POVERTY IN AMERICA | JFK Library
Andrew Adams
Updated on March 22, 2026
TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR.
In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy stated, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Just hours later, in his first official act, he issued an Executive Order to provide more food aid for needy families in response to the poverty he witnessed as he campaigned across the country. So, too, at the end of his Presidency, the poor were again on his mind and at the forefront of many discussions with his advisors as they prepared new initiatives that under President Johnson's leadership would become known as the War on Poverty.
The latter period was richly informed by Michael Harrington's book, The Other America, a review of which found its way to President Kennedy's desk. We're fortunate to have Maurice Isserman, professor of history at Hamilton College, with us this evening. Professor Isserman has written extensively on the history of the American left, including a prize-winning biography of Michael Harrington. 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Other America, and we appreciate Professor Isserman joining us to help mark this occasion and to reflect on what has changed and what has not related to the hidden struggles of the poor across our land.
It could be argued that the man who inherited the mantle of Michael Harrington for our time is Peter Edelman. His newest book, So Rich, So Poor: Why it is Hard to End Poverty in America -- which is on sale in our bookstore, and we'll have a book signing following the Forum – is an insightful exploration of the unending cycle of poverty and income inequality that afflicts so many in our nation. The book provides both historical perspective and concrete solutions on how we can best move forward.
Mr. Edelman is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He was a top advisor to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, with whom he witnessed the plight of the poor first hand in the San Joaquin Valley, the coal mining towns of eastern Kentucky, the inner city neighborhoods of New York City, and in the Mississippi Delta where he also happened to meet Marian Wright, whom he would later marry. Mr. Edelman also served in the Clinton Administration, famously resigning in protest over the signing of the welfare law in 1996.
Our moderator this evening is Jennifer Hochschild, a professor of government and African American studies at Harvard University. Professor Hochschild's scholarship focuses on the intersection of American politics and political philosophy, particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity and immigration as they relate to education and social welfare policy.
I can also attest from personal experience. She's a wonderful teacher and advisor, demonstrating a generous manner and engaging with the misbegotten if well-intentioned theories of her students. It's an honor for me to introduce her and to thank her publicly for the pivotal role she played in shaping the person that I've become.
The night before he died, in a speech in Houston, President Kennedy talked of an America that is both powerful and peaceful, with a people that are both prosperous and just. The issues that were before the country in November of 1963 – economic inequality, civil rights and Vietnam – were bequeathed to his successor. Yet we see echoes of them still, including in the current Presidential campaign as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney explain their respective strategies on our how our nation can be both prosperous and just.
In his new book, Peter Edelman quotes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who suggests we become more and more ensconced in a two-speed world. "We have a society of dichotomies," Mr. Edelman explains, "of gated communities and ghastly ghettos; of yachts and people with no buoys at all; of private jets and children whose wings are clipped early, long before they could even consider flying. We need a more honest and more candid discussion," he concludes, "and we need it sooner rather than later."
So let the discussion begin by joining me in welcoming Peter Edelman, Maurice Isserman and Jennifer Hochschild to the Kennedy Library. [applause]
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, delighted you're all here.
Not particularly delighted with the subject for the evening's discussion, but very, very happy to welcome a lot of people to talk about what's obviously a tremendously important and very difficult issue, about which we have a lot of concerns but also a certain amount of progress and a certain amount of optimism. So I think we want to touch on both sides of that issue tonight.
Let me start by asking Professor Isserman. You told us a few minutes ago that you had an introductory comment that would link Michael Harrington, Peter Edelman, poverty, contemporary American politics.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: It's not my comment. It's Michael Harrington's from the conclusion to The Other America -- the very last chapter, entitled "The Two Nations.” The problem, he said, is to a great extent one of vision. The nation of the well-off must be able to see through the wall of affluence and recognize the citizens on the other side. There must be vision in the sense of purpose of aspiration, so vision in two senses.
He concludes, “As usual, the fate of the poor hangs upon the decision of the better-off. If this anger and shame that he thinks should come from seeing the Other America and seeing the conditions of the Other America – if this anger and shame are not forthcoming, someone can write a book about the Other America a generation from now and it will be the same or worse. I guess the question I would pose to Peter is, is it the same? Is it worse? Or how does it compare?
PETER EDELMAN: Maurice, I think that it's different. It is not the same. It is in important ways not worse and in some ways it is worse.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: In this case being poverty.
PETER EDELMAN: Poverty. Poverty has changed. Children have become the poorest group in our society and that's connected to what's happened to work. Children are poor because their parents are poor. After the time of Michael Harrington and all of the efforts of the 1960s, we saw the change in the economy that we all know took place, where the better paying jobs, the industrial jobs, the jobs that were the path to the middle class for so many people, particularly people of color, went away – auto, steel, all of that -- and were replaced by -- fortunately replaced -- but replaced by this flood of low wage jobs that we have. We can go into more detail about that, but people who are poor are most of the time working, most of the time getting some income from work. They're really doing the very best they can, and they're up against the fact that the jobs just pay so little. Some of those jobs are jobs that are in services that are what moms used to do at home. They went out into the workforce, sometimes because they wanted to, sometimes because the family needed a second earner, if there were a dad and a mom there. So think about it: Fast food -- people cooked at home, now they go eat fast food, etc.
Some things came from government policy, maybe successful in some ways, but the money isn't good. So you look at home health workers; the average wage of home health workers is $21,800; that’s not even above the poverty line for a family of four. So the whole thing is really different from the 1960s, and the number of single moms who are out there. There's a lot to be discussed about that. But one thing is for sure: it's really hard to support a family on only one of those jobs. That's the child poverty.
Now, another thing that's different is that we've actually done a lot. Ronald Reagan famously said we fought a war against poverty, and poverty won. It's not true. We have, of course, starting with Social Security and very big things that are important wholly apart from their income value – Medicare and Medicaid – but also lots of other things – earned income tax credit and food stamps, very important – and so on. Something like 40 million people are being kept out of poverty now by the public policies that we have. Well, those things didn't all get built in the 1960s. In fact, they've kind of accumulated through the '70s, '80s; some of them happened under Richard Nixon. So that's different.
The problem is, on the one hand you have all of these things that have just up until the last decade kept us even. We were down to 11.1% poverty, lowest we've had since we started measuring in 1973, and in the Clinton years at 11.3%. So are we doing better with all those programs that I mentioned? Well, that's about the low wage jobs and going particularly now into the last 12 years -- the Bush period and the terrible recession -- we've almost destroyed the safety net for people at the very bottom. And that is a reversion to the kinds of poverty that we saw. Now, we haven't got the hunger that we had; we've done better. Food stamps is a great success.
From my point of view, in framing the discussion, it's the low wage jobs, it's the very deep poverty that we have, 20 million people now with incomes below half the poverty line, that's below $9,000 for a family of three, just really astonishing. Continuing issues of race and gender in society, we still have an enormous disproportionality between white and African Americans, Latino and Native American. That's the frame of what the problem is as we start this discussion.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: We'll get to solutions eventually, but let me focus more still on what the nature of the problem is before we start talking about potential solutions. I'm going to pick up on something that you said at the beginning of your comment. Again, it's about both what persists, but also especially what's changed since the Michael Harrington era, which is that children are now the poorest group. Fifty years ago it was the elderly, or at least the elderly were much poorer than the elderly are now on balance. Of course, that's largely the story about the success of Social Security, the success of Medicare. So that's a very positive story, that the elderly are not poor disproportionately, but children are.
That's pretty horrifying on its own terms. It may be especially interesting because the American ideology is that of opportunity, of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps; everybody both has the responsibility but also the right to succeed based on what they can accomplish in their own life. The American Dream, we all know that ideology; we all probably share it.
It seems to me that would lead Americans to want to put a lot of money into enabling children who, after all, are innocent of all the terrible things that adults might have done, to give children enough of a platform to be able to take advantage of those opportunities. So even if you want to punish the parents, even if you imagine it's the parents' fault that the parents are poor, it's very hard to argue that it's the children's fault that the children are poor. So why don't Americans want to do things like very high quality schooling? Very high quality healthcare? Very high quality daycare? Very high quality etc., etc. Things that would benefit the children, even if you just want to shove the parents aside because it's somehow their fault. First of all, why are the children the poorest? That's the real question I'm asking, and I would ask both of you to comment on that.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Well, it's kind of a digression, though it does speak to the larger question. The elderly were disproportionately poor in 1962, and Harrington devoted an entire chapter to the elderly poor. One doesn’t feel the need to devote an entire chapter because the elderly now are disproportionately not poor, although certainly there are poor elders. Maybe this kind of strays over into the solution part of the evening, but the elderly benefited from universally targeted programs – Social Security, which, starting in the early '70s, was linked to cost of living increases, and, of course, Medicare. Although they are under attack now, those are both extremely popular programs because they're not targeted towards the poor.
There's a saying in social welfare circles that programs for poor people are poor programs, and I think that's a perfect example. The best way to lift people out of poverty is not necessarily through programs targeted to the poor, but universal programs. Medicare for all would be an enormous step forward to eliminating poverty in the United States.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: So why don't we do that for children?
PETER EDELMAN: It's called universal public education.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: That would be a place to start.
PETER EDELMAN: We aren't doing it, obviously, nearly well enough for low income children. But I will say that when you disaggregate the problem into other words, we're not very good about using that P word. I say that in the book. Our President has done a lot for low income people – the 16 million added to Medicaid in the Affordable Care Act, that's phenomenal; that's a huge hole in that health safety net that's been there since 1965 when Medicaid was enacted, and there was a lot for low income people in the Recovery Act, the stimulus legislation that was enacted in 2009. One thing that he's concentrated on and that has had, up until the current mess that we have, is an effort, not always agreed on in the details, to improve education for low income children. That's a serious effort. Race to the Top is a very, very serious strategy.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Not a lot of money in it.
PETER EDELMAN: Well, but it leveraged. I mean, right now, all the states have cut their education budgets. It's horrible. I would think in this room we could probably get agreement from most people that the stimulus that took place in the first two years of the Obama
Administration – certainly Paul Krugman is our standard-bearer on that, over and over and over again, and rightly so – should have continued that stimulus.
Before the bottom fell out for the states, the Race to the Top incentivized a lot of action at the state level. So if we talk about children, if we talk about healthcare – because, again, as controversial as the Affordable Care Act is, the enactment of this expansion for 16 million people, 18- to 64-year-olds and Medicaid went through with barely any opposition.
So in fact, in some other things we don't do so well. We could say housing. There wasn't anything magical that happened when we said housing, it didn't suddenly get built. But we do better. These things that I mentioned before that reach the 40 million -- and some of them do relate to poor people only -- you can't do food stamps as a universal program, but when you can, it's certainly better.
So we've done all these things. I think the thing that people really don't understand – it's certainly one of my major purposes in writing this book – is the extent to which we have been fighting against the effects of this low wage economy, which are just pervasive in terms of the barriers that they create. You talk, Jennifer, about the upward mobility, the kind of American ideal or mythology or whatever it is, and, of course, there was a great deal of upward mobility after World War II until 1973. African American men, who we all know have not done so well the last 40 years, did very well for the 28 years after World War II. Then when those structural economic changes occurred, they were worst for people of color and people at the bottom.
We are in a situation that I'm afraid is not going to get all that better. That's one of the areas where we really need to have the conversation that I've called for, which is what are we going to do about the 103 million who now have incomes below twice the poverty line, below $44,000 for a family of four. That's a third of the American people. The median wage job in this country now pays, if you have it all year full-time, pays $34,000. Half the jobs that we have pay less in this rich country, pay less than $34,000. A quarter of them pay less than $22,000. If you have two people who can go out to work, you can do sort of okay. If you're one person trying to do it, you just can't. Talk about those home health workers. The average wage for somebody who works in childcare is about $17,000. So actually public policy -- because we're a little cheapskate about it - is creating and paying some of those low wage jobs.
It's so complicated. You asked this question, do people care. I think people do care, but I think that they really don't completely understand what we're up against so we're not having a full-on honest debate. And then now, my goodness, Paul Ryan and all of his pals …
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: We'll get to the politics. Hang on, I want to get to the politics.
PETER EDELMAN: I just want to introduce Paul Ryan to the conversation. [laughter]
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I'm a political scientist.
PETER EDELMAN: Hello, Paul Ryan, are you out there? [laughter]
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I want to hang on to the political questions for a few minutes, if that's okay.
PETER EDELMAN: Okay, sure.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: And also the public education and all that. Stick for a minute: so the median wage is low. The mean wage or mean income is, of course, very much higher, which is a slightly arcane way of saying that we have a small fraction of the population who have enormous incomes and orders of magnitude more enormous wealth. So that's a way of introducing this question about how do we think not just about poverty, but about broader questions of inequality, which is to say probably everybody in the room knows that the top 10%, 5%, 1% .1%, .01%, as you go up to a smaller and smaller fraction of the population have had a larger and larger increase in income and especially wealth even with the 2008 crash. So question mark at the end of that sentence. How do we think about the relationship between great and rising both incomes and wealth at the very top, and persistent poverty, although a change in the composition of the poverty?
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Could I say something in relation to The Other America? It's interesting that Peter does discuss that issue, precisely, and talks about the 1%, and talks about the drop in the tax rate. Harrington, the socialist, didn't address that, in part because he wanted to write a book that kept the focus on poor people and didn't raise distracting issues about his socialism. In fact, the only political affiliation … He avoided using the S word.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Tell us about that. That's interesting. Talk about words that we avoid using. Peter talks about the fact that we avoid talking about poverty. Harrington avoided talking about socialism.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Well, he talked about his earlier radical affiliation with the Catholic Worker Movement, which is where he first came in contact with poor people on the Lower East Side of New York in the Bowery, but a particular subset of the aging alcoholic male poor. But he thought he wouldn't be taken seriously if he raised those distracting radical issues. Peter's book, not writing as a socialist, does in fact say we have to address this broader question.
Of course, in Harrington's time, the marginal tax rate was 35%. We were still under radical socialist Dwight Eisenhower's tax structure. Today, of course, it's 15% or less, if you can get away with it so that's another major difference between the two.
The question about the P word though, poverty, you have a very interesting discussion about how if you repackage what you're talking about into, say, homeless veterans or hunger, food stamps can exist on a massive scale because it's not targeted to poor people, it's targeted to hungry people. Hungry people elicit a kind of sympathy on the part of the public that the poor don't necessarily.
PETER EDELMAN: I'm torn about that, as I say in the book, because I really want us to talk about poverty. But the fact is we understand that if we take homeless veterans and hunger and so on, we do better.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: You also want us to talk about wealth.
PETER EDELMAN: Yes. Well, both wealth and high income, two different things. You look at the changes in the wealth distribution, especially for African Americans and Latinos in the last few years, and the wealth in the African American and Latino communities, especially African American, just plummeted because the predatory lending and the housing bubble finally reached lower middle class African American middle class families, who historically had never -- back when you could buy a house really cheap -- been prevented by public policy and by bank policy from buying houses and never accumulated that wealth. Just a terrible tragedy that they were targeted by the banks. They bought these houses, then the crash came and they lost everything.
It's just awful.
I said in the book about the wealth generally, that like Harrington – I confess I hadn't particularly thought of myself as paralleling Harrington in that, although it's fine – I, over the years, have talked about poverty and I think my thinking was the same as his was. But you can't talk about these things separately now. There's a moral decay that goes with the gaps that have come. The way the gaps were when Michael Harrington was writing The Other America, not only was the tax structure tougher on people at the top … You talked about the effect of tax level, Maurice, but of course on paper it was on up to 90% for individuals, but correctly they had deductions.
Let's go down to the Trans-Lux and boo Roosevelt. Remember the New Yorker cartoon with the people in their white tails and so on. You had the JP Morgans and all. Still, the distribution of income didn't change all that much for the first seven decades or so of the 20th century, and this incredible gap is really a factor of the last 40 years.
For one thing, we can't pay for what we need without them. Now, we can't pay for what we need only with them. We need to look at the whole tax structure. We need to look at what we're spending the money, the defense budget, other things. But we simply can't talk about the issues of low income people without putting it into a context, and a lot of this is not about money. It's about inclusion. It's about whether people are a part of this society.
We didn't finish. We've got time to do it, but talking about children and whether we're serious about including them in our society. I said some nice things about Obama, but the fact is that I think it's associated with the fact that we don't, quote/unquote, need them in the economy. I can say to you – I suspect we'll agree – if everybody in the economy was a consumer that would be good for the rich people who sell the goods, the corporate people who sell the goods; they would have a bigger market. But nonetheless, from the point of view of who we need to work in this economy, we have some people who are sort of extraneous. That's a big problem in terms of trying to do a policy of inclusion. It's very racial because it's not pre-Brown v. Board of Education; it's not mandated segregation, but it's effective segregation. It's de facto, as we lawyers say. So who's going to the worst schools? Inner city kids and also kids in rural areas who are part of this sort of discarded economy. That's a big piece of the challenge.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Yes, to put it mildly. Let me ask one more sort of background how do we explain the situation, and then we'll talk about policies and politics, about how to fix it. It's the old bugaboo of culture and structure, agency or choice on the one hand, and constraint or controls on the other hand. You've got some interesting discussion in the book in which you say, look, it's fundamentally a problem of jobs or low wage jobs, it's a problem of extraneous workers. It's a whole series of very deep structural issues. No question about that, and you'll say a lot more about them over the next half-hour.
But you also have some comments that say individual responsibility matters, civic association matters, good behavior matters. We have to take seriously thinking about why are there such high levels of single parenthood? Why are there relatively high rates of crime in certain communities, certain places? Why don't people graduate from college or at least graduate from high school? You tip-toe in the direction of saying that there are cultural or agency or individual choices going on here as well as these very deep and broad structural problems. This is a really hard issue for all of us, and probably many of you, to talk about. It's got racial inflections, it's got gender inflections. It certainly has wealth and poverty inflections. It has deep moral and religion inflections. The left, I think, does a very bad job in general in thinking about how to talk about individual agency and culture.
Again, question mark at the end of that sentence. How do we talk about these issues? So it's partly how do we talk about them? What role do they play in poverty? What role do they play in beginning to try to dig ourselves out of this hole that we're in?
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Well, Michael Harrington bears the …
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: You could also answer in your own voice, as well as in Harrington's voice, you know.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: I'm about to offer a critique of a man of whom I'm very fond. He bears some of the onus for introducing the concept of culture of poverty, which was actually a phrase coined by Oscar Lewis, the anthropologist, to talk about poor families in Mexico and the notion that poverty was not simply the absence of income, but it was also a set of values, family structure, expectations that held people down. Lewis made it very clear: he was only talking about a subset of the poor. Harrington handled the term loosely, picked it up, said that we're not just facing poverty, we're facing the culture of poverty. What he meant by that, what he intended to say was that poverty was tenacious. He was writing at a time of an expanding economy. He said, look, rising tide is not going to lift all boats. We need programs targeted in terms of education, in terms of health.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I want to come back to the targeted universalism later, but go ahead, keep going.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: And a concerted federal effort to do it. It's not just going to happen automatically. So his intentions were good but he threw that term "culture of poverty" into the mix. If you read The Other America carefully, you'll see that he often uses the term "culture of poverty" interchangeably with the term "vicious circle," which is another reformer term going back to Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives. The vicious circle was a little different in the way he used it, because it was about the poor who lived in slums. They have inadequate nutrition, so they get sick more often, and so they lose work, and then they start off again at a lower level. Actually, no part of the vicious circle that he described had anything to do with culture. It had to do with lack of income. If you inserted more income, more jobs at any point of the vicious circle, you'd lift the individual or the family out of poverty. So he used the term with the best of intentions.
What happened in the 1970s was that the neo-conservatives – which was also a term he coined, those former liberals, in some cases former socialists who had grown disenchanted with the welfare state – they flipped it and they said that the culture of poverty, it was not just a symptom. It was the operative cause of poverty; hence, federal social welfare spending was counterproductive; it actually created a culture of poverty or culture of dependence. It's telling that in later books on poverty – and Harrington wrote several more before his death in 1989 – he never used the term culture of poverty. You use it once to critique it and to say it has a pejorative connotation.
Some of you may have seen Barbara Ehrenreich's Nation piece. I'm a great admirer of Barbara and her writing, particularly about the working poor. I think she was a little unfair to Harrington, saying it's his fault. Conservatives were perfectly capable of inventing the concept for themselves and using it to attack the Great Society and the war on poverty. But it is, as you suggest, a very problematic concept. I think you handle it well when saying, yes, we have to have programs that deal with teenage parents who don't know how to raise their children and we can help them. There are things we can do about it, not just throw our hands up in moralistic horror or mock moralistic horror. But the real issues are structural, and the real issues are low wage jobs.
PETER EDELMAN: I would say a couple of things. One is that in understanding who is poor, the vast majority of people who are ever poor are people who dip into poverty for a pretty short period of time. Something happens in their lives, they lose a job and they don't have unemployment compensation or it runs out. Or a mom is left in a situation where the husband goes off and leaves her and she's stuck. For the most part, if you look at people who are poor, low income anywhere, they're trying very hard, especially for their kids. They're trying very hard to earn enough. There's a long history and so on and so on of what happened through their schooling, what their skills are. They may have some personal issues of one kind or another.
Then, there is a much, much smaller group, which is really who Michael Harrington was talking about, that continues to be a huge challenge. It's a much, much smaller group and I basically think shame on us that we have to throw epithets and use labels and so on, and just call them irresponsible. For a variety of reasons -- and it's a long conversation in itself -- we're talking about persistent poverty, intergenerational poverty. It is associated with place quite a bit. That's a tougher nut to crack.
Now, what I was trying to do, what you both referred to here in terms of talking about personal responsibility is, first of all, to say it's obvious. I mean, who succeeds and is able to function in the society if they don't take responsibility for themselves? So why are we having this big argument about it? But it tends to be, as you said Jennifer, our side -- whoever we are – we’ve lost some of us on what the name is. I'm not sure. Are we liberals? I guess I am, okay. [laughter]
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Ooh, the L word.
PETER EDELMAN: Right. But I get to define it. Or we're progressives. I think we maybe need a new one. So there is this discomfort, as you both said, about talking other than in structural terms, about these issues. Then of course, on the other side, they don't have any trouble at all. There aren't any structural problems. Now, I don't know, am I permitted to say this yet …
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Yes.
PETER EDELMAN: … or do I have to hold on?
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Go for it.
PETER EDELMAN: It's the old thing of, you've got to remove all these things that are helping people because they're not going to – food stamps, and so on -- they're not going to get anywhere if you keep helping them. The only way they're going to take responsibility for themselves is cold turkey. Get rid of all that stuff. I mean, that's a serious proposition. Paul Ryan gave a big speech about that just a couple weeks ago. So I don't get it but they really do it with a straight face. Gingrich saying Obama's the food stamp president.
Let's try to say, look, there is something that's got both these aspects to it, particularly the references to the question of young people and taking responsibility. You mentioned that I'm not all-public policy guy. I mean it's both. There is enormous civic responsibility here, and particularly in these low income communities. Where are the adult role models and so on? They are there, but maybe not in sufficient numbers.
I think you can't have a full conversation about this if you don't say at the end of the day … These kids growing up in the inner city face a street culture. Elijah Anderson, the sociologist, talked about the war between the decent and the street in one of his books, which has always stuck with me. Plenty of people who are churchgoing, etc., very upstanding people, and then there somehow is a kind of a peer sense out on the street that says, why bother to go to school? What's that for? One problem is that there's a reality to that because what's going on in school that seems to be useful? So you really have to say, no, wait a minute, you've got to stick to this.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Have we moved to the political part of the evening?
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Yes. These poor men who've been trying all evening and I've been preventing them. I guess what I want to ask you both to do is to talk about the policy proposals that you think are most urgent, most important. But also do me a favor and link them to the politics. Probably everybody in this room could identity one or two or three policies that we really, really want to have happen, and none of us have the one that we're going to make it happen. So let me ask you to talk about what you think the crucial policy steps would be and the politics that are going to get us there. Or at least going to get us going in the right direction.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: I'm not a policy guy, other than having a preference for universal programs. I think those are politically the ones that are the most viable. But I will say something about the politics, and again we're getting to the difference between 1962 and 2012, is that when people read The Other America, they often read it in a single reading; they were so absorbed in it. It was a 186-page book. That was one of its virtues, it's a short book. And this is a short book, too; that's another virtue of the book.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Which I also read in one sitting and you can do, too.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: But they would describe the experience as "the scales fell from my eyes," that the discovery that poverty existed in the United States. I mean, people talked about poverty in the '50s. Galbraith wrote a book called The Affluent Society, in which there was a chapter on what he called insular poverty, that there were these little islands of poverty. Or
Edward R. Murrow did a famous CBS broadcast about migrant labor and farm workers in Harvest of Shame.
People recognized that there were these little atypical places where poverty existed, but the notion that poverty was something that swept up to a quarter to a third of the American population and wasn't going to disappear on its own came as a great shock. That had a political consequence in a moment when the economy was expanding and people's lives were getting better and real wages were improving, which is that people were – the board public, I think -- more willing to think, well, the pie is expanding. Why shouldn't the poor also have a larger slice of the pie?
Today is extremely different. Today we've gone through 30 years of declining real wages, of having to have two breadwinners rather than a single breadwinner to keep a family afloat, of people working longer hours, seeing their children less, going deeper into debt, all of these pushing a sense of insecurity that not only includes the poor and the near-poor, but people who are above twice the level of poverty income. It's a kind of a generalized insecurity, and that is a very unpropitious climate to say the poor should get a bigger slice of the pie because people are looking after their own slice of the pie and not at all sure that it's going to be sufficient. I think the political moment in the early 1960s, the shock, the revelation of the existence of poverty, plus the general sense of optimism created this rare moment when programs like the War on Poverty could gain footing. We live in a very different era.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: So do you have a solution to this?
PETER EDELMAN: Well, I certainly agree with Maurice's analysis. This is a tough time. We weren't doing so badly, except at the very bottom, at the point where Clinton left office. The really tough time politically and with lots more people, poverty went up from about 31 million when Clinton left office to 46 million now. At least for now, it's gotten worse and the Tea Party thing has come along, if you will, parallel or even connected to that.
Right now, the politics is that we've got to defend what we've got. I don't know what it is, whether people think that Paul Ryan isn't for real? He gets a free ride. He goes out there and he says this stuff, and I don't know whether … I mean, I'd love to hear from people. People say, "Well, that's the House, they're crazy. It won't go through the Senate, so forget about it." Maybe that's got to be too simple.
Let's suppose the President is reelected and the House is still Republican and the Senate is whatever it is, 51/49, one way or the other, but that the Republicans don't have 60 votes. They're still going to be able to take a Republican budget and the Senate will pass, particularly if it's still Democratic, something better. Then they go to conference … and you can see right now. The legal services program, for example, that I pay a lot of attention to, for poor people, that I care a lot about, a huge cut, a huge whack was already taken at it just because the Senate couldn't protect it. They had to go and make a deal in a conference. So the Paul Ryan thing isn't just some guy who's out saying all this crazy stuff. If you asked me the question, what's my first thing, what's the only thing I could have … I hate that question, but anyway, I just asked myself.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I was going to say, so what is the one or two policies …
PETER EDELMAN: Well, see, I preempted you, I knew you were coming.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: … that you want us to pull all our chips in.
PETER EDELMAN: It's the fact that there are so many people. There are six million people now who only have food stamps. Think of that. Six million people. Food stamps pay a third of the poverty line. That means an income of $6,000 for a family of three. Well, why is that? Because welfare, cash assistance for mothers and children – primarily mothers and children, not too many dads in that – it's basically gone. And the Republicans are still out there saying, "There are all these people on welfare! We've got to kick them off!" They're not even there anymore; we're down to about four million people, from the 14 million that there were when Clinton signed that bill. That was too many, by the way, but that's another conversation. The previous policy was bad.
So when you look, there are now 25 states in which there are fewer than 20% of the poor children getting welfare, getting TANF -- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is our name for it now -- twenty-five states. In the State of Wyoming, there are 617 people – it's down from the number in my book. You can say, "I caught you, it was 644 in the book" – 617 people, latest number, in the entire State of Wyoming, 4% of the poor children. It's not there. That's why there are six million people who have only food stamps for their income, because welfare doesn't exist in about half the country, pretty much most of the country. So I would do something about that. Now, you asked me, politically that's a whole other question, but that's where I'm going to put down my mark.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I'm going to ask you one more question, but first of all say that as soon as I ask him one more question, we're going to ask the audience to participate and I will ask you, when you devise your own questions to (a) keep them short, and (b) keep them questions so that our panelists actually have a chance to answer as many as possible.
So while you're thinking of your questions, one more. So how does this desperate poverty that you just described and the lack of welfare and the very thin reed of food stamps, how do you link that to what you were saying earlier and what comes through very strongly in the book, which is jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs, decent jobs with decent wages.
Now, one doesn't have to choose between the two things, obviously. But will a jobs solution get at the desperately poor? Are these two quite distinct policies for distinct populations? How do we think about the relationship between those two policies?
PETER EDELMAN: They're interactive. It goes back to my trying to preempt you on the question of only one thing. The heart of an antipoverty strategy and on up to everybody who's having a tough time, which the research shows is up to about twice the poverty line, it's jobs. That's a whole thing in and of itself to list. It's the macroeconomic policy, it's the minimum wage, it's the revival of unions, it's a whole series of work supports that have money value – healthcare, housing, childcare, help with college. It's adding to the wage of low wage jobs the earned income tax credit, which adds well over $5,000 to the income of a mom with two kids who has a minimum wage job -- so all of that on the wage side. One of the things I would put on the table is I think that that question of income from work, connected to work, is still not going to get you all the way there with the things that I said. So we need a conversation about wage supplements. All right, but you have to have a safety net; that's the interaction. Some of it is temporary. Most of it's temporary.
Most of the people who would ever go on welfare are just desperately poor. I mean, they go in and out, all that. But you have to have a decent safety net for everybody who's in trouble, and it has to be connected in the policy to work, too. That was what was wrong with the old welfare system and it's also wrong with the way they did it in the new TANF. Not only does the TANF disappear, but their work policy is "kick them in the pants and tell them to go to work."
Why is it – I just want to sneak this in here -- in the recession welfare went up from 3.9 to 4.4 million people; 500,000 people. Desperate unemployment all over the country. What do you think happened to food stamps? You know this, but I'll give you numbers. 26.3 million people on food stamps at the beginning of the recession in 2007. How many now? 46 million. What's the difference? There's a legal right to get food stamps; there's no legal right to get TANF, to get welfare. Simple as that. So it is all connected, and we have to have a safety net. Then we get to investing in our future, in our children, and so on, and so on. But I just had to slip that in there.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I noticed. We invite questions from the audience. We have two microphones here. Line up between the two microphones, and I'll just go right, left, right, left. If you have a question for a particular speaker, if you could specify that or just ask the question and these guys will jump in as they wish.
ROBERT CHISICK: My name is Robert Chisick, and I'm quite often here. I guess my question is -- I can paraphrase it by quoting Chris Matthews. Tell me something I didn't know when I came in this place, and before I leave the microphone, I would like to say this, too. A lot of elitists in this country -- Paul Ryan, John Boehner, some who tried to be, Newt Gingrich, four members, at least, of the Supreme Court -- they are not Dorothy Days. They are the Other Catholics, just like the Other Americans. I don't know how they got that way, but tell me something I didn't know.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: That's a question?
PETER EDELMAN: Can't help you. You're going to have to read my book. [laughter]
PETER HILL: Hi, my name is Peter Hill. You actually all touched on it. One of the best predictors of poverty is single motherhood in this country. Yet federal and state policies have incentivized the destruction of family and throwing fathers out of the kids' lives and for single motherhood. Do you think that the government will ever reform the federal and state laws to help bring back fathers into kids' lives to reduce poverty?
PETER EDELMAN: I think, first of all, that if you look at why there are so many families where there's a single mom, it's actually an international phenomenon. The increases have gone up in every industrialized country. You probably know those numbers. They cut across racial lines. So it isn't just federal policies that have somehow rewarded single motherhood or discouraged families from staying together.
But I'll give you one thing that I think – because I think it's a broad and complicated question -- the criminal justice system has a lot to do with this conversation. Because the young men, some young women, too, but the young men are growing up in these neighborhoods and as my wife says, but it's now in the discourse, cradle-to-prison pipeline. These young men were already, partly as a result of their poverty, and then the conversation we had and the facts about taking responsibility, all of that …
PETER HILL: You don't believe federal policies have any relationship at all to it?
PETER EDELMAN: Well, the welfare system that we had was anti-two-parent family. I think that's where you're coming from.
PETER HILL: Absolutely.
PETER EDELMAN: So certainly in the area of income support, we ought to have policy that says it's based on need. Now, it also ought to be connected to what are we going to do to help you have the minimum stay so that you can end up working? If you're not, for whatever reason … Suppose you've got small kids, suppose you're home taking care of a disabled child; I mean, there are various reasons why people legitimately aren't in the labor force but certainly the income policy that we ought to have shouldn't differentiate. I'm totally with you on that.
DAVID ROAN: Hi, my name is David Roan, and I appreciate your being here today to engage this important discussion. Sorry for the philosophical nature of this question, but to what extent, if at all, do you think equality and freedom, two of our most profound American ideals, work against each other, if at all?
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Yes, well, that's the question, isn't it? I think Harrington would say – that's always my fallback – that those are two values in tension with each other, but that you do your best to honor both of them. What he would say is that a lot of the discourse we hear, that somehow the equality is the road to serfdom – the Hayek argument – is greatly exaggerated, that there is no historical example of an expanding welfare state leading to totalitarianism. It's usually a society in freefall, economic freefall, political collapse that leads to totalitarianism. So, again, we honor those two values. I respect conservative concerns about an expanding state undermining liberty, but I think also we need to avoid hysteria on the subject, which is what we generally hear from Fox News and like-minded folk.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Let me make a comment on this. I teach American political
thought, so I absolutely can't resist because it is the crucial question running for the last three or four hundred years of American history.
Another way to think about it, it's not really disagreement, but another way to think about it is that we spend a lot of time talking about equality meaning identical incomes or equality of opportunity to become unequal. We spend less time as a society talking about the various ways of parsing the word freedom. I think if you do that, there's less of a tension and less of a contradiction, at least by some definitions. The starting point that I would use is sort of freedom from interference, sort of the Hayek notion – government shouldn't interfere with my life; government shouldn't take my money. Nobody in this room has a right to interfere with my choices, and so on.
There's an alternative meaning of freedom, which I think has just as deep a set of philosophical roots, and it's the freedom to accomplish, the freedom to achieve, the freedom to be what you want to be. Those aren't radically different, but they have somewhat different connotations.
It seems to me you could make a very plausible argument that says the freedom to be the person that you actually can be, which is in part what American liberalism – small l, not liberal versus conservative, but traditional understandings of liberalism democracy – requires some level of resources or some starting point. It doesn't have to be extremely high. This is back to my earlier question about children and schooling and healthcare.
It's really the issue of deep poverty. If you're desperately poor and you live in a desperately poor community, you're neither free from interference, nor are you free to achieve. So some minimal level, some threshold, not full equality of outcomes, may be necessary in order to promote really any of those several different understandings of freedom. That's at least how I would parse the relationship between these two potentially contradictory values that I don't actually think really have to be. I don't know if you want to take a crack at this one or not.
PETER EDELMAN: I'll buy that, totally, both of you. But I would just say, in the reality of where we are in this country, we're not near …
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I'm operating at 30,000 feet here.
PETER EDELMAN: You're fine, but we're not near that collision. The ways in which so many people are unequal – and I talked about the criminal justice system, but the whole idea of justice in the courts and what happens when you go if you have no lawyer. The law's on your side, but you're going to get kicked out of your house anyway because you don't know how to use it.
We can go on and on with all the ways in which we're so far from -- whether it's equality of opportunity or equality of the administration of justice or what it is -- that we're nowhere near the idea that you want to make everybody equal in exactly the same for-dollar income. The same thing on the other side, because what's the freedom that all these young people have the way things are? There are differing numbers, but Andrew Sum from Northeastern is my sort of labor economist on these things. He says there are four or five million young people between the ages of 18 and 24 who are both out of school and have no job, on a continuing basis, not just for one day. That's just a mind-boggling number.
JOHN HARRIS: My name is John Harris. I am an economist by profession. I've been looking a good bit at the growing literature on intergenerational mobility. The American Dream is, wherever you start, you have a chance to make it. With a growing body of careful studies, we are right at the bottom of the major industrial countries and most of that is explained by differential access to education and health, at least that's how it seems to me. So the question is is your outcome determined by where your parents were?
On the other hand, looking at the US versus those other countries that have generally higher levels of mobility, we seem to have done a lot better as far as immigrant population. We throw out Canada because you select in differently, but you see the success of immigrant kids, particularly in education, going into a lot of these lousy central city schools. So I'm left with this puzzle about this equality of opportunity and why do we seem to be having these different kind of outcomes?
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Harrington would have been pleased to notice that western European social democracy now has higher rates of social mobility than the United States.
JOHN HARRIS: But not for immigrants.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: But not for immigrants.
JOHN HARRIS: The gentleman was absolutely right about immigrants.
PETER EDELMAN: Well, in our country, there is a history of immigrants coming and the next generation does better and so on, and so on. I think you do have to divide somewhat by which group of immigrants you're talking about. Some are doing spectacularly well, and some are doing just sort of okay. So that's something of a puzzlement.
The basic facts, you know, you've mentioned them. Over the course of the Pew Mobility Project – you've probably looked at their stuff – it's very disturbing, in general. In the African American community, if you look in 1973 at the African American middle class at that time, 45% of the kids born into a middle income African American household end up in the bottom quintile. That gets into a long conversation about – it's too simple to say racism. Race is in that conversation somewhere, and then we get into some of these other harder things that we talked about. But the larger point is that it's not just a matter of education and healthcare. It's a matter also of the structure of the economy. How many jobs are there that can allow anybody to end up with a better income than their parents had. As you know, there are two kinds of mobility – absolute where you just go up, that's good; or relative, where you actually pass somebody up. But we're not facing up to the fact that it's now gotten to be much more of an upside-down funnel. The mobility just isn't there because the better jobs don't exist in enough numbers.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: But I still don't think that quite deals with the immigrant issue.
PETER EDELMAN: No, I don't think I did. [laughter] You got me.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: To be continued.
JOHN THOMPSON: John Thompson, over 80, and very proud to live in subsidized senior housing. My question to Mr. Edelman: We heard lots about jobs, jobs, jobs in 1930s, and I did take a very – friends of mine told me later, including my grandfather, it was communistic -- but I did take a 50-cent-an-hour job writing papers at Amherst College under the NYA and I got an education, fantastic, entered another socialized program to sort of repay me for my so-called four years of military.
The question would be, sometimes in the '70s, I remember working on, of my many causes, a socalled right to work that even Nixon was slightly interested in. Anyone ever heard of it, either of you, panel? And if you have heard of it, I would ask you to comment on it, or certainly recommend it be considered that we have a right to work in the United States and jobs, either public or private, are made available to any man or woman such as these you see who want to work. Thank you. Right to work, by law.
PETER EDELMAN: And not right to work in the sense of no labor unions, that's another– JOHN THOMPSON: You don't want to abolish the labor unions entirely. I happen to be a long-time teacher.
PETER EDELMAN: No, no, the terminology, as you know, gets you …
JOHN THOMPSON: There was a right to work proposal.
PETER EDELMAN: Whatever we want to call it, right to a job anyway.
JOHN THOMPSON: Or it would be created, we remember, to us in Boston. It was told that there would be public works to take you through so you could get a better private job.
PETER EDELMAN: I think that one of the things that we should have done in this great recession, that effectively we're still in, is to have that sort of a New Deal job project. We spent $860 billion over a two-year period, and some of it was to have a broadband set up for the whole country. Well, that's important, but that's not an anti-recessionary thing. I think there would have been a lot of public support if we had people out doing conservation stuff and building things.
JOHN THOMPSON: Rake leaves.
PETER EDELMAN: Maybe not making raking leaves, but …
JOHN THOMPSON: Well, that's what I did, and was proud of it.
PETER EDELMAN: And look what happened to you! You're fine! So nothing against raking leaves. But I think that's largely my personal view is that's an anti-recessionary thing. I think when the economy is doing pretty well, I personally would not put government money into a guaranteed job. I would use it as a strategy for transition into the labor market for, for example, young people, some of those young people that I was talking about, so that they could have a job as part of personal development, of a skills development, as part of a transition into the labor market.
There are all kinds of things that we should be doing with government jobs that would employ people, but that also performs some other public function. So we should be investing, for example, in childcare. The government programs that we have for childcare reach one out of seven people who are eligible; that's what the funding is, they reach one out of seven. We should be putting money into having decent childcare for lots of reasons – for child development, so moms can go to work – two different reasons, but it's so crucial what happens in kids' lives before they're five years old.
Well, that also happens to be a jobs program. Now, you're going to put people who are trained into those jobs; you're not going to just say, "Oh, you don't have a job, you can go take care of kids." But if you take that idea of how can we intelligently use public resources to put people to work doing things that we need done, then we have a conversation.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Just a historical note. The greatest social welfare spending in American history did not come during the New Deal. It came after the Second World War in the form, first as the GI Bill. Sixteen million Americans served in the military in the Second World War and they were all eligible for low interest loans for housing, to purchase a house, to start a business, support to go to college, some other kind of higher education. The great expansion of
American higher education took place in large measure because of the incentive of the GI Bill.
That followed in the 1950s by the National Highways Act; again, that great radical Dwight Eisenhower spending billions of dollars, putting hundreds of thousands of people to work, transforming the face of the United States, for better or worse. And as the title of Peter's book suggests, we're rich and we're poor. We have enormous wealth. We don't have the political will to mobilize it for the purpose of lifting people out of poverty.
PETER EDELMAN: Though I would add to any of these things where we want to talk about using public money, we have to pay for it. So there are a lot of wonderful things that we're all in favor of. It's also true that we've got to look at the revenue side, and that's also been a little weakness of the liberals sometimes.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Except nothing was more expensive than World War II. Huge national debt. It wasn't the New Deal that put the country in debt, it was World War II. And that debt became unimportant. I mean, it disappeared.
PETER EDELMAN: Because we grew.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: Because we grew, exactly.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I'm going to violate my left/right rule because I want to get a question from a woman. So please.
JANE RICHARDS: Hi, I'm Jane Richards. Just to put a context before I ask a question, I'm 75. I'm one of seven children. My mother was from Ireland. My dad was first generation Irish. We lived in public housing for 20 years, and you can stay there if you meet the guidelines. But in my family there were two sets of twins, and each one who got old enough to get a job, then your rent goes up. Eventually, it got that it was more expensive to stay in public housing than to go into private. As a kid, I remember my brother had an eye injury and we had a new baby, the youngest of the seven. He's seven years younger than I am.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I'm sorry, we're running out of time and we have a few more questions.
JANE RICHARDS: What I'm addressing is, when you're poor – we didn't know we were, but we were – you are a second-class citizen, and they still are. There was a girl in my neighborhood who told me she was going to her aunt's for a week. "Don't tell anybody because they'll take my mother's money." And it's still happening. We're all here pretty well fixed probably, and we're trying to solve the problems of people who can't be here, who don't have the education to speak for what they need. Then you listen to the Republican debates: "Get the kids to clean the toilets so they won't be like their parents, getting money for nothing." People like that should try to stand in a line in a grocery store, not my family, we never had any of those services. But my youngest of four children had a baby, and four days later she called us and said she was coming home. Her husband turned out to be mentally ill.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: We need you to ask your question.
JANE RICHARDS: Just a minute, the poor haven't had a chance to speak; I'm speaking for them. One more thing, okay? She came home. I went with her because I remember doing this, representing my parents at the hospital or City Hall or whatever. I went with her to the welfare office, and the caretaker was totally cold. She didn't even look my daughter in the eye. I went there so that they wouldn't do that to her, and this is what they put up with. They stand in a line to get food stamps, to get their food, and people criticize what they choose. They feel looked upon by the register. My daughter wouldn't take the food stamps, she was so embarrassed.
What I'm saying is how do you change the culture? We listen to all this stuff about people getting stuff for free and buying condoms. What about the people that are truly struggling to get by and nobody knows that? All they know is stuff they say about them taking stuff for free. That's all. [applause]
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: We're almost out of time. I'm going to take the last questions from the four people standing. If you could ask a quick question and then have our panelists respond as quickly as you can to whatever combination of questions. I'm sorry, but we're just about out of time.
QUESTION: Early childhood education, your thoughts on how it's a part of the solution. And if you could weave the current state of Head Start and the UPK -- the universal prekindergarten movement -- I'd appreciate it.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Can you hang on?
PETER EDELMAN: I can hang on.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I want to get the last three questions in, and we have three minutes in which to do this.
QUESTION: I just want to observe that I'm probably not the youngest or the oldest person here, but there is a generation that isn't here today, and I was just going to ask a very simple question – when I served in the Senate for 20 years, I was to the left of my district, and it's very difficult to make any kind of political change because we've lost the left. I want to ask a simple question: what has happened to the American left?
MAURICE ISSERMAN: That's not a simple question.
QUESTION: Where did it go, and how do we get it back?
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: We're collecting the last two questions, and then the two of you are going to somehow speak to all of the questions remaining on the floor in your last 30 seconds.
QUESTION: As you talk about the issue of the living wage and poverty as a product of social exclusion, you didn't mention anything about unions in both the historical and the current scenario. So I'm curious as to what your thoughts are about unions. Are they anachronistic? Do they need to be reinvented? We used to have big government, big labor and big unions, and now we've got big government, big corporations, and we're not sure whether the government's for business. But can you talk a little bit about the role of unions. What do you see is the future there? Is there any future there, particularly for the daycare workers, the home healthcare workers? It's not an issue of your skills and your wage; it's an issue of your control of the market and your wage. So if you speak a little bit to the unions, I’d appreciate it.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: And the final question.
QUESTION: Final question. In the great state of Massachusetts, Willie Horton, CORI reform, and the 18- to 25-year-olds or whatever that demographic was, first of all, none of them are sitting here with me. Are they all in jail? What are we doing for them? And as we continue to cut services to people who are imprisoned, how do we empower them to come out and become productive members of society and remain involved with their families?
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: These are four very easy questions. [laughter] Maurice, you can start, picking whatever piece of them you can open.
MAURICE ISSERMAN: On unions, Peter's book does talk about the unions and values their contribution, but also says it's a different world and it's a much more difficult world to organize when you're not talking about great steel factories and great auto factories.
It will take a different strategy to organize workers who are not concentrated into big, central workplaces and are not necessarily out of the backgrounds of people who were brought into the unions in the '30s and the '40s and '50s. Harrington certainly would be the first to have said, “When I was alive” – I'm channeling him – “30% of American workers in the non-agricultural sector were members of unions and today it's 11%.” That's a huge difference, and a change for the worse.
It's also one of the reasons why there is no effective left, or why there's a much less effective left. There are many other reasons, including a kind of balkanization of concerns on the left, some of which have --those various concerns -- great value but no one's speaking to the common interest or finding an effective way, which was always Harrington's great goal. He was a great coalitionbuilder. He talked about building a coalition of the conscience constituency and the labor movement and the minorities. The left has fallen down in that in the past 30, 40 years.
PETER EDELMAN: I'm very comfortable with what you said, Maurice. I did very quickly mention unions before, but there is a little bit more discussion. But I don't have anything really profound to say and you've said essentially what I did say.
The country's moved to the right, and I certainly hope that this century can be a time where – we can't foresee the future – where people get finally, as they did in the progressive era, so fed up with the power. Citizens United has awakened some people. It's a terrible decision because it reifies the power of big money, of the corporations in the political process. It makes it that much harder to have a better politics. But at the end of the day, there are more of us than there are of them. That's really the challenge: to get the more-of-us to get up off our duffs and do something about it. It's a challenge to everybody in this room, to me, to the three of us up here. So that's on those two points.
The early childhood development is obviously a long, long conversation. I would just reiterate what I said before. Head Start, going back to the '60s; the pre-K is extremely important, early childhood development generally. If anything, we know so much more now than we knew 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, about the importance of what happens to children from prenatal care and through their early childhood. We just have to invest, because it's an investment. You have to keep on with good education. But it's so crucial. So I know I'm not giving you, the questioner, a long thing, except to underline the importance of it.
Finally, on jail, the first question is keeping kids out of jail, keeping kids out of getting into the juvenile justice system, and that's about investing in our children. That's about a decent education, seeing opportunities, seeing that there's a way to get somewhere. But then it's looking at the criminal justice system. Many of you know Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, which is powerful. It's published by The New Press, which published my book, which is a wonderful publisher, nonprofit. Everybody should give money to help support The New Press put out more books like Michelle Alexander's book. It is a system which is simply rigged to support the prison correctional industry that we have. I was so pleased to see yesterday that Governor Cuomo is proposing to finally do something about reducing the incarceration for marijuana. That's a relatively small step, but it's crazy. Federal people don't put people – even the laws [1:23:38] don't put people in jail for marijuana. States do all over the country. Prison after prison, you'll see marijuana, people who've offended the law. It's just crazy.
I'll tell you one more thing. When I was doing the chapter on young people and this whole question of young people getting into the labor market, I looked up the numbers on what's the prison population composed of, who's in there. Not so much racially, we know that, but age. Turned out that out of the 2.3 million people who are in prison and jail in this country, only 804,000 are between the ages of 18 and 24. We are all told, we know that offending is a young person's thing. So why only about a third of the people who are incarcerated are young people? It's the long sentences. We've got to do something about that. We also have to reduce the people coming in; that's the biggest thing. But this is crazy, to put these people in. We're already starting to have these geriatric prisons, so we have got to tackle the criminal justice system.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: Most of us in this room, and certainly on the podium, are not able to speak in the voices of the poor but we at least hope that we're speaking on their behalf, and, more generally, on behalf of all the rest of us. Because it's not really a country in which the poor are over there and the rest of us are over here; this is a unified, or at least one hopes it's a unified system. I want to thank our speakers for being so eloquent about both what should be done and to remind you, the book is available outside. The book is available right outside the door so you can all buy it, read it. And Maurice Isserman's is also. Not here, but it's available in the world. Thank you all.
[Applause] THE END
