Hans Rosling illustrates the change in the percentage, but not the number, of people living in extreme poverty:
Found at GapMinder.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Driving from New Orleans to Las Vegas this June, I was struck by the fact that every roadside I saw, everywhere, had a fence separating the shoulder from the land. Not only was every parcel of land owned, travelers had to know it. Mine. Keep out.
There are lots of reasons why people become and remain homeless, but one of them is “private property.” Private property, of course, isn’t real. People made it up. But because the vast majority of us accept the concept and enforce it, it persists as a reality that structures people’s lives. For example, we’re not allowed to build a house just anywhere there’s space. We can’t just tap any aquifer you please, no matter how much we need water. If we want to go camping, we need permission from a property owner or we have to pay a fee at a public or private park. And, because of private property, if you can’t afford to buy property or rent space from a property owner, you are homeless. Homelessness, then, is a function of our commitment to private property.
I offer this as a context with which to view these photographs that accompany a story in the New York Times about a tent city in Providence, Rhode Island. The residents of the tent city call it “Camp Runamuck.” As the pictures below show, the 80 or so members of Camp Runamuck have a pantry, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a recycling center. They also have rules (e.g., no fighting), a democratically elected “chief,” a “leadership council,” and a social contract that they have all signed. They share labor; they cook dinner for one another. However, despite the fact that they’ve made a home for themselves, they are officially homeless. And state officials have now officially told them that they are not allowed to make their home there.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
The figure below, borrowed from Matthew Yglesias, shows that poor children, especially poor black children, have higher concentration of lead in the blood than other middle class children.
Lead poisoning is a serious problem, causing cognitive delay, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior. If poor children do less well in school and on standardized tests, it may be, in part, because of the environmental toxins to which they are disproportionately exposed.
See also a previous post in which I argue that lead poisoning remained a mother’s problem until the China toy scandal put middle class children at risk, at which point the state stepped in to ensure children’s safety.
Also see this post on race and toxic release facilities.
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Andrew Gelman over at FiveThirtyEight posted a map (larger version here) that estimates support or opposition of groups with various characteristics to school vouchers, by state and broken down into five income groups. The overall national average is 45% in support of vouchers. Orange indicates that more than 45% of a particular group supports vouchers in that state, while green indicates that less than 45% support them. So, for instance, looking at row 2 (White Catholics), we see that as income goes up, support for vouchers in most states increases, particularly in the $150,000+ income group; on the other hand, row 4 shows much less overall support among White non-evangelical Protestants, even in the highest income group.
Note that if a particular category (the characterstic for the row at any particular income level) makes up less than 1% of voters in the state, the state is left blank on the map. The data is from 2000, based on about 50,000 respondents. There’s a map of the raw data and a discussion of Bayesian statistical modeling in the original post, if you’re all into that.
As Gelman admits, he needs to add more details about what level of support/non-support the lightness or darkness of the colors indicate–what’s the difference between a very pale green and the darkest green? How many percentage points is that? However, the maps give a general sense of how different racial and religious groups feel about school vouchers, and how income influences that.
One thing I do have a problem with is that the categories are mutually exclusive, meaning Hispanic is treated as a race that does not overlap with Blacks or any of the subcategories of Whites (I also don’t know why all Hispanics and Blacks are put together in one category each). But most people labeled Hispanic in the U.S. see their race as White, with Hispanic as an ethnic, not racial, category–that is also how the U.S. Census defines “of Spanish origin.”
Ed at Gin and Tacos offered up the figure below comparing the minimum wage (adjusted to inflation) and the poverty line for a family (he doesn’t specify how many children). It reveals that, as Ed puts it: “not once in its 80-year history has the minimum wage, if earned 40 hours weekly, hit the Federal poverty line for a family.” That is, a dedicated full time worker earning minimum wage does not earn, and has never earned, enough to keep a family out of poverty.
So, if you are a single parent, you’re screwed. (And, frankly, if you aren’t, you’re still screwed because child care will likely wipe out, if not exceed one person’s entire income. Subsidized day care only serves a fraction of the children that are qualified.)
Ed notes that, given this, the rational choice for a parent is to go on welfare. Welfare doesn’t get you above the poverty line either, and you’re still likely to be miserable, but at least you’ll be miserable while parenting your children instead of miserable while flipping burgers.
Some argue that, if people choose to go on welfare instead of work, then welfare must be too generous. Lower welfare payments and people will choose to work. Ed, however, suggests that the real problem revealed by this figure is the insufficiency of the minimum wage. Raise the minimum wage and people will choose to work. Only one of these solutions actually mitigates human suffering.
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Elizabeth H. sent in the trailer for the movie Precious (based on the novel Push), which should be released later this year:
As Elizabeth says,
It seems to reinforce…negative associations [of] underclass or working class African-Americans: poor education, single motherhood, teenage pregnancy, abuse, child obesity, etc.
The trailer brings up some interesting issues about skin color as well. Precious’s desire for a light-skinned boyfriend highlights the emphasis placed on skin color as a measure of attractiveness: a light-skinned boyfriend would indicate her own success in the world, just as fame and wealth would. Elizabeth points out that all the “good” adult characters are light-skinned (and thin) as well.
Also see our posts on kids’ perceptions of skin color and attractiveness, an ad for skin lightener, a club letting light-skinned girls in for free, Malaysian anti-racism parody of skin lightening cream ad, and an ad that shows darker skin as more exciting.
Jason S. sent in this (pretty hilarious) three-minute “ad” for Zima. While modern motherhood takes many different forms, the ad is a great illustration of one stereotype of the modern mother:
So, according to the ad, moms…
1. …are middle class. She and her husband can afford a nice, new minivan.
2. …provide their children with active social and educational lives. Since they live in the suburbs, she spends a lot of time shuttling them from place to place.
3. …are frazzled. Likely a full time wage worker and the primary care taker for the children, the condition of the inside of the minivan suggests that she does not have time to clean or organize her family’s life.
4. …feed their kids fast food (french fries) because, being overwhelmed, she doesn’t have time to feed them what she’d thinks they should eat.
5. …have husbands who still take on the masculine jobs but, being white collar workers, no longer have the skill to effectively perform them.
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
The New York Times has some interactive graphics showing various types of data about social class and class mobility. You can see where you fall in terms of four characteristics often used to measure class status, see the overall class breakdown for various occupations, and so on. This graph shows social class mobility by depicting which social class (divided into quintiles) the U.S. population fell into in 1998 based on the social class they started out in from 1988:
You can hover over a particular group, such as “lower middle,” to see the outcome just for them.
Another graph of social mobility:
This next graph counters the idea that poor families remain poor forever (often explained by some version of the “culture of poverty” thesis) by showing that if you track a poor family over multiple generations, there is a general trend toward upward mobility:
That isn’t to ignore the fact that being poor leads to circumstances (poor schools, etc.) that make upward mobility difficult. But the idea that poor families stay poor for generation after generation, passing on poverty almost like a genetic characteristic, simplifies a more complex story about how families become poor, how long they remain poor, and the importance of looking at structural factors as opposed to a “cycle of poverty” explanation.
Since Lisa shared an embarrassing story today, I’ll share one too: for some reason, I think because he had the album Purple Rain and was famous for wearing purple a lot, for the longest time I thought the book The Color Purple must be a biography about Prince.
