Transfer Programs and Black Poverty

A person is in poverty whenever the following is true of their income situation:

(Market Income + Transfer Income - Taxes) < Poverty Threshold

Thus, there are three ways to lift someone out of poverty:

  1. Increase their market income.
  2. Increase their transfer income
  3. Reduce their taxes.

Given that the poor do not pay much tax in the US, there are two basic channels for poverty reduction: market income or transfer income.

Due to various racist mechanisms, the market income channel presents Blacks with unique difficulties. The transfer income channel does not. Thus, it seems that anti-poverty strategies focused on transfer incomes are the most helpful to Black people and the most sensitive to the unique income challenges experienced by Black people. This is not to say that efforts shouldn't be made to deal with the market income obstacles. Obviously they should. It's just to say that, given that those obstacles currently exist, it's clear that anti-poverty strategies centered around market income are structurally biased against Black people and really all people who are structurally prevented from full labor market participation.

This is my pro-transfer take. But it's apparently not universally subscribed to. At Seven Scribes, Vann R. Newkirk II reaches the opposite conclusion about the racial dynamics of transfer programs:

[1.] While much of the safety net, save TANF, is not explicitly designed as such, the central conceit of anti-poverty programs is that a temporary injection of resources can help families rebound from poverty back above the threshold where they can pay for living unassisted again. Life above this threshold is generally considered some variation of lower-middle class. The logic checks out for poverty at large.

[2.] And the math checks out too. After Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” reforms, the national supplemental poverty rate–which takes into account a broader range of income as well as taxes and other expenses–decreased by an astonishing ten percentage points! This is good. Even as the age of inequality grips America, the basic assumptions of lifting people out of poverty–providing immediate living aid, health coverage, jobs, education, and housing–would probably do a decent job at it if we invested enough in it. For now at least.

[3.] But these proposals alone don’t quite work for black poverty. Black poverty is best understood as a societal-level phenomenon by which black people are in a sense predestined to poverty. Social mobility for white people is only loosely assortative; while the most poor white people and most wealthy white people are most likely to stay in their income ranges for life, there are good chances that people of any income range can wind up in another one. White children born in the middle three income quintiles can expect about a 25% lifetime chance of moving to another of the middle income ranges or even to the highest range. The only real rule here is that white people who aren’t born poor are unlikely candidates of ever becoming poor.

In paragraph one, Newkirk says that the purpose of transfer programs is to buffer you until you can get out of poverty by getting your market income to go up. In paragraph three (and elsewhere), Newkirk notes that Blacks face unique challenges in getting their market income to go up. Thus, he concludes that transfer programs don't really get the job done for Blacks.

But this argument is backwards. The purpose of transfer income is not to increase market income. These are separate income channels. By cramming the two channels together in the analytical way that he does, Newkirk uses the existence of racist barriers to market income mobility to take down all anti-poverty strategies, even transfer strategies that do not rely upon market income mobility to work.

The reason why Newkirk crammed transfer income and market income mechanisms together is explained by the text in paragraph two. In paragraph two, Newkirk claims that the Columbia Poverty Measure (CPM) confirms the point he made in paragraph one about the poverty-reducing nature of transfer income. But the CPM doesn't do that. In fact, it does the opposite.

Recall that Newkirk's theory of transfers is that they temporarily buffer you so that you can get out of poverty by increasing your market income. If this was the mechanism by which transfers cut poverty, then you would expect the War On Poverty reforms to have cut market poverty, i.e. poverty measured at the market distribution of income. But the CPM shows that this is not what happened. In fact, under the CPM, market poverty slightly increased over the period. The sole reason poverty fell was because higher transfers gave many populations with low market incomes enough extra income to put them over the poverty threshold. Put simply: the War On Poverty transfers worked by directly pushing people over the poverty line, not by indirectly boosting their market incomes.

dajoi-fig-1

So, contrary to Newkirk's argument, the CPM shows us that transfer incomes are perfectly capable of reducing poverty even without increasing upward market income mobility. Thus, the fact that Blacks face structural barriers to market income mobility is not an argument against the effectiveness of transfers for Blacks; rather, it's a very strong argument for the effectiveness of transfers for Blacks. Transfer-heavy approaches are more responsive to the nature of Black poverty precisely because poor Blacks face bigger market income mobility barriers than poor Whites do.

Economic Conditions and Racism

Yglesias asks a question that I have seen a number of commentators ask of late:

The suggested conclusion of this question is that the economic anxiety argument for Trump’s support is weak. But I don’t think that’s true.

Trump has a lot of supporters and their reasons for supporting him probably vary from person to person. Some people seem to like his business man shtick. Some people seem to like his outsider status. Some are even longstanding internet white supremacists, such as those who post on Stormfront.

But among his crowd of supporters there is also likely some who would not be supporting him but for their bad economic conditions. The problem with Yglesias’ argument is that it assumes that everyone responds to bad economic conditions the same way. But this isn’t true. As we know from history, including very recent history, when faced with economic turmoil, different people respond in different ways. Some break far left. Some break far right. Some don’t break at all. Greece provided a great case study of this in the last few years as its struggling country simultaneously saw the rise of the far left Syriza and the far right Golden Dawn.

Just like Donald Trump, Golden Dawn appears to attract a certain strata of ethnic Greeks who responded to the economic turmoil in Greece by turning on immigrants and other ethnic groups. Not everyone in Greece broke for Golden Dawn, especially not immigrants and those in other ethnic groups. But that fact doesn’t make it any less true that Golden Dawn’s popularity surged because of the country’s economic troubles.

In causal terms, what we would say is that economic problems are a necessary but not sufficient condition for making that far right turn. Someone still has to be somewhat racist or xenophobic or whatever in order to respond to economic conditions in that far right manner. But that doesn’t negate the point that, but for the economic problems, they wouldn’t have turned far right.

The Electability Contradiction

The facially plausible case for Hillary Clinton is that neither Clinton nor Sanders will get much done given the GOP Congress. Thus, it doesn’t really matter which one of them becomes President, only that it is one of them and not a Republican. Clinton is clearly way more electable than Sanders and thus Clinton should be nominated.

Interestingly, in the last month or so, many of Hillary’s media supporters have been indirectly making the case that she has serious electability problems.

Here’s Catherine Rampell making the case that Clinton is structurally prevented from behaving in the kind of authentic and sincere manner that appeals to voters:

These qualities are what make him seem “authentic,” “sincere” even — especially when contrasted with Clinton’s hyper-scriptedness. Sanders, unlike Clinton, doesn’t give a damn if he’s camera-ready.

This is, of course, a form of authenticity that is off-limits to any female politician, not just one with Clinton’s baggage.

Female politicians — at least if they want to be taken seriously on a national stage — cannot be unkempt and unfiltered, hair mussed and voice raised. They have to be carefully coifed and scripted at all times, because they have to hew as closely as possible to the bounds of propriety available to both their sex and their occupation. They can’t be too quiet or too loud, too emotional or too cold, too meek or too aggressive, and so on.

Here’s Rebecca Traister making a substantially similar point about the ways in which Clinton is structurally prevented from getting behind the kind of ambitious proposals that appeal to voters:

That hurts, and it falls into a very old, very well-worn gendered pattern, in which women — understanding that making promises they cannot back up will not get them taken seriously and that they must prove themselves extra-competent in order to be understood as basically competent — become the nose-to-the-grindstone wonks, easily compared to know-it-all bores like Tracy Flick and Hermione Granger. They’re the wet blankets, the ones all too acquainted with the limitations imposed by the world, and all too eager to explain their various ideas for working around them. Men, and especially white men, whose claims to public or political power are more easily understood, are permitted a slightly looser approach.

There’s been some talk about how a female candidate could never be as scruffy as Bernie Sanders, as uncombed and unkempt. A woman could never be as grumpy as Bernie, as left-leaning as Bernie, as uncooperative with party machinery as Bernie. And that stuff is true enough. But the bigger truth is that what Bernie does, to great acclaim, that Hillary Clinton could never do is make big promises of institutional overthrow, tug on our imaginative heartstrings by laying out a future that might not be grounded in reality, and urge a revolution.

Here is a truth about America: No one likes a woman who yells loudly about revolution.

Here is Courtney Enlow repeating these same points and adding that Clinton has been structurally prevented throughout her career from adopting the kinds of good and clean politics that voters like:

FIRST AND FUCKING FOREMOST, COOL, YOU LIKE BERNIE’S WISHES AND DREAMS APPROACH TO POLITICS. “FREE COLLEGE FOR EVERYONE AND A GODDAMN PONY.” YES, THAT SOUNDS FUCKING WONDERFUL BUT DO YOU THINK HILLARY COULD EVEN SAY THOSE WORDS WITHOUT FOX NEWS LITERALLY BURYING HER ALIVE IN TAMPONS AND CRUCIFIXES?
…
YOU DON’T LIKE THAT SHE PLAYS THE GAME? THAT SHE HAS TIES TO THE ESTABLISHMENT? FOR ONE THING, THAT’S HOW SHIT FUCKING GETS DONE. FOR THE OTHER THING, THE BIGGEST THING, A WOMAN DOESN’T GET THE FUCKING OPTION *NOT* TO PLAY THE GAME. NOT NOW. NOT YET. WE ALL WISH THINGS WERE DIFFERENT BUT THEY DON’T BECOME DIFFERENT WHILE WE’RE ATTACKING THE FUCKING PERSON WHO CAN MAKE THAT POSSIBLE.
…
IT IS ABSOLUTELY GUT WRENCHING THAT THIS BADASS, IMPORTANT WOMAN HAS BEEN DIMINSHED AND WRITTEN OFF AND HATED HER WHOLE CAREER, HER WHOLE EXISTENCE AS A PUBLIC FIGURE. YOU LIKE BERNIE BECAUSE HE DOESN’T PLAY THE GAME, BUT FOR HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, FOR A WOMAN, SHE HAS HAD NO OTHER CHOICE.

These are three examples from this particular genre of essay, but there are dozens more. The way the genre works is you identify a criticism of Clinton — that she’s unlikable, inauthentic, insincere, has weak policies, has a bad track record, constructed and participated in a corrupt political money machine — and then you defend Clinton from the criticism by saying sexism in society makes it impossible for her to do or have done otherwise. Insofar as it’s not fair to ask someone to do the impossible, the upshot of this argument is that it’s unfair to criticize Clinton for these deficits.

Most of the debate on these articles focuses on whether it is actually impossible for Clinton to do or have done otherwise. This debate tends to hit a dead end pretty quickly as both sides just assert that it is or isn’t impossible back and forth without having any definitive way of resolving the disagreement.

But there seems to be a bigger issue lurking in the background. If it is truly impossible for Clinton to do the kinds of things that attract voters, then that means she has serious electability problems. If it’s impossible for her to be a likable, sincere politician with inspiring, ambitious ideas that really gin up the enthusiasm, then that means she’s a weak candidate. Whether this is her own fault or the fault of pernicious forces in society doesn’t change the ultimate fact that she’s weakened by it.

If you believe that the most important thing is electability, and believe that sexism makes it impossible for Clinton to do a lot of the things that are important for electability, then where does that leave you exactly? Should you roll the dice on a candidate who, by your own account, is so heavily weighed down by double standards and gendered expectations that she cannot appeal to voters? That seems like a big risk to take with the White House on the line, doesn’t it? Can we really gamble on running someone who is apparently severely handicapped as a candidate when four Supreme Court nominations hang in the balance?

I bring this up not to actually endorse any particular argument on this front, but rather to point out the tension in many of these electability arguments. To say Clinton is electable is also to say that sexism is not that big of an impediment to being a good politician that appeals to voters. Conversely, to say that sexism is a big impediment to being a good politician is to say Clinton is not that electable.

Why the Pundits Ignore the Truth About Sanders Youth Support

The reason Sanders is winning among the younger generation is that the younger generation is more left-wing than the older generations. The left-wing nature of Millennials has been substantiated in many polls. But instead of admitting this, many pundits have cooked up bizarrely complicated theories to explain why the youth (and especially young women) are going for Bernie. The most amusing of these theories to date is the Steinem theory (which has received qualified endorsement from some prominent pundits) that young women are simply fake geek girls following the Bernie boys in order to be cool.

When people disagree with you, it is natural to try to psychoanalyze them to figure out what’s truly going on. And this is what many pundits (almost all of whom are for Hillary) have been doing to young people and young women in particular.

But in that same vein, I think it might be useful to psychoanalyze why the pundits are psychoanalyzing youth. What the hell is going on in their head that makes them so reluctant to accept the basic fact that young people are more left wing and are thus going for the more left wing candidate?

I think part of the answer is that, for many of these pundits, being leftist (nay “very liberal”) is a big part of their self-identity. They cut their teeth being the “very liberal” bloggers and pundits of the 2000s. And they just cannot stand the idea that they are more conservative than the generation coming up behind them. Even though their politics have not changed, they are now the lamewads because the youth are actually more left than they are. They cannot countenance this and so they refuse to countenance it.

Theories of Why Young Women Support Bernie

Just like young men, young women support Bernie over Clinton by huge margins. This creates a rather interesting situation for the pundits to explain. I have been monitoring the take channels waiting for the pundit theories to come. But so far, I haven’t seen much. The pundits seem eager to explain why young men support Bernie, but are hesitant to explain why a similar number of young women support Bernie.

For the most part, I expect the pundits to just punt on this question: hold out and wait for Clinton to win the primary and then it will be kind of moot. This is the easy way out of a rather unwelcome situation for many.

So far, I’ve only seen two prominent people deal with this question head on. Here they are.

1. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz had this to say (bolded part is the question she was answering).

Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide? Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.

According to DWS, young women are simply complacent about abortion rights and, perhaps, women’s rights more generally. And this is why they support Bernie over Hillary.

2. Gloria Steinem

Here’s what Gloria Steinem had to say.

First of all, women get more radical as we get older because we experience… Men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age and women get more radical because they lose power as they age. It’s kind of not fair to measure most women by the standard of most men because they are going to get more activist as they grow older. And when you’re young, you’re thinking “Where are the boys? The boys are for Bernie.”

According to Steinem, younger women are simply less radical than older women and are also just going to where the boys are. And this is why they support Bernie over Hillary.

If you’ve seen any other prominent people offering thoughts on this question, please do share and link in the comments.