Poor Kids in a Rich Country

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 1 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 Poor Kids in a Rich Country Rainwater, Lee and Smeeding, Timothy (2004). New York: Russell Sage; 280 pages. $39.95 (hard). ISBN 0871547023. The happy news is that Rainwater and Smeeding have written a book that could hypothetically make a real difference in how informed Americans and their political leaders understand the nature and causes of child poverty and the most effective strategies to combat child poverty. The sad news is that Poor Kids in a Rich Country is unlikely to actually make that difference. First, the happy news. Lee Rainwater, Professor of Sociology Emeritusat Harvard University, and Timothy Smeeding, Maxwell Professor of Public Policy at Syracuse University, transform their 20yearconceptual and technical obsession with cross-national analyses ofchild poverty into a small, rich-in-content if a bit poor-inaccessibility treatise. They make three points exceedingly well. You cannot understand or change child poverty unless you properly define and measure it. Agreed. But this is not a message that will pull a wider readership into this topic, so the authors and the savvy Russell Sage Foundation(publishers of the work), decided to make the entire last third of the book the extended argument on definition and measurement. The authors introduce two key ideas that will be new to most American researchers. First, don’t think of poverty as either absolute lack of cash/income(the official approach of the U.S. government) or as an artifact of deviant subcultures or family structures (the favorite approach among certain conservative scholars and political leaders). Rather think of poverty as “the lack of material resources required to perform– except with the greatest difficulty– roles in the central societal domains of family, work and citizenship as defined by mainstream members of society.” Poverty, in short, excludes certain individuals and groups from normative engagement in their 309 society’s life. Important philosophers and much of official Europe embrace this definition. Americans in general do not. Second, if you accept this conceptual definition of poverty, then it follows that the best way to measure it is a) relatively, comparing individuals’ and families’ positions within communities and societies, and b) objectively/quantitatively, not subjectively/qualitatively. (You cannot change what you cannot measure.) The result is a measure of poverty that amounts to distance from a nation’s or community’s family median income. When you properly define and measure child poverty and compare rates and trends across advanced democracies, the U.S. looks very bad indeed. For most of the last two decades, we have had among the highest rates of child poverty (20-23 percent from the mid-80s to the late 90s). Our nearest “competitors” for last place among advanced democracies over the same time period are Great Britain (10-17 percent) and Italy (10-19percent). In most other Western European countries, child poverty rates fell considerably below our shameful levels (from 3-13 percent). A leading conservative explanation for the comparatively high rates of the U.S. centers on our unique demographic characteristics, especially the percentage of children who live in no-wage earner versus one- or two-wage earner families. Through a variety of simulations(e.g., how would U.S. poverty rates look if we had European population characteristics? How would European poverty rates look if they had U.S. population characteristics?), Rainwater and Smeeding convince me that demography is not destiny. National differences in population characteristics explain only a tiny bit of the cross-national differences in child poverty rates. So what does? The answer is public policy. The major point of Poor Kids in a Rich Country is that “America has a high child poverty rate because we choose it” by virtue of the policies we implement. Other countries’ policies make it easier for working parents to earn a decent living while raising their children, but U.S. policies do not. What could America do? The authors point the readers to better child-related tax policies, parental leave, child care support, income supports for 310 working families and new educational policies designed to really close the achievement gap between low-income and middle/upperincome children. As they...