you had to be able
to key in the produced items really fast.
So, she would take the most popular produced items
and she would read the barcode
in her recording device on her phone.
And then, she would actually set that recording of herself
to play over night and she'd say in the morning,
my subconscious had done the work.
And she was named "Cashier of the Month" two times
in the six months that she worked there.
But that in that six month, she had been living with an aunt
and uncle who are not related and she actually got
in to the truck that they shared
and she had given $50 in to get gas.
And she gets in the truck to go to Walmart
and the gas light is on, there's no gas, the car won't start up.
She goes in and says what's the deal, you know, this is supposed
to be for me to be able to get to work and they say, "Well,
you know, we're running errands and we use the gas, sorry".
Ray has no way to get to work and she calls her manager.
She works in the suburbs partially
because she likes the ability to go the suburbs
and I think can get away from the city.
She work in the suburbs, there was no way to get there
by public transportation.
And she called her manager and said, "I can't get to work,
you know, can you float me a loan.
I don't have anymore money until the next paycheck,"
and her manager said, "If you can't get in,
don't bother coming in again."
So, we see the interaction of both volatile work conditions
with a non-supportive family.
>> So if you think about our argument,
there's a three legged stool.
The first piece is really the welfare is dead claim.
The second piece really is that work has become--
welfare is dead but work has become degraded to the degree
that is incredibly hard to raise the family.
And in fact, it is the degradation of those jobs
and job loss which usually predates entering
into $2 dollar a day poverty.
But the third leg of this tool is housing instability.
A housing instability was ubiquitous among the poor.
Housing has-- rental housing has increased in cost by about 6%
since 2000, but renter's incomes have declined by 13%
so we see this increasing disconnection
between rent and wages.
Of course, these folks have incomes so unstable
that they're often unable to stay in a place of their own
and end up in a series
of parallel stable ups or homeless shelters.
And this is often when we see kids exposed
to the greatest risk.
But housing instability also interferes with work and often,
both deepens and elongates a spell of extreme poverty
as to the family relationships of many of our folks.
And in these parallel stable ups we often see the true harm,
the trauma especially the children experience while their
parents are living in less than $2 a day in poverty.
Jennifer Hernadez had 1 point, flees to an uncle's house
to escape, about of $2 a day poverty.
He's a respectable ground's keeper at a country club.
She comes home one day, of course,
and finds him molesting her daughter Caitlyn.
The family flees to a good will who generously clears on office
for the family to live in for a while
since there are no family beds in the shelter.
And when recounting the story, she said,
"I never expected that".
Ray McCormick similarly has lived among the $2 dollar a day
poor on and off since she was 12 and asked
about the trauma she experienced as a child.
She says matter of factly to us,
"I've been beat, I've been raped."
And her daughter at aged 6 has also been molested.
>> So, when we start to look at the question that Kathy post
at the beginning of, is cash important?
So, we have some resources of non-cash, SNAP.
Some of these charitable organizations play a vital,
vital role but does cash matter?
Really, I think the most compelling evidence
of that is the work, the extent
to which people spend their time trying
to generate just enough cash to go on to the next day.
So, Travis and Jessica content, when Travis's work hours got cut
down after the holiday surge at a fast food restaurant.
The only cash coming in to the household was
Jessica's donation.
I've been told to call that the selling of her blood plasma.
So, every-- two times a week and in fact we're the only country
that allows plasma donation more than once a week.
But two times a week is much [inaudible] allow the whole
family Travis and Jessica and Rachel
and Blight [assumed spelling], their two little girls,
four and two, I think, would actually walk
down to the plasma clinic.
And Jessica is only about five foot two,
and in fact she would always have this panic as they're going
to the center that she's not going
to meet the health requirements for the day.
Her iron count is not going to be high enough and--
or her blood pressure is not going to be sort
of in the range it has to be, and she's not going
to be allowed to sell her plasma because of the $30
that that provides actually is perhaps the sort
of the best hourly rates that they could get for anything.
So she has all of these very sort of, sort of planned
out techniques that she always eats an iron-rich supplement bar
right as she's going in the door so that that's going
to boost her iron count.
And she does these breathing exercises as she's waiting
to get her blood pressure taken,
so she can make sure she's the a range to brings
in Nicholas Parks' novel that she checks
out from the library to try to calm her.
And across the range of folks,
you see all of the sort very serious strategies,
and I think almost an American spirit in a way, right?
We originally titled this chapter,
"The Entrepreneurial Spirit", because it was all about sort
of figuring out what resources you have,
whether it's your blood, whether it's your body,
to sort of make-- get that little bit
of cash that'll keep you going to the very next day.
>> So you have to go back to the last slide real quickly.
So plasma cells were so obliquitous, right,
that many people had little [inaudible]
in their arms from selling plasma.
It was almost like a marker of $2 a day poverty,
but a very debilitating thing if you do it very often
and many people actually weren't healthy enough or strong enough
to be able to give plasma that often.
Trading SNAP is probably not common among they just
plain poor.
We have a lot of evidence.
The evidence is actually quite rare.
But among the $2 a day poor, it is actually obliquitous.
And the generally, for your trade, you get 60
or even 50 cents on a dollar.
So it-- since food stamps actually don't generally cover,
we know this from surveys, our family's food needs
for an entire month is guaranteed that you
and your children won't go hungry.
But when it comes to buying socks and [inaudible]
for school, paying for the utilities or, you know,
staying-- keeping the rent going for just one more month,
our families do make that tradeoff.
Finally we see a just a lot of creativity.
We occasionally see selling sex.
We do see scrapping.
But all of these are very, very low level survival strategies
that generate only a few dollars of cash typically
and really leave families both consumed with the work
of survival but of also very badly off.
Of course, the ultimate expression of this was
in the Mississippi Delta.
The two towns that we were in Percy
and Jefferson we [inaudible] the skies by the way
to protect the identity of our respondents, are in some sense,
in exception because they are so poor, you know,
the poorest places on Earth.
But if you look at the Census Bureau's data,
you can see that there are little hidden rural places
like this all across the country that share many
of the characteristics of these towns.
And it is here in the Delta they really saw the intensification,
a system of mutual exploitation that kind of sprung
up because there were so much poverty.
You can almost throw a stone in any given direction
and you would be likely to hit a household of a family
who was $2 a day poor.
TANF face so little in Mississippi that you actually
in most cases will qualify as $2 a day poor,
even if you happen to get it.
So here, what we saw is that they're not quite poor,
who didn't really have enough cash to survive.
This is specially disabled people,
would often be the purchasers of the food stamps
of the extremely poor, right,
often transporting the extremely poor to the grocery store
and then of course basically at taking their price by loading
up at that the extreme poor family's car
with their own groceries.
We also what passed for the middle class in these towns.
Sometimes exploiting the poor
because of their desperate circumstances, Tabitha Hicks
in the little town of Percy was inboxed by teacher
when she's 15 years old.
Her mother, Olva [assumed spelling] had roughly a
dozen children.
This was probably the poorest family that we encountered.
They typically sold their food stamps when they came
in because they need to pay the utilities
and the temperature just in the last six months had ranged
from 9 degrees to 109 degrees.
So the family was always hungry as a result.
And in fact, even when we met her, Tabitha was almost
at unbelievably thin after those years of hunger.
So a teacher who did Facebooked her when she was 15 years old
and wrote to her as follows.
"I've been watching you waiting for you mature."
Then he suggested she come over to his house
after school and promised food.
And this led to, of course, a four-month liaison
between the teacher and Tabitha were she exchanged sex
in return for food.
Now, as we were talking with Tabitha about the story,
I asked her, you know, what did it feel like to be that hungry?
And she answered as follows.
"Well, actually it fells like you want to be dead
because it's peaceful being dead."
>> So what do you do with that, you know, as we sort set
out to write the last chapter trying
to think what are the policy implications as folks situated
in schools of public and social work.
And I don't think we have--
clearly don't have all the answers that we think
that we need to do something.
But I think there's a couple of hopeful notes here.
We have heard-- we do understand
that our book is depressing, so sorry about that.
But really, the folks who-- you know Jennifer and even Tabitha,
they haven't given up and they saw a hope and I think--
so I think we can't either, necessarily.
So we don't provide all the answers or moving forward
and sort of trying to tackle the type of extreme poverty.
But we did sort of, I think, get a couple of insights
that at least wasn't on my radar when we went in.
The first was the importance of dignity and the extent
to which families would actually trade in hunger in a sense.
Trade in some resources like SNAP for the chance to--
especially with their children sort of get them some clothes
at the Thrift store that would give them a little bit
of dignity when they go to school,
or get them, get them underwear.
And I think there's very strong connection to work,
really has a lot to do with a desire to be a part
of a community, right?
Be a part of America.
So, we have this premise, and maybe it's a simple premise
that whatever we do, whatever policy sort
of solutions we might try, maybe there's a litmus test
and maybe it's simple but maybe it's something more than that,
that whatever we do either through government policy
or as universities or as nonprofit, we should see
of these, these intervention or these programs work
to incorporate poor family and especially those
at the very bottom into society rather
than isolating them from it.
And the history of welfare in this country is one
of isolating families.
So we talked about how what we see is partially significantly I
would say, related to the welfare reform of 1996.
But in no way that Kathy and I want to go back
to the system we have before,
which absolutely failed this test of a litmus test
of incorporating the poor.
>> So, we endorsed three principles.
And I think we do have a little--
we have quite a lot of detail
about how we think we might move forward in the book.
But the first principle is really about work,
because work equals citizenship in the society.
The poor know it and they want it.
There is no doubt that we have too few jobs to go
around especially too few good jobs
at the bottom of the labor market.
It's a serious problem.
And if we're going to have a work-based safety net
and that's essentially what happen in 1996,
we moved toward a work-based safety net,
then we must insure the opportunity.
Second, parents should be able to raise children in a house
of their own, this follows from the trauma that we often see--
saw children exposed to.
But third, we do have to have a safety net that catches people
when they fall because sometimes work won't work.
I'll end there and turn it over to Professor Danziger, et.al.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>> OK. So, ton of questions have come in, a ton,
we really appreciate it.
And Rashid [assumed spelling]
and Melanie [assumed spelling] are going
to give you questions back and forth.
They're sort of split between a little--
other ideas about causes and further explanations and ideas
about policy, questions about policies.
So, well maybe go kind of back and forth.
>> First off, thank you so much for the wonderful presentation.
My name is Melanie, I'm a first year Master student
at the Public Policy School here.
Our first question, how might extreme poverty be growing
because of mass incarceration, especially the removal
of many men from their communities?
>> Anyone?
>> Do you have ideas?
>> Well, you know, it's interesting,
we were really looking at households with children
and certainly households are made more vulnerable
when the father is taken out of the household
and separated from his children.
We saw that in, I believe, at Jennifer Hernandez's childrens--
one of her children's father was incarcerated.
At this no doubt plays a role and I've written
about it extensively in my other book,
especially the relationship between male incarceration
and family instability.
So, it is important, it's not something that we focus on here
because these families are often--
what's interesting about $2 poverty is that sort
of that equal opportunity condition.
Right. We see white families as well as black
and Latino families and they're also in fact I think half
of the families in the--
>> In the household.
>> -- the households are white.
We see married and unmarried households,
we see households across the country.
So, maybe this is a special kind
of poverty certainly incarceration interacts with it
but there are a number of groups are represented in this category
that you don't sort of think about when you think
about a poverty this deep.
And those are not necessarily the group most attracted
by mass incarceration.
>> Hello and I am Rashid Malik [assumed spelling],
I'm a second year Masters of Public Policy student here
at Fort School, interested in social welfare policy
and a student of Luke Shaefer's.
I, well, have a two parts question.
What administrative burdens are imposed on those living on less
than $2 a day when they seek government assistance?
And how can we-- and as policy makers design programs
that alleviate that burden and improve access
and use of these programs.
>> So, this is a-- this gets us into the question
of why TANF is sort of failing.
Even I think in its stated mission,
temporary assistance for needy families.
And I at least thought when we started this investigation
and it was really about work requirements which were part
of the-- sort of the welfare reform and there was
about time limit, lifetime limits
that would make a lot of sense.
And those play roles but are really I think the bigger factor
is the structure-- the very structure
of the black grant itself.
So the way that TANF is set up, is to say, states here is--
here is a fixed pot of money, right, that we're going
to distribute across the States, and by the way we're not going
to sort of in, you know, adjust it for inflation at all.
So it's declining in real value every year since 1996.
Here's a fixed pot of money, and you can use it
for cash assistance, right?
You can use it for the Stigmatized Program
that not many people like and if you do that,
we're going to impose a lot of, sort of restrictions on you.
That you have to have a certain fraction
of the case load working and you have
to take care of this and that.
Or, if you don't give it out, through cash assistance,
which you don't have to do, you can pretty much use it
for any other related thing.
Right. So, you see a very, very clear incentive,
and here at the Fort School,
we now how important incentives are.
For States to keep their cash assistance case loads
artificially low.
And we saw that and clear
as force I think during the great recession
where the case loads very much didn't sort of in any ways sort
of leap up like some of these other, like snap, for example.
And a case of a lot of States they've actually kept their case
loads incredibly low so might just have 23
out of every 100 poor families on the program.
But I think we have some States that are bound to eight
or nine poor families out of every 100 on the program.
And in those cases, a lot of those States are actually,
redistributing that money to other things
that they would've spent on any ways.
So there's actually not net positive benefit
of the money going into TANF rather
than to provide a little bit of caution for states.
So I guess, to answer the question I would say,
building effective policy.
This is a great case example of what not to do, right.
And paying attention to the incentives that are sort
of coming from the way that the program is designed,
I think we have a lot of nice examples like,
snap which is going to electronic EBT card.
And we'll, you know, TANF istoo.
But that actually reduces especially when we have rates
of residential instability reduces people loosing
their benefits.
And you have a lot of States that are doing the online
and sort of longer re-certification periods.
And those will all make a difference.
>> So to add to that, the qualitative story here really is
that our welfare has disappeared from the imaginations
of the poor it has become so rare.
Out of the social networks which might have spread the word,
have really atrophied.
But I do want to emphasize this point about pride almost
to a person, actually to a person
of the people on our study.
We followed 18 of these families very in depth
over several years really saw themselves as workers.
And perhaps that's partly a credit to welfare reform,
you know, back when Laura and I we're studying, Dean Lein
and I was studying Welfare Acceptance in the early 1990s,
mother's would say, "I don't know
if I can be a good mother and a worker."
Now, they say, "I don't know how I can be a good mother
if I'm not a worker because I have to model the value
of education to my children."
So for better or for worst,
a strong working identity motivates a lot of job seeking
and that's what you see over and over again in this book,
these heartbreaking endless--
seemingly endless searches for work.
But it doesn't make people very eager to come to TANF store
because that is really the antithesis
of what workers do to survive.
>> Can you expand a bit on the role
of mental health and extreme poor?
>> So we saw a significant agree.
I think of mental health challenges
and we can trace a lot of those in the stories
of the families to-- let's call them a literature,
adverse childhood experiences, right?
So this is the sort of experience of physical,
sexual abuse, emotional neglect and we know very clearly
that these sort of experiences
and especially accumulatively experiencing many
of them follows a person through their lifetime.
And we can see very clear associations
with physical health that and mental health.
And so that was very clear.
And when you look at the ACE Literature,
it's actually quite astounding the significant degree
of just all Americans
who experience this-- experience ACEs.
But we think it's very much concentrated among this group
at the bottom.
So, you can sort of see a clear link there.
Now, for us, we are actually very interested in the effect
of work as mental health intervention.
And the idea that Jennifer Hernandez really
like the stability of work, the structure of work, I think a lot
of us in this room can probably relate to that, right, of,
you know, if you lost your job, what would you do
and how would you feel?
And so we're very taken with the possible healing effects
of work structured well, right, decent work with dignity.
And the last thing I'll say on this is that we did have,
you know, there's pretty good coverage especially for kids
of medical insurance through our public health
insurance programs.
One of the good things we did during the 1990s was expand
access to public health insurance for kids
and you can see a dramatic decline
on the number of uninsured kids.
And the earned income tax [inaudible]
which provided a wage subsidy in this,
the story in Kathy's other-- one of her other recent books.
It's a little intimidating to write a book
with somebody who's an-- writes one before and after yours,
but that's for me to deal with.
And so, it's not like I'm [inaudible] about the ITC.
It's also actually like the happy story in the 1990s, right,
of providing, you know, a significant wage subsidy
for folks who go to work.
So, expanded health insurance was a part of this
and we can see mental health treatment.
Now, we didn't write about this in the book
but I will say we very much question the quality
of the both physical and mental health treatment that many
of our respondents got and wondered, are they actually--
you know, this is an expensive program.
We spend a lot on health insurance for the poor
and there's a-- and it's still a question--
open question on my mind.
Sort of what, especially for this group at the bottom,
is the net benefit that they receive
out of the treatment they get.
>> And on to the next question from the policy pile.
How might the policy idea
of a universal child allowance help alleviate extreme poverty?
>> So people have, you know, learned summers
and others have sort of noted that we may be running
out of work that automation might be affecting many jobs
in the US.
I know people have varied opinions on this.
I think in one PC suggest that we need some sort
of guaranteed minimum income to get us
out of this mess of too little work.
To us, a guaranteed child allowance is a little different
than a guaranteed minimum income because parents feel worthy
because they're claiming them in behalf of their children.
And in fact, in the EIC book, people often coded it
as the kid's money because they knew they were getting it
in part because they had children.
So what I'm about to say probably applies more
to this notion that we will suggest, you know,
basically subsidize a large group
of Americans who aren't working.
Again, work equals citizenship in the United States.
If you've seen the "Joe, run" ad
that was running last night during the presidential debates,
where he speaks very eloquently about the dignity of work
and work is-- you know, a good job is the ability to say
to your child with confidence, it's going to be, OK, honey.
You know, kind of-- thinking about the story
of his own father who had to leave town to find a job
and then bring the family along later.
But in any case, we think in America
that it's really important to find a solution for work.
Because we're not just interested
in the financial wellbeing of the $2 a day poor,
we're interested in America where everybody gets
to take part, where everybody is sort of a part
of the same community.
What AFDC did was to divide the poor.
It was almost as if you had to trade your citizenship card
in to cross the road
that separates the worthy from the destitute.
That's a rough rephrase of TH Marshall's world
in order to get that help.
And we think that this is the 21st century
and we should have a 21st century approach to caring
for the poor that allows them to claim dignity
and be part of society.
And the work have several political scientists
to at least suggest that there might be spillover benefits
beyond financial wellbeing that extend
to citizenship participation.
Maybe we'll no longer be so prone to bowl alone
and maybe even voting, and other activities
that benefit our democracy.
>> You described how family
and friends could often have detrimental impact
on these families from abuse to maltreatment to theft?
Did you find any trends that challenge this
such as family networks and smaller towns in the south
or communities with more active churches and social clubs?
>> So, I think we had examples where family was a support.
So that's what you're asking.
And we take Susan Brown that we write
about in the first chapter is living with her husband Devin
and their daughter Lauren, baby daughter Lauren, with a number
of other family members who are both sort
of among the $2 a day poor, but they're able to live
in a house that's sort of owned by the family.
And it's clear actually you can see Susan as we've followed
up with her sort of after the book, she is doing the best,
I think, of virtually all of our respondents, right?
And so, that family buffer is an important one.
So I think what we were trying to note in the book was that,
you know, family is not always positive.
In fact, it can be a serious detriment.
And again, we're not trying to say this is a story
about the poor or, you know, in general,
but I think among this specific group, there's almost
like a selection effect of, you know,
if you're in these circumstances, you're--
but you have family that can support you, you either get
out very quickly or you don't-- never sort of fall into our--
the sample we selected.
>> Next question.
How optimistic are you for a genuine policy response
to the new data you've discussed?
>> Well, I think we're both pretty optimistic people.
So maybe that's what I'm going to reflect here.
But, you know, I do think that we are
in a moment during the reception of this book, both at the state
and federal level has been absolutely astonishing.
Our people seem very hungry for the information they see moved.
But this is one voice among many sort of pointing
out the degradation of work and the deepening need of families,
not just at the very bottom of the labor market,
but maybe even, well, at the bottom 40%
of the labor market that's experiencing many of the things
that are [inaudible] they are--
poor experiencing but to a less severe degree.
If you watched the debate last night,
you might have seen the anti-Walmart ad,
another total heartbreaker.
It's as if-- it was as if those families could be our families.
So, people are catching on.
There are, you know, there's pressure
for increasing the minimum wage.
Some folks are even thinking
about expanding the reach of the EITC.
So, if not now, when?
>> Actually I applied for a job at Walmart as part
of the [inaudible] and Kathy was my reference
and I didn't get a call.
But yeah, I think you know, I'm sort of--
we're both sort of pessimists again,
incredibly optimistic at the same time.
And I'm thinking in Washington, it's very hard
to sort of do anything.
Maybe we'll see sort of more stuff at the state level.
And I do think you can expect sort of any one book to sort
of really move the dial.
It has to come with the other things
but maybe we'll be a part of it.
You also just never know, I'm sorry,
when the policy windows are going to open up.
So what doesn't seem possible, you know,
for David Ellwood writing "Poor Support"
in the late 1980s becomes very possible,
like in the first month that he goes
into the [inaudible] administration
where they expended their income tax credit which is
by the way billions and billions more than we ever spend on AFDC.
It's just only you can only get it if you work.
So, it's not really a safety net.
Right. So, so maybe it will happen--
something good will happen this year
or maybe it will happen five years from now.
I will say that as we've been in Washington, I think,
the notion of doing something to create more jobs
and government intervention, whether it's
for the private ship-- public/private partnership,
is more on the table than it was, I think, five years ago.
>> Thank you.
Next question.
Reading your book, I was surprised that more
of the extreme part didn't turn
to drug trade though you mentioned other felonies.
Do you think this is about character and their commitment
to parenthood or is there an economic calculation behind this
as well?
Not available or worth it?
>> OK. Great question.
So, you know, one of the things
that gives me great comfort is I've been
in this business a long time.
I've talked to thousands of poor families across 11, as well--
let me see now, roughly, you know, 15 different locales
across the United States.
So, we restricted our sample to parents with custodial children.
Right? Parents with a custodial children very rarely sell drugs.
And why, it's because they're almost certain to lose custody
of their kids to the state
and their kids are their most precious asset,
so they don't wan to do that.
Now, are there drugs in the Mississippi Delta,
are there drugs in Chicago, Cleveland, and Johnson City?
Absolutely.
But it's generally not parents who are engaging
in those kinds of behavior.
So, it is interesting how, you know, we can--
We tend to think of drug dealing as sort
of this ubiquitous activity.
And you do hear a lot about this in all locales
that we talked to, but these are parents desperately trying
to keep their families together.
You know, if they weren't tough, they are--
we would have already lost their children's child protection.
They're very-- living circumstances often put them
at risk of CPS involvement.
Paul Hackwilder [assumed spelling] had the 22 people
in his house.
He was very nervous to engage with social services
because of course that would have violated the rules many
times over of how many children could be in the same room
and what their ages and genders could be.
So, I'll end there but it's a question that comes
up every time and it's actually quite interesting
to see how little we see of this, especially since all
of our families except one actually did have to commit
at least one felony in order to survive during the period
that we observed them.
>> Our next audience question asks,
"Besides the welfare reform, have you seen major changes
on the low wage-- in the low wage labor market side
that leads to more instability?
>> We think that there is a fairly significant change
or start of a trend in the low wage labor market starting
in the early 2000s.
And we've actually-- I think a lot
of us has thought it was there and we're starting
to get more data that I think confirms that.
And a lot of that has to do with the prevalence of these sort
of unstable sort of work conditions outside of wages.
So, low wages is a part of this story, right?
But these, you know, keeping large part time workforces,
keeping the, you know, this sort
of very closely linking consumer demand to the number
of people you have in the store, right,
unlike an hour to hour basis.
Some of these things employers just couldn't do,
you know, 20 years ago.
So we think all of these things are clear.
The-- actually we see a lot of examples of on call work also
where somebody doesn't get paid but is actually required
for a sort of a set of hours to be
by their phone and able to come in.
Or in some cases, they actually have to call in every couple
of hours just to see if they're one
and they don't get paid for that.
And so I think there's a lot of talk about, you know,
what kind of policy reforms do you undertake to sort
of fix those kind of problems.
And I tend to think often
that employers are smarter than policymakers.
So if you did something to say, well,
you can't keep people on call.
Employers might figure out a way to get around that
or they might come up with something else
that tries to help them.
So that's why we have such a focus, I think.
I think we absolutely need to look at policies that can kind
of curb some of these.
One thing we can do is try to curb the extent
of labor law violations that exists, right?
So, as it is right now, it's better for an employer to sort
of not pay over time, if people actually get over time
or to sort of engage in some of these practices
and risk being caught.
Because chances are they won't be caught.
And if they get caught, the penalty isn't that bad, right?
So, actually benefiting from those is better,
so maybe we just start
by enforcing what we have on the books.
But in addition, I think,
this notion of creating more jobs, right.
And these public/private partnerships
that potentially subsidize jobs or jobs coming
to the nonprofit sector will put pressure on the labor market
and should positively impact some of these practices.
>> Having said that, the problem is really big and I think many
of the programs we can point to right now are pretty small.
So we also say in the book that we might actually have
to reconceptualize how we think of work and how we think
of the government as an employer.
Maybe this is too big of a thought for a policy school,
I hope not, but there are still much work
to be done in our community.
So, there are parks that aren't clean, they are not open
because we can't afford the personnel to keep them open.
We have recreation centers that have limited hours,
public libraries that are barely open.
On the little town of Percy, there is a public library
that has virtually no books, and it is only open limited hours
because they can't afford a librarian.
Our cities are filthy.
Our preschools are too few.
Our classrooms are too large.
There's so much work to be done in our society.
And if you say to me, well, the government is never proved
to be a very good employer, I would just like to point
at our teachers and our firefighters
and many fine public service--
servants who our employees of the government
and whose work is a vital value to our daily lives.
>> And this will be the last question we have time for today.
We spoke a bit about potential policy responses,
but what do you hope will come
from the public reading your book?
>> Well, so when Kathy and I started to write this book,
we knew we wanted to try to do a popular press book, right,
and try to actually connect with the-- a broader audience.
And we were happy to get a contract with Houghton Mifflin
that has brought us such literary icons
as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Curious George.
But, you know, I think that we have sort
of a targeting policymaker strategy
and also being a discussion point, right?
And I hope maybe the book goes a little bit on these lines
of social incorporation that it allows.
We tried to tell people stories.
My mother is a professional storyteller.
So, I sort of known the importance of stories
for a long time, tried to tell the stories in a respectful
but honest way, right, and try to sort of bring people
to meet peoples that they wouldn't have ever met
in their life because, you know, we're so stratified in society.
So, I think we would be really happy if people picked
up this book who didn't necessarily agree
or had thought a lot about poverty in the United States
and used it as a sort of a resource to hone what they,
you know, sharpen their ideas about what poverty is like
and what we should do about it.
>> Well, thanks again.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you, thank you very much.
I'd also like to thank Sandy, Rashid and Melanie
for facilitating the questions and all of you
for a fabulous group of questions.
I know we didn't get to all of them, I hope you'll stay
so that we can continue the conversation in the great hall
and you all can get your book signed.
Please join me in a final round of thanks
to Kathy Edin and Luke Shaefer.
[ Applause ]