Despite the stereotype of religion as something that people “cling to” (to quote a different moment of condescension from this president) in desperate circumstances, actual religious practice has collapsed more quickly among Americans with weaker economic prospects than it has among the college-educated upper class.
.. A church that pays out to help the poor, but doesn’t pray with them, looks less like a church than what Pope Francis has described, unfavorably, as merely another N.G.O.
But even from a secular perspective it’s a problem, because (as Putnam’s work stresses) the social benefits of religion are stronger further down the socioeconomic ladder, and these benefits are delivered through community, practice, and belonging.
Upward Mobility for the World’s Destitute
Poverty is dropping around the world. In 1981, more than half the globe lived on the equivalent of $1.25 a day. By 1990, that number fell to 43 percent, and today it’s at 21 percent.
But almost all the gains have come from pulling up those just under the extreme poverty line, rather than from progress amid the ultrapoor: roughly the half-billion people who live on less than 75 cents a day. These truly destitute people have tended to stay that way.
The difference between poor and ultrapoor isn’t just one of degree. Being ultrapoor has an extra component: it is a trap so deep, people can’t take advantage of ways to improve their lives.
They may not send their children to school, because they don’t believe they could keep them in school long enough to benefit from education. They don’t take microcredit loans, because they lack the skills to use them and the confidence that they can repay.
.. A second ingredient was a small regular grant of food or cash.That allowed participants to take time off from labor (or begging) to learn their new business. It also protected the business; they had less reason to sell the cow to buy food.
.. “These are quite impressive results,” said Frank DeGiovanni, the director of the financial assets unit at the Ford Foundation. “But many people say, ‘Oh, anything can work in Bangladesh, because BRAC is so fabulous and has such incredible grant support.’ Just because it works in Bangladesh doesn’t mean it works anywhere else.”
.. Curiously, this happens even though the effects of the program on food, income and other factors are not large. The effects “do not correspond to our intuitive sense of what it would mean to be liberated from the trap of poverty,” Karlan and his colleagues wrote.
In a lecture at Harvard, Duflo argued that something less tangible is going on: the effect of suddenly having hope. “What we hypothesize, although we cannot directly confirm it using this data, is that this improved mental health is what gave participants the energy to work more, save and invest in their children — we see in the data that children spend more time studying,” she said. “A little bit of hope and some reassurance that an individual’s objectives are within reach can act as a powerful incentive.”
Ben Carson: It’s Not Politics or Economics, It’s the Culture
Carson’s argument that poverty is the result of poor decisions and a culture of government dependency doesn’t fit the media’s narrative.
.. But that similarity highlights how much Obama betrayed his promise of hope with a divisive, cynical presidency. Obama has ignored inner-city issues while hobnobbing with rich elites over esoteric issues like global warming.
Sex, Drugs and Poverty in Red and Blue America
The highest rates of white teenage pregnancy in the 30 states with available data are in red states. While the national white teenage pregnancy rate in 2010 was 38 per 1,000, white rates were at least 10 points higher in nine states: Oklahoma (59), West Virginia (64), Arkansas (63), South Carolina (51), Alabama (49), Mississippi (55), Tennessee (51), Kentucky (59) and Louisiana (51). Each of these states cast decisive majorities for Romney in 2012.s.
.. Regions as diverse as Europe, Japan, South America, Canada and the United States are undergoing a profound shift in fertility, reproductive attitudes and behavior. The changes include rejection of premarital virginity, social acceptance of single parenting, and the replacement of values stressing family obligation with values stressing personal autonomy.
.. The result, he said, is that “the moral control that calls for people to get married and not to live in sin ends in society as a whole, that moral control weakens and ends. There is no moral stigma, it becomes destigmatized.”
The destigmatization of once-disapproved-of behavior can be seen in the rapid growth of cohabiting couples, which, according to the census, went from 3.8 million in 2004 to 7.9 million in 2014,
.. The violent crime rate in both cities has fallen over the past decade, just as it has nationwide, although the 22.3 percent drop in Baltimore is four times as large as the 5.6 percent decline in Muskogee.