Poverty and policy

This is Jared Bernsteinon a New York Times magazine piece that will run this weekend. Haven’t had time to read the original yet, but Jared’s insights are always thoughtful and perceptive:

The loss of family-wage jobs to non-college educated men—and not just minority men—was a well-documented problem even when Wilson wrote his influential treatise on urban poverty—The Truly Disadvantaged—in the 1980s, and it was a core theme of the book.

Tough convincingly argues that our anti-poverty agenda lacks the more lasting—and often more expensive—interventions targeted at deep poverty’s youngest victims with the potential to reset their life trajectory and even their neurology, like Geoff-Canada-style wraparound early childhood education and parenting programs.  As he notes:

…the stimulus may not have made things much better, but it stopped them from getting much worse. Food stamps helped some families get enough to eat, teenagers got summer jobs, some tenants received help with their rent. A stimulus grant to the Chicago public schools helped pay for [a poor youth assistance] program…But it was, by definition, a temporary fix.

Agreed.

But in America, which isn’t Sweden, it’s particularly hard to imagine really attacking poverty, including its impact on kids, without doing a lot more to provide gainful, lasting, living wage employment for the parents—moms and dads—of poor children.  Absent a strategy to accomplish that goal, I fear that all the parental counseling in the world won’t get us nearly far enough.

I think about poverty a lot, and not just because of my own situation. Mine isn’t anywhere near as bad as someone in the inner city, but I do see the results of deep poverty all around me. I suppose nothing significant will be done on the national policy level until more crime spills out into the high-end suburbs, because until that happens, a large percentage of our voters just won’t care.