“It’s very, very disheartening. We take a couple of steps forward and then fall back at least one. The private sector isn’t going to fix these neighborhoods. I view these things as investments, not expenditures. These things are an investment in the future that bring returns many times over,” he said.

While the U.S. economy is slowly recovering, improvements for those deep in poverty do not keep pace with the cuts now in place. The spending reductions going into effect will hit hardest at Americans whose prospects are not directly tied to the economy — people like Antonio Hammond and children in the Head Start pre-school programs.

According to the AP, U.S. poverty levels are spiking during a time when the government is cutting funding (due to the sequester) for programs aimed to help the poor, like Head Start, which “provides educational services for low-income pre-school children and frees single mothers to find work without the huge expense of childcare.” Austerity measures are tough on everyone, but there’s no doubt that they’re toughest on those living in poverty.

While one would think gun violence would be higher in states with higher levels of economic anxiety related to unemployment or inequality, we found no association to either at the state level. My colleagues and I did, however, find gun deaths to be higher in states with higher levels of poverty and lower incomes, as well as in red states and those with more blue-collar working class economies. Conversely, we found gun deaths to be less likely in states with more college graduates and stronger knowledge-based economies.

Poverty, education, and socioeconomic disadvantages all play a role in moderating gun deaths, according to this story in Atlantic Cities. These are things we should also consider (in addition to the discussion about mental health that’s already taking place), as the president prepares his proposals on gun control in the coming weeks. (Thanks to Jon Custer for the pointer.)

Over at Marginal Revolution this morning, Alex Tabarrok examines a paper from the Chicago Booth School of Business that looks at why people living in poverty do things against their own interest, like borrow too much money, play the lottery, and save too little:

SMS argue that immediate problems draw people’s attention and as people use cognitive resources to solve these problems they have fewer resources left over to solve or even notice other problems. In essence, it’s easier for the rich than the poor to follow the Eisenhower rule–”Don’t let the urgent overcome the important”–because the poor face many more urgent tasks.

Basically, this says that since I’m not worried about how I’m going to pay my rent next month, or whether or not I’ll have enough money to buy groceries, I can think about what I need to do over the long-term to stay financially stable. People without money spend much of their time figuring out how to address these immediate needs, so saving for the future isn’t as important as paying for the things they need now.

This seems a bit obvious, no? I’d like to know what the researchers think about what comes next after coming to these conclusions. What can we do to help people living in poverty make good decisions that will benefit them over the long-term? That’s a difficult question to address, and it involves these bigger issues of fair pay, affordable housing and SNAP.

Watch Poor Kids on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

I’m not trying to bring the mood down right before Thanksgiving, but Frontline has an excellent documentary we should all watch about poverty in America through the eyes of poor children living in cities like New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix and San Francisco. The children are aware of the circumstances they are in. Sera, an 11-year-old who lives with her sister and mother in San Francisco, has been in and out of shelters before securing subsidized housing in the Tenderloin district. “I think it’s kind of scary that we don’t have much of a choice if we lose this place,” she says. “This is not the Great American Dream.”

Filmmaker Jezza Neumann made the documentary after seeing the huge response he saw when he made a documentary about poor children living in the U.K. 12 years ago. In a Q+A, Neumann discusses how difficult it is to remain neutral while making the documentary:

During the filming you try to stay as distant as possible, while remaining connected. It’s really difficult because, of course, as a human being, you don’t want to witness what you’re witnessing. You’d love to change things for the kids, but you know in your heart of hearts you can’t. If I changed things for Kaylie and I bought her all the food, can I buy the food again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? If I buy her a bunch of clothes, should I buy them for Tyler? And should I therefore go and buy them for the kid next door, who also doesn’t have any? Where does it stop?

So many questions we don’t yet have the answer for.

“Until roughly the year 2000, becoming a billionaire was something that everybody saw as a good thing in India. They saw it as a coming of age,” he explains, as we sit in his home in a fancy neighbourhood of New Delhi. “Now being wealthy has been given a bad name.”

The generation that rose in the period immediately after India’s reforms in the early 1990s amassed fortunes in areas such as information technology and outsourcing, he contends. However, recent times have seen a more troubling economic trend. “In the last decade, almost all of the billionaires created in India have been created because of the proximity to politics,” he says. “They have been created in specific areas where government policy determines whether you make a billion or you don’t, which includes land, real estate, infrastructure, and natural resources.”

The Financial Times examined some of India’s newest richest people (men), and found that as India’s economy rapidly grew in the last decade, the wealth found a way to corrupt people (surprise!). Not everyone is so bad: The country has its own version of Warren Buffet in the guise of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, a financier who made a bundle spotting undervalued companies, and who recently promised to donate at least a quarter of his fortune to charity. Interestingly enough, the two words you’ll find missing from the piece are the words “poverty” and “poor.” The only time the word “slums” appears is in the context of where India’s richest man has decided to build his mansion—the $500 million home is located in a city where half of the residents live in slums.

The system reduces poverty the most for the disabled and the elderly and least for several groups among the nonelderly and non-disabled. Over time, we find that expenditures have shifted toward the disabled and the elderly, and away from those with the lowest incomes and toward those with higher incomes, with the consequence that post-transfer rates of deep poverty for some groups have increased. We conclude that the U.S. benefit system is paternalistic and tilted toward the support of the employed and toward groups with special needs and perceived deservingness.

This paper by researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Johns Hopkins University is worth looking at—especially during an election year when there’s a question about how effective President Obama has been on reducing poverty. I’ve only skimmed the study so far, but one interesting thing the paper discusses is behavioral responses to benefit programs, for example, the idea that people “reduce their work effort to increase their benefit levels, since most programs pay higher benefits to those with lower income.” That may be true in some cases, but I think we can all agree that nobody wants to be poor.

The previous summer, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, who was serving, at the time, as an adviser to the McCain campaign, testified before Congress on the need for an aggressive stimulus program. In his testimony, he included a handy chart, based on his own algorithm, that listed the “Bang for the Buck” that various stimulus measures would provide. According to Zandi’s calculations, aid that went to wealthier Americans would not be very effective as stimulus: for every dollar that Congress cut from corporate taxes, the G.D.P. would gain 30 cents; making the Bush tax cuts permanent would boost it by 29 cents for every dollar added to the deficit.

Stimulus measures that gave money to poor and distressed families, on the other hand, would be much more productive: extending unemployment-insurance benefits would boost G.D.P. by $1.64 for every dollar spent. And at the top of Zandi’s list was a temporary boost in the food-stamp program, which he calculated would produce $1.73 in G.D.P. gains for every dollar spent.

This New York Times Magazine feature on how Obama’s early experience in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Roseland in Chicago kindled his political ambitions for change, and made urban poverty a focus of his first run for president is comprehensive and very interesting—mostly because urban poverty has virtually disappeared as a key issue for the president. The reason it disappeared? The economic crisis caused everyone—the poor, the middle class, the rich—to say, “hey, I’m struggling too, how about helping me?” and the administration had to switch gears in the name of “the economy” instead of what kind of drastic approach it could take to ensure that 1 in every 10 children are no longer living in deep poverty. A few things have become clear: 1) As the excerpt above shows, our dollars go much farther when we focus them on the poor, and 2) We need a new drastic approach to end poverty in the U.S. because pouring billions of dollars into food stamps and unemployment insurance will enable people to pay their rent and prevent them from being hungry, but it won’t do very much to actually get them out of poverty.

She might have worked at data entry forever had SourceCorp not laid her off. “I used to do the only thing I thought I could earn money from,” she says, “but I was kind of content.” Not content in a happy way but content in that she wasn’t looking for any other type of work. “It’s sometimes easier to stay where you’re at, instead of trying to get to someplace else.”

The American Prospect has a very good profile of Sue Christian, a mother of two who lives in one of America’s poorest counties: Owsley County in Booneville, Kentucky where 40 percent of the population lives in poverty. At 40, Sue decided to go to college so she could get a job in education to earn more money, and six months after graduating, was able to land a job working with middle school students. Sue gets a happy ending.

What was interesting to me, though, was that Sue was content (though not happy) to continue working at a job that paid her minimum wage, and didn’t get the wakeup call that she could be doing something better—and better paid—with her life until she was laid off from her job.

I think about all the times I’ve been content (but not happy) with a job because it met my basic needs, and why I was willing to stay at those jobs for so long even if they’re not fulfilling.

Sue is right: It’s always easier to stay where you’re at, instead of trying to get to someplace else. But every time I had a wakeup call to try to get to that someplace else, I’ve always been better for it. I’m here, aren’t I?

Photo: Shutterstock/Joanne Harris

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

“Hey nuns! Stop helping poor people so much, and start dedicating more time to hot button issues that won’t actually accomplish anything except remind everyone that the Catholic Church is against things! Who do you think you are, a bunch of Mother Theresas!?” — The Vatican (Photo: keepwadling/Flickr)

Season 8 of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations premiered last night with a beautiful/depressing/enlightening/uplifting/amazing episode about Mozambique.

As per usual, the colors and the foods and the descriptions and the vistas and the cinematography were so beautiful that I got sad about my less-aesthetically pleasing life. Why do I have to live in this ugly country? Why can’t I live on an island in the Indian Ocean? Or at least afford to buy plane tickets to go to islands in the Indian Ocean? WHY DOES MY LIFE SUCK?! (These are totally normal feelings when watching this show, I checked.)

So there’s that, the longing. But then there’s the other feeling: Deep shame.

This television show on the Travel Channel has taught me most of what I know about poor people in the world. It’s brilliant, because it never says explicitly: “I’m going to teach you about poor people in the world.” But it does, always. Bourdain is interested in the origins of the foods he’s eating and gets to know the people and the People who are preparing his meals. Those people, so often, are really poor.

In last night’s ep, Bourdain and company did a really lovley job explaining and exploring sadness and tragedy of the country while also celebrating the people and the cuisine. This Tweet from the folks at The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck pretty much sums it up:

@NoReservations Mozambique episode of #NoReservations is like repeated kicks to the balls broken up with food porn. Damn.

— Big Gay Ice Cream (@biggayicecream) April 10, 2012

This is a show I watch because I love it, but it’s also serves as a reality check and Thing To Think On. I go back and forth between feeling sorry for myself for being an idiot with money and therefore not being able to go to Mozambique and participate in colonial tourism (basically), and then a second later, I’m so ashamed of being spoiled and terrible and can’t believe that I’m not just, the happiest person all the time.

I mean, check this, from Eater’s collection of last night’s best one -liners:

On the former Grande Hotel in Beira: “There’s not a single toilet in that entire structure or electric power and 2,700 people live in it. That’s enough, call it a day. Nothing more to say.”

Next week’s episode takes place in Kansas City.

Photo Credit: flickr/babasteve