Persistence of Poverty

Recently, Doris Entwisle, Linda Olson and Karl Alexander have written a book called “The Long Shadow,” which summarizes their study of 790 inhabitants of the city of Baltimore over a span of over 30 years. They looked at 790 children of different socio-economic background, aged 6 in 1982, and tracked their lives for over 30 years. The results they find is that the socio-economic status of the parents largely predict the socio-economic status of their children in their adult lives. Studying this cohort, they find that white males without a college degree fare better than African-American males without a college degree. White males are better at finding jobs through social networks. Only four percent of children from the low socio-economic status obtained a college degree, as opposed to 45 percent of children who grew up in a higher socio-economic household. The book show that the neighborhood a child grows up can significantly affect their socio-economic status in their adult life.

Similar research, such as Aaronson (1998), Datcher (1982), and Islam (2013) have shown that the neighborhood where a child grows up can have significant impact on their earnings in their adult life. And, as this interactive map on Upshot shows, the county where a child grows up in the US can have a big effect on their adult income. Thus, to fix the problems of poverty, one has to look at developing the community.

I show my students this video and ask them how to develop this community that is on the other side of the road. One side of Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis is an affluent community, while the other side is a poor community. Prosperity has not diffused from one side of Delmar to the other. This is not unique to St. Louis; we find this feature in many cities and towns across America. Local, grassroots development projects are needed to develop these disadvantaged communities. Otherwise, these pockets of urban disadvantaged neighborhoods will continue to exist and will continue to perpetuate poverty among the residents of those neighborhoods for generations.