Liberals and Conservatives Finally Agree on (Some of) the Facts About Poverty

            It’s news when right of center and left of center policy mavins can get together on anything, much less a complicated and values laden problem such as reducing poverty.  But, that’s exactly what a team of scholars from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the progressive Brookings Institution, with the guidance of New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, have just accomplished.

            The working group included 15 scholars—7 from Brookings, 7 from AEI and Haidt--who spent 14 months trying to develop a shared understanding of the causes of poverty and to build a framework for addressing it.  The result is an 85 page report that seeks to craft policies promoting personal responsibility, opportunity and financial security, the three values that all of the scholars agreed were central to addressing poverty.

            In many ways, this is a remarkable document.  It does a fairly good job of dispensing with the talking points of both sides.  Instead, it insists that all policies must both flow from a clear-eyed factual view of reality and be empirically proven to accomplish what they sets out to accomplish.  It is forthright in identifying the known unknowns, it is cautious about making broad policy prescriptions in the face of uncertainty, and it suggests pilot programs that test its conclusions to insure that what it suggests will be effective and scalable.

            Chapter 2 of the report is particularly refreshing in that it specifies a shared set of facts about the world. This is a major achievement in itself.  Liberals and conservatives tend to see the world through different lenses, and I suspect that the purpose of Chapter 2 was to end the argument about which side’s view of the world was correct. 

            Among the key facts that are now no longer open to dispute.  According to the report:

• ·      The poverty rate for the elderly declined from 35% in 1959 to 10% in 2014 and “this progress can be attributed to government programs because the entire reason for the decline is Social Security;
• ·      The poverty rate has risen since the Great Recession, and regardless of how it is measured, the poverty rate has never fallen below 15 percent and remains within the15-20 percent range;
• ·      There is little economic mobility in the United States.  Children in the top and bottom income quintiles—40 percent of all children--are much more likely to wind up in or near their parents’ quintiles than other children; 
• ·      The rungs on the economic ladder are getting further apart;
• ·      There are fewer marriages and more children living in single parent homes, giving children from two parent homes a major advantage;
• ·      Less-educated men (especially blacks) have been working less over time, partly in response to their declining wages;
• ·      The wages of at least 90 percent of men have fallen since the Great Recession if benefits like health insurance are not taken into account;
• ·      Wages for men at and below the 50^th percentile are similar to or lower than they were in 1979;
• ·      Government work support benefits have greatly reduced poverty rates among single-mother families (and low–income two parent families as well) every year since 1987. Thus, the federal work support system achieves the important goal of making work pay;
• ·      The minimum wage and collective bargaining “have traditionally helped limit inequality”; and
• ·      The gap in reading scores between children in the top and bottom income quintiles has grown, as has the gap in educational attainment.

            Imagine that! Conservatives finally willing to agree that government anti-poverty programs actually work! Not only that, but they agreed that collective bargaining and minimum wages “traditionally” served the admirable purpose of reducing inequality.  And they also agreed that low wages (and not laziness or shiftlessness) had at least something to do with the declining number of hours black men work.  Elsewhere in the chapter, they also acknowledge that there is some evidence that bleak economic prospects for potential mates has influenced the rate of marriage among the poor.

            There’s other good language in the remaining six chapters that progressives can cheer.  Scholars on the right have made it possible to move on from the arguments that we lost the war on poverty or that government programs designed to help the poor don’t simply transform the safety net into what House Speaker Paul Ryan likes to describe as a hammock.  On the whole, we progressives can feel hopeful about the fact that representatives from DC’s premier conservative think tank have finally heard what we’ve been saying and taken the evidence seriously.

            That’s the good news.  The bad news, which I’ll detail in my next post, is that in order to get this good language, progressives have had to capitulate on the right’s claim, as detailed in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, that culture plays an important role in creating American poverty.  The Brookings folks have implicitly signed on to the proposition that the poor, in large part, are at fault for their poverty.

            This is an important point, because it affects the kinds of remedies that can be considered and accepted by all.  Whereas progressives are likely to look at the problem from a macro level and propose remedies that seek to reform the entire economic system—full employment policies, for example—conservatives tend to focus on improving the behavior of the individual.  And, for the most part, that’s what we get in the policy proposal chapters of the report.

            I do think that the report suggests some good ideas for addressing poverty.  Something is almost always better than nothing.  But I also think that it’s folly not to emphasize the need to reform the economy as a whole.  The problem with the poor isn’t that they’re not good, smart or responsible.  The problem with the poor is that they’re caught in a system that makes it hard for them to earn enough money.