I think reality is so incredibly rich and powerful. It's like looking at the sun like we would get blinded.

the suffering comes from me forgetting who I am

I think a lot of my problems my stress a lot of my suffering is because I believe illusions to the extent that I believe that I need to become something at all need to be better than I am in any way

All the egoic stuff that we do that causes all the problems in the world because you don't know who you are

what's interesting about this now is if I think I'm just this little body and I'm nothing but this body and and my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain does. So, so that's my theory and that's that's all I am. I don't feel very big. I don't feel very important. Um, and so I'm going to probably need to do something to make myself feel a little bit better and I'm going to need to compete with you.

“So I had this problem—work or starve. So I thought I’d combine the two and decided to become a writer.”

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. George Bernard Shaw never said these words, but Charles F. Brannan did.

sordid

Aneurin Bevan

How does wealth manage to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power?

it confirms something found in the Buddhist tradition uh which is this notion of innate basic goodness that all human beings are born with Buddha nature we all have the seeds of kindness within us and scientific research strongly confirms that this is true

It comesafter a couple believes they have achieved a level of financial stability.

Poverty, by America

poverty is no equalizer.

Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you

Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse.

poverty is instability.

Poverty is pain, physical pain

Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled onincarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes.Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected toevery social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families aredenied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in thehistory of the world.

scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this “the bandwidthtax.” “Being poor,” they write, “reduces a person’s cognitive capacity morethan going a full night without sleep.” When we are preoccupied bypoverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.” Poverty does not justdeprive people of security and comfort; it siphons off their brainpower, too.

Poverty is diminished life and personhood.

There is no flag forpoor rights, after all.

Misery (misère), the Frenchsociologist Eugène Buret once remarked, “is poverty felt morally.”

Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing.

Criminal justice agencies levy steep fines and fees on the poor, oftenmaking them pay for their own prosecution and incarceration.

In the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities passed “ugly laws” banning“unsightly beggars” from public places. In the first half of the twentiethcentury, vagrancy and loitering ordinances were used to expel the poor frompark benches and street corners. Today, municipal regulations still allow thepolice to arrest the homeless for being seen in public, criminalizing abjectpoverty.

Itdisappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: Theincarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in afalsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measuresexclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych

Poverty is the loss of liberty.

According to the latest national data, one in eighteenpeople in the United States lives in “deep poverty,” a subterranean level ofscarcity. Take the poverty line and cut it in half: Anything below that isconsidered deep poverty. The deep poverty line in 2020 was $6,380annually for a single person and $13,100 for a family of four. That year,almost 18 million people in America survived under these conditions. TheUnited States allows a much higher proportion of its children—over 5million of them—to endure deep poverty than any of its peer nations.

In the land of the free, you can drop all theway down, joining the ranks of the lumpenproletariat (literally the “raggedproletariat”).

Most renting families below the poverty line now spendat least half of their income on housing, with one in four spending morethan 70 percent on rent and utility costs alone.

poverty is about money, ofcourse, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems.

The architect of the Official PovertyMeasure—the poverty line—was a bureaucrat working at the SocialSecurity Administration named Mollie Orshansky.

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson paid a visit to Appalachia and sat on therough-hewn porch of a jobless sawmill worker surrounded by children withsmall clothes and big teeth.

But itwill also require that each of us, in our own way, become povertyabolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation andrefusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.

Are we—wethe secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, thelucky—connected to all this needless suffering?

America’spoverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty thanany other advanced democracy.

How could there be, Iwondered, such bald scarcity amid such waste and opulence?

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH poverty in America?

The dancehall deejays of the 1980s and ’90s who refined the practice of “toasting” (rapping over instrumental tracks) were heirs to reggae’s politicization of music. These deejays influenced the emergence of hip-hop music in the United States and extended the market for reggae into the African American community. At the beginning of the 21st century, reggae remained one of the weapons of choice for the urban poor, whose “lyrical gun,” in the words of performer Shabba Ranks, earned them a measure of respectability.

if our core self or being is um not limited to contained within or defined by the content of our experience thoughts images feelings and so on if it is a a single infinite and indivisible whole or reality from which everyone and everything derives its apparently independent existence then our essential self must be must be whole complete lacking nothing

Now we understand why there has to be an inner reality which is made of qualia and an outer reality which is made a lot of symbols, shareable symbols, what we call matter.

this is the essence also of one and if we are part all well then we all can have this experience because it is who we are

the people who has the power need to act faster

"An' a fly go a moon And can't find food for the starving tummies" criticism on how the wealth and resources used on space exploration - is something that humanity can't understand when those billions used for the scientific pursuit/understanding of the universe, can instead be used to feed and clothe the hungry, the impoverish - basically poverty and world hunger would cease. it's sort of like criticisng the fact that we have problems here on this planet that we all need to work together to solve as a species/planet, yet we're not prioritising those problems as our main repsonisbility, something we need to fix, instead the most intelligent bunch/resourceful are spending their energy/time/reousrces on solving the mysteries of the universe instead. it's commenting on the notion of the microcosm within the macrocosm. if we as a species, esp. the intelligent and resurceful of our lot focused on solving problems like poverty, world hunger, war, crime... solve problems that continue to stagnate our human evolution/progress/conciousness, we could put an end to hegelian dialectics of problem, reaction, solution... this repititive state of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. why do we keep looking outside/external when we have problems in the inside/internal, in our very hearts, minds and homes.. on our own planet Earth? if we solved the problems at home, problems that create the suffering and keep just a few individuals privelaged/intelligent/resourceful over the rest of humanity who is stagnated and moving backwards and keeping humanity in a continous cycle of karma, the wheel of samsara of the human condition... then doesn't that mean that everyone as a whole is enlightened intelligent, resourceful? no one gets left behind and everyone becomes empowered self-sufficient, self-independent, self-enlightened, self-responsible...imagine each and every person self empowered now imagine the entire race of humanity self-empowered... that's billions of buddhas/christs - intellectuals, academics and enlightened individuals working together as a strong force of unity for a common cause. if we can fix those small problems that continue to keep humanity going backwards towards self-destructi, those small problems which greatly impact upon the bigger picture and schemes of things, then we can truly progress towards real change and together explore the universe as a human species. no one gets left behind.

we've achieved a level of prosperity for a huge number of people that was not typical of the past i mean most countries have a big middle class as well as an extremely wealthy upper 00:50:00 class but the number of people in abject poverty in the world today living on less than two dollars a day is greater than the entire population of the world 00:50:13 only 100 years ago so that's not progress

In​ 1880 Britain could with some justification be called the ‘workshop of the world’: it produced more than 20 per cent of global industrial output and about 40 per cent of the world’s manufactured exports. In the nearly half-century since Samuel published his essay of that name, historians have done much to undermine the narrative of an ‘industrial revolution’ bookended by the invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and the New Poor Law of 1834.

¹¹ For you al-ways have the poor with you, but you will notalways have me.

The city council president said Grants Pass’s goal was to “make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”

In Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court will decide whether it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment to fine, ticket, or jail someone for sleeping outside on public property if they have nowhere else to go. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would make it easier for communities to clear out homeless people’s tent encampments, even if no available housing or shelter exists.

In 1622, the famous poetand clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing thenew colony as the nation’s spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of thebody . . . to breed good bloud.”

Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could bereclaimed if they were given a fair chance.

According to Francis Moore, who visited the settlement in its secondyear of operation, two “peculiar” customs stood out: both alcohol and dark-skinned people were prohibited. “No slavery is allowed, nor negroes,”Moore wrote. As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would notpermit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.” Free labor encouragedpoor white men in sober cultivation and steeled them in the event they hadto defend the land from outside aggression. It also promised to cure settlersof that most deadly of English diseases, idleness.41

In milder weather they got as far as thinking aboutplunging a hoe into the ground.

History of the United States (1834)

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

Britishcolonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back inEngland, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive tothe New World.

Proverbs 21:5 New Living Translation, “Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty.”

. It should be noted that stress can be seen as the inverse of “satisfaction” [22], and is relative to a contextual and non-stationary target.

what I'm advocating here isn't radical redistribution it's merely more 00:13:08 redistribution in a and structurally dependable manner that is fair that is inclusive and that allows for the poor and improvised Nations to be granted excess not just a vital strategic resources that are very much needed in 00:13:21 maintaining the quality of life at own citizens but also more importantly the ropes to climb the ladder

Americans are increasingly experiencing economic insecurity. According to a recent survey by Bankrate, 6 out of every 10 of us don’t even have $500 in the bank.

I do want to point out one more really significant implication here which is how it affects our experience of time

t the irony of course is that if this desire if this craving for money if this lack project and we could also call it reality project because another 00:13:08 way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole right 00:13:20 because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside that's going to secure this sense of self-insight the tragedy of the whole process of 00:13:32 course is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn it's never going to be enough because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem

if you ask about things like lack projects or reality projects on the individual level you know I was talking 00:32:01 about how the separation is a delusion it's uncomfortable we become preoccupied with trying to find something out here that'll fill up our sense of lack and you know we can Wonder is there 00:32:13 something comparable at the civilizational level and frankly I think that there is I think that it is our Collective preoccupation with progress

there's 00:08:43 nothing there that could be secured and here's the important point I think we experienced that we experience it as a sense of lack 00:08:58 that is to say the sense that something is wrong with me something is missing something isn't quite right I'm not good enough and the reality is I think all of us to 00:09:14 some degree have some sense of that some sense of lack even though we might ignore it or cover it up there's there's some sense of that but because it's mostly sort of unconscious in the sense that we don't 00:09:29 really know where it comes from

Ludwig firebach has this idea that religion is a place where human 00:12:22 beings sort of um alienate their intrinsic superpowers right they they turn them inside out and they push them into some kind of Heaven which is basically the future

Cap top 20% of energy users to reduce carbon emissions

how to helpmost effectively children from ‘poor circumstances’.

Lomborg proposes that since the Kyoto agreement limits economic activities, developing countries that suffer from pollution and poverty most, will be perpetually handicapped economically.

“They were professional poor people,” he told an interviewer, invoking his parents. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”

As a result, the tax creditfor 2022 will be based on the 2021 federal poverty lines.2021 Poverty Lines for the 48 Contiguous States and the District of ColumbiaFor families/households with more than 8 persons, add $4,540 for each additional person (100% Poverty Line)Persons in family/household 100% Poverty Line 138% Poverty Line 400% Poverty Line1 $12,880 $17,774 $51,5202 $17,420 $24,040 $69,6803 $21,960 $30,305 $87,8404 $26,500 $36,570 $106,0005 $31,040 $42,835 $124,1606 $35,580 $49,100 $142,3207 $40,120 $55,366 $160,4808 $44,660 $61,631 $178,6402021 Poverty Lines for AlaskaFor families/households with more than 8 persons, add $5,680 for each additional person (100% Poverty Line)Persons in family/household 100% Poverty Line 138% Poverty Line 400% Poverty Line1 $16,090 $22,204 $64,3602 $21,770 $30,043 $87,0803 $27,450 $37,881 $109,8004 $33,130 $45,719 $132,5205 $38,810 $53,558 $155,2406 $44,490 $61,396 $177,9607 $50,170 $69,235 $200,6808 $55,850 $77,073 $223,4002021 Poverty Lines for HawaiiFor families/households with more than 8 persons, add $5,220 for each additional person (100% Poverty Line)Persons in family/household 100% Poverty Line 138% Poverty Line 400% Poverty Line1 $14,820 $20,452 $59,2802 $20,040 $27,655 $80,1603 $25,260 $34,859 $101,0404 $30,480 $42,062 $121,9205 $35,700 $49,266 $142,8006 $40,920 $56,470 $163,6807 $46,140 $63,673 $184,5608 $51,360 $70,877 $205,440

2023 Poverty Guidelines for the 48 Contiguous States and the District of ColumbiaPersons in family/householdPoverty guideline1$14,580219,720324,860430,000535,140640,280745,420850,560 For families/households with more than 8 persons, add $5,140 for each additional person.

HHS Poverty Guidelines for 2023 The 2023 poverty guidelines are in effect as of January 19, 2023. Federal Register Notice, January 19, 2023 - Full text. The Poverty Guidelines API is now available with the 2023 data. Join our listserv to stay up-to-date on the latest news regarding the poverty guidelines. 2023 POVERTY GUIDELINES FOR THE 48 CONTIGUOUS STATES AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Persons in family/household Poverty guideline 1 $14,580 2 $19,720 3 $24,860 4 $30,000 5 $35,140 6 $40,280 7 $45,420 8 $50,560 For families/households with more than 8 persons, add $5,140 for each additional person. 2023 POVERTY GUIDELINES FOR ALASKA Persons in family/household Poverty guideline 1 $18,210 2 $24,640 3 $31,070 4 $37,500 5 $43,930 6 $50,360 7 $56,790 8 $63,220 For families/households with more than 8 persons, add $6,430 for each additional person. 2023 POVERTY GUIDELINES FOR HAWAII Persons in family/household Poverty guideline 1 $16,770 2 $22,680 3 $28,590 4 $34,500 5 $40,410 6 $46,320 7 $52,230 8 $58,140 For families/households with more than 8 persons, add $5,910 for each additional person. Resources Prior Poverty Guidelines and Federal Register References A chart with percentages (e.g., 125 percent) of the guidelines (PDF) Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the Poverty Guidelines and Poverty Poverty guidelines — gross or net income The poverty line for a state or city The number of poor people in a state or city How the poverty line was developed Further Resources on Poverty Measurement, Poverty Lines, and Their History ASPE research on poverty The Census Bureau's Poverty Home Page

By making an investmentup front to alleviate poverty, the evidence suggests that we will be repaid manytimes over in the lower costs associated with a host of social problems.

As has been demonstrated, it is not a question of paying ornot paying. Rather, it is a question of how we want to pay, which then affectsthe amount we end up spending.

There is, however, an argument often made with respect to not fully addressingpoverty and inequality. It is based on the assumption that there is a necessarytrade- off between having a strong economy and having a robust social welfarestate. The recent origins of this argument can be traced back to an influen-tial book entitled, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by the economistArthur Okun.

However, there is a second way of estimating the difference between the priceof ending poverty and what it is costing us. It is through a measure known asthe poverty gap or the poverty income deficit. This measures what it would costto lift all poor households with children younger than 18 years to the level ofthe poverty line. In other words, how much total income is needed to pull everyAmerican child out of poverty? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, thatfigure for 2015 was $86.9 billion.12 For $86.9 billion, every American householdwith younger than 18 years in poverty could be raised out of poverty.We can then compare this figure to our overall estimate of the costs of child-hood poverty, which is $1.03 trillion. Combining these two figures results in aratio of savings to cost of approximately 12:1.

By summing together these costs, the overall estimate is that in 2015, child-hood poverty in the United States was costing the nation $1.03 trillion a year.This number represented 5.4 percent of the U.S. annual GDP.The bottom line is that child poverty represents a significant economicburden to the United States.

to lowered economic productivity through reduced earnings. In addition,increased health costs amount to $192 billion, whereas costs associated withincreased crime and incarceration (increased victimization costs of street crime;increased corrections and crime deterrence; increased social costs of incarcer-ation) total $406 billion.

For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

To a large extent, we have failed to recognize that poverty places enormouseconomic, social, and psychological costs on the nonpoor as well as the poor.These costs affect us both individually and as a nation, although we have beenslow to recognize them. Too often, the attitude has been, “I don’t see how I’maffected, so why worry about it?”

The 1960s were a period of time when poverty in theUnited States was cut in half. This should be seen as a major economic ac-complishment. The War on Poverty played an important role in this decline.It demonstrated that the nation’s poverty is not immovable and that genuineprogress is possible with a concerted effort by the government and a growingeconomy.

One dominant way that people think about poverty, both in scholarship and in publicdiscourse, is to focus on demographic characteristics. This explanation assumes thatthere is something wrong with poor people’s individual characteristics: that they aremore likely to be single parents, they are not working enough, they are too young, orthey are not well-educated. So, the way to attack poverty, from this perspective, wouldbe to reduce single-parenthood or reduce the number of people with low education. Thisexplanation concentrates on the individual characteristics of the poor people themselvesand how they are different from nonpoor people.The problem with this explanation is that it does not adequately explain thebig differences in poverty between countries. For example, think about the big fourindividual risks of poverty—single parenthood, becoming a head of household at anearly age, low- education, and unemployment. These are indisputably the four bigcharacteristics that predict your risk of poverty. If the demographic explanation iscorrect, then the United States should have very high levels of single-parenthood, youngheadship, low educational attainment, and unemployment. That would explain why wehave high poverty: We have a large number of people with those four characteristics.The reality, however, is that the United States is actually below average in these areascompared with other rich democracies.

Accordingly, poverty acts to reduce overall available bandwidth. It does thisthrough creating greater stress and worries, reduced nutrition, exposure to toxicenvironments, and so on. For example, the constant worry of how to survive ona day-to- day basis acts to reduce bandwidth:Being poor means having less money to buy things, but it also means havingto spend more of one’s bandwidth managing that money. The poor mustmanage sporadic income, juggle expenses, and make difficult trade-offs.Even when the poor are not actually making financial decisions, thesepreoccupations can be distracting. Thinking and fretting about money caneffectively tax bandwidth.23This body of research has demonstrated that it is important to understanddecision- making not only within the socioeconomic context of individuals’lives, but within the psychological context as well.

The magic bullet of education and skillseliminating poverty is an alluring one, but without a substantial increase in thenumber and quality of opportunities available, it is only a mirage.

However, there is fatal flaw to this argument—as an overall macro strategyfor reducing poverty, it will be ineffective unless we also increase the overallquantity and quality of opportunities, particularly job opportunities, in society.In other words, by providing an individual with greater education, we havemade them more competitive in the job market, but only at the expense ofsomeone else. In this sense, the strategy is played as a zero-sum game.

The critical mistake that has been made in the past is that we have equatedthe question of who loses the game with the question of why the game produceslosers in the first place. They are, in fact, distinct and separate questions.

What greater education and skills allow an individual to do is to move fur-ther up in the overall queue of people looking to find a well-paying and re-warding job. However, because of the limited number of such jobs, only a setamount of people will be able to land such jobs. Consequently, one’s positionin the queue can change as a result of human capital, but the same amount ofpeople will still be stuck at the end of the line if the overall opportunities re-main the same.

One of the most enduring poverty myths across the political and ideologicalspectrum is that if we were able to provide individuals with enough educationand skills, poverty could be eliminated.

One of the clear signs that the bottleneck to low-income adults working moreresults from their lack of opportunities is provided by looking at their hours of workover the business cycle. When the economy is strong and jobs are plentiful, low-incomeworkers are more likely to find work, find work with higher pay, and be able to securemore hours of work than when the economy is weak. In 2000, when the economy wasclose to genuine full employment, the unemployment rate averaged 4.0 percent and thepoverty rate was 11.3 percent; but in 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, theunemployment rate averaged 9.6 percent and the poverty rate was almost 15.1 percent.What changed in those years was not poor families’ attitudes toward work but simplythe availability of jobs. Among the bottom one-fifth of nonelderly households, hoursworked per household were about 40 percent higher in the tight labor market of 2000than in recession- plagued 2010.Given the opportunity for work or additional work hours, low-income Americanswork more. A full-employment agenda that increases opportunities in the labor market,alongside stronger labor standards such as a higher minimum wage, reduces poverty.

research finds that minimum wage increases are associatedwith significant reductions in poverty.

A final point regarding the myth of hard work and poverty is that this mythis particularly powerful because it implies a sense of justice and fairness. Thosewho do well in life through their hard work are seen as deserving, and thosewho do not do well in life through their lack of hard work are also seen as de-serving of their fate.14 There is something comforting about the idea that peopleget their just rewards. Unfortunately, neither the world nor poverty is fair. AsMichael Harrington wrote in his 1963 book, The Other America:The real explanation of why the poor are where they are is that they madethe mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of thecountry, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group. Oncethat mistake has been made, they could have been paragons of will and mo-rality, but most of them would never even have had a chance to get out ofthe other America.15

The overrepresentation of AfricanAmericans as poor, in and of itself, has been found to undermine support forantipoverty initiatives by activating racist and classist stereotypes about lazi-ness and lack of motivation among African Americans and people experiencingpoverty (see also Chapter 6).15

Asset limits (or savings penalties) are designed sothat only the most vulnerable can access public benefit programs. However, in practice,they discourage low-income households from having a checking or savings account andbuilding a savings cushion. Relaxed asset limits increase low-income household savingsand mainstream financial market participation.

In contrast, poverty is something that most Americans will experience fora short period of time as a consequence of very “normal” occurrences—theloss of a job, the birth of a child, the transition to adulthood, the dissolutionof a marriage, and so on.

To truly alleviate poverty on a large scale, we must fix a system in which normallife experiences such as childbirth can translate into economic insecurity. Mostof the poor are not unexplainable anomalies in an otherwise well-functioningsociety. Instead, they are the normal consequence of structural arrangementsguaranteed to produce economic insecurity.

Unemployed workers are much more likelyto fall into poverty in countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan,compared with countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland.

Consider another example—education. It is true that in most countries, asin the United States, a higher level of educational attainment is typically as-sociated with a lower risk of economic insecurity. But the penalties associatedwith low levels of educational attainment, and the rewards associated with highlevels of attainment, vary significantly by country. Full-time workers without ahigh school degree in Finland, for instance, report the same earnings as thosewith a high school degree. In the United States, however, these workers ex-perience a 24 percent earnings penalty for not completing high school.23 InNorway, a college degree yields only a 20 percent earnings increase over a highschool degree for full-time workers, versus a much higher 68 percent increase inthe United States.24 The percentage of those with a high school degree earningat or below the poverty threshold is more than 4 times higher in the UnitedStates than in Belgium.25

In the United States, we have col-lectively decided that we are not going to protect all families to the same degree,and this is reflected in our social policies and resulting poverty rates for thesefamilies.

David Brady and colleagues have shown this to be empirically the case across29 rich democracies. The authors focused on four major risks of poverty—loweducation, single motherhood, young adults heading a household, and unem-ployment. They found that although the prevalence of these risks in the UnitedStates is actually below the average in other countries, the rate of poverty inthe United States is the highest. The reason is that “the penalties for risks inthe United States are the highest of the 29 countries. An individual with allfour risks has an extremely heightened probability of being poor in the UnitedStates.”

What is abnormal about this situation is not that people experience theseevents, but that we have collectively chosen as a society to punish these normallife events so severely

Indicative of howclose many Americans are to poverty, a recent study by the Federal ReserveBank found that 37 percent of Americans do not have enough savings put asideto protect them from a $400 emergency.20

Driving this home, a recent FederalReserve survey found that 37 percent of Americans cannot cover a $400 unexpectedexpense with savings or its equivalence.

Federal Reserve Bank, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in2019” (Washington DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2020).

For millions of Americans who are living pay-check to paycheck and precariously close to the poverty line, normal life eventslike the birth of a child or temporary loss of a job can send them below thepoverty line. But poverty spells tend to be short, and they are caused by the riskassociated with normal events that happen to most of us across the life course.They are just more catastrophic for some than for others.

economic insecurity will strike a majorityof the population but will do so for a relatively short period of time.

Employment, education, and marriage are helpful in both avoiding povertyand exiting faster if one does become poor.

Poverty spells triggered by moving out of one’s parents’ house tend to bethe shortest, while spells triggered by the birth of a child tend to be the longest.

Research has also shown that poverty entrances and exits are most oftencaused by changes in employment status and/or financial resources.

within 1 or 2 years,the majority of people escaped from poverty. Within 1 year, 53 percent of newspells ended; 70 percent ended within 2 years, and more than three-fourthswithin 3 years. Less than 15 percent of spells last more than 5 years.3 If weconsider long-term poverty as lasting 5 or more consecutive years, then the vastmajority of American poverty spells do not meet such a standard.

It turns out that a much more accurate picture is that povertyspells tend to be short but frequent.

The culture of poverty argument asserts that poverty has become a way of lifefor many of the poor, and that this way of life is passed down from one genera-tion to the next.

sociologist Elijah Anderson’s memorable phrase, the “iconicghetto.”

One reason for this is that poverty is not something that people wish to ac-knowledge or draw attention to. Rather, it is something that individuals andfamilies would like to go away. As a result, many Americans attempt to concealtheir economic difficulties as much as possible.22 This often involves keeping upappearances and trying to maintain a “normal” lifestyle. Such poverty downthe block may at first appear invisible. Nevertheless, the reach of poverty iswidespread, touching nearly all communities across America.

In 1990, 15.1 percent of the poor were residingin high- poverty neighborhoods. That figure dropped to 10.3 percent by 2000,rose to 13.6 percent for 2010, and then fell to 11.9 percent for 2015.

It is a region marked by historicallylow wages paid to farm laborers and their families.

High-poverty neighborhoods arefrequently defined as census tracts in which 40 percent or more of the residentsare living below the poverty line.6

onlyapproximately 10 to 15 percent of those in poverty do so

The cost of child poverty is not just borne by the poor. When the expenses related tolost productivity, crime, and poor health are added up, it is estimated that child povertycosts the nation between $800 billion and $1.1 trillion per year. This is vastly higherthan the estimated $90 to $111 billion per year it would take to implement a programpackage that would lift half of children out of poverty.

10 percent of children spend atleast half of their childhood living in poverty.

Or, take the case of unemployment as described by sociologist C. WrightMills:When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his per-sonal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of theman, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and

Although the causes of poverty have not been examined in this chapter,the findings presented here suggest that given its widespread nature, povertyappears systematic to our economic structure. In short, we have met the enemy,and they are us.

Approximately half (49.2 percent) of all U.S. children between theages 1 and 20 years will at some point reside in a household that receives foodstamps.14

three-fourths of Americans will encounterpoverty or near- poverty (150 percent below the official poverty line).4

Results indicate that between the ages of 20 and75 years, nearly 60 percent of Americans will experience living for at least 1 yearbelow the official poverty line, while three-fourths of Americans will encounterpoverty or near- poverty (150 percent below the official poverty line).4

The underlying theme tyingthese myths together is that poverty is often perceived to be an issue of“them” rather than an issue of “us”—that those who experience povertyare viewed as strangers to mainstream America, falling outside accept-able behavior, and as such, are to be scorned and stigmatized.

Income inequality refers to how wide or narrow the overall distribution of an-nual income is.5

The mostcommon relative poverty measure is one that counts individuals as poor if theyfall below one-half of a country’s median income.4

Could the maintenance of these mythsactually be useful for particularly powerful constituencies? Does the contin-uation of these myths serve a purpose or function for other segments of theAmerican population? If so, who and what might that be?

Mark Robert Rank

Lawrence M. Eppard

Heather E. Bullock

But until all participants in the debate recognize the overwhelming importance of having two parents in the home, we’re not going to get very far in improving opportunity.

Chetty’s paper reports that “the strongest and most robust predictor [of the level of upward mobility in an area] is the fraction of children with single parents.”

As more gadgets, bikes and cars are tracked, thieves may be deterred from stealing them at all. But for those who persist, don’t we want them to fear the police are coming — and not their victims?

Well they are of course individual experiences but they're ones that are widely shared.These are things that if you talk to a vast range of people living in poverty you'd hear very similar things.And that’s because what they're speaking about is a sort of systematic set of social reactions to poverty and to poor people.In the process, poor people are stigmatised.They are judged as being inadequate.That poverty, as it were, results from them being poor people.That there's something in their moral character, their make up that makes them become poor and that, in a very powerful way in the present day, we treat poverty as though it is their own fault.

; until, in 1907, eachclass had come to be dealt with according to principles which wereobviously very different from those of 1834. The report of this investi¬gation was presented to the Poor Law Commission, with the interest¬ing result that we heard no more of the “ principles of 1834 ”! It wassubsequently published as English Poor Law Policy (1910).

First, our numbers have risen by 1.4 billion, nearly a hundred million per year. In other words, we’ve added another China or 40 more Canadas to the world. The growth rate has fallen slightly, but consumption of resources — from fossil fuel to water, from rare earths to good earth — has risen twice as steeply, roughly doubling our impact on nature. This outrunning of population by economic growth has lifted perhaps a billion of the poorest into the outskirts of the working class, mainly in China and India. Yet those in extreme poverty and hunger still number at least a billion. Meanwhile, the wealthiest billion — to which most North Americans and Europeans and many Asians now belong — devour an ever-growing share of natural capital. The commanding heights of this group, the billionaires’ club, has more than 2,200 members with a combined known worth nearing $10 trillion; this super-elite not only consumes at a rate never seen before but also deploys its wealth to influence government policy, media content, and key elections. Such, in a few words, is the shape of the human pyramid today.