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2 Separate Assets Race, Gender, and Other Dimensions of Poverty T he brief “American Century” of diminishing inequality, the post– World War II decades, finished long ago. Ever since the mid-1970s, global competitors have transformed the nation’s economy and politics , and since the severe downturn of 2008, the nation has faced disintegrating traditions of social solidarity. In the mid-twentieth century there was a common belief that all Americans shared an economic destiny. The wealth of the nation would flow to all citizens who displayed diligence and thrift. This belief lasted perhaps forty years,and then,after four decades of progress, the basic social contract that connects people and opportunities began to tear.Whereas in the earlier period citizens generally (and accurately) expected economic improvement, now most cannot. False and temporary relief came with the dot-com bubble and mortgage balloon, but those artificial reprieves have ended. The first decade of the new century has finished, and economic prospects are bleak. Public officials seem unable to face up to the most pressing problems of the poor.Willing to allocate resources to giant institutions like banks, bond houses, and auto manufacturers, leaders still expect poor people to survive on trickle-down. Neither economic growth nor public subsidy works to solve the problems of poor people. The failures are perhaps best revealed by severe inequalities in the distributions of income and wealth. We use a series of basic facts about these distributions to construct a platform from which we can view the middle class, the poor, and, most important, those who are very poor and thrown together near the centers of metropolitan areas. Only after framing this evidence can we interpret their problems. In 36 / Chapter 2 this chapter, as background for subsequent chapters, we thus display the statistical dimensions of poverty. In a nation of plenty, Americans face surprisingly wide-ranging poverty. At the turn of the century the highly respected Luxemburg Income Study estimated that 17 percent of Americans were poor, almost double the Census Bureau estimate , then just under 9 percent.1 By either count, things then got worse—for 2008 the Census increased its estimate to 13.2 percent, with worse to come. Economists of every political persuasion agree that inequality has risen for at least thirty years.2 Some of the poorest people,disproportionatelyAfricanAmerican and Latino, have lived for years tightly concentrated into inner-city areas. Neighborhoods of the poor have transferred population recently from the historically most segregated cities into the close-in suburbs and sometimes beyond, but even in the suburbs, as we see in Chapter 4, the poor live in relative isolation from the middle class, and most people of color live isolated from Whites. In newly poor suburban neighborhoods, as in long-poor city neighborhoods, problem involve lack of family resources, inadequate public services, homelessness and poor housing, crowded or poorly run schools, and inadequate police protection. Americans rarely see poor people in plain sight, and then usually in just a few places—elderly women working evenings at McDonald’s, Wal-Mart clerks without health insurance, young men in a sidewalk line for the soup kitchen, children signing up for free school lunch, or beggars on the corner. Aside from such passing observations, most middle-class Americans avoid the poor, whom they find frightening or repugnant. Exceptions include anti-hunger campaigners and poverty activists working on Living Wage campaigns or with Justice for Janitors or similar organizing efforts, but such efforts have been few, small, and fragmented. Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago and later on a legal case for ACORN, which assists poor neighborhoods nationwide to organize, so at least the White House is aware. Even when residents in rich industrial societies such as the United States and Canada do perceive the poverty that surrounds them, they are not so likely to perceive the inequality, because various social and psychological mechanisms hide it from view. Inequality encompasses much more than poverty. People who earn enough to escape poverty and avoid physical deprivation may be hurt socially and damaged psychologically by their relative lacking. The terms rich, middle class, working class, and poor are slippery but important social distinctions that mirror social stigma and signal psychological harm. People who experience the downsides of inequality may suffer health problems and reduced life expectancy. Inequality can reinforce more tangible deprivations such as lack of food, housing, medication, or hospital treatment. People reveal feelings of unfairness, disrespect, and stress in many...

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