Research

The gap watch continues: US is 34th of 35 developed nations in child well-being

Kimberly Springer — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:25:00 +0000

Initially, it was darkly funny and absurd: "What's up with all the 'gaps'?," we asked ourselves. Discipline gap. Gender gap. Achievement gap. And now the United Nations Children's Fund is reporting that the US is at the almost-bottom of their index for relative child poverty rates: a child poverty gap.

What you can learn about prejudice by putting kids in different colored shirts

Dustin Dwyer — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:16:27 +0000

If you want to know how kids gets their ideas about something like race or gender, it’s not just a matter of asking them. They might not know where they got their ideas. And you can’t really control all the variables.

For nearly two decades, psychologist Rebecca Bigler at the University of Texas has been testing race and gender ideas using colored t-shirts in a summer school program.

How do you think wealth is distributed in America?

Jennifer Guerra — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:00:52 +0000

This video blew my mind. A few friends posted the video on Facebook, and I finally got around to watching it this morning. It's a quick six-minute piece about wealth distribution in the U.S. - what people think the wealth distribution looks like, what people wish wealth distribution looked like, and the reality of what wealth distribution looks like in this country. The disparity between reality and what folks perceive to be the ideal is staggering. I want you to watch the video with this question in mind: How sustainable is this system of wealth distribution?

http://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM

No, government benefits don't add up to more than middle class incomes.

Sarah Alvarez — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:34:43 +0000

Popping up on my facebook feed and elsewhere the last few weeks has been an urban legend in the making. It's a claim people on government benefits actually have more income than those making the median income for the country.

This claim is courtesy of Senator Jeff Sessions. It's a loaded accusation that seems perfectly tailored to build class resentment and perpetuate myths about poverty in the "welfare queen" vein.

And, it's not true.

The folks at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities have done the hard work of proving why and are happy to call out the fuzzy math. From the CPBB, via the Census.

In 2011, the typical person in a family whose income was below the poverty line before means-tested benefits are counted remained 12 percent below the poverty line after counting the non-health means-tested benefits (including SNAP, housing assistance, SSI, cash welfare assistance, and the EITC, among others). Moreover, these benefits left this low-income individual 57 percent below the living standard of the typical middle-income American.

What I'm reading: There Are No Children Here

Jennifer Guerra — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:32:08 +0000

Sometimes I think there should be a State of Opportunity book club. We read tons of books as part of our research here at State of Opportunity, and any number of them could spark great discussions. The book I'm reading now, Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, is no exception. It is, in a word, intense.

If you think poverty is rare for kids in Michigan, or its effects aren't serious, you're wrong.

Dustin Dwyer — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 05:03:00 +0000

We post about a lot of reports on this site. We use a lot of statistics. Not sure if you noticed.

The point is that these statistics all tell a story, and the story for kids in poverty is almost always bad. The latest report to confirm it is from the Michigan League for Public Policy (formerly known as the Michigan League for Human Services).

The League is the agency responsible for compiling Michigan's statistics for the annual Annie E. Casey Kids Count report. Kids Count offers one of the most comprehensive set of statistics on child well being. If you want to know how children are doing, particularly children in poverty, Kids Count will give you the answer.

And the answer in the latest Michigan Kids Count report is that children are not doing great.

Attitudes shift on people in poverty and government programs

Sarah Alvarez — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 16:00:50 +0000

I found a recently released New America Foundation report really interesting for a couple of reasons. There's the data (more on that later), but I was fascinated by how the report also documents the same phenomenon that occurs when you look at yourself in the mirror for too long. When you stare at yourself for too long you start to not like what you see. Imperfections ("My nose is actually crooked!"), start to surface and then to loom very large.

How your brain makes you less sensitive to suffering

Sarah Alvarez — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 03:50:02 +0000

This week our Michigan Radio colleague Kyle Norris will be starting a series on homelessness. So, when I came across this post on the stellar Sociological Images blog I thought it was worth a mention.

It explores a study that finds our brains, not just our emotions, react to the homeless with "disgust." This happens in part because we see them as very different from ourselves. Then, with the help of our brains we build up our tolerance for seeing suffering among these people. We rarely feel empathy for them.

I'll be exploring issues of empathy and children in a few weeks with the help of one of our storytelling sources. This study is an an interesting introduction.

Have we been measuring poverty wrong this whole time?

Sarah Alvarez — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:23:44 +0000

The U.S. poverty rate has hardly budged in half a century. The Census says the same share of our country is living in poverty right now as in the 1960’s.

So there’s lots of traction for accusations that programs like food stamps and Medicaid cost too much and don’t work. That criticism is not new, President Regan famously said in his 1988 State of the Union address, “My friends, some years ago the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”

Why are all the programs not making a dent? Ask James Sullivan, and he'll say they actually are.

Sullivan and his co-author Bruce Meyer say since we started measuring poverty we’ve been doing it wrong. Sullivan is an economist at the University of Notre Dame. He thinks a simple change in how poverty is measured would have huge implications. Sullivan thinks people should just be asked how they spent their money instead of how much money they earned. It's called a consumption measure. As Sullivan explains,

"The official poverty between 1970 and today has risen by two and a half percentage points. But if you look at consumption based poverty over those same four decades you see that poverty has fallen by 12 percentage points, which is a very different story.”

Great Recession impact biggest on families in poverty

Jordan Medina — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:00:00 +0000

A new report by the Pew Economic Mobility Project shows that while all communities were impacted by the Great Recession, families in high-poverty neighborhoods took the hardest hit.