only one migrant worker child in five hundred: The figure is from the powerful Edward R. Murrow documentary of 1960, Harvest of Shame, about migrant laborers. The documentary led to improved conditions for migrant workers.
the median American household is actually poorer in net worth today: David Leonhardt, “We’re Measuring the Economy All Wrong,” The New York Times, September 14, 2018. This is adjusted for inflation.
Median wages for the majority of the population: Weekly and hourly earnings data from the “Current Population Survey,” Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject, Bureau of Labor Statistics website, from 1979 to 2019. For workers with some college or an associate’s degree, median wages in 2019 are about 15 percent less than they were in 1979, adjusted for inflation. It’s even worse for high-school dropouts, whose median wages after inflation are about 21 percent less than in 1979.
“In fact, the levels of negative emotions”: Julie Ray, “Americans’ Stress, Worry and Anger Intensified in 2018,” Gallup News, April 25, 2019.
Some 68,000 Americans now die annually from drug overdoses: “Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts,” National Center for Health Statistics, 2019. At the peak in 2017, more than 70,000 died of overdoses.
another 88,000 from alcohol abuse: “Alcohol Facts and Statistics,” National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
and 47,000 from suicide: “Suicide,” National Institute of Mental Health.
America ranks number 40: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” 2009.
76 percent of the white working class expects: Patrick O’Connor, “Poll Finds Widespread Economic Anxiety” The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2014; results from a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll.
Suicide rates are at their highest level: Jamie Ducharme, “U.S. Suicide Rates Are the Highest They’ve Been Since World War II,” Time, June 20, 2019. The town of Herriman, Utah, endured the suicides of six high-school students, plus one recent graduate, in less than a year. Ian Lovett, “One Teenager Killed Himself, Then Six More Followed,” The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2019.
one American child in eight is living with a parent with a substance use disorder: Rachel N. Lipari and Struther L. Van Horn, “Children Living with Parents Who Have a Substance Use Disorder,” The CBHSQ Report, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, August 24, 2017.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett: Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, “Billionaire Bonanza,” Institute for Policy Studies, November 2017. Collins and Hoxie say that the wealthiest 1 percent of all U.S. households own 39.7 percent of all private wealth. From 1860 to 1900, the wealthiest 2 percent of American households owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth, while the top 10 percent owned roughly three-fourths of it.
“I don’t believe modern American capitalism is working”: Senator Warner believes in market economies, of course, but thinks that the current system skews incentives to invest in equipment rather than human resources. He also notes that venture capital overwhelmingly goes to white men in New York, California and Massachusetts and would like to see more efforts to broaden opportunities for struggling Americans to earn their way out of poverty. He would like to create more incentives to invest in human capital rather than machines. For example, he suggests that something like the R&D tax credit be applicable not just for buying a computer but also for training workers.
“even I think capitalism is broken”: Ray Dalio said this in a tweet on April 7, 2019, https://twitter.com/RayDalio/status/1114987900201066496.
“The problem is that capitalists typically don’t know”: Dalio’s comment is from an essay, “Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed,” posted on his website, EconomicPrinciples.org, April 12, 2019.
more than two-thirds of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine: Frank Newport, “Democrats More Positive About Socialism Than Capitalism,” Gallup News, August 13, 2018.
don’t readily have the cash to cover a $400 emergency: J. Larrimore, A. Durante, K. Kreiss et al., “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 2018.
more unhappiness and psychological distress than low wages: Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, “Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being,” American Sociological Review, February 1, 2019.
“a lot of little diamonds”: Heather Long, “ ‘Nobody Like You Has Ever Done It’: How a High School Dropout Became President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve,” The Washington Post, January 18, 2019.
ninety-three valedictorians: “The Valedictorians Project,” The Boston Globe, January 2019.
about 8 million of these voters had supported Barack Obama: Geoffrey Skelley, “Just How Many Obama 2012-Trump 2016 Voters Were There?,” University of Virginia Center for Politics, June 1, 2017, says there were 8.4 million such voters.
“an honest look at the welfare dependency”: Kevin D. Williamson, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction,” National Review, March 17, 2016.
a lifeline: The federal disability program is a lifeline for some but traps other people in perpetual poverty and makes it more difficult for them to return to the labor force when economic conditions or their own circumstances improve. After bottoming out in September 2015, labor force participation rates in the United States have risen, partly because some people who had been on disability returned to work, but they often lose benefits when they do. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has suggested that people on disability be allowed to work while losing fewer benefits. Another approach would be to give people a holiday so that they could return to the job market without losing disability payments for a certain number of years, or by allowing them to work more hours without facing a penalty. These steps would have given people like Kevin Green or Ricochet Goff more incentive to reenter the labor force.
The policy of confiscating driver’s licenses: Justin Wm. Moyer, “More Than 7 Million May Have Lost Driver’s Licenses Because of Traffic Debt,” The Washington Post, May 19, 2018.
private wealth in the United States has increased: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), “Households and Nonprofit Organizations; Net Worth, Level (TNWBSHNO),” retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TNWBSHNO, April 24, 2019.
The people in the top .01 percent: David Leonhardt makes this point in an excellent chart using income data (after taxes and transfers) from Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, as well as GDP data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. David Leonhardt, “How the Upper Middle Class Is Really Doing,” The New York Times, February 24, 2019.
The Wall Street bonus pool at the end of each year: “How Wall Street Drives Gender and Race Pay Gaps,” Institute for Policy Studies, March 26, 2019. The latest report says that the total bonus pool for 181,300 New York City–based Wall Street employees was $27.5 billion—more than three times the combined annual earnings of all 640,000 U.S. workers employed full-time (at least thirty-five hours per week) at the federal minimum wage.
Average hourly wages: Drew Desilver, “For Most U.S. Workers, Real Wages Have Barely Budged in Decades,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, August 7, 2018. This refers to average hourly wages for non-management non-farm private-sector workers. After 1973, these average wages declined modestly until the 1990s, then rose modestly afterward. Overall, they remain slightly below where they were in January 1973, after adjusting for inflation.
the median net worth adjusted for inflation: “The Demographics of Wealth: How Age, Education and Race Separate Thrivers from Strugglers in Today’s Economy,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Essay No. 3: Age, Birth Year and Wealth, July 2015, Table 2: Median Wealth of Families by Age of Family Head, p. 7.
only half earned more than their parents had: Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell et al., “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility,” Science, April 28, 2017. Another measure of economic mobility, intergenerational earnings elasticity, suggests that about 40 percent of an American’s rank in the distribution of earnings is accounted for by his or her parents’ incomes.
three more don’t have jobs but aren’t looking for work: Congressional Joint Economic Committee, Vice Chairman’s staff, Mike Lee, Senator, Utah, “Inactive, Disconnected and Ailing: A Portrait of Prime-Age Men Out of the Labor Force,” Social Capital Project, September 18, 2018.
the incidence of child neglect rose by 20 percent: Dan Brown and Elisabetta De Cao, “The Impact of Unemployment on Child Maltreatment in the United States,” University of Essex, UK, working paper, March 2018.
in Flint, Michigan, where 35 percent of men of prime working age were not employed: Edward Glaeser, Lawrence Summers and Benjamin Austin, “A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland,” The New York Times, May 24, 2018. See also Benjamin Austen, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence Summers, “Saving the Heartland: Place-Based Policies in 21st Century America,” Brookings Institution, March 8, 2018. There’s growing interest in Congress in job-creation programs. But at a time of full employment, it may not make sense to introduce such a program at a national level. Rather, because of the regional variations, we should target high-unemployment areas. We can also create incentives for employers who create jobs, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and also target at-risk demographics like juvenile delinquents with special interventions like Career Academies that have an excellent record of job creation.
The OECD estimates that 38 percent of jobs in rich countries are at risk: Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintini, “Automation, Skills Use and Training,” OECD, working paper, 2018.
asked Americans recently to offer a word: Laura Wronski, “Top Words to Describe 2018: Great and Exhausting,” Survey Monkey, Curiosity at Work, survey dates December 10–17, 2018.
between poor people who have a job and poor folks who don’t: “We focus on not working, rather than income inequality, throughout this paper because we see it as a far greater problem. There is significant evidence suggesting that misery haunts the lives of the long-term not working,” write three distinguished Harvard University economists, Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence H. Summers, in “Saving the Heartland.”
Today 80 percent of American households living in poverty: Rachel Sheffield and Robert Rector, “Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in the United States Today?,” The Heritage Foundation, July 19, 2011. Also see Derek Thompson, “30 Million in Poverty Aren’t as Poor as You Think, Says Heritage Foundation,” The Atlantic, July 19, 2011, which argues that productivity increases in electronics and other areas have made certain products very cheap, while health care, education and housing are still expensive.
same impact on lifespan as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day: Vivek Murthy, “Work and the Loneliness Epidemic,” Harvard Business Review, September 2017. Murthy notes that we as a country have moved to confront the public health threat from cigarettes but have been largely oblivious to the threat from loneliness.
Children from the richest 1 percent of households: Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez et al., “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” NBER Working Paper No. 23618, July 2017.
it seems to work: We know about Ivy Coach’s fee structure because it sued a family for paying only half of the $1.5 million owed for guiding a child into boarding schools and then an elite college. In that case, the child was accepted early at an Ivy League college. Scott Jaschik, “$1.5 Million to Get into an Ivy,” Inside Higher Ed, February 12, 2018.
77 percent of kids in the top quartile of incomes: “College Affordability and Completion: Ensuring a Pathway to Opportunity,” U.S. Department of Education, www.ed.gov/college.
a college degree on average is worth: Mary C. Daly and Leila Bengali, “Is It Still Worth Going to College?,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, FRBSF Economic Letter, May 5, 2014.
low-income Canadian children are about twice as likely: Raj Chetty, “Improving Opportunities for Economic Mobility: New Evidence and Policy Lessons,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Economic Mobility: Research & Ideas on Strengthening Families, Communities & the Economy, March 2017, p. 37.
“an inequality machine”: Karin Fischer, “Engine of Inequality,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2016.
Today 15 percent of black students attend: “Segregation Then & Now,” Center for Public Education, CenterforPublicEducation.org/research/segregation-then-now.
“Quietly and subtly, the opponents of integration have won”: Rucker C. Johnson with Alexander Nazaryan, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 2.
The public frets about cheating with food stamps: Emelyn Rude, “The Very Short History of Food Stamp Fraud in America,” Time, March 30, 2017.
zillionaires hide assets abroad: Gabriel Zucman, “The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens,” University of California at Berkeley, presentation, September 2015. He calculates that $36 billion is lost to the Treasury each year because of hidden assets. This is only a small share of tax cheating. Overall, the IRS has estimated that people owe $458 billion annually in taxes that they don’t pay, and follow-ups suggest that this underpayment is largely from very wealthy people.
“we confused the hard work of wealth creation”: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” 2009.
By some calculations, corporate subsidies, credits and loopholes: Mike P. Sinn, “Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies Than Social Welfare Programs,” Think by Numbers, 2013.
Amazon paid zero federal income tax: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “Amazon in Its Prime: Doubles Profits, Pays 0 in Federal Income Taxes,” blog post, February 13, 2019.
By late April 2016, Boeing had laid off: Jim Brunner, “For the First Time, Boeing Reveals State Tax Breaks: $305 Million in 2015,” The Seattle Times, April 29, 2016.
“The United States invented antitrust”: Luigi Zingales, “How E.U.’s Google Fine Explains High Cellphone Costs in the U.S.,” op-ed, The New York Times, July 24, 2018.
More than one-third of all tax audits: Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger, “Who’s More Likely to Be Audited: A Person Making $20,000—or $400,000?,” ProPublica, December 12, 2018. For the fact that the top 5 percent of taxpayers account for a majority of underreported income, see Andrew Johns and Joel Slemrod, “The Distribution of Income Tax Noncompliance,” National Tax Journal, September 2010, especially Table 3.
his attorney asked that the fine be canceled: “Manhattan DA Urges Jail for Dewey Exec, Alleges ‘Fraud on This Court,’ ” New York Law Journal, November 13, 2018.
“Punishing and imprisoning the poor”: “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on His Mission to the United States of America,” United Nations General Assembly, Human Rights Council, May 4, 2018.
fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers now in a union: “Union Members Summary,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 18, 2019.
Noncompete agreements: “Non-compete Contracts: Economic Effects and Policy Implications,” Office of Economic Policy, U.S. Department of the Treasury, March 2016.
40 percent have moved on to work on behalf of the finance companies: Jeff Stein, “Many Lawmakers and Aides Who Crafted Financial Regulations After the 2008 Crisis Now Work for Wall Street,” The Washington Post, September 7, 2018.
“Secondary schools in America were free”: Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 12.
top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share: These are real incomes after taxes and government transfers, based on data from Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. See David Leonhardt, “How the Upper Middle Class in America Is Really Doing,” The New York Times, February 24, 2019.
who didn’t graduate from high school do even worse: Isabel Sawhill, The Forgotten Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 60–62.
in the United States it doubled to 20 percent: F. Alvarado, L. Chancel, T. Piketty et al., “World Inequality Report 2018,” Harvard University Press, 2018.
not everyone, particularly those left behind: Some of the figures in the France-U.S. comparison come from Sawhill, The Forgotten Americans, 79–80.
a real Chicago woman, Linda Taylor: Josh Levin tells the story of Linda Taylor in The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth (New York: Little, Brown, 2019).
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”: In political philosophy, there was a great debate about whether life in the natural state before governments was idyllic or horrific. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed the former, Thomas Hobbes the latter. Hobbes famously argued in Leviathan, published in 1651, that individuals needed to surrender some rights to a powerful government to avoid a life that would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
“What began as a useful corrective”: Steven Pearlstein, Can American Capitalism Survive? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 13–14, 22.
“Americans became a more acquisitive”: Michael Tomasky, “The Real Legacy of the 1970s,” The New York Times, February 3, 2019.
now the average CEO earns: Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder, “CEO Compensation Surged in 2017,” Economic Policy Institute, August 16, 2018.
A Walmart employee earning the median salary: Walmart Proxy Statement Schedule 14A, filed with the Securities Exchange Commission, May 30, 2018.
“What we have been left with”: Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker (New York: Encounter Books, 2018), 4.
to kick people out of the safety net: Catherine Rampell, “Arkansas’s Medicaid Experiment Has Proved Disastrous,” The Washington Post, November 19, 2018.
no correlation to increased employment: Jacob Bundrick and Thomas Snyder, “Do Business Subsidies Lead to Increased Economic Activity? Evidence from Arkansas’s Quick Action Closing Fund,” Mercatus Working Paper, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 2017.
“morality of grace”: Victor Tan Chen, Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). The discussion of the Ford plant in Windsor and the nursing program is on page 61; the reference to sinking into “apathy, despair, and self-blame,” on page 228. We strongly agree that what is needed is not just smarter policies but also a social narrative that is less judgmental and scornful of those who stumble.
Mississippi went from 30 percent of the per capita income: Paul Krugman, “What’s the Matter with Trumpland?,” The New York Times, April 2, 2018.
right-wing politicians in the South defend Confederate statues: These points are well made by Krugman, ibid.
“risks driving even more of the working class into the Republican camp”: Sawhill, The Forgotten Americans, 13.
wrong for a man to beat his wife with a belt or stick: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 408.
A 1963 poll found: Karlyn Bowman, “Interracial Marriage: Changing Laws, Minds and Hearts,” Forbes, January 13, 2017. See also Eleanor O’Neil, Heather Sims and Karlyn Bowman, “AEI Political Report: The Trump Presidency: Change, Change, Change,” AEI, January 13, 2017.
fifteen states specifically banned: Hrishi Karthikeyan and Gabriel J. Chin, “Preserving Racial Identity,” Asian Law Journal 9, no. 1 (2002).
“OxyContin is our ticket to the moon”: Barry Meier, Pain Killer (New York: Random House, 2018), 41. Meier did pathbreaking reporting on Purdue Pharma, and his book remains a powerful chronicle of how drug companies peddle drugs at enormous human cost.
By official estimates, 2.1 million Americans suffer opioid addiction: “Health Insurance Plans May Be Fueling Opioid Epidemic,” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, June 22, 2018.
some scholarly estimates run many times higher: “Almost 18 million Americans are currently taking long-term prescription opioids,” according to a joint statement by pain experts. “International Stakeholder Community of Pain Experts and Leaders Call for an Urgent Action on Forced Opioid Tapering,” Pain Medicine, March 2019.
McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm, advised Purdue: Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich, “McKinsey Advised Purdue Pharma How to ‘Turbocharge’ Opioid Sales, Lawsuit Says,” The New York Times, February 1, 2019.
Insys Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company: “Justice Department Takes First-of-Its-Kind-Legal Action to Reduce Opioid Over-Prescription,” U.S. Department of Justice press release, August 22, 2018.
Insys achieved 1,000 percent growth in earnings: Evan Hughes, “The Pain Hustlers,” The New York Times Magazine, May 2, 2018.
“Every time a doc tells you they prescribed”: “Fueling an Epidemic: Inside the Insys Strategy for Boosting Fentanyl Sales,” U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Ranking Members Office, October 17, 2018, p. 8.
payments to doctors in a particular county correlated to overdose deaths: Scott E. Hadland et al., “Association of Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing of Opioid Products with Mortality from Opioid-Related Overdoses,” JAMA Network Open, 2019.
prescribing it for chronic back pain is a recipe for addiction: The information on Insys comes largely from “Fueling an Epidemic.”
McKesson Corporation, another giant pharmaceutical company: “Combating the Opioid Epidemic: Examining Concerns About Distribution and Diversion,” House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, May 8, 2018. See also Stephanie Armour and Thomas M. Burton, “Opioid Shipments to Small Towns Come Under Spotlight at Hearing,” The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2018.
The government eventually fined McKesson: Erika Fry, “Big McKesson Shareholder, Governance Experts Say the Opioid Crisis Should Have Cost the CEO Some Bonus Pay,” Fortune, July 10, 2017.
“The biggest drug dealers wear white lab coats”: Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys, “Drug Dealers Among Us: Look for Those Wearing Lab Coats or Pinstripe Suits,” The Hill, February 6, 2018.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968”: Ehrlichman made this comment about the drug war in 1996, many years after his White House years, to Dan Baum, who was writing a book about drug policy. Dan Baum, “Legalize It All,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016. Partly because of this quote, liberals sometimes assume that the war on drugs and mass incarceration were simply a conservative plot; in fact, it’s more complicated than that, and this was a bipartisan failing. James Forman Jr. notes in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Locking Up Our Own (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) that black leaders initially supported the war on crime and tough law-and-order measures because the cities they governed were so overrun by drugs and crime.
6,100 deaths from illegal drugs: Margaret Warner, Li Hui Chen, Diane M. Makuc et al., “Drug Poisoning Deaths in the United States, 1980–2008,” NCHS Data Brief, No. 81, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, December 2011, p. 1.
Back in 1971, President Nixon ordered: Nixon brought in Dr. Jerome Jaffe, who had run a drug treatment program in Chicago, to lead his drug effort, which in effect amounted to a decriminalization of addiction for those who wanted treatment. Likewise, American soldiers in Vietnam were treated before returning home, but were not court-martialed or otherwise punished. See an interview transcript with Dr. Jaffe by PBS Frontline: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/jaffe.html.
Only one in five Americans: Substance Use and Mental Health Administration, Key Substance Abuse and Mental Health Indicators in the United States, 2018.
a dollar invested in addiction treatment programs: “Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment: A Research-Based Guide (Third Edition),” National Institute on Drug Abuse, January 2018.
Dozens of studies have found: Jennifer Ng, Christy Sutherland and Michael R. Kolber, “Does Evidence Support Supervised Injection Sites?,” Canadian Family Physician 63, no. 11 (November 2017): 866.
One study estimated that a safe injection site: The Editors, “Addicts Should Be Able to Shoot Up Legally in Safe-Injection Facilities,” Scientific American, July 1, 2018.
in 2016, doctors wrote more opioid prescriptions: Julie Mack, “Michigan Has More Annual Opioid Prescriptions Than People,” MLive.com, June 2017. Michigan doctors wrote 11 million prescriptions for opioids in 2016. The population of Michigan was nearly 10 million.
a growing empathy gap in America: Paul Bloom, a distinguished Yale professor of psychology, pushes back in a book called Against Empathy. Bloom declares himself on an “anti-empathy crusade” and warns that empathy can lead to depression or to irrational efforts to help a particular child with big eyes, rather than assisting larger groups who are more needy. Like many critics, we believe that Bloom defines empathy too narrowly and unfairly pits it against reason. Of course we’re against irrationality, but we believe empathy is made of sterner stuff.
Varney’s successful trajectory began: We learned of Varney’s exchange in an excellent episode of the WNYC radio program On the Media about poverty. It’s available at www.wnyc.org/poverty.
Life expectancy rose in the United States: There are competing estimates of life expectancy in the nineteenth century, but see J. David Hacker, “Decennial Life Tables for the White Population of the United States,” author manuscript, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2011, Table 8. The figure for white males in the 1860s is 35.6; we know of no reliable figures for American life expectancy at that period that include the black or Native American populations, but they must have been considerably lower; hence we suggest an overall figure of “less than 35.”
“We should take it very seriously”: Lenny Bernstein and Christopher Ingraham, “Fueled by Drug Crisis, U.S. Life Expectancy Declines for a Second Straight Year,” The Washington Post, December 21, 2017.
less significant than geography: James J. Lee et al., “Gene Discovery and Polygenic Prediction from a Genome-wide Association Study of Educational Attainment in 1.1 Million Individuals,” Nature Genetics, July 23, 2018.
given hope that there is a way out: We discuss this in our book A Path Appears (New York: Knopf, 2014), in a chapter called “The Power of Hope.”
cirrhosis-related deaths in the United States: Elliot B. Tapper and Neehar D. Parikh, “Mortality Due to Cirrhosis and Liver Cancer in the United States, 1999–2016: Observational Study,” British Medical Journal, July18, 2018.
93 percent of girls in the juvenile justice system: Malika Saadar Saar, Rebecca Epstein, Lindsay Rosenthal et al., “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, c. 2016, p. 7.
79 percent of women in jails have children: Elizabeth Swavola, Kristine Riley and Ram Subramanian, “Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform,” Vera Institute of Justice, 2016, p. 12.
if offenders in state prisons received needed drug treatment: Gary A. Zarkin, Alexander J. Cowell, Katherine A. Hicks and Michael J. Mills, “Benefits and Costs of Substance Abuse Treatment Programs for State Prison Inmates: Results from a Lifetime Simulation Model,” Health Economics, June 2012.
We’re now behind Chile in life expectancy: “America’s Health Rankings: 2017 Annual Report,” United Health Foundation, p. 43.
Children in America today are 55 percent more likely to die: Ashish P. Thakrar, Alexandra D. Forrest, Mitchell G. Maltenfort and Christopher B. Forrest, “Child Mortality in the US and 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis,” Health Affairs, January 2018.
we lose fifty-eight children a day: Skeptics sometimes note that cross-country comparisons are complicated by differences in how data are collected. There is something to that, and we believe that China and Cuba sometimes do not count in infant mortality statistics newborns who die very soon after birth. But among advanced nations, reporting standards seem similar. One study examined this issue and found that fetal death rates are affected by the standard used, but that infant mortality rates are not materially affected. Ashna D. Mohangoo, Béatrice Blondel, Mika Gissler et al., “International Comparisons of Fetal and Neonatal Mortality Rates in High-Income Countries: Should Exclusion Thresholds Be Based on Birth Weight or Gestational Age?,” PLoS ONE, May 13, 2013.
life expectancy rests so heavily on where a child is born: Robert M. Kaplan, More Than Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 96–98.
at least one life is saved: The study showing one life saved for every 830 people who gain insurance was conducted in Massachusetts. Baicker conducted a similar study with Benjamin Sommers and Arnold Epstein that found that in Arizona, Maine and New York the number of lives saved from insurance was even greater; there, insuring an additional 176 people saved one life per year.
in Spain, it’s $2,003: International Federation of Health Plans, “2015 Comparative Price Report.” The prices listed are averages in each country, with Spain and Switzerland consistently inexpensive for drugs and procedures and the United States consistently at the high end.
weight-related issues account for 9 percent of U.S. health-care spending: Kaplan, More Than Medicine, 128–29.
drained all their life assets over the next two years: Adrienne M. Gilligan, David S. Alberts, Denise J. Roe and Grant H. Skrepnek, “Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer,” The American Journal of Medicine, October 2018.
By even a conservative count: Meghan Henry, Anna Mahathey, Tyler Morrill et al., “Part I: Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness,” The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, December 2018. p. 1.
homelessness resulted in $8 billion in additional costs for children’s health: Ana Poblacion, Allison Bovell-Ammon, Richard Sheward et al., “Stable Homes Make Stable Families,” Children’s HealthWatch What If? series, July 2017.
These are areas lacking adequate affordable housing: Andrew Auramd, Dan Emmanuel and Diane Yentel, “Out of Reach: The High Cost of Housing,” National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2018.
one shouldn’t spend more than 30 percent of one’s income on housing: Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability,” NBER working paper, March 2002.
“our evidence suggests”: Ibid.
“zoning and other land-use controls contribute significantly”: “Housing Development Toolkit,” The White House, September 2016, p. 7.
financial literacy programs have had a mixed record: See Daniel Fernandes, John G. Lynch Jr. and Richard G. Netemeyer, “The Effect of Financial Literacy and Financial Education on Downstream Financial Behaviors,” Management Science, August 2014. Careful studies have found that financial literacy is helpful with individual development accounts, and some school programs have also found good outcomes.
twice as much on subsidizing housing for mostly affluent homeowners: Kathy Orton, “Federal Government Spends More Subsidizing Homeowners Than It Does Helping People Avoid Homelessness,” The Washington Post, October 11, 2017. Also see: Michael Novogradac, “Once Again, Homeownership Gets Far More Tax Subsidies Than Rental Housing,” Novogradac Journal of Tax Credits, July 2, 2018. The cost of the mortgage interest deduction is expected to drop to $41 billion in 2018 from $66 billion in 2017 after that year’s tax reform law; the exclusion of $500,000 from capital gains on home sales amounts to another $36 billion annually.
provided $1.3 billion to Stockbridge Capital: Peter Whoriskey, “A Billion-Dollar Empire Made of Mobile Homes,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2019.
children raised in religious households were less likely to suffer: Ying Chen and Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Associations of Religious Upbringing with Subsequent Health and Well-Being from Adolescence to Young Adulthood: An Outcome-Wide Analysis,” American Journal of Epidemiology, June 29, 2018.
military particularly helped black men: W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy R. Wang and Ronald B. Mincy, “Black Men Making It in America,” American Enterprise Institute, 2018. The same study also found that black men were more likely to reach the middle class if they were married, were church members or had a sense of agency as teenagers or young men. And not surprisingly, higher education and full-time work also correlated to success.
Beginning in the early 1970s, our incarceration rate: Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steve Redburn, eds., The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014), 33.
now it has 1.4 million: “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections,” The Sentencing Project, Washington, DC, June 2018.
Barr issued a report: U.S. Department of Justice, “The Case for More Incarceration,” with opening statement by Attorney General William P. Barr, dated October 28, 1992.
one in seven Americans in prison today: Ashley Nellis, “Still Life: America’s Increasing Use of Life and Long-Term Sentences,” The Sentencing Project, 2017, p. 5. The one in seven figure includes an additional 44,311 individuals who are serving “virtual life” sentences of fifty years or more. For life imprisonment costs, see ibid., p. 26.
in Germany, it’s 6 percent: Danielle Allen, “How Should We Deal with Wrongdoing? And You Can’t Say Prison,” The Washington Post, May 16, 2018.
home visitation reaches less than 2 percent: Edward Rodrigue and Richard V. Reeves, “Home Visiting Programs: An Early Test for the 114h Congress,” The Brookings Institution, February 5, 2015. See also National Home Visiting Resource Center, 2018 Home Visiting Yearbook, which says that evidence-based home visitation programs served 300,000 families in 2017, out of 18 million that would have benefited.
Judges are more likely to rule against defendants: Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” PNAS, April 26, 2011.
disproportionately applied to black defendants: Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, “Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 10, no. 3 (September 2016): 171–205.
our justice system acts in racist ways: This point has been made powerfully by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
One way researchers measure bias: Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (September 2004): 991–1013.
A survey found that 92 percent of black youths: Orlando Patterson with Ethan Fosse, eds., The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
In a 2015 CNN poll: Kaiser Family Foundation/CNN Survey of Americans on Race, November 2015.
That’s one reason the median black family: Lisa J. Dettling, Joanne W. Hsu, Lindsay Jacobs et al., with assistance from Elizabeth Llanes, “Recent Trends in Wealth-Holding by Race and Ethnicity: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FEDS Notes, September 27, 2017.
educational discrimination continues: Jonathan Rothwell, “Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools,” Brookings Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program, April 2012, p. 8.
As a young adult: Stephanie Saul and Matt Flegenheimer, “The El Paso Homecoming That Set Beto O’Rourke’s Star on the Rise,” The New York Times, April 27, 2019.
The graduation rate at high schools: “Synopsis of Reprogramming,” Bureau of Indian Education website, www.bie.edu.
The Indian Health Service: “IHS Profile,” Indian Health Service, 2015–2018 data.
less than half what the Bureau of Prisons spends: “Bureau of Prisons: Better Planning and Evaluation Needed to Understand and Control Rising Inmate Health Care Costs,” GAO-17-379, published June 29, 2017, publicly released July 31, 2017.
Newt Gingrich rose to become Speaker of the House: Bonnie Goldstein, “What Newt Gingrich’s Three Wives Tell Us About the President He’d Be,” The Washington Post, January 2, 2012.
the judge scolded Moore: See Jon Swaine and David Smith, “Trump Fed Pick Was Held in Contempt for Failing to Pay Ex-Wife Over $300,000,” The Guardian, March 30, 2019.
Forty percent of American kids: Joyce A. Martin, Brady E. Hamilton, Michelle J. K. Osterman, et al., “Births: Final Data for 2016,” National Vital Statistics Reports, January 31, 2018, Table 9, p. 31.
four out of five of them will experience the stress: Maria Cancian, Daniel R. Meyer and Steven T. Cook, “Stepparents and Half-Siblings: Family Complexity from a Child’s Perspective,” Fast Foucs, Institute for Research on Poverty University of Wisconsin–Madison, September 2011, p. 3.
Same-sex couples seem to have slightly better outcomes: Some studies have found that children of same-sex couples have modestly worse outcomes, but that seems to be because these children often were in households that divorced; typically, the child was born in a heterosexual marriage, then one parent came out as gay and the couple divorced. Divorce is an ACE, and so has an impact on child outcomes in the aggregate. However, other researchers have found that children raised from birth by a same-sex couple do slightly better than average. In all likelihood this, too, has no relationship to the sexual preference of the parents. Rather, same-sex parents who have children are somewhat more affluent and have higher socioeconomic status than the average. In addition, because same-sex parents have to actively seek a child and invest considerably to have one, such children are less likely to be neglected. See Deni Mazrekaj, Kristof de Witte and Sofie Cabus, “School Outcomes of Children Raised by Same-Sex Couples from Birth: Evidence from Administrative Panel Data,” Conference of the American Economic Association, January 5, 2019.
only 5 percent rise to the top quintile: Richard Reeves and Joanna Venator, “Saving Horatio Alger,” Brookings Institution, Social Mobility Memo, August 21, 2014.
Foster care costs: Nicholas Zill, “Better Prospects, Lower Cost: The Case for Increasing Foster Care Adoption,” National Council for Adoption, Adoption Advocate, May 2011.
only 58 percent graduate from high school: “Supporting Older Youth in Foster Care,” National Conference of State Legislatures website (www.ncsl.org), February 25, 2019.
six times more likely to end up homeless: “Aging Out of Foster Care,” National Foster Youth Institute website (www.nfyi.org), May 26, 2017.
“it makes it harder for me to get a job”: Resentment of Latino immigrants was rooted not only in lost jobs but also in frustration that the social status of white working-class men had plummeted, with demographic and cultural changes making them feel a little like, in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s phrase, “strangers in their own land.”
success for black men was marriage: W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy R. Wang and Ronald B. Mincy, “Black Men Making It in America,” American Enterprise Institute, 2018. Of course, that is correlation rather than causation, and some of the unmarried men had risk factors that also made them less marriageable.
two-parent households have more social capital: Consider low-income black men growing up in two different neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Of young black men who grew up in the lowest-income families in Watts, 44 percent ended up incarcerated on a single day (the day of the 2010 census). But of young black men who grew up similarly poor in Compton, two miles to the south, only 6 percent were incarcerated that day. One difference between the two neighborhoods is family structure: when these men were children in the 1980s, single parents made up 87 percent of households with kids in Watts and only 50 percent in Compton. All this underscores Pat Moynihan’s point about the importance of family structure, not only for children but also for adults and the larger society.
policies have made low-income men less attractive as marriage partners: See David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” NBER working paper, revised December 2018, and Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett and Matthew Stimpson, “What Explains the Decline in First Marriage in the United States?,” Journal of Marriage and Family, May 8, 2018.
Lifting the minimum wage: Research on cities that have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour has so far not shown a significant corresponding loss in jobs, perhaps partly because of slightly higher loyalty and reduced turnover. Sylvia A. Allegretto, Anna Godoey, Carl Nadler and Michael Reich, “The New Wave of Local Minimum Wage Policies: Evidence from Six Cities,” Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, September 6, 2018. Other research shows that higher minimum wage has some negative effects, including more automation by companies. David Neumark, J. M. Ian Salas and William Wascher, “Revisiting the Minimum Wage–Employment Debate: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?,” The National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2013.
Some 70 percent of pregnancies among single women under thirty: Mia Zolna and Laura Lindberg, “Unintended Pregnancy: Incidence and Outcomes Among Young Adult Unmarried Women in the United States, 2001 and 2008,” Guttmacher Institute report, April 2012.
More children die each year in the United States from abuse: By official figures, 1,600 die each year, although experts suggest that the real total is twice that.
five-year-olds who have experienced serious adversity: Poor boys are twice as likely to be arrested and poor girls are six times as likely to have a child out of wedlock before age twenty-one. Greg J. Duncan and Ariel Kalil, “Early-Childhood Poverty and Adult Attainment, Behavior, and Health,” Child Development, February 4, 2010.
they will be much more susceptible to substance abuse: Ju Lee Oei, “Adult Consequences of Prenatal Drug Exposure,” Internal Medicine Journal, January 3, 2018.
a 1,220 percent increased chance of adult suicide: Vincent J. Felitti, Robert F. Anda, Dale Nordenberg et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, May 1998, 245–58.
We’ve reduced teen pregnancies by 67 percent: “Teen Pregnancy Prevention,” National Conference of State Legislatures website (www.ncsl.org), October 11, 2018.
We’ve raised high-school graduation rates by 5 percentage points: “Common Core of Data: America’s Public Schools,” National Center for Education Statistics; graduation rates for the 2016–17 school year reached 84.6 percent, up from 79 percent in 2011. And see Moriah Balingit, “U.S. High School Graduation Rates Rise to New High,” The Washington Post, December 4, 2017.
through genetics or epigenetics: In high school, you probably learned that Lamarck’s theory of evolution—that animals change during their lifetime and pass those changes to their offspring—was wrong. For example, ancient giraffes did not stretch their necks to reach tall branches and then have longer-necked babies. But epigenetics is a new field of science that suggests that environmental factors can affect the expression of genes so that acquired traits may sometimes be transmitted to the next generations. This is not Lamarckian genetics, but it is not quite clear what it is; this is a revolutionary discipline in its infancy.
each dollar invested in reducing child disadvantage: Michael McLaughlin and Mark R. Rank, “Estimating the Economic Cost of Child Poverty in the United States,” Social Work Research, March 30, 2018.
cost of a single murder is $3 million: Some estimates of the costs of murders are higher, including one that reached $17 million, but most estimates are in the range of $3 million to $5 million where the murderer is convicted and imprisoned. Matt DeLisi, Anna Kosloski, Molly Sween et al., “Murder by Numbers: Monetary Costs Imposed by a Sample of Homicide Offenders,” The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, August 2010.
crime is caused by 5 percent of the population: Örjan Falk, Märta Wallinius and Sebastian Lundström, “The 1% of the Population Accountable for 63% of All Violent Crime Convictions,” Social Psychiatry Psychiatric Epidemiology 49, no. 4 (2014): 559–71.
diminish the well-being of an entire society: Richard Wilkinson and Katie Pickett, The Inner Level (London: Allen Lane, 2018), xxi. Wilkinson and Pickett also explored these issues in their previous book, The Spirit Level.
64 percent less likely to attempt suicide: Chloe Reichel, “Suicide Prevention: Research on Successful Interventions,” Journalist’s Resource, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019.
4 percent of pediatricians screen for ACEs: Vanessa Sacks and David Murphey, “The Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences, Nationally, by State, and by Race or Ethnicity,” Child Trends, February 20, 2018.
devastating for their children as well: See H. Luke Shaefer and Kathryn J. Edin, $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). There is a vigorous debate about how to make these international comparisons. Some note that extremely poor families abroad often are villagers who raise their own food and pay nothing for housing in a way that is not possible in the United States; others observe that broke Americans, especially children, can get food stamps, emergency medical care and help from private charities.
sometimes having unintended consequences: One of the dangers, for example, is that by offering benefits for households with children, the government will create an incentive that results in a surge in births to low-income single moms. The economist Paul Collier argues that this is what happened in Britain in 1999. Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 160. Other British studies found no impact on births to single women but an increase in births to low-income couples. Reviews of the United States are mixed, with Robert Moffitt finding fertility effects (“The Effect of Welfare on Marriage and Fertility,” Institute for Research on Poverty discussion paper, 1997), while Hilary Hoynes reaches the opposite conclusion in “Work, Welfare and Family Structure,” in Alan Auerbach, ed., Fiscal Policy: Lessons from Economic Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Studies in Canada and Europe have found that welfare offerings have little or no effect on fertility among low-income women; Australia had a temporary bump in fertility that then disappeared. To us, the balance of evidence internationally suggests that we should be vigilant about fertility effects arising from benefits for children but that they are unlikely to be a significant problem.
“millions of Americans whose suffering”: Angus Deaton, “The U.S. Can No Longer Hide from Its Deep Poverty Problem,” The New York Times, January 24, 2018.
70 percent said they had been affected by prescription drug use: Deborah A. P. Hersman, “How the Prescription Drug Crisis Is Impacting American Employers,” National Safety Council, 2017, p. 8.
an incarceration rate that is the highest in the world: H. Luke Shaefer, Pinghui Wu and Kathryn Edin, “Can Poverty in America Be Compared to Conditions in the World’s Poorest Countries?” National Poverty Center Working Paper Series, #16-07, August 2016.
The case went through endless appeals: Kenneth Reams v. State of Arkansas, Arkansas State Supreme Court case, 2018 Ark. 324, majority opinion by Judge Karen R. Baker.
each dollar invested in the programs saved up to $30: Sara B. Heller, Anuj K. Shah, Jonathan Guryan et al., “Thinking, Fast and Slow? Some Field Experiments to Reduce Crime and Dropout in Chicago,” NBER Working Paper No. 21178, May 2015.
the collective impact model: John Kania and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011.
“the breaking of a man’s spirit”: Robert F. Kennedy, speech to Cleveland City Club, April 5, 1968. The transcription on the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library website is not entirely accurate, so we relied on our own transcription from the recording.
a bargain by any calculation: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2019).
other nations have developed better childcare options: Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, “Female Labor Supply: Why Is the United States Falling Behind?,” American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 2013. See also Catherine Rampell, “Paid Family Leave Isn’t Just a Women’s Issue,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2019.
the allowance would virtually eliminate children living in extreme poverty: See H. Luke Shaefer, Sophie Collyer, Greg Duncan et al., “A Universal Child Allowance: A Plan to Reduce Poverty and Income Instability Among Children in the United States,” The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4, no. 2 (February 2018): 22.
Various studies have calculated: Chuck Collins, Darrick Hamilton, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad et al., Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2019).
Congress pulled the plug on funding for an IDA program: These individual development accounts are extensively discussed in Robert E. Friedman, A Few Thousand Dollars (New York: The New Press, 2018).
wage insurance has bipartisan support: Robert J. Shiller, “How Wage Insurance Could Ease Economic Inequality,” The New York Times, March 11, 2016.
federal job guarantee: L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler et al., “Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment,” Levy Economic Institute of Bard College, April 2018.
“As an economist, I am always asked”: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” 2009.