When Shadows Fall

Scott Winship, director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Jonah to discuss ...

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Scott Winship, director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Jonah to discuss the history of poverty in the United States. The pair begin by digging into a new report from Scott and four of his peers that explores issues of black vs. white inequality, before they turn to examining potential solutions to these disparities. Is the success sequence outdated? Should America be based on bourgeois morality? And will Jonah ever forgive Scott for collaborating with scholars at the hated Brookings Institution? 

Show Notes:

–“Long Shadows,” Scott’s report on the black-white gap in multigenerational poverty

–Scott joins the candy eaters on the Brookings Cafeteria Podcast

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  1. Richard Fulmer

    Suggestions for reducing poverty:

    --- Education ---
    Expand parental choice. Letting parents choose the schools to which their children go gives all schools incentives to improve the quality of their teaching.

    --- Employment ---
    Eliminate minimum wage laws. Minimum wage laws penalize companies for hiring low-skilled workers, making it more expensive to hire such workers and making it much harder for the least employable – that is, the least educated, the least experienced, and the most discriminated against – to get and retain jobs.

    Streamline and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC is a more targeted way to help the working poor than are minimum wage laws. By supplementing the wages of low- to moderate-income employees, it increases the incentive to get and keep a job without penalizing businesses for hiring low-skilled workers. If we care about helping low-wage workers, we should be willing to help them with our tax dollars rather than forcing companies to do our giving for us.

    Eliminate unnecessary occupational licensing. The state of Louisiana, for example, requires 1,200 hours of training for a license to arrange flowers.

    Remove regulatory roadblocks to employment by:
    • Repealing occupational licensing requirements not closely related to public health and safety
    • Making it easier for out-of-state workers to become licensed (e.g., with interstate reciprocity agreements)
    • Making sure that the benefits of proposed new licensing laws outweigh the costs

    Eliminate unnecessary regulatory hurdles to starting new businesses.

    End the war on the “gig” economy.

    --- Policing ---
    End police unions’ ability to protect bad cops.

    End qualified immunity, which over the years has become nearly unqualified immunity.

    Reign in the regulatory state. Over-policing is the inevitable result of the growing government intervention into every aspect of life. Was stopping the sale of loose cigarettes worth Eric Garner’s life? Before deciding that there “oughta be a law,” we need to ask whether killing potential lawbreakers is worth the intended goal.

    Eliminate Police Disclosure Laws (PDLs), which prohibit releasing information about an officer’s alleged misconduct until after internal investigations are finished.

    End civil asset forfeiture which gives cities and police departments incentives to confiscate money, cars, houses, and other goods from people – especially from poor people who (1) disproportionately deal in cash and (2) cannot afford to hire lawyers to get their property back.

    End the “War on Drugs.” Young people who were denied a good education by the public-school monopolies and who were denied jobs the market sector by minimum wage laws and unnecessary regulations have an incentive to find work in unregulated, illegal markets. Illegal jobs too often lead to prison or death.

    --- Housing ---
    Eliminate rent control laws, which create housing shortages.

    Reign in building codes and zoning restrictions, which increase housing costs and create housing shortages.

    --- Welfare ---
    End the marriage penalty.

    Stop paying young women to have babies without fathers.

    Eliminate work penalties

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  2. ExploreOK

    I really enjoyed this podcast.

    One of the things I've been thinking about is it seems the media and pundits spend a lot of time discussing disparity of outcomes. This, from what I have read, immediately leads to conclusions of 'systemic racism'. I do not doubt that one can construct policies, without regard to race, that are still in practice discriminatory.

    However I have yet to see such an argument conclusively made that is not based on something that couldn't be more reasonably attributed to racist actors at the helm. You could also argue that blacks are more likely to utilize public defenders who are poorly paid and new to the profession.

    But when do we get to actually evaluating not just the outcomes, but these resources (not monetary), similar to the public defender? Is there no minimum standard of available expertise, knowledge, or educator that can be quantified to be get to the bottom of this disparity problem?

    I think Jonah touched on this topic a bit, hope he can follow-up with other experts in the field.

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    Ben Connelly

    Scott, I have some questions based on your analysis of the decline in childbearing in the last 5 minutes of the episode. Since averages can only tell us so much (and often tell us very little), what is the breakdown of the women who say they did or did not have all of the kids they wanted to as teenagers? Is the data polarized? By that I mean that was there a large group that got married and had all the kids they wanted (or more), and also a group who had 0 kids? Meaning that they did not marry (but wanted to) or married late and did not have kids (but wanted to). Strikes me as somewhat less likely that there would be a large group who said, “oh I wanted 3 kids but then we only had 2.” Whereas there is a large cohort of childless women/couples. As a separate question, what percentage changed their minds? At 16, maybe they wanted kids, and at 30, maybe they really didn’t. Life isn’t defined by living up to what you wanted when you were 16, because people do change.

    Also, before anyone attacks me about women not getting married or marrying late, I am talking about those who wished, and still wish, they could have kids. And didn’t. Many women do not want to marry or do not want to have kids. Fine. But some do and either don’t get married or marry late and try to have kids and don’t. And are understandably upset about that. I’m not attacking anyone’s choices. Just suggesting that the decline is less a function of anything related to the economics of having 2 vs 3 kids, and more due to the decline in marriage and the trend of marrying later in life.

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  4. Randall Briggs

    I am sorry that this point did not come up in the conversation. The Heritage Foundation (FWIW) has long publicized data showing that black incomes began rising more rapidly than white incomes around 1950 and stopped rising relative to white incomes around 1966--just as the War on Poverty programs were coming on line. I don't know if the Heritage Foundation fudged the data, used misleading criteria, or was right on the money. But I would like to have heard it addressed.

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    Adicesa14

    Point after point made referencing data established a base. Then conversation and debate moved forward to theorizing. Wow, a scientific methodology. What a wonderful departure from the usual screaming, hollering, dictating, placard waving nonsense we see from the activists. If our politicos could echo this behavior, perhaps they would develop theories and policies that had a chance to be effective.

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  6. David Wagenmaker

    Mr. Goldberg, what do you think of Charles Murray's latest book, Facing Reality? I haven't read it, but I understand his thesis to be that different distributions of IQ and crime among the "races"(/ethnicities) significantly affect the disparities, and that the political center has to choose between this explanation or systematic racism. This conversation appears to me to confirm his thesis.

    Winship briefly mentioned something that seems to confirm the explanatory power of IQ- the greater income mobility of black females over black males. I can't recall where I initially encountered this idea, but I understand that black females have a higher avg IQ than black males (a quick google search yielded this paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289615000525). I'm not entirely comfortable with Murray's thesis, but I am more sympathetic to it after listening to this conversation. Thoughts? Can you have Murray back to the podcast now that his new book is out?

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  7. linda

    When has a federal program ever helped poverty stricken communities except in the short term? The Great Society which required a man not be in the house and the crack epidemic were the two most awful events to converge to destroy the black family and create black gangs.
    First time I ever really disagreed with Jonah in a big way but it is not in the black communities best interest to expand gov't services. It has held them back. It's like everyone thinks they are children and the gov't has to be the daddy.
    I have a black son in law. He was raised in Detroit and after elementary moved to Oakland. His mom was a crack addict as well as his dad but he left by the time he was 4. Many boyfriend came and went and then their were 5 kids. No particular dad. He was emancipated by the courts at 15. He worked a job. He finished high school and got a track scholarship at Berekley. He wanted to be an electrical engineer. Got called that his mom was getting the other kids taken away by the state so he went home and became at 20 the inheritor of 4 younger siblings. They laugh now but he threaten to beat up the older boys when then they refused to go to school. The boys turned out very well. They make good livings. The girls have struggled. Those were the younger two.
    Today he is a general contractor with more business that he can handle. He has just bought both my widowed sisters air conditioners (they are white) and his aim is to pass on intergenerational wealth. The current problem is that of his 3 boys, one wants to go into the military, one wants to be a cop, and the littlest is 4......dashing a man's dreams one child at at time. heh

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      Narwhal

      “When has a federal program ever helped poverty stricken communities except in the short term?”

      The TVA.

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      1. Randall Briggs

        Did the TVA reduce poverty in the region it covered? That is still a relatively poor area of the country.

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          Narwhal

          Yes and it arguably contributed in the effort to win WWII.

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          1. Randall Briggs

            I get the helping-to-win-WWII argument. I'm less sanguine about the federal overreach represented by the TVA. It is a huge federally owned system that is in some ways like a government, in other ways like a business. And its successes have come at an unknown cost. We don't know how things would have turned out in the seven states effected; we only know how they did turn out. Electricity generation is up, prices are down, and the region it covers is still relatively poor. If the TVA is an unqualified success, then we should gladly turn over all power-generation and flood-control to the federal government.

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  8. Publius58

    As I understand, the African American poverty rate is twice that of Whites. However, there are significantly more Whites living below the poverty line owing to relative population. Is this for similar reasons? (Maybe single mother households?) If the reasons are the same, then shouldn't the presciption be exclusive of race?

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  9. Publius58

    Why is the Asian poverty rate less than whites?

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