In 2020, more than 37 million Americans lived in poverty according to new data from the U.S Census Bureau. That’s 3.3 million more than in 2019.

But this number doesn’t include those who are above the poverty line and struggling to make a living.

According to the Poor People’s Campaign, once low-income families are accounted for, that number is closer to 140 million Americans.

What does it actually mean to be poor? How do people fall below the poverty line? And why is it so hard to get above it? We carve out time to talk about poverty in America in our series “The Price of Poverty.”

Washington State University sociologist Jennifer Sherman is among three national experts who spoke on the topic in the first part of a series by 1A.

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NPR

The CARES Act approved by Congress in 2020 established a $150 billion dollar Coronavirus Relief Fund. It provided payments to state, local, and tribal governments, but relief expired at the end of 2021.

Sociologist Jennifer Sherman, a professor at Washington State University, says this is affecting rural communities of the Northwest.

“Very often, rural housing insecurity looks different. It might mean, doubling up or couch surfing or things like that,” she says.

“You’re less likely to have any kinds of services for the rural poor as well. So I think I think they’re less visible and easier to ignore.”

Sherman, who studies rural poverty and income inequality, suggests policymakers look into subsidizing things like housing, healthcare, childcare and food. Expanding access to life’s necessities could especially help vulnerable populations, she says.

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Northwest Public Broadcasting

Ever since J.D. Vance became the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, journalists and pundits have been preoccupied with how Vance’s politics have shifted since the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other—those who work versus those who don’t. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the “settled” working class versus the “hard living.” A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits.

Vance has not renounced that divisive message. He no doubt hopes to garner the support of the slightly more upmarket of the two factions—which, probably not coincidentally, is also the group more likely to go to the polls. While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic, Vance’s competitiveness in the Ohio Senate race can be explained in no small part by his ability to politically exploit this cleavage.

As a scholar studying working-class and rural whites, I have written about this subtle but consequential divide. I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher’s aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the “settled” side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion.

Vance and my parents are mere anecdotes, yes, but scholars, including sociologist Jennifer Sherman of Washington State University, have studied folks like them in both urban and rural locales and have documented the phenomenon they represent.

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Politico

Survey finds that most people think poverty is why pollution disproportionately affects Black people, despite evidence that racism is the major cause.

Most Americans do not think that Black people are any more likely to be affected by pollution than white people, despite significant evidence that racism is a root cause of environmental injustice in the United States, a survey has found.

Numerous research papers over the years have shown that people of colour and poor people are significantly more likely to live in areas of high pollution — a result of the deliberate construction of polluting industries in these communities, says Dylan Bugden, an environmental sociologist at Washington State University in Pullman.

But Bugden found that respondents to the survey were more than twice as likely to identify poverty as the main cause of environmental inequalities, instead of blaming structural racism. This is despite scientific evidence clearly demonstrating that “race, rather than poverty, is the primary factor behind environmental inequality”, notes Bugden in his study, published in Social Problems. Additionally, many people suggested that a lack of hard work and poor personal choices were responsible for increased exposure to pollution.

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Nature
Scientific American
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