The First Year Book is crucial in challenging readers to critically examine the stereotypes and misconceptions that often dictate public discourse.


Stereotypes

Analysis
Poverty is simply a matter of small incomes. Poverty is compounded by social, health, and economic issues extending beyond income.
      * More than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters, and abandoned buildings.1
The poor are unmotivated and lack work ethic. Many people living in poverty work multiple jobs and long hours but are still unable to make ends meet due to low wages and lack of benefits.
     * America has welcomed the rise of bad jobs at the bottom of the market—jobs offering low pay, no benefits, and few guarantees. Some industries such as retail, leisure and hospitality, and construction see more than half of their workforce turnover each year. Workers quickly learn they are expendable, easily replaced. 2
    * In 2022, the poverty line was drawn at $13,590 a year for a single person and $27,750 a year for a family of four. 3
    * Estimates of housing cost burden exclude renters reporting no cash rent as well as those spending over 100 percent of their household income on housing costs. 4
Increased welfare spending hasn’t helped. Despite significant increases in welfare spending, much of the allocated funds do not reach people experiencing poverty due to misallocation and inefficiencies in program administration.

Immigrants increase poverty. Immigrants have some of the highest rates of economic mobility in the country, and states with large immigrant populations have not seen increased poverty rates.
     * Between 1970 and 2019, the share of the immigrant population increased by nearly 18 percent in California, 14 percent in Texas, and 13 percent in Florida. But over that same period, California’s poverty rate increased only marginally (by 0.7 percent), while poverty fell in both Texas and Florida: by 5 and almost 4 percent, respectively.5
Low-wage workers are just starting out. Many low-wage workers are adults supporting families, not just teenagers or young adults starting their careers.
    * In 2020, almost a third of full-time workers between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree made less than the national median ($59,371).6
The poor pay less because they have less. People experiencing poverty often end up paying more for essential services and necessities due to systemic exploitation.
    * In 2019, the largest banks in America charged customers $11.68 billion in overdraft fees. Just 9 percent of account holders paid 84 percent of these fees. Who were the unlucky 9 percent? Customers who carried an average balance of less than $350.7
    * Between 2011 and 2017, owners of multifamily properties (with five or more units) saw their rental revenues increase by 24 percent, but their expenses increased by only 18 percent. Landlords who owned properties with market valuations in the bottom twenty-fifth percentile, properties located primarily in poor neighborhoods, saw their rental revenues increase by 47 percent between 2012 and 2018, but their operating expenses increased by only 14 percent. 8
Opportunity is available to everyone equally. Access to opportunities like education and jobs is often unequally distributed, favoring those who are already privileged.
    * One study found that growing up in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood is equivalent to missing a year of school when it comes to verbal ability. Another found that achievement gaps between rich and poor children form and harden before kindergarten.9
Investing in poverty reduction is too expensive. The long-term benefits of investing in poverty reduction far outweigh the costs.
    * In 2020, the gap separating everyone in America below the poverty line and the poverty line itself amounted to $177 billion. This figure is less than 1 percent of our GDP. Americans throw away more than that amount in food every year.10
Segregation, both economic and racial, persists and contributes to the cycle of poverty. The long-term benefits of investing in poverty reduction far outweigh the costs.
    * Schools today are less economically diverse than their grandparents’ schools were, and although we have taken baby steps toward racial integration, most of our communities remain sharply segregated by race as well.11


“Provocative and compelling . . . [Desmond] packs in a sweeping array of examples and numbers to support his thesis and . . . the accumulation has the effect of shifting one’s brain ever so slightly to change the entire frame of reference.”
—NPR

person holding work for food sign

Sources

1. Desmond 6; National Center for Homeless Education ↩
2. Desmond 16, Chapter 1, Note #8, pg. 199:
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table 16. Annual Total Separations Rates by Industry and Region, Not Seasonally Adjusted,” March 10, 2022; Business Wire, “Temporary Employment in the U.S. to Grow Faster Than All Jobs Through 2025, According to New Job Forecast from TrueBlue and Emsi,” November 1, 2019; Matthew Desmond, “Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not,” The New York Times Magazine, September 11, 2018; Henry Farber, “Job Loss and the Decline in Job Security in the United States,” in Labor in the New Economy, eds. Katharine Abraham, James Spletzer, and Michael Harper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 223–62; Jacob Hacker and Elisabeth Jacobs, “The Rising Instability of American Family Incomes, 1969–2004: Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics,” Economic Policy Institute, May 29, 2008; Erin Hatton, The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Wojciech Kopczuk, Emmanuel Saez, and Jae Song, “Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data Since 1937,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 (2010): 91–128; Jake Rosenfeld, You’re Paid What You’re Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021), 158, 173; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Temporary Help Services, 1991–2021, source code CES605613200.↩
3. Desmond 10↩
4. Desmond 198, Chapter 1, Note #7:
CoreLogic, “United States Residential Foreclosure Crisis: Ten Years Later,” 2017; Desmond, Evicted, part 2; Matthew Desmond, “Unaffordable America: Poverty, Housing, and Eviction,” Institute for Research on Poverty, Fast Focus 22 (2015): 1–6; Will Fischer, “President’s Budget Would Provide More Vouchers to Help Families with Rising Housing Costs,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 20, 2022; Ashley Gromis et al., “Estimating Eviction Prevalence Across the United States,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (2022): e211616911; Dowell Myers and JungHo Park, “A Constant Quartile Mismatch Indicator of Changing Rental Affordability in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 2000 to 2016,” Cityscape 21 (2019): 163–200; RealtyTrac, “Record 2.9 Million U.S. Properties Receive Foreclosure Filing in 2010 Despite 30-Month Low in December,” 2011; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 1985–2022; U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey, April 27, 2022, table 11A; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “40th Percentile Fair Market Rent, 1985–2022”; U.S. Census Bureau, American Housing Survey, 2019, table 10. Estimates of housing cost burden exclude renters reporting no cash rent as well as those spending over 100 percent of their household income on housing costs. ↩
5. Desmond 34, Chapter 2, Note 25, pg. 212-213:
U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census: Count 4Pa—Sample-Based Population Data, tables NT23, NT126; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2019 1-Year Estimates, table B05012; U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census: Count 4Pa—Sample-Based Population Data, tables NT18, NT83, NT89; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2019 1-Year Estimates, table S1701. See also Jeff Chapman and Jared Bernstein, “Immigration and Poverty: How Are They Linked?,” Monthly Labor Review, April 2003. ↩
6. Desmond 52, Chapter 3, Note #24, pg. 223:
The Pell Grant program for low-income college students was a $7.5 billion program during the 1980–81 academic year; its budget for the 2020–21 academic year was $26 billion (in 2020 dollars). Margaret Cahalan et al., Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States: 2020 Historical Trend Report (Washington, D.C.: The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, Council for Opportunity in Education, and Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy of the University of Pennsylvania, 2020), 40, 43, 216; Richard Fry and Anthony Cilluffo, “A Rising Share of Undergraduates Are from Poor Families, Especially at Less Selective Colleges,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2019, 3–4; U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2021 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, tables PINC-03 and HINC-01; U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, Fall 2021, table E12. See also Stijn Broecke, Glenda Quintini, and Marieke Vandeweyer, “Wage Inequality and Cognitive Skills: Reopening the Debate,” in Education, Skills, and Technical Change: Implications for Future US GDP Growth, eds. Charles Hulten and Valerie Ramey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 251–86. On international education and poverty data, see National Center for Education Statistics, “International Educational Attainment,” May 2022; OECD Data, “Poverty Rate.” ↩
7. Desmond 71, Chapter 4, Note #18, pg. 231:
Caskey, Fringe Banking, 87–89; Peter Smith, Shezal Babar, and Rebecca Borné, Banks Must Stop Gouging Consumers During the COVID-19 Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Center for Responsible Lending, 2020)↩
8. Desmond 229, Chapter 4, Note #7:
Between 2011 and 2017, owners of multifamily properties (with five or more units) saw their rental revenues increase by 24 percent, but their expenses increased by only 18 percent. Landlords who owned properties with market valuations in the bottom twenty-fifth percentile, properties located primarily in poor neighborhoods, saw their rental revenues increase by 47 percent between 2012 and 2018, but their operating expenses increased by only 14 percent. Author’s calculations, U.S. Census Bureau, Rental Housing Finance Survey, 2012 and 2018. ↩
9. Desmond 117, Chapter 6, Note #28, pg. 253-254:
From the expansive body of research regarding the impact of school and classroom poverty on educational outcomes, let me stress three points. The first is that policies that attempt to expand poor children’s opportunities only by integrating their classrooms along class lines—allowing those children over the wall only when school is in session—while doing nothing to address the poverty they face at home and in their neighborhoods will have limited results. The second is that students who are smart and driven, or who have parents who care deeply about education, or both, still shine in the classroom (and on standardized tests) even in the nation’s poorest schools, a fact to which the best teachers in those schools can attest. But in America—my third conclusion—that’s not enough to get you into college; what really helps on that score is attending a rich high school. See David Armor, Gary Marks, and Aron Malatinszky, “The Impact of School SES on Student Achievement: Evidence from U.S. Statewide Achievement Data,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 40 (2018): 613–30; Douglas Downey, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumptions About Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Jennifer Jennings et al., “Do Differences in School Quality Matter More Than We Thought? New Evidence on Educational Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century,” Sociology of Education 88 (2015): 56–82; Douglas Lee Lauen and S. Michael Gaddis, “Exposure to Classroom Poverty and Test Score Achievement: Contextual Effects or Selection?,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2013): 943–79; Ann Owens, “Income Segregation Between School Districts and Inequality in Students’ Achievement,” Sociology of Education 91 (2017): 1–27; Robert Sampson, Patrick Sharkey, and Stephen Raudenbush, “Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Ability Among African-American Children,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2008): 845–52. ↩
10. Desmond 124-125, Chapter 7, Note #13, pg. 256:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimated that $161 billion worth of food was wasted in 2010. Assuming this rate of loss remains constant, that amounts to $191.67 billion in 2020, adjusting for inflation. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Food Loss and Waste,” November 19, 2021. Other studies have supported this finding. See Zach Conrad, “Daily Cost of Consumer Food Wasted, Inedible, and Consumed in the United States, 2001–2016,” Nutrition Journal 19 (2020): 1–9. ↩
11. Desmond 165↩

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