The point is that it’s easy to imagine a non-skateboarder walking by skateboard deterrents every day and taking no notice of them at all, remaining entirely unaware of the social role of these devices. Such a person would be oblivious to the power relations at work in their surrounding environment. These dynamics are especially important in the case of homelessness.
Growth Has Been Good for Decades. So Why Hasn’t Poverty Declined?
Conservatives tend to attribute the persistence of poverty, even amid economic growth, to the perverse incentives that a welfare state creates against working.
But the reality is that low-income workers are putting in more hours on the job than they did a generation ago — and the financial rewards for doing so just haven’t increased.
.. That’s the real lesson of the data: If you want to address poverty in the United States, it’s not enough to say that you need to create better incentives for lower-income people to work. You also have to devise strategies that make the benefits of a stronger economy show up in the wages of the people on the edge of poverty, who need it most desperately.
Paul Ryan, Culture and Poverty
According to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (in Ryan’s home state), the gap between the poverty rate in inner cities and that in rural areas and small towns is not as great as one might suspect. The inner city poverty rate is 19.7 percent, and the poverty rate in rural areas and small towns is 16.5 percent.
.. His research, he noted, indicates that “40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period” and “54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty.” Rank concluded, “Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans.”
The New Puritans
These are but a few voices in a choir that sings a catchy tune about a vast swath of people who have lost touch with the ethical and cultural importance of hard work. They are the New Puritans, reliant not upon any long-term economic analysis or examination of structural problems, but on a simplistic mythology about American values and a quasi-religious sanctification of the providence of work.
.. The New Puritans are snake oil salesmen hawking an all-in-one moral solution to a make-believe cultural problem. The crux of the matter is that Americans work some of the longest hours in the developed world and have seen dramatic increases in labor productivity over the past half century – two facts in direct contradiction to the claims of Dr. Path and others like him.
.. The New Puritans see the growth of welfare recipients during this time of recovery as a problem of dependency and not, despite all the evidence, as a problem of profitable companies hoarding wealth and refusing to justly compensate workers
.. America now carries the dubious distinction of having some of the most highly educated low-wage employees in the world: nearly one-fifth of all low wage earners have a four year college degree.