Poverty

This month’s Atlantic has a story about housing and poverty, and to me it’s a case study in what’s wrong with the safety-net-as-opportunity narrative.

The article argues that the Section 8 housing vouchers and the destruction of public housing are responsible for the uptick in crime in smaller-scale cities like Memphis, where much of the reporting was done. But the argument fails to pass the smell test because a)crime has largely been dropping like a stone for the last 15 years and b) it doesn’t compare statistics on Section 8 usage in larger cities, where crime hasn’t gone up. However, while it may not be structurally coherant, the argument does fit into the neoliberal narrative on anti-poverty policy, where good intentions produce bad results, and where it’d be nice to do something about poverty, but unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do. Sounds like it's ready to publish.

Putting crime aside, the article does tell an interesting story about how housing policy is changing. In the 1990s, housing policy focused on addressing concentrated poverty, which was considered more harmful and offered less opportunity than diffuse poverty. Housing projects came down, Section 8 vouchers were given out, and people were supposedly on their way to greener pastures. However, most folks who moved out didn't do much better.

So has our housing policy really failed, as the article implies? I’d argue no, because the primary purpose of programs like Section 8 isn’t to make things better but to keep them from getting worse. Having a voucher helps ensure you won’t live in dilapidated housing or be forced onto the street. It is, in other words, a safety net program. To say that the program failed to achieve its goals is a distortion of what its primary goals are.

But this isn’t the author’s fault- both liberals and conservatives have sold housing policy as way to reduce poverty. Conservatives thought if you got rid of the projects, you’d get rid of poverty, while liberals thought if you let folks move out of the racism-created ghettos, you’d get rid of poverty. Turns out, it’s a bit more complicated than both of those stories.

Strangely, the article doesn't make it to this point, and I'd speculate it's because this safety-net-as-opportunity narrative contributes to individualistic thinking. Take the author's closing remarks:

The problems of poverty run so deep that we’re unlikely to know the answer for a generation. Social scientists tracking people who are trying to improve their lives often talk about a “weathering effect,” the wearing-down that happens as a lifetime of baggage accumulates. With poor people, the drag is strong, even if they haven’t lived in poverty for long. Kids who leave poor neighborhoods at a young age still have trouble keeping up with their peers, studies show. They catch up for a while and then, after a few years, slip back. Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.

As usual, the causes of poverty are reduced to the individual. Poverty exists not for lack of get up and go, as popular opinion has it, but for the psychological effects of a poverty-stricken environment. So poverty is a viscous cycle, and there’s not much you can do about it.

But that’s RIDICULOUSLY STUPID. People move out of poverty ALL THE TIME. The economy gets better, our policies shaping opportunity get better, and people move out of poverty. It's lost on the author that all the policies mentioned aren't primarily meant to lift people out of poverty, and that other policy does it more effectively.

This type of defeatism isn't particular to the safety-net-as-opportunity frame. Individualistic narratives of all types produce it. And even though there's leftward movement in our politics, Americans still tend to see social policy through the lens of individualism, unless otherwise prompted. While it may take a more subtle, though equally insidious, form in the Atlantic, you can bet its nastier cousin has an even stronger hold on media that doesn’t aspire to middlebrow respectability. The challenge remains to elevate the discourse to the systemic level, and the safety-net-as-opportunity argument consistently fails to do this.

When reframing anti-poverty work comes up, I often hear reservations about taking the word "poverty" out of our vocabulary. Lots of people think you can't address the issues if you can't speak about them directly. While I think they're wrong, the point gets at a deeper debate about how to talk to an American public that seems like it just doesn't care about poverty.

The first couple of times I heard this question raised, I thought it was easily resolved. There's a million and one ways to talk about poverty in different terms. Phrases like "low-wage work" have the benefit of being more specific (about jobs for low-income people) and get people focused on the structural causes of poverty. Maybe I'm being stubborn, but I just don't think this is an arguable point.

But if the debate was about words and not ideas, it would have ended long ago. Rather, I think the real debate is over what to do about American values. As you may know, it's been a while since Americans have done much to reduce poverty. Does that mean our values need to be overhauled? Or can we emphasize some part of American culture and deemphasize the rest?

I believe that all we really need is a change of priorities. Lots of public opinion surveys show that Americans believe "we're all in this together." That belief, however, must compete with individualism, the other major current in American political culture. Individualism may have been dominant recently, but in the not-too-distant past, Americans weren't quite so individualistic. Public-spiritedness once trumped individualism, and it can again. This is the idea behind the Demos Center for the Public Sector's work on framing government, EPI's work on framing the economy, and Inclusion's work on framing low-wage work.

Now, the folks who want to use the word "poverty" have legitimate concerns. One of those is that poor people will be framed out of the policy agenda, a la Clinton-style triangulation, if you don't talk about poverty. Sometimes I hear communications experts do this- they say, "forget about poor people, nobody will ever go for that. You gotta focus on the middle class." So their concerns are warranted, but they're being too cautious. Not all communications folks agree on everything, and there are ways of including low-income folks in effective frames.

Another concern: who's excluded from the "we" in "we're all in this together"- that is, the "other"- racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, rural folks, to name a few. Many Americans still have not embraced stigmatized populations, so frames rooted in a vision of an "us" could exclude them. It follows, then, that the poverty frame must be redefined and the lens through which Americans understand it changed fundamentally. If certain groups are always going to be excluded, then the only alternative is to get people to value poverty reduction per se.

There's also truth to this point, but it's too pessimistic. Far more folks are included in the national "we" than they think. Granted, much more could be done to get folks to see marginalized populations as "one of them." This is vital, but long-term, work. Indeed, much of it began in the '60s, and I think it's now paying dividends. While we still haven't destigmatized poverty, America has become a far more inclusive society since 1968. In today's environment, we will get results if we put our ideas into a frame that's tied to a vision of an expansive "us."

But a debate needs to happen over how to prioritize both the long-term work of broadening the "us" and the short-term work of building a frame for inclusive policy. This debate hasn't been happening, but it could help move things forward.

When analyzing the UK's child poverty target it is critically important to remember that it uses a relative measure. Poverty is set at 60 percent of median income. For the past decade, median incomes in the UK have risen above inflation. Reducing child poverty by 17 percent over 6 years, relative to a rising median is no small feat, and makes the UK’s efforts so very commendable. That the job is getting tricky in this economic and political climate is not surprising. With a reduction as dramatic as 17 percent, the message must have resounded with some segment of the electorate. But for a host of nuanced reasons, even jobless Brits are now more likely to give their vote to the Tories rather than to Labour. In most circles, this is viewed as “people just being tired of Labour,” a phenomenon we Americans tend to answer with the help of term limits and set election days, neither of which exist in the UK.

It’s undeniable though: since the Labour Government took power in 1997, the tide has raised all ships, and smaller boats have been towed closer to the fleet.

Having studied first hand the successes and challenges of British policies on social inclusion, I’ve been asked recently why my friends at inclusionist.org and I advocate so strongly for a relative poverty measure when “it’s not likely to happen”?

Here's my case:

1. We believe in a more inclusive society. We believe in a more inclusive society where our government, our public services, and our community-based organizations have the power to bring those who have been excluded back into the mainstream of society. The only way to know if this is happening is to take a social-inclusion approach that measures against what’s happening in the middle, and whether the gaps between excluded groups and the whole of society are narrowing.

2. We’ve got the political capital, and we can build the political will. We’re enthusiastic, hopeful and ready to demand a little extra from the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, and, c’mon – let’s start to believe it – a progressive president. To poverty and social inclusion analysts across the nation, we ask: “When is a relative measure of poverty more likely to happen?”

3. We don’t have to wait for the government to do it. There are some very encouraging poverty and child poverty campaigns that are building momentum in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut, to name a few. To achieve at least a smidgen of the success that the UK has achieved, they’ll need to start by re-conceptualizing their state’s notion of poverty by identifying the state’s median income and measuring from there.

Conventional measurements of 100 percent or 200 percent of the official poverty line are more easily calculated and sold, but it’s not really the smart policy we’re capable of developing. Without a true relative measure, we’re stuck in the same old school ideas that haven’t taken us as far as we might go. Generating ideas independent of government—isn’t that what America is bloody about?

(This guest post by Natalie Branosky of the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (CESI is a UK think tank, but Natalie is from the U.S.) was originally written as a comment on Shawn Fremstad's post about Kate Stanley's recent Guardian op-ed on the UK's poverty reduction goal. The Editors.)

From today's Guardian, IPPR's Kate Stanley notes that "the goal of ending child poverty by 2020 has failed to strike a chord with the [UK] electorate" and outlines some of the steps that need to be taken to actually meet the goal:

The next year will be a real test of the government's mettle: will it stand by its historic pledge and find the resources, in a hostile political and economic climate, to halve child poverty by 2010, or will it weaken and put resources into more popular causes? Strange though it may seem to many, the goal of ending child poverty by 2020 has failed to strike a chord with the electorate.

To meet the 2010 target, the method is quite simple. The government will have to find around £2.8bn next year and the year after to increase the child tax credit (or some similarly targeted measure).

Meeting the ultimate 2020 target will require a more sophisticated strategy. To start with, the UK has the highest proportion of children growing up in workless households, so more needs to be done to tackle worklessness. This will necessitate a more radical approach to welfare reform.

However, more than half of all poor children live in households where someone is working, so much more needs to be done to make sure that people move out of poverty when they move into work.

While tax credits will continue to have an important role in raising incomes, there is a limit to what can be achieved through tax credits alone. Measures are also needed to help households reduce the risk of poverty by having more than one person in the household in work. This means doing more to enable mothers and fathers to balance work and care.

And, of course, low wages have to be addressed. This means high-paying industries need to start paying their low-paid workers more and low-paying industries need greater support and greater challenge to raise their wages.

In the short term then, the challenge is coming up with significant extra cash to transfer to poor families. This will get the government back on track to meeting its ultimate target and send out a message that an anti-poverty agenda still sits at Labour's heart. In the longer term, a much stronger coalition between government, employers and citizens is needed to achieve sustainable change and end child poverty for good.

If a poverty reduction goal has "failed to strike a chord" with the relatively more liberal UK electorate--this is a country, after all, with a nationalized health system, one that makes the Canadian model look conservative--it seems safe to assume that such a goal may have even less resonance with the US electorate. One lesson might be that a goal by itself, particularly if set in a top-down manner by a government in power, may not be sufficient to mobilize public opinion in support of policies to meet that goal. In a parliamentary democracy like the UK, lack of broad public support might not be an obstacle to meeting such a goal, but it's of considerably greater importance in a non-parliamentary system like the US.

An emerging challenge for liberals is to how to frame the apparent success of New York City's program that gives cash rewards to low-income people who exhibit certain kinds of good behavior, like attending school and visiting a health clinic regularly. An individualistic perspective informs the program's design, and according to some recent evaluations, it's working fairly well (Kathy G has a good description of it).

So how should liberals frame it? Half-Changed World suggests the following:

I agree that I worry about the framing of these payments as all about overcoming poor people's bad values. You can also tell a convincing story about how the financial incentives make it possible for a worker who is paid by the hour to take off from work to go to a parent teacher conference, or wait in a crowded medical clinic to get the kid immunized, or let the parent keep their job by hiring a more reliable babysitter, but that's not how these payments are being covered in the media.

As true as this point is, I see a couple of problems with it. First, it seems like the tail is wagging the dog. These cash payments are conditioned on behavior. Changes in behavior are more a result of that fact than anything else. To me, the framing feels like an attempt to claim the policy's success for liberalism, but it just isn't. I worry that rather than reinforcing a progressive narrative, it would muddle what people think progressives are all about.

Second, it doesn't direct enough attention to systems as opposed to individuals. I don't blame the author for this- I've been thinking it over, and I just can't come up with a systems-based frame. I think the reason is it isn't about systems. It's about individual motivation. There's no alternative to the conservative frame, because it's conservative policy. You can't shoehorn everything into a progressive frame.

But that's ok. A better way to frame it is to admit it's working because of individual incentives but put more stress on a progressive narrative. I.e: yes, the program does encourage good behavior, but the far more important task ahead of us is to fix the systems that leave so many folks behind.

I also think it's important to encourage the kind of conservative thinking that led to this program. More conservatives should be thinking about how government programs can reward good behavior. Many are way too focused on punishing bad behavior by kicking people off programs or throwing them in jail. I've been reading Prof. Charles Karelis's book about what's wrong with the conservative economist's understanding of poverty, and I think it, like the New York City program, represents the compassionate side of conservative thinking on poverty. He denies that poor people are irrationally unmotivated and must be punished. Rather, he argues that they're unmotivated, just for the rational reason that work and work supports don't provide enough reward. What follows is a a larger role for government and an expanded notion of social responsibility.

But as much as I hope conservatives pursue this line of policy more, I really hope liberals don't. Plenty of progress can only be achieved by changing systems, and when we reinforce the conservative narrative, we undermine our own. I don't think that means opposing good programs, like New York's seems to be, but it does mean pushing for a different set of policies, advancing a frame rooted in systems, and condemning hyperindividualism.

One of the good things about the Half In Ten campaign is that it doesn't just cast poverty as a social issue. That's not to say poverty isn't a social issue- just that it has economic impacts. Right now, it seems smart to me to play up the relationship between poverty and economic growth, because the economy is first on everyone's mind. Half in Ten uses the "from poverty to prosperity" language, and it promotes a paper that makes the case that reducing poverty grows the economy. This point can't be made loudly enough, and it's definitely a good thing it's being made.

I just wonder if they couldn't do a better job making the argument. First, they claim that everyone benefits by raising the productivity of workers at the bottom of the labor market. But productivity gains are a necessary but insufficient condition of widespread wage gains. Who knows where the gains would go? Second, some growth comes from a reduction in crime and the assorted dysfunction that poverty fosters. All this may be true, but I wonder if framing it this way seems like rewarding bad behavior. Some research suggests that people want to punish deviant behavior even if it conflicts with their self-interest.

And most importantly, there's no meta-frame. Jared Bernstein suggests two ways to frame economic policy: the you're-your-own frame and the we're-all-in-this-together frame. It's not clear which one the campaign embraces. The authors argue for policies that would ensure shared prosperity- they propose a higher minimum wage, better collective bargaining rules, and a bigger and more inclusive EITC. But they're framed as a way to raise the productivity of low-skill workers and their families. This focuses attention on individual low-income folks, their contributions to the general welfare, and what they deserve. Given the stereotypes about shiftless low-income people, I doubt this thinking would lead to a productive conversation about poverty and the economy. I also worry that appealing so directly to economic self-interest gets people thinking about what they would gain as individuals. People may default to thinking in the conservative you're-on-your-own frame.

Framing poverty reduction as economic growth promotion requires a full embrace of we're-all-in-this-together economics, I think. What we want is an economy that reflects the belief that we as a nation rise and fall together, where shared prosperity creates a virtuous cycle of shared growth. From within this frame, it's much more appropriate and effective to promote the shared benefits of increased productivity and even reduced crime.

In a previous post, I noted that the Half in Ten Campaign's website was, well, not so hot—particularly its use of images that seem likely to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about poverty (no white men, mostly African-Americans, etc). They've recently added some new images, including a white male construction worker, but I still end up being decidedly non-enthusiastic about the site.

The fact that the newly added white dude is the only person clearly presented as a worker is part of the problem—why not a white guy protesting in favor of increasing the minimum wage and a black guy in a hard hard? they do exist, after all—but even if the images accurately represented poverty in the United States, they might not help Half in Ten's case.

To see why, compare Half in Ten's site with the site for ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History. ONE avoids using any of the standard images used to depict global poverty in developing countries. My guess is that they made a very conscious choice to avoid using images that evoke a sympathy/charity frame, or what's been called an "individual victim" frame. Instead what you get are images (and text) that position ONE as a public campaign, one that calls on public leaders to do more to fight the social phenomenon of global poverty. Most of the photographs on the ONE site are of people in the United States campaigning to end global poverty. (I think the photos are mostly submitted by visitors—the site makes great use of flickr, facebook and other social networking sites). By contrast, the bulk of images used on the Half in Ten site seem likely to evoke sympathy, charity, and the individual frame, rather than public action.

This discussion of Shanto Iyengar's research on media depictions of poverty, from a Frameworks brief, suggests that framing and images that reinforce an "individual victim" understanding of poverty will likely be counterproductive:

"To identify the frames in which television news embeds the issue of poverty," Shanto Iyengar reprised an earlier analysis of 191 poverty-related news reports. Using an experimental method that allows scholars to empirically compare the impact of specific news reports on political attitudes, Iyengar and his colleagues exposed viewers to poverty reporting that featured either societal frames or individual victim frames. After exposure to a newscast in which only one story addressed poverty, the informants were asked "In your opinion, what are the most important causes of poverty?" and "If you were asked to prescribe ways to reduce poverty, what would you suggest?"

The societal frames - which Iyengar also calls "thematic" - featured "information bearing on national trends (e.g., the poverty rate, the number of states experiencing significant increases in hunger, changes in the government's definition of poverty, etc.) or matters of public policy (the Reagan administration's proposals to curtail various social welfare programs, allegations of fraud in welfare programs, etc.) These are essentially...stories in which the object of the coverage is abstract and impersonal."

"In the individual-victim frame, by contrast, poverty is covered in terms of personal experience; the viewer is provided a particular instance of an individual or family living under economic duress." This type of coverage, which Iyengar has termed "episodic" is the dominant form of news coverage for most social issues. In fact, in a recent review of more than 10,000 stories of foreign affairs on five local television stations, a report for the FrameWorks Institute found episodic stories were 97% of the coverage. As Iyengar concludes, "poverty is clearly an individual-level rather than a societal phenomenon."

The problem with the over-representation of this kind of coverage is that episodic coverage tends to reinforce notions of individual responsibility. "When poverty was described in societal terms, individuals assigned responsibility to societal factors - failed government programs, the political climate, economic conditions, and so on. Conversely, when news coverage of poverty dwelled on particular instances of poor people, individuals were more apt to hold the poor causally responsible."

Iyengar also found that "race appears to be a meaningful contextual cue when Americans think about poverty....When the poor person was white, causal and treatment responsibility for poverty were predominantly societal; when the poor person was black, causal and treatment responsibility were more individual." Iyengar discounts the easy explanation that the informants were "anti-black"; rather, he suggests, "the observed racial differences fluctuated with the particular victim (suggesting) that race more effectively evoked stored knowledge concerning responsibility for poverty..."

Iyengar concludes that "the national debate over social welfare policy has traditionally been formulated in terms of specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled. The results reported here suggest that framing welfare programs in terms of particular beneficiary groups will weaken rather than strengthen public support for welfare."

What Iyengar cautions against—formulating the national debate in terms of "specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled"—isn't what CAP and Half in Ten intend, but the design of their website will leave many viewers with the impression that the debate is being formulating in that way.

In a thoughtful piece, CAP's Joy Moses compares the 1968 Poor People's Campaign with the Half in Ten anti-poverty campaign (kicked off on the 40th anniversary of the Poor People's Campaign demonstration in DC):

America is not reeling [like it was in 1968] from the loss of some of its greatest leaders or functioning in an environment of ongoing political unrest in the form of riots and protests. However, there are some notable similarities between the 1968 and 2008 campaigns to end poverty; both derive their goals from the following basic principles:

-There is no justification for poverty in America, and we should make every effort to eradicate it.

-Poverty isn’t a black problem, a white problem, a southern problem, or a northern problem; it is an everybody problem that requires a joint effort to eradicate it.

-Increasing worker wages is key to eliminating poverty.

The two campaigns were also born from similar political contexts. Both anti-poverty campaigns were formed in the shadow of war. The Vietnam and Iraq wars accumulated significant costs to the American people, negatively affecting domestic spending and the quality of social programs. Both campaigns also began as the nation prepared for important presidential elections that would ultimately have a great effect on a whole host of issues, including the effort to end poverty.

The similarities that tie these efforts together may be somewhat discouraging. It is apparent that the 1968 effort did not end poverty and the concerns about wages and income for low-income people still exist to such a degree that Half In Ten became necessary.

In 2008, certain factors should lead to more positive results. By some accounts, the nation has been embracing a political agenda focused on change. Half In Ten organizers have developed vast grassroots networks throughout the country and the capacity for valuable research and federal and state-level policy development. The organizations involved are building valuable partnerships with one another as well as with other leading advocacy groups, faith-based organizations, think tanks, and academics focused on the goal of ending poverty. And John Edwards, a significant poverty advocate, has joined the team.

There's an additional important difference between '68 and '08, one that could lead to more negative results for the Half in Ten Campaign. America in the mid-to-late 1960s was still in "The Great Compression"—a nearly three decade period of relatively shared prosperity when economic inequality fell and incomes rose across the board, with the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution gaining more than the very top. By contrast, today's America is much more unequal in economic terms. Income gains for the top 20 percent have far outpaced the modest gains for the bottom half. Since 2000, median household income has actually declined, despite overall economic growth.

This difference in economic context calls for a different framing for the Half in Ten campaign. Instead of a narrow and literal anti-poverty frame, what's needed is a broader and more populist economic one. Such a frame would call for a new social contract to expand and strengthen the middle class, and view the working class and middle class as allies in a movement for greater economic security and opportunity for everyone.

In his 1995 book Middle Class Dreams, pollster Stanley Greenberg notes that:

... In the end, the identification of the Great Society with the poor alone marginalized the beneficiaries, dissipated public support, and blocked any broad, enduring alignment of black and white support for dependable social insurance.

Moses argues that the development of "vast grassroots networks throughout the country and the capacity for valuable research and federal and state-level policy development" will make Half in Ten more successful than the War on Poverty and the Poor People's Campaign, but I'm not persuaded. If grassroots networks and research were what it took to make progressive policy happen, we'd have seen a lot more progressive policy—and a lot more progress on reducing poverty—over the last couple of decades.

In a new map/chart book released today, Rebecca Ray, Hye Jin Rho, and I present state data on economic insecurity and job quality from the Bridging the Gaps project. Here's more from the press release:

The federal poverty line does a poor job of measuring economic insecurity in the United States according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). In the typical state, 22 percent of people in working families suffer from economic hardship because their earnings and income from other sources, including public work supports and other public benefits, fall below the basic needs budget standard for where they live. By comparison, only 12.6 percent of Americans live below the federal poverty line.

The report, "Working Families and Economic Insecurity in the States: The Role of Job Quality and Work Supports," synthesizes previous CEPR research using a new approach for measuring economic insecurity that addresses the major limitations of the poverty line and analyzes the state of economically insecure families across 45 states and the District of Columbia.

To determine how much income a working family needs to "make ends meet", the authors of the report use basic family budgets that take into account the actual costs of goods and services needed to have a decent standard of living, as well as the variations in these costs, depending on where one lives.

The researchers also examined the role of public work supports- programs such as child care assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, health insurance provided through Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, housing assistance, and income supplements provided through Temporary Assistance- in helping families achieve economic security.

"When measuring poverty, the government and most researchers do not take into account most public work supports," said report co-author Rebecca Ray. "By contrast, when we determine whether a family is able to make ends meet, we take into account the value of all of these benefits."

The report also shows that most economically insecure workers have jobs that pay low wages and provide few or no benefits or "bad Jobs". Only a minority of jobs nation-wide are "good jobs", in other words, ones that pay at least $17 an hour and provide health and retirement benefits.

"Public work supports play an important and largely unheralded role in promoting economic security and opportunity for working families," said Shawn Fremstad, a co-author of the report and Director of Bridging the Gaps, a CEPR initiative. "In the typical state, work supports close more than half of the hardship gap-the gap between a working family's income and the basic family budget for where they live".

The authors of the study point out, however, that substantial numbers of workers in low-paid jobs receive only modest or no help from work support programs.

According to the report, which uses data from the 2001-2003 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the basic family budgets developed by the Economic Policy Institute, the monthly income of the typical economically insecure family varies from $12,775 a year in Arkansas to $25,047 a year in New Hampshire.

Hopefully I'm not piling on, but I'd like to add to Shawn's comments about the Half In Ten Campaign.

Both the CAP report and this campaign are pushing policy that would not only help people currently in poverty, but would help prevent folks in the middle class from slipping into it. As a result, "poverty will be cut in half." A more strategic way to say this is to call for expanding the middle class by making opportunity widely available and providing enough economic security to sustain a broadened middle class. This is how the Drum Major Institute's middleclass.org defines their issues/constituency. Basically, both CAP and DMI are talking about the same stuff, but in different terms.

DMI's frame is more effective in part because it reflects the apirational side of American political culture. This has been persistently documented. Very few people identify as poor. Rather, low-income folks see themselves as making their way to the middle class. People on the edge of poverty see themselves as moving toward stability. Nobody likes being called poor, as Shawn said. Plus, everybody supports the idea of helping people move up. More than 85 percent of the public thinks society should make sure "everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That language could be something you'd want to lead with, but what do I know?

Security is also an effective frame. People who've already made it to the middle class value security- health security, job security, child care security, etc. Clearly policies in the CAP proposal would achieve these goals. Yet it's not highlighted and nothing really articulates how folks in the middle class would benefit. On the website, we see pictures of sad-eyed children, not abandoned factories.

And I'd echo what Shawn said about the ONE campaign's inclusion of the "we're all in this together" thought. A campaign like this has to make an argument about whose role it is to address the problem. Is it the individual's or society's problem? Government or charity to the rescue? I think the language of interdependence and solidarity make an effective argument for a strong governmental role, so there's definitely a viable option to use. But there's little mention of it, and I'm afraid that people will default to thinking that addressing poverty is a matter of individual responsibility.

Which brings us to the core question: who is this campaign supposed to inspire and persuade? Because it's not low-income folks who're trying to get to the middle class. And it's not folks who're losing their foothold in the middle class.

The sad irony here is that the policy proposed is politically savvy. It bridges class divides that for so long have stymied progress. And now is exactly the right time for a proposal like this, just when everyone's feeling like the American dream is slipping away. But its ideology and language do not address today's political moment or American culture, and as a result we may miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Earlier this week, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, ACORN, the Coalition on Human Needs, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights kicked off the political arm of a campaign to expand the middle class by nearly 20 million people over the next decade. Well, they don't actually it that, but that's the basic idea.

The campaign's new website notes that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes." The part about focusing on issues facing the middle class is a notable addition and something that was lacking from CAP's earlier report on poverty.

It's a good sign that John Edwards is chairing the campaign. Edwards could bring the kind of partisan and populist voice to this work that has been lacking on the national level. As Larry Bartels' new book suggests, advancing the cause of economic justice in the next decade will require a Democrat in the White House and more partisanship rather than less.

Edwards should help ensure that the campaign doesn't become a kind of mushy attempt to find "common ground" between Republicans and Democrats on economic justice. The reality is that there really isn't any common ground on economic justice right now or in the near future at the national level given the conservative extremism of the national Republican party and their allies. (I say this as a matter of fact rather than advocacy—there are thoughtful efforts by progressive R's to change this, but it's a decades-long project, not a short-term one). The biggest challenge for the CAP campaign isn't finding common ground between Republicans and Democrats, it's making sure that conservative Democrats don't obstruct efforts to expand the middle class (which is one of the reasons, by the way, that this campaign needs to be framed as a campaign to expand the middle class).

While I'm fan of the policy ideas put forward by the campaign, I'm less enthusiastic about much of the communcations aspect of the campaign. The name of the campaign "Half in Ten: From Poverty to Prosperity" worries me. Half in Ten sounds more like a technocratic goal than a statement that combines vision and values. This can be demonstrated by comparing it with ONE: The Campaign to Make [Global] Poverty History and Green for All's goal to "build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

ONE is both a values statement (we're in this together, "united as ONE") and a true vision statement ("make poverty history"). Similarly, Green for All's goal combines vision and values—a strong and inclusive economy—in a slogan that clearly positions poverty as an economic issue. By contrast, "Half in Ten" has no obvious values content and will sound to some like "give us half a loaf in 10 years." This may be fine as a compromise governmental goal adopted by political leaders, but may be less effective as an advocacy slogan. I wish the wealthy backers of estate tax repeal had rallied under the banner of reducing the estate tax by 50 percent in 10 years, but unfortunately they went for the whole loaf and were much more successful as a result. Of course, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in ten years would be a fantastic accomplishment, but the slogan the campaign, like all good advertising, doesn't need to be so literal.

A related communications issue. Most of the images used on the campaign's website seem likely to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about people living below the poverty line. The banner of the site rotates a set of photographs that appear to be: a black child, a white mother hugging a child, an elderly white woman in a wheelchair, a black man, and a black woman (the classroom setting suggests that she may be an immigrant). None of the pictures portray people who are clearly at work or in work clothes.

A final point that involves framing in a deeper sense: while it's positive that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes", they need to go one step further and describe the cross-class constituency they're trying to build as "the working class and middle class." Where I grew up in the tundra of rural Minnesota, there were plenty of people living below the poverty line, but if you called one of them a "poor person" you would probably get either a punch in the face or an insulted glare. The same goes for the hundreds of clients I represented as a legal services attorney in west central Minnesota. Most people with incomes under even the miserly federal poverty line describe themselves as working class or middle class rather than "poor." The descriptions used to describe people—and how they describe themselves—change considerably over time. Negroes, paupers, and, increasingly, homosexual, are examples of terms that have been replaced in general public conversation or are in the process of being replaced. Poor people is another term in need of such evolution.

In a previous post, I mentioned Larry Bartels' important new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Bartels is blogging about the book this week on TPMCafe. In his lead-off post, he reviews some of his key findings:

1. Ordinary citizens' policy preferences are often only loosely connected to their beliefs and values. For example, upward of 85% of Americans agree that "our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed," but support for specific policies that would promote equal opportunity is much more modest. One problem is that many people are too inattentive to grasp connections between values and policies. Among people with strongly egalitarian values, those who were highly informed about politics opposed the highly inegalitarian Bush tax cuts by a four- to-one margin, but those who were least informed were more likely to support the tax cuts than to oppose them.

2. Even when public preferences are clear and firmly held, policies contrary to those preferences can persist for a very long time if powerful political elites want them to persist. For example, the real value of the minimum wage has declined by more than 40% since the late 1960s despite remarkably strong and consistent public support for minimum wage increases. (This outcome has been facilitated by the fact that the nominal minimum wage is not adjusted for inflation, but that is itself a political decision; even when Democrats have controlled the White House and Congress, they have preferred symbolic nominal increases to permanent indexing of the sort that has long been accepted for social security.)

3. There are big differences in policies between Democratic and Republican elected officials, even when they represent exactly the same constituents. Political scientists have an elegant theory explaining why this shouldn't happen: if voters choose the candidate closest to their own policy positions, Democrats and Republicans alike must move to the center in order to get elected. The only problem is, they don't. A figure in the book compares the behavior of Democratic and Republican senators representing liberal and conservative states. The difference in behavior between a Democrat and a Republican representing the same constituents turns out to be much greater than the difference in behavior between a Democrat representing the most liberal state in the country and a Democrat representing the most conservative state in the country. Party and ideology dominate constituents' preferences in shaping legislators' roll call votes.

4. Insofar as elected officials are responsive to the policy views of their constituents, only the views of affluent and middle-class people really matter. The preferences of millions of low-income citizens (in the bottom third of the income distribution) have no discernible effect on senators' roll call votes, whether we consider the whole range of issues that come before Congress or specific salient roll call votes focusing on the federal budget, the minimum wage, civil rights, and abortion. Aristotle wrote that "where the possession of political power is due to the possession of economic power or wealth ... that is oligarchy, and when the unpropertied class have power, that is democracy." By that standard, America is, at best, a very unequal democracy.

From the Washington Post's On Faith, there's an insightful discussion about the black church's paradoxical rhetoric about social justice. I thought this passage was particularly poignant.

The words and the dramatic declarations of judgment may be inflammatory and denunciatory but they come from a deep love for the people. There is almost an uncontrollable longing to see them repent of their misdeeds before the wrath of God visits disaster upon them. The paradoxical juxtaposition of condemnation and compassion reflects the nature of God’s love that will not let us go even as God threatens to destroy those who break faith with the covenant and desecrate God’s holy laws.

A lot of anti-poverty rhetoric shifts between these two poles, but rarely blends the two as effectively as many in the black church have.

On the one hand, there's the condemnation frame. "We're the richest nation in the world, so why haven't we ended poverty?" Then there's the compassion frame, where we focus attention on pictures of sad-eyed kids and sob stories.

Both kinds of rhetoric are deeply flawed, I think. Being critical without compassion can be effective at first. Guilt, shame and fear can motivate people to change. But ultimately this rhetoric breeds resentment and division. Criticism can feel like it's an attempt to undermine rather than build up. It's the talk of someone who's not on your side, somebody who's trying to dominate you. It can be seen as given in bad faith. And then, in my experience, people tune out.

Likewise, purely compassionate stories don't condemn enough. They don't tell a good story about what caused the problem. Every story has to explain what needs to be fought. If there's nobody to fight, there's nothing we can do. In a way it denies both the agency of the story's subject and the listener. And as Inclusion's research shows, people take on an individualistic, private-minded lens when they're exposed to this rhetoric.

Putting together these ideas requires a different frame. Anti-poverty rhetoric has to both condemn and love America. It has to show compassion for working class people and condemn the systems that fail them. We need to tell more stories, as the black church once did, about national redemption and the salvation of our people.

Some interesting stuff in this new Kaiser Family Foundation poll:

• During the last five years, one of out every five Americans reports having been contacted by a collection agency because of medical bills. Some 17 percent have used up all or most of their savings and 12 percent have been unable to pay for basic necessities because of medical bills.
• Almost one in five (18 percent) decided to stay in one job, rather than take another, mainly because the job they held at the time offered better health care benefits.
• Asked to name the two issues they would most like to hear presidential candidates talk about, 22 percent named health care as the first issue (it was third after economic issues and Iraq); and 18 percent named it as their second issue. Poverty didn't manage even half a percent as a first or second issue, but was named as a second issue by 1 percent of Democratic registered voters. The budget deficit/national debt was named as a first issue by two percent, and a second issue by one percent.
• More Americans want to hear candidates talk about reducing the costs of health care and health insurance (40 percent) than about expanding health insurance coverage for the uninsured (31 percent), with an even wider gap (46-25) among independent voters.

And my favorite finding: Five percent decided to get married "mainly to have access to their spouse's health care benefits", and another five percent decided to get married so their spouse could have access to their health care benefits.¹ Which got me thinking, this might be a good follow-up to the "married people earn more money" billboards that have been popping up in urban neighborhoods (including mine):

A poignant example of how children in a rich Western democracy (in this case, Canada) experience poverty as social exclusion:

Members of Parliament beginning historic hearings into a national poverty plan heard a poem from North Bay schoolchildren Thursday on how being poor excludes them from what so many of their friends enjoy.

“Not going to McDonald’s, getting Santa Fund baskets, missing birthday parties, no camping, no hot dog on hot dog day, no hockey, pretending you forgot your lunch,” were some of the ways the kids defined poverty in their poem, Being Poor.

It was submitted Tuesday as a written brief by income security expert Richard Shillington and then read at televised hearings Thursday by NDP MP Martin as MPs grappled with coming up with an official poverty measurement Canada might adopt.

“I'm going to talk now about programs, but before that I've given the committee a poem, Poverty Is from children in North Bay,” Shillington said. “These are not economists. They will not talk about before-tax, after-tax; they will talk about what it's like to be a child living in poverty. What I want you to notice is they're not talking about malnutrition, they're not talking about housing, they're talking about social exclusion. That's what they see. If this committee chooses to think about poverty, they will think about social exclusion.”

Martin, whose motion led to the national hearings, said: “Shillington has it right. Kids figure poverty out by kindergarten. We may need a combination of factors to measure poverty but above all we need a plan with targets that leaves no one behind - not the kids, not their parents or their families. We need a poverty plan that ends this exclusion of so many Canadians and newcomers which means they lead less than productive lives.”