Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - RE: Baltimore: The Nature of Poverty

OA, great response. You should send it in to the NYT.

P

Sent from my grandfather's typewriter

On May 1, 2015, at 11:49 AM, Anunoby, Ogugua <AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu> wrote:

Same song. Blame the poor.

Is it not true that some inner city areas of Baltimore are yet to recover from the destruction that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Why is this so?  This DB article below may be another case of the misuse of statistics. Yes, Baltimore spends $15,483  per pupil. Does anyone know how much is needed per pupil? $15,483 may be a lot of money but it just may not be enough given the long period of underinvestment in public education. It is like stating that the higher wages are paid in the San Francisco without adding that the cost of living is higher there. Yes, townhouses were constructed for $87,000 and sold for $37,000 but what was done to ensure that the new homeowners could keep-up with the homes- jobs, childcare, healthcare, and others. Is it any real surprise that the project failed? Yes, the federal government spent $13,000 per poor person in 2013. Who got the bulk of the money? That is the question. One is reminded of the rich countries' aid budgets to poor countries and the poor in the poor countries, being blamed for the self-full-filing outcome- their continuing poverty. The poor get blamed for the unrealized outcomes.  

DB is right. The problem is in not a lack of attention. It is a lack of proper attention. Many 'experts' have long figured out how to be creative with funds' allocation and utilization, and bamboozling with statistics. They work from their answer to their question. Money is not the problem when in fact it is- its allocation and utilization. The prison industry gets a lot of money. It is not the convicts who pocket most of it. The public school system gets a lot of money. How much of it goes directly to educating the poorer students? Is there anyone who does not know that quality public education is a zip code lottery?

Why is it so hard to figure out why all the spending on the poor does not deliver expected results? Is it a case of pre-ordination like why World Bank/I.M.F. structural adjustment programs do not deliver proclaimed expected benefits to developing countries? Should it not be a matter of great public concern that a twenty-five year old in U.S.A. had a drug addict, illiterate, unemployed mother, and has no "path to upward mobility" in an equal opportunity country, after all the spending claimed on the poor? Should it not be a matter of even greater public concern that the same person, arrested reportedly without undue incident, died in police custody of the causes he did? Could a rich kid have suffered a similar fate in the same situation. Why is the safety of volunteer police officer, a higher order objective than the safety of those the police officers swear and are well compensated and resourced to protect?  Are there not enough fatal incidents already for police brutality to be a matter of urgent public concern? Is it not time already for equal attention to be given to police recruitment policies and practices as is given to police training?

Yes, there should be a shift in "how we think about poverty". Social psychology is not now an effective path to the shift. What is needed is more constructive policy actions and not new social theories. There are enough of them already. Are there reasons to suspect that the system even if not by design, is operated to continually perpetuate and grow the numbers of the under classes? May be. Look at the criminal justice and tax systems. There is no credible evidence that anyone of sound mind, will in good conscience desires or plans to be poor. White collar crime usually is a crime of choice. Petty street crime is usually not. It is oftentimes a desperate choice of last resort. Most petty criminals after all, know that their trade, unlike white collar crime, is less tolerated by the high and mighty and more severely punished by the criminal justice system. If they are together, why would they choose it?

 

Modern poverty is not inevitable. It can be alleviated with effective development, choice, and implementation of public policies. There is abundant evidence that it can be. It is increasingly becoming a choice for more countries. Great societies were created. Decay and poverty in societies is ignored and/or tolerated. In many countries, poverty is usually imposed on people by their environment that is enabling of it. Oftentimes the instrumental factors for perpetuating poverty in the environment are systemic human factors- discrimination, greed, neglect, politics, unfair/unjust  laws, and others. It is troubling that it continues to be the case that the poor are not only at the mercy of the not-poor, but are also judged and blamed for their poverty by them.

Jon Stewart and his audience may very well know what DB does not seem to know.

 

oa

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Toyin Falola
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2015 6:53 AM
To: dialogue; Yoruba Affairs
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Baltimore: The Nature of Poverty

 

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Nature of Poverty

·         90

New York TimeS MAY 1, 2015

David Brooks

Lately it seems as though every few months there's another urban riot and the nation turns its attention to urban poverty. And in the midst of every storm, there are people crying out that we should finally get serious about this issue. This time it was Jon Stewart who spoke for many when he said: "And you just wonder sometimes if we're spending a trillion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan's schools, like, we can't build a little taste down Baltimore way. Like is that what's really going on?"

The audience applauded loudly, and it's a nice sentiment, but it's not really relevant.

The problem is not lack of attention, and it's not mainly lack of money. Since 1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded. As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person. If you simply took that money and handed it to the poor, a family of four would have a household income roughly twice the poverty rate.

Yet over the last 30 years the poverty rate has scarcely changed.

In addition, American public spending on schools is high by global standards. As Peter Wehner pointed out in Commentary, in 2011 Baltimore ranked second among the nation's largest 100 school districts in how much it spent per pupil, $15,483 per year.

The Sandtown-Winchester area of Baltimore, where Freddie Gray lived, has not lacked for attention either. In the late 1980s, Baltimore's then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke decided he would make the neighborhood a model of urban restoration. He gathered public and private actors like developer James Rouse and Habitat for Humanity. They raised more than $130 million and poured it into everything from new homes, new school curriculums, new job training programs and new health care centers. Townhouses were built for $87,000 and sold to residents for $37,000.

The money was not totally wasted. By 2000, the poverty rate in the area had dropped by 4.4 percent. The share of residents who lived in owner-occupied homes had risen by 8.3 percent, according to a thorough study by The Abell Foundation. But the area was not transformed. Today there are no grocery stores in the neighborhood and no restaurants. Crime is rampant. Unemployment is high.

Despite all these efforts, there are too many young men leading lives like the one Gray led. He was apparently a kind-hearted, respectful, popular man, but he was not on the path to upward mobility. He won a settlement for lead paint poisoning.According to The Washington Post, his mother was a heroin addict who, in a deposition, said she couldn't read. In one court filing, it was reported that Gray was four grade levels behind in reading. He was arrested more than a dozen times.

It is wrong to say federal efforts to tackle poverty have been a failure. The $15 trillion spent by the government over the past half-century has improved living standards and eased burdens for millions of poor people. But all that money and all those experiments have not integrated people who live in areas of concentrated poverty into the mainstream economy. Often, the money has served as a cushion, not a ladder.

Saying we should just spend more doesn't really cut it. What's needed is a phase shift in how we think about poverty. Renewal efforts in Sandtown-Winchester prioritized bricks and mortar. But the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.

Jane Jacobs once wrote that a healthy neighborhood is like a ballet, a series of intricate interactions in which people are regulating each other and encouraging certain behaviors.

In a fantastic interview that David Simon of "The Wire" gave to Bill Keller for The Marshall Project, he describes that, even in poorest Baltimore, there once were informal rules of behavior governing how cops interacted with citizens — when they'd drag them in and when they wouldn't, what curse words you could say to a cop and what you couldn't. But then the code dissolved. The informal guardrails of life were gone, and all was arbitrary harshness.

That's happened across many social spheres — in schools, families and among neighbors. Individuals are left without the norms that middle-class people take for granted. It is phenomenally hard for young people in such circumstances to guide themselves.

Yes, jobs are necessary, but if you live in a neighborhood, as Gray did, where half the high school students don't bother to show up for school on a given day, then the problems go deeper.

The world is waiting for a thinker who can describe poverty through the lens of social psychology. Until the invisible bonds of relationships are repaired, life for too many will be nasty, brutish, solitary and short.

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Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

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