 Hi, I'm Reed Kramer of the New America Foundation, and I'm joined by Jason DeParle of the New York Times and Monica Potts of the American Prospect. And each of them recently published an article on poverty in their respective publications. And when I read them, I was reminded once again how impactful long-form journalism can be in bringing to light issues in very nuanced ways and ways that policymakers and advocates often forget about. So I thought it'd be interesting to bring them both here to have an extended conversation about their works and implications for policy. So that's what we're going to do. Jason's correspondent with the Washington Bureau of the New York Times, which is written on poverty for many years, including a book on the welfare reform debates of the 1990s called American Dream. And he's also an incoming fellow at the New America Foundation. And his article was called Two Classes Divided by I Do. Monica writes for the American Prospect, and her article, which was in their latest issue of the Prospect's poverty issue, really interesting stuff, also was just awarded a prize by the Hillman Foundation. And it's called Pressing on the Upward Way, a Profile of Life in America's, in the country's poorest county. So obviously I recommend reading the pieces themselves, but to get oriented here, I wanted each of you to kind of talk a little bit about what your pieces were about. So Jason, let's start with you in your recent piece. I've been writing about growing inequality and impediments to mobility for the past six months or so. By mobility, I mean the ability of one generation to rise above its relative place in the economic order from the past generation. Inequality and mobility often sound like similar things to the casual observer, but politically they're quite different because liberals tend to worry about inequality and see it's growth as a negative thing, whereas conservatives in general are not troubled by inequality, often see it as an unequal society being a good thing in that people with different drive, different talents get rewarded differently, but I think both sides see reduced mobility as a problem. So the conversation about mobility, about whether we really all have an equal opportunity to advance despite our origins, tends to be a place where there's a little bit of convergence of interest right now. In that context, I got interested in the role of family structure and whether the growing number of single parent families and the correlation between that and college education was both amplifying inequality and impeding mobility. So there's a research that shows a growing correlation between college education and the likelihood of having two parents to get the two parent family, so what you've got is an effect where the people who aren't finishing college are more likely to form single parent families. So you have less pay and only one paycheck, whereas the people with the college educations who are getting the higher paychecks are also getting two of them. So you could quickly see how that would exaggerate inequality and then there's also some evidence that kids growing up in single parent families on average, I think you have to emphasize on average, face longer odds than people growing up in two parent families of attending college and getting a good job. So as another structure to tell the two stories, we found two women who worked together in a daycare center and by all outward appearances were quite similar. They were best friends, they did essentially the same job all day long, made similar pay. One was the boss, so she made a little bit more, but one was married and one was not, so their overall family incomes were quite different and their kids' lives were quite different. Both had children. Two mothers each had a couple of kids, two Midwestern women raised in modest circumstances. We would think they would have the same lives, but one went home to a bare-bones existence on food stamps. She was the single mother raising three kids by herself and the other had a husband, so together their income was three times what they could make alone. And that was Jessica was the... Jessica was the single mother. And Chris was the boss if we get back to the conversation. Correct. Okay. Monica, tell us a little bit about your piece and the story behind it. Sure. We decided to go to one of the poorest counties in the country, Asley County, Kentucky. It's actually the poorest county in America with a majority white population and it's also very traditionally poor since we've been measuring poverty. It's one of the poorest counties always to rank in all different kinds of poverty measures. And so I wanted to go there because the poverty rate's 40%, the number of families who live in near poverty is another 30%. So I sort of wanted to see what it would be like to actually to try to live there and create opportunity there, which was what I wanted to kind of the question I wanted to answer in my piece. How do you start a business or how do you think about going to college or how do you think about getting a job in a county where poverty seems almost written in the landscape? So I went there in January and February and half of March of this year and just lived there for two and a half months and tracked this family called the Christians. Sue Christian the mother went back to college when she was 40 using WIA funds and a bunch of other federal help. The father is a handyman and an electrician and the son had come back after leaving college after one year to start his own business. So they were all trying to answer that question in their own ways. And just I wanted to ask, in reading your piece and the reaction is gotten, what was actually new about the story for you? It seems like we've seen the rise of single headed households dating back probably 30 years now. And it's always been inherently challenging to run a family with one parent there. And anyway, wanted to ask you a little bit about what was kind of breakthrough in your mind about why this is a contemporary story and maybe in addition to one that's being kind of played out over decades in America? Single parent hood has been quite common for high rates of single parents has been common for several decades or longer among African Americans and poor people. I think what's different now is that the fastest growth among single parent families has been in the white working class. So something that used to be confined to marginal populations or poor populations, minority populations is now middle America. More than half the children born to women in their 30s are now born outside of marriage. So I think that's what's new and the fact that there's so much attention being paid to the problem of inequality right now that there's kind of like the two things coming together in a way that I think hadn't been discussed a lot. Right. Yeah. I mean, I read the pieces. I mean, they're really captivating characters you feel for all of the characters in these articles. They're all working hard. They're all really applying themselves. And I was really struck not just by the family structure and how much harder it was for the single mother, but how low her pay was in, you know, she did childcare and it's, you know, traditionally thought of women's work and extremely low paying. And that to me was one of the biggest takeaways. I think other people are reading your piece and seeing, you know, seeing you as a marriage proponent. I mean, that's just maybe that was the headline. But anyway, how do you kind of compare or tease out the various influences of family structure versus almost wage levels and compensation? The contributions of stagnant wages to inequality is it's an essential probably the major driver of inequality, but it's the one that's been the most discussed. So obviously, her pay is a huge part of the story. I think what hasn't been discussed as much is the family, the effects of family structure. And if you look at these two women, one makes $35,000, one makes $25,000, that's a difference. The bigger difference between the two of them is the fact that she's got a second income and a second set of parenting hands. Eyes, ears, heart, hands, you know, to help her with the kids. Yeah, no, it clearly emotionally, it has a big impact in the wife of the woman that has the partner versus the one that didn't. I mean, that comes clear. But there was no implication as far as I'm concerned that low wages are not a part of Jessica's problems. He says she's the assistant manager of the daycare center and she makes $25,000 a year, which is just over the federal poverty line for a family of four. So she's both in management and on food stamps. And she seems very responsible and hard-working, committed, like people are probably thrilled that she's there working away. I mean, I know that's how I approach the people that cared for my children when they were here. Well, I was just going to say, yeah, right, she's responsible enough to be entrusted with the most precious thing these parents have for their children. And turning to your piece, Monica, I mean, it really does seem a little bit like this geography becomes destiny here. There seems to be just also limited amount of resources and jobs in this county. And is that what your takeaway was, or were there other factors in kind of any kind of culture of poverty that felt like it was part of the story for you, even that's a very loaded term? So it wasn't destiny, but it mattered a lot. It was really hard to get around physically in that area. There's very poor infrastructure. The roads are very bad. Any amount of bad weather really shuts everything down. And that really changes the way that people think about commerce coming in. It changes the kinds of goods that you can get in. It changes who wants to start a business there. It changes the relationship that you have to the biggest cities nearby, which are an hour and a half away, Lexington, Kentucky. So all of that really sort of does affect the way that people think about themselves versus the world. And they do sort of see their little community as this sort of very separate from the world. And also they want to protect themselves from it because they always felt like they've been criticized from it. And some of that is culturally, I won't say culture of poverty, but they feel that they are a particular sort of Appalachian culture that is looked down upon by people in the liberal northeast and by people in bigger cities. And so that changes the relationship people have when they leave their hometowns and try to travel or try to go to college. And they don't necessarily fit in very easily. And it changes the relationship that they feel people have when they come in. There's just a constant influx of missionaries and do-gutters coming in all the time. And so it's not exactly an easy relationship, really, from the point of view of the people there. So I think that it matters a great deal. They are very physically isolated. And also they are sort of small town, the small town pride sort of affects the way that they approach the outside world, I'd say. Right. The family structure varies, obviously, in these two pieces. Here we have kind of an intact unit. But interestingly, the role of kind of breadwinner has kind of shifted in your family. It's the mother who has the earning potential. And the male in the household kind of comes and goes in the workforce. Not just the earning potential, but the maturity in your story, the grown-up. She's the responsible one. Yeah, so she wouldn't call herself the breadwinner. And she would really sort of fight that. But there are a lot of different ways in which she really was. And I would say that also she would say she doesn't know how to relax as easily as JC. And there's a way in which that's a detriment to her at times. She really did suffer through serious anxiety problems, I would say, through a lot of her adulthood, where she really sort of felt like she was the only, that all these burdens were only on her. But JC really helped her a lot. He drove her to school in the snow. And he helped her through her panic attacks when she had them. And so it's really hard to imagine Sue and JC making it anywhere alone. They really, really did help each other. And so that is one thing to think about when talking about family structure and poverty is that just the single fact that another adult is there helping you, I think, is very immeasurably good. And is he the father of the two kids? Or is he the, OK. So they've all, they've been together. But she was previously married, but there were no kids out of that. There were no kids out of that. Yeah. And they're both very committed to raising their children together. And so I think that helped keep them together over the years. But I do have a question for Jason, if it's OK. There have been a lot of policy debates about what policy makers should do with family structure, whether they should promote marriage or whether they should just sort of try to imitate the influence that marriage has in single family households or single parent households. And I was wondering if you thought about those debates at all when you went there. You asked us by way of preparation what were the policy implications of what we looked at. Even though both pieces stayed away from policy in some respects. You know, anyway. Well, the two most obvious policy conclusions that I could think of from my article had nothing to do with family structure. They had to do with food stamps and the tax credits because on a $25,000 income, Jessica relies heavily, heavily on the tax credits. She gets, I think, $7,000 between the earned income tax credit and the child tax credits. That's a huge supplement to her income. And significantly, also, she relies on food stamps. So the preservation of those supplement, earning supplements for low-wage workers, I thought was the most immediate and essential policy thing that flowed from that article. You know, the importance of those to her family. You know, I think one reason why family structure doesn't get discussed more is because who knows how to promote it. Gosh, if I knew that. Yeah, I mean, I think one place to start is at least by making it a topic for, you know, intelligent discussion and which it hasn't always been and it can be a divisive and a polarizing issue. But I think the left, at one point, you know, hurt it as a kind of blame the victim or even an anti-feminist language, you know, that why should a woman need a man? And I think that has substantially shifted, not entirely, but you've got very prominent liberal academics like Sarah McLanahan or Christopher Jenks who are pointing to it as a driver of inequality. And, you know, I think that's good. Yeah. The, you know, what I'm always taken by in some of the conversations and the trends in family structure is just how diverse they are now in America. Like, they're, you know, it's, you know, seeming like rare to find this unique traditional family and mother, father, two kids, you know, they're still out there. But you see a lot of kids living with other relatives. You see marriages dissolve and reform. And so it becomes very hard to prescribe something with that in mind. Well, but the other thing you, I would slightly disagree with that. I think where you don't see that, you know, you don't see that in equal proportion depending on people's level of education. Among college-educated, college graduate, among women who've finished a four-year college degree, more than nine out of 10 are having children while they're married. And among, as you go down to women with or high school graduates, but with less, but some college, but less than a four-year degree, that jumps up to about 30% when you go down to high school graduates up to about 50%. And when you go down to people with less than a high school, you know, it's more than 50% are having children outside of marriage. So there's a real class gulf opening up. And how about the, some of the trends about when people are, when women are having children, I assume that the last time I checked, they were having them later. There was an issue around teen pregnancy focus kind of in the 1990s, some policy efforts and other attention. And I believe that has been moving where the teen pregnancy has been on the decline for a number of years now. That fits in as well. The other, to follow up on your point about, is the variety of living relationships. If you take, divide the American population into three groups, into thirds, upper income, the top income, middle income, and lower income, the upper two thirds, if you go back 30 years ago, one in the upper, the top level, I think it was 96% of the kids were growing up with two parents. And the second level was 95%. The two thirds of the income distribution were essentially the same in terms of the way the kids were growing up in the family structure. The bottom third was somewhat different. Now, a golf has really popped up. There's a 20 percentage point or so spread between the two groups where the upper third, the percentage growing up in two parent families has declined, but has declined much more rapidly in the middle group. And you're starting to, you know, you're seeing a golf there open up. So I think that's what, when you were asking me earlier, what's new? I think that's new. Yeah. I also, you know, thinking about the characters, people in your stories, definitely wanted to know more about them, and I wanted to know more about what they thought about kind of their plight and how they relate to kind of government and policy, like at large, like, you know, and then it raised issues for me of kind of almost political engagement and empowerment, whether they, you know, vote or participate and whether they see that as potentially being able to change their circumstance. So your family was very, or at least the mother was pretty avid Christian, devout, I don't know if she was an evangelical or not, but she was evangelical. So anyway, tell us a little bit about what you learned about how they thought about politics, political engagement and kind of government. So Sue, the mother, is very conservative politically. She came to, she came to politics after she came to religion, which was when her son was two. And so she really definitely is very Republican-leaning and conservative-leaning. She, this is really true of everyone in the county almost, not just her, but she sort of views a lot of government programs there very suspiciously. There aren't a lot of industries in town, and so government is an industry there. And there's sort of been a, but not a welcome industry. But not a welcome industry. They sort of viewed it as very, you know, critical of their livelihood. I think the bigger problem is that there seems to be sort of a new program every five years. It changes because of things that have nothing to do with the people on the ground in Owensley County. They don't necessarily have a huge say in how the programs come down. Sometimes they're run out of colleges nearby, and so that also feels like it's a separate kind of, a separate sort of thing imposed upon them. So almost everyone participates in some federal program, whether they know it or not. Very, very many people rely on food stamps, and very, very many people receive welfare. But I even had some families who receive welfare tell me in a way that was very critical that that family over there receives welfare. So they don't like it. They like thinking that they earn their money, and they like thinking that they have chances to earn their money. Did they view the food stamp SNAP program distinctly than other kinds of assistance? They do, and they, by and large, don't really wanna criticize anyone who relies on it for some period of time. But I heard a lot of stories that there were some people who just, that's all the money that they got during the month, and they were very critical of those people. I never met those people, but I'm sure, I'm sure there are some people who don't want jobs and just wanna get government checks. I'm sure those people exist, but it was out of proportion to the way that people talked about it. So that people who were striving and wanted to engage. Almost everyone had some sort of, at least temporary relationship to the workforce. Right, and I'm not sure how much in-depth time you spent with Jessica and Chris. I'm not sure you moved down as Monica did, but did you get a sense of their kind of view of politics and political engagement? I mean, I think of the lives of some of these single mothers, and I'm like, why did they even have time to vote or go to a PTA meeting or anything? I was surprised at how apolitical Jessica was, because she's a thoughtful, reflective person about other things, but the few times I tried to, she would reference some, like, earned income tax credit or the food stamps. And I would mention, you know, there's some discussion in Washington about cutting food stamps, and she hadn't heard that, and she didn't, it was kind of like, oh really, it didn't seem to go anywhere. She didn't, I don't think she had nearly the developed political consciousness that Supe did. But, you know, I wanted to ask you, why, she talks about not wanting her kid to go to the liberal college, but what does liberal mean? Is that a cultural thing, is it religious for her, or how does she define conservative, and why do you think she sees that as her identity? I think it's primarily religious. She came to politics through the issue of abortion. She's very anti-abortion, and that's probably the single biggest issue that she votes on. And I also think that she sort of identifies, you know, liberalism is something that happens elsewhere. You know, it's a different kind of culture, it's a different kind of acceptance of everything that happens in the cities, and so she doesn't really see it as any way related to her life. At the same time, she used WIA funds to go back to college, and she didn't really see that as being a liberal or conservative program. She goes to the free health clinic in her county, which is mostly paid for by federal funds, but everyone goes there, it's always existed. She was on food stamps for some amount of time, yeah. And she, you know, that was a time that she viewed very, you know, with shame. They were very ashamed. Did she get the Earned Income Tax Credit? She does, yeah, they do qualify. They, I think almost every year, they must have, and I want to say, 80% of the county qualify, something very high, yeah. So I'm not sure why she doesn't see those as liberal programs, and I'm not sure why she sees liberal as something different from how it manifests itself on the ground there, you know, that all of those, almost every program that's come in to the county and helped relieve some of the poverty is a program that came from liberal leaning politicians on her. Her conservatism isn't primarily the size of the federal government, it's about abortion. It's about abortion. I also think that she, like everyone in Owesley County, thinks that the government programs there prevent people from helping themselves. I think that that's the prevailing view. And I'm not sure why they think that that's true. But that's generally how they view it. That came through very strongly in your article, I thought it was very interesting. Please, it's your interview, oh no, I'm done. Why, why does she want to stay there and why does she want her children to stay there? Well, she has a immense amount of hometown pride. She's very patriotic. She really loves Kentucky. She loves growing up there. She did have, she moved away. She moved away for a brief amount of time, primarily because of her first husband. And she really wanted to go back when she and JC thought that they could go back and make a living. It's quiet, she knows everyone in the whole town. She can rely on them to help with her family and raising her children. She actually was president of the parent teacher organization for some amount of time. She's just really committed to sort of turning it into the kind of place that people want to stay. And the idea of leaving is both unappealing and also feels like giving up on that mission, I think, for her. And of course, the article ends with the tidbit that she has the prospects of a new job working in this college readiness program that the Department of Ed runs called Gear Up. And there were prospects for a grant to come through to the local Berea College that would create this position for her that could be somewhat steady, a salaried employment even if it was fairly low. It would be a nice boost. And again, that's another public funding stream that might help change her prospects. So I imagine it's something you're gonna go and check in on them over time. It's actually, it's very similar to Gear Up. Gear Up exists in her county, but the program through which she gets a job is Promise Neighborhoods. And she has it now, and it's starting next year. Yeah, great. All right, well we'll tune in and look for the follow-up. And with yours too, with your characters and... I thought of one other similarity between Jessica who I was following and Sue. They both seem like pretty smart people to me. And so whatever is responsible for their economic hardships, you earlier mentioned it isn't a lack of work. It's also not a lack of intelligence. There are times I hear in even in polite liberal company, why are people, especially people, maybe they're just not, they can't quite make it in the knowledge economy. They're just not quite smart enough. And I am always come back from a reporting trip reminded that whatever is limiting people, it's not that. And that really came through with Sue, and I certainly felt that with Jessica. This is a smart person who could have easily made her way through college intellectually and whatever held her back wasn't that. Yeah, now she does seem to have both drive and the ability to navigate some hard situations. I think one cultural hazard of believing that you're a meritocratic society is a tendency for many people to assume even unconsciously that the people who don't make it must not be bright enough. And one great benefit of being a reporter and going out and meeting low income people is it cures you of any suspicion that that's a factor. Well, that's one of the things that I think is uniting a lot of this work. Both the geography and some of the work that you've done on mobility and equality is that meritocracy in America is under threat. And that's part of one of the challenges. Good, smart, hardworking people are not having the economy return the goods and the shared prosperity we kind of expect. But there's I think a moral hazard for the people at the top if they believe in a meritocracy, then inevitably it must mean that I'm smart because I made it on top. Some of their colleagues also have to fall out of it at the top as well for it to be truly meritocratic. Well, thanks for coming in today and for your time and invite everybody to read the pieces online at the American Prospect in New York Times. And maybe we'll check back in later to see how your friends are doing down there. Thank you. Thank you.