Thread by @DaveBrady72

Poverty, not the poor | Science Advances

My new article just got released in Science Advances today. The article is open access. I try to both describe the nature of America's "systemically high poverty" and review explanations of it.science.org/doi/full/10.11…

Here’s the abstract.

By "systemically high" I mean U.S. poverty is (i) a huge share of the pop., (ii) a perennial outlier among rich democ's; (iii) staggeringly high for certain groups, (iv) unexpectedly high even among those who “play by the rules,” & (v) pervasive across various groups & places.

I critique 3 prevailing approaches focused on the poor not poverty. First, behavioralists aim to "fix" the poor, but cannot explain macro-level variation, the causality bw behaviors & poverty is questionable, & wrongly focus on prevalences but neglect the more salient penalties.

Second, "dramatizing the poor" aims to elicit emotion and compassion through humanizing narratives. But, this approach overemphasizes unrepresentative groups of the poor, disproportionately focuses on symptoms rather than underlying causes, & downplays effective social policies.

Third, "culturalists" "fix" AND "dramatize" - claiming pathological culture -> counterproductive behavior -> poverty. This is "hopelessly endogenous", & suffers from selection biases & subjective biases, & lacks contrast against rival explanations & comparison groups.

Rather than these prevailing approaches focused on the poor, I advance political explanations aiming to explain America's systemically high poverty. According to political explanations, power, policies, and institutions are the pivotal cause of poverty.

Political explanations emphasize: (1) the essential role of social policy, (2) political choices to penalize risks, (3) power resources of collective political actors, and (4) institutions.

Over the past couple of years, I've been posting drafts of some of the figures that ended up in this piece. Here are a few of the ones I'd highlight now: