In the atlas, Poverty in America: One Nation Pulling Apart, we focused on the link between the challenges facing the black family and the plight of black men, especially men between the ages of 18-35. Reporting in the New York Times, Erik Eckholm cites three new studies that echo the findings of the Atlas and underscore the challenges facing black men in “Black Males Left Behind” (edited by Ronald B. Mincy, Urban Institute Press, 2006), “Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men” (Harry J. Holzer, Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, Urban Institute Press, 2006) and “Punishment and Inequality in America” (Bruce Western, Russell Sage Press, forthcoming).
Key findings include:
“The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990’s.
In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20’s were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated.
By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.
Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20’s were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990’s and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20’s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30’s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school”.
Over the decade of the 1990s, public programs focused on reducing the welfare rolls of women, especially African American women with children. Despite the severity of the statistics referenced in the Atlas and reported in Eckholm’s article about the fate of black men, no similar effort of the scale of welfare reform has been undertaken to assist black men in accessing the American labor market. As author Ronald Mincy laments in the article: “We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women,” Mr. Mincy said. “We are not even beginning to think about the men’s problem on similar orders of magnitude.”
For more than 10 years, scholars, scientists and policy makers have been discussing and debating the need for a new measure of poverty that captures the experience of economic distress in America. Despite many discussions of the need to update the measure to more accurately reflect the meaning of being poor in America, because of politics and the fact that the measure’s threshold is set in the President’s office, there is no political will to really determine what actually and meaningfully constitutes being poor in America today.
The current poverty measure no longer accurately represents the experience of families and individuals. Created in the 1960s by Ms. Mollie Oshansky, of the Social Security Administration, the poverty measure was based on the caculation of a “thrifty diet” for a family of four. The measure was intended as a first cut of what economic security meant at the time. As originally constructed, the existing poverty measure no longer reflects the lived experience of Americans who are poor.
Writing for the New York Times, Anna Bernasek points out that the original measure focussed on food as a share of total expenses, which has dramatically declined since the 1960s (from 30 to 12% today). More important today are so called “non-essentials” such as housing, clothing, transportation, and medical expenses. In 1995, a National Academy Panel offered a set of revisions to make the poverty measure reflect today’s reality. Why weren’t any of the suggestions adopted? As Ann Bernasek noted, ”
The answer is politics. Thanks to a quirk of history, the poverty indicator, unlike many other economic statistics, is not under the jurisdiction of an authoritative statistical agency like the Bureau of Economic Analysis or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Instead, it resides in perhaps the most political place of all: the office of the president. And during the last four decades, no president of either party has wanted to draw attention to a statistic that the nation has come to take for granted, especially if updating it might cause the number of people regarded as living in poverty to increase.
Ideology, meanwhile, has muddied the debate about how to improve the poverty count. Some experts have tended to advocate adjustments that raise the poverty line, while others prefer ways that decrease it. “
The first step forward in developing a realistic measure of poverty is to remove the determination of the poverty measure from the Office of the President and turn it over to an independent commission or agency involved in matters associated with poverty alleviation.
