Ch. 2. Poverty and Class Inequality Flashcards
Social Constructions
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS – Our ideas of what are and what are not problems in society.
- 43 million people in the United States live below the official poverty line, and millions more live barely above it.
- the top 1% possess 33% of the wealth of the country
- Inequality is growing.
- We know that we live in a society where some people have very little and others have immense wealth.
- But is that good or bad? Is inequality a useful incentive to spur people to work hard? Or is the gap between rich and poor unfair? That is what we mean by saying that concepts are socially constructed.
Absolute vs. Relative Measure of Poverty
ABSOLUTE MEASURE OF POVERTY – A threshold or line (usually based on income) at or below which individuals or groups are identified as POVERTY.
- sets a threshold, usually based on annual income. A person or family with an annual income at the line or below it is identified as being in
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POVERTY.
- If income is above the line—by even one dollar—the person or family is identified as not being in poverty.
- The line is arbitrary but set by policymakers to help guide them in developing programs for the poor
- family spends about one-third of its disposable income on food,
- Orshansky proposed a poverty threshold of three times the cost of a market basket of food, adjusted for family size. This standard has been used ever since, and the federal government adjusts the rate for inflation each year so comparisons can be made across time.
- The poverty line in 2017 was $24,600 for a family of four.
- EX: Someone making $25K in Warsaw will live very differently than someone making 25K in NYC.
RELATIVE MEASURE OF POVERTY – A measure that looks at individuals or groups relative to the rest of their community or society rather than setting an absolute line.
- One common relative measure uses the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME for a nation, the point that half the households are below and half are above.
- We might then consider poverty to be the income at half the median, indicating how some families compare to what is typical in their society. For example, the median U.S. household income for 2015 was $56,516. Half of that is $28,258.
- EX: Someone making $25K in Warsaw will live very differently than someone making 25K in NYC. So a person making that much in an expensive city might live in poverty while a person making that much in an inexpensive, small town might be doing just fine.
Poverty Rates Over Time and Among Different Social Groups
POVERTY THRESHOLDS – The level of income below which the person or family is in poverty.
- In the 2015 report, the poverty rate stood at 13.5%
- more than 43.1 million U.S. men, women, and children fell below the official poverty line.
- The Census Bureau takes into account age, family size, and number of children in a household in counting the number of people below the poverty line.
- In 2016, the poverty threshold was $24,339 for a four-person household
POVERTY GUIDELINES – A simplified version of the U.S. Census Bureau poverty thresholds, which take into account only family size; the poverty guidelines are used to set the Federal Poverty Level (FPL).which set
FEDERAL POVERTY LEVEL(FPL) – as developed by Orshansky, is the number generally referred to in the media when they mention the poverty line and also the guideline used to determine eligibility for many public services.
SOME CATEGORIES of PEOPLE ARE MORE LIKELY to be in POVERTY THAN OTHERS –
- The poverty rate for non-Hispanic whites was 9.1% in 2015, compared to 24.1% for African Americans, 21.4% for Hispanics (any race), and 11.4% for Asian Americans.
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Look just at families:
- female-headed households is 28.2%,
- 14.9% for male-headed households
- 5.4% for married couples
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Looking specifically at age:
- children under 18 have the highest poverty rate at 19.7%
- adults aged 65 and older have the lowest poverty rate at 8.8%.
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Those living in:
- rural areas and principal cities have higher poverty rates (16.7% and 16.8%) than those living in suburban areas (10.8%).
“Extreme” Poverty and Low Income
EXTREME POVERTY NEIGHBORHOODS – Areas (usually based on census tracts) that have poverty rates of 40% or more.
EXTREME POOR – Households that have children present but little or no income.
Social Safety Net
SOCIAL SAFETY NET – Consists of programs that emerged during the Great Depression to provide baseline support for the poor.
- Until then, most charitable programs were either private, often church-based, or state and local in scope.
- The roots of the safety net are found in the SOCIAL SECURITY ACT of 1935. – which provided a guaranteed minimum income to the elderly.
- The second period of expansion in federal programs occurred during the 1960s, when poverty emerged as a national concern.
- Researchers focused not only on the problem of poverty but also on how minority status, including race and sex, was connected to poverty and being poor.
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OLD-AGE, SURVIVORS, and DISABILITY INSURANCE (OASDI) – in which individuals pay into the system (or have spouses who pay into the system) and earn “entitlement” to services.
- One of the programs that has had the most impact on poverty is old-age insurance or Social Security pensions for older people.
- Social Security pensions are now the most common form of income for older people, with more than 97% of older households receiving or about to receive such income.
- More than half of all elderly households receive half their income from these benefits.
- Average monthly benefit at the end of 2016 was $1,360.
- In 1965, MEDICARE was added to the Social Security program.
- MEDICARE – This is a public health care program for people aged 65 and older, and most older people now participate in it.
- MEDICAID – is another important part of the social safety net. This is a public health insurance program for the poor, which now includes the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
- One of the programs that has had the most impact on poverty is old-age insurance or Social Security pensions for older people.
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MEANS-TESTED PROGRAMS – in contrast to social insurance programs are means-tested programs for which people usually qualify by having a poverty-level income.
- These programs include:
- TEMPORARY ASSISTANCE FOR NEEDY FAMILIES (TANF) – a program of cash assistance to poor families.
- SUPPLEMENTAL NUTRITION ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (SNAP) – more than 44 million people receive benefits each month. (SNAP used to be known as the food stamp program.
- SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTAL NUTRITION PROGRAM for WOMAN, INFANTS, AND CHILDREN (WIC) – Which provides nutrition education and a small amount of supplemental income that can be used with authorized vendors.
- NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM – provides free or reduced-cost meals for students whose family incomes are between 130% and 185% of the poverty line.
- These programs include:
- The general public has had a negative image of means-tested public assistance programs, which are often associated with racial stereotypes.
Compared to the US, France has far superior safety nets providing:
- Free healthcare
- Free daycare
- Universal preschool
- Prenatal and postnatal care
- Paid maternity leave
Other Dimensions of Poverty
- People are unequal not just in income or wealth but also in desirable social and political qualities.
- Should lack of political rights be included in a definition of poverty?
- Should we think of social conditions as a part of poverty?
- What about the right to be public about your gender identity? Should some people be so anxious about losing—or even getting—a job that they feel they must keep that part of their humanity hidden?
Social Class
SOCIAL CLASSES – Groups with different access to resources.
- Groups of people stratified by their resources:
- Occupation, income, education, and wealth
Roots of the “Classless” Society
SELF-MADE MYTH – This was the concept of the self-made man—the idea that anyone could rise from humble beginnings and become wealthy and successful simply by applying him- or herself.
- In this view, social position is a matter of individual achievement and has little or nothing to do with a person’s origins in the social hierarchy.
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Horatio Alger – He was one of the major advocates of this self-made myth.
- His vision became a central part of the American image.
- He wrote more than 100 “rags to riches” novels and stories.
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Ayan Rand – A libertarian writer came to have a powerful influence on the continuing acceptance of the self-made myth, especially through her novel Atlas Shrugged.
- Her writings provided the foundation for the political philosophy and ethics of capitalism that lie behind modern conservative political thought and that advocate self-reliance and limited government influence on the economy.
Class as a Social Science Concept
Two of the most important social scientists in the development of social class as a scientific concept were:
Karl Marx (1818–1883) – According to Marx, social position revolves around one important factor: ownership of the means of production.
- In essence, there are capitalists, who own the factories and other means of producing goods, and there are the working class, who sell their labor in order to survive.
- Many of Marx’s critics, including Weber, have focused on this oversimplification of social stratification (Marx does identify other classes as well).
- Marxist analysis of social structure has not been widely accepted in popular or academic circles in the United States because of the link between Marx and communist ideology.
- Much more acceptable have been the writings of Weber, who identifies three aspects of social structure: class, status, and power:
- CLASS – refers to a person’s position relative to the economic sector, such as proprietor, wage laborer, or renter.
- STATUS – refers to social position in the context of characteristics like education, prestige, and religious affiliation.
- POWER – refers to political affiliations and connections.
Max Weber (1881–1961) – Weber’s ideas led to a conceptualization of U.S. social class as a continuum of Socioeconomic Status (SES). rather than as a set of discrete categories that are easily distinguished from each other.
That is how social science research generally treats class – by using a quantitative index or scale that measures several variables.
Social Mobility
SOCIAL MOBILITY – is upward or downward movement in social position over time in a society.
- Can refer to individuals or groups (EX: Racial or ethnic groups) who change social positions.
- Social mobility between generations is referred to as INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY.
- The higher one’s social class, the more likely they are to overestimate social mobility.
- In other words, wealthy Americans tend to subscribe to the belief that pulling one’s self out of poverty is easier than it actually is and that one’s wealth is a result of hard work and initiative, rather than luck or birth.
- While social mobility has always been limited in the United States, it has become even more limited in the past three or four decades.
- Furthermore, it lags well behind mobility in most Western European nations.
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Declining social mobility is a relevant issue for current college students.
- Not only will many graduate with considerable debt, but they are the first generation in U.S. history likely to end up in a lower social position than that of their parents.
Intergenerational mobility, in terms of earnings, is greater in Sweden. That is, Sweden shows higher rates of mobility from one generation to another than does the United States, contrary to popular perceptions by Americans about mobility in their country.
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Reasons:
- The impact of family background on economic status is not as strong in Sweden as in the United States.
- Sweden is more egalitarian in that where someone comes from is much less of a determinant of where he or she ends up.
- (COMMENT: But that’s because Sweden is extremely homogeneous ethnically and racially)
Equality of Opportunity in a Society – Is there equal opportunity in the USA? There is more likelihood of inheriting social position in the United States, contrary to what most U.S. adults believe.
- This likelihood is an important indicator of equality of opportunity in a society.
Understanding the U.S. Class Structure
Understanding the U.S. Class Structure:
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Income is a skewed distribution or a distribution in which a few values are at one extreme.
- In this case, the skewness is due to a few very high income values, compared to many more in the lower ranges.
- The bottom 40% of all U.S. households received only 11.3% of all earned income in 2014.
- The top quintile (top fifth, or top 20%), in contrast, received 51.1% of household income, with a mean of $202,366.
- In the top 5%, the mean household income was $350,870.
- The bottom quintile (bottom fifth, or bottom 20%) represents the poor (with those below the mean for that group representing the extreme poor).
- The second quintile the ‘near-poor’ or ‘working poor’.
- The third = middle class.
- The fourth = upper-middle class.
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The top quintile = upper class.
- We could also divide that top quintile into the affluent (the first 15%), the rich (the next 4%), and the super-rich (the top 1%).
Inequality
INEQUALITY – The fact that some in a society have more than others.
- When we ask who gets what and why, we are dealing with the issue of inequality.
- The continuum of inequality is a highly skewed distribution in which many more individuals fall toward the bottom than the top
- Inequality is increasing throughout the world.
- The gap between those at the top and those at the bottom is greater in the United States than in nearly all other industrialized societies.
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income is an important aspect of this divide between top and bottom, it is NOT all there is to inequality. These also contribute to inequality:
- Housing
- Access to health care
- Good Jobs
- Education
Income and Wealth
INCOME – Money that flows into a family or household from a variety of sources, such as earnings, unemployment compensation, Social Security benefits, interest and dividends, and rental income.
WEALTH – Assets (or possessions) or net worth (the difference between the value of assets and the amount of debt for an individual, family, or household).
- Currently, 10% of the population possesses about 75% of all the wealth in the United States.
- Meaning the other 90% together share a meager 25% of everything there is to own.
- And the divide between those at the top and the rest of U.S. society has been growing rapidly in the past 30 years – known as the WEALTH GAP.
- The distribution of WEALTH is generally MORE UNEQUAL than the distribution of income.
- Wealth shared by the top 3% increased from 44.8% in 1989 to 54.4% in 2013.
- In contrast to the rising wealth of the top 3%, the share of wealth the bottom 90% possessed declined from 33.2% in 1989 to 24.7% in 2013.
- Gap is increasing globally, but greater in U.S. than in nearly all other industrial societies.
GREAT RECESSION – A deep recession between 2007 - 2010 was the worst economic fall since the depression.
- Adversely affected the lower 90% much more than the top 10% of income earners.
IMPORTANCE OF WEALTH Vs INCOME:
- Wealth affects people’s everyday lives.
- For those who possess it, wealth provides a safety net for getting through difficult times.
- The absence of wealth can turn small crises into major disasters.
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Wealth provides TRANSFORMATIVE advantages, such as:
- a down payment on a home.
- private schools
- Start a business
- Plan for retirement
- Wealth dvantages such as safe neighborhoods and quality schools positively impact, or when absent, present serious obstacles for future generations.
- And as the wealth gap increases, the prevalence of high-poverty neighborhoods is on the rise.
- A child born into a wealthy family is more than six times as likely to become a wealthy adult than a child born into a poor family.
- The way people believe wealth is distributed in the United States is very different from the way it is actually distributed. Most people don’t realize how concentrated wealth is into the top 10% or top 3%.
Toxic Inequality (Race & Wealth)
TOXIC INEQUALITY – We cannot understand contemporary class inequality without considering the widening racial wealth gap, a combination (of race and wealth) referred to as toxic inequality.
- Class and racial inequality are inextricably linked.
- The gap between white and black family wealth has increased nearly threefold over the past generation.
- The Great Recession produced the largest loss of minority wealth in U.S. history, with a wealth loss of 50% for African Americans and 66% for Hispanics.
- In 2013, median net wealth of white families was $142,000, compared to $11,000 for African American families and $13,700 for Hispanic families.
- Mobility is also a greater challenge for black families, who are not only more likely to be stuck at the bottom of the income and wealth ladders, but also have a harder time exceeding their parents’ family income and wealth than whites do.
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HEALTH CARE – Another important dimension of inequality is access to health care.
- If we look at actual health conditions, we find that mortality, self-rated health, and specific serious illnesses are all associated with poverty.
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PRISON INCARCERATION – The likelihood of being imprisoned in the United States is directly related to race and ethnicity.
- Incarceration rates for all racial groups have decreased since 2005
- We find the incarceration rate per 100,000 adults is 312 for whites, 820 for Hispanics, and 1,745 for African Americans
- Black adults are 5.6 times as likely as white adults to be incarcerated.
- Hispanic adults are 2.6 times as likely as white adults.
- In 2015, 501,300 black men were in prisons across the United States, making up 34% of the total prison population, while 21.6% of all prisoners were Hispanic and 33.8% were white.
- Note that African Americans account for only 13% of the US population, while whites account for 77%.
ECONOMIC DISPARITY is the CENTRAL ASPECT of INEQUALITY, but many other social forces drive inequality in the United States and around the world. Two of the most significant of these are gender and race/ethnicity.
Farmworkers and Poverty
FARMWORKER and POVERTY: – most farmworkers and domestic help are minorities.
- More than three-fifths of farmworkers are poor.
- Farmworkers’ average annual income is $11,000; for a family it is approximately $16,000. This makes farm work the second lowest-paid job in the nation (after domestic labor).
- Agriculture is consistently listed as one of the three most dangerous occupations in the United States.
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Farmworkers are excluded from nearly all federal labor laws that protect other workers:
- Labor organizing
- Minimum wage
- Overtime pay
- Child labor laws
