The most dangerous of social problems are those that go unchecked for so long that they cease to inspire indignation or action among the members of a society. The commonness of an injustice seems to spur the belief that it cannot or should not be any other way.
Poverty in the United States has become a problem of this sort. Now is a time when poverty is at an 11-year apex in this country having climbed in 2009 to 13 percent from the year before. The poverty rate for children under the age of 18 also crept up to nearly one in five owing largely to the rise in single-parent families.
The United States has failed to break its impasse on poverty during the past 35 years despite a tripling of its economy’s size over that time. The poverty rate has more or less stagnated ever since the post-World War II economic boom followed by government initiatives in the 1960s which together abated poverty considerably.
As the classic American adage goes ours is a country of equal opportunity but not necessarily of equal outcome. The anything-is-possible brand of individualism in the United States runs in our blood and endows us with unrivaled vigor but it also encourages cynicism about the poor.
Indeed poverty is caricatured by some as an incurable and expected result of some not making the most of opportunity whether for a lack of industriousness or poor choices. As for the 13 percent impoverished in the United States: Is it that they have shunned opportunity and settled for poverty or that the weight of poverty keeps opportunity out of reach?
Both answers are likely popular depending on whom you ask which would reflect the need for more dialogue about poverty as a genuine social problem.
It’s much too complex an issue to pigeonhole. It also really is universal in some regard because misfortune doesn’t discriminate. We’re all one catastrophic illness one slew of recessionary job slashes one unaccounted disaster away from the prospect of poverty. Nearly three-fifths of Americans will experience at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages of 25 and 75.
All that said what if there are in fact inadequacies in the promise of equal opportunity? Though the United States is a bastion of equality inequality runs rampant in factors as critical to success as education and health status.
The troubling thing is that it’s a vicious cycle with inequality reinforcing poverty and vice versa. Many are born into it and save for the formative influence of good schooling and a job chances are that it becomes a crippling generational problem.
In an op-ed published last Wednesday in The New York Times “Escaping From Poverty Nicholas Kristof discussed various policy interventions that offer promise in the poverty struggle. A growing body of evidence has shown that poverty can be quelled early on, with the key interventions being in education and jobs.
Time spent in school is an incubative and decisive period in one’s life during which skills are honed and attitudes are forged. But our education system is broken, worse yet under the strain of budget cuts in this recession, and it’s depriving too many kids of guidance in life when they need it most. As such, there is a lot of optimism about interventions in schools.
One idea, for instance, is to keep children on the right path from the very start through high-quality early childhood programs. Another is a bolstered ninth-grade curriculum, with an increased load of math and English, which has shown to increase attendance and performance at a pivotal juncture when poor students often drop out of school.
In a similar vein, employment is a stabilizing force both for the individual and the family. Many people want jobs but can’t get them. The current escalation of poverty attests largely to the dearth of jobs in this recession. Another agent of joblessness is the incarceration rate, which is five times as high as it was four decades ago.
Again, there is reason to believe that we can use jobs to tip the scale with those at risk of falling into poverty. A promising intervention is career academies, which supplement high school curricula with career themes and opportunities for work experience. Another is job programs, targeted to residents of public housing, which provide advice about getting jobs and offer incentives to keep them.
We must fight vigorously to secure equal opportunity for everyone. The greatest tragedies are those that society could have stepped in to prevent. Poverty must not be trivialized to a mere set of buried statistics, and our lack of progress must impel us to be both more contemplative and innovative. It’s clear that many lives can be turned around if we target the roots of poverty.
