Bill Shore’s Letters
Letter About the Annual Poverty Statistics
Originally published: September 2004
Dear Friend,
One week ago the Census Bureau released the annual poverty statistics. The percentage of those living in poverty increased for the third straight year, totaling 35.8 million Americans, of whom 12.9 million are children.
The number of people living in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than half the income defined as the poverty line, was 15.3 million, higher than any time in the 28 year history of the Census Bureau's data collection. These Americans are not just left behind. They are locked out, trapped in desperate circumstances and lacking even the most basic tools of education and health care that enable one to find and seize opportunity.
As usual, the poverty rate statistics had their moment in the sun, but the key word is moment. Quickly and inevitably there were pushed out of the news cycle by the Republican convention, the horrors of terrorism in Russia, a former president's heart condition, and other riveting developments. Poverty has long ceased to be riveting, perhaps because it is instead so persistent. A condition that exists in perpetuity will always be less interesting than something that has just started or stopped. This is the way of the world. But we cannot let it be our way.
For those of us devoted to eradicating poverty's scourge from our communities, what meaning can we take from this annual, ritual release of depressingly stubborn poverty statistics? The numbers never seem to budge much, except at the margins. Nor, in a macro sense, do anti-poverty programs seem to succeed much, except in the same marginal way.
It would be easy to conclude from this annual release of poverty rates that nothing much changes from year to year. But that is not so. What has changed is our knowledge. Over the course of 40 years, government agencies, academic institutions and the foundation community have been able to consolidate a tremendous amount of intellectual capital about what works and what doesn't work with regard to breaking the cycle of poverty.
It is no longer the case that we don't know how to solve poverty. The real problem is that we don't like what we know about how to solve it. What I mean by this is that at the same time we've succeeded in developing effective interventions, we've also learned these unpleasant truths about the most effective interventions: they are complex and difficult, very expensive, require widely shared sacrifice, and will never really be finished. Compared to other issues society might tackle, poverty finds itself at a serious competitive disadvantage.
Entrepreneurial efforts conceived and designed to break the cycle of poverty are taking root across the United States and many of them are succeeding. Whether it is the cocoon of comprehensive services provided in the Harlem Children's Zone, or the educational achievements of College Summit and the SEED school in Washington, DC, or Projecto Azteca's home building and community development in the Rio Grande Valley, results that are saving and changing lives are not in dispute. But they are not cheap, and worse, given the priorities we've chosen, they are possibly not even affordable. Contrary to popular fantasy, these organizations are not able to make a little go a long way because the laws of physics are not suspended by divine intervention for social programs. And so a little only goes a little way and the only thing that goes a long way is a lot.
Many social entrepreneurs in America have succeeded in building a program that works. What our society has not succeeded in doing is marshaling the political will and the resources to scale each effective program into a nationwide network of programs that work.
Because we know so much more than we used to about what works, ending poverty is for the first time less of a puzzle and more of a choice. Ultimately democracy is about people making choices that represent their own self-interest, and our history is filled with examples of society finally reaching such decision-making points. We choose to live with air pollution, until we decide not to, and then clean air laws, though expensive and cumbersome, are proposed and enacted. We choose to live with impoverished senior citizens, until we decide not to, and then Social Security is proposed and enacted.
If we believe our long-term interests are better served by more opportunity and less division between haves and have-nots, then we will make tough choices, difficult as they may be, of acting on what we know, on the hard won lessons of the past 50 years, to end poverty in America. Whether we're willing to face the costs is still an open question. But there is no excuse for not trying because we now know how.
Reader Comments
No comments yet
Post a comment
All fields are required (your e-mail address will not be displayed)