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Dr Kathryn J Edin: We Solved Teen Pregnancy. So Why Aren’t Things Better?
36 Plays7 days ago
In this episode, Eric talks with sociologist Dr Kathryn J Edin, one of America’s leading poverty researchers, about what decades of fieldwork reveal that statistics alone can miss.
Dr Edin’s work began in living rooms, church basements, public housing communities, and long conversations with families trying to survive on too little money and too little stability. Early in her career, she learned something simple but deeply important from welfare recipients in Chicago: no one could actually live on welfare alone. Families had to improvise, hustle, rely on informal support, and sometimes break rules simply to survive.
The conversation explores how poverty has changed over the past several decades. Dr Edin explains why child poverty statistics can hide the deeper problem of instability, how welfare reform created both benefits and serious gaps, and why families can fall into stretches of extreme hardship that are very difficult to climb out of.
Eric and Dr Edin also discuss marriage, motherhood, fatherhood, declining labor opportunities for non-college men, and the changing meaning of family formation in America. Drawing from Promises I Can Keep, Dr Edin explains why many low-income women value marriage highly, but see it as something too important to enter into under unstable conditions.
They also talk about place. Why do some communities recover while others struggle for generations? Dr Edin points to the loss of social infrastructure, the disappearance of places where people build bonds, and the importance of cross-class relationships in creating opportunity.
At its core, this is a conversation about seeing people clearly. About the stories behind the numbers. And about why the explanations we reach for first are often too simple.
Topics Covered
- How Kathryn Edin was drawn into poverty research
- Why fieldwork reveals what statistics often miss
- What welfare recipients taught her early in her career
- How poverty has changed over the past several decades
- Why instability matters as much as annual income
- The rise of extreme poverty and cashless survival
- What welfare reform got right and wrong
- Why low-income women often value marriage deeply
- How the meaning of marriage has changed in America
- The decline of stable work for non-college men
- Fatherhood, family instability, and labor market withdrawal
- The role of place in shaping opportunity
- Why social infrastructure matters
- What happens when communities lose gathering places
- The relationship between narrative, numbers, and policy
- Why poverty is often misunderstood from a distance
Episode Links
- Explore Dr Edin’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kathryn-J.-Edin/author/B0C4LVDY7P
- Dr Edin at Princeton: https://sociology.princeton.edu/people/kathryn-edin
- Dr Edin on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Edin
- Connect with Dr Edin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-edin-2a534923b/
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Dr. Katherine Eden, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? I am at home in Trenton, New Jersey, sitting in on my at my living room table. I appreciate you being here. Would you mind telling me a bit about yourself?
00:00:17
Speaker
I'm a sociologist. um I teach at a policy school at Princeton. um I'm from rural America, a little town with one stoplight in central Minnesota.
00:00:31
Speaker
And I spent much of my career studying urban poverty, interestingly enough. So... um I think my sort of rural background was critical um to to sort of my trajectory.
00:00:44
Speaker
um They call it Minnesota Nice for a reason. if if you're If you learn Minnesota Nice, you can get people to talk to you. And I found that just to be a skill, just beat up being being personable, being warm, being nonjudgmental, that's really served me well in this business of um collecting stories.
00:01:08
Speaker
What drew you into this line of work? So as I said, I grew up in this small town and then, um but it was a very poor community in central Minnesota.
00:01:18
Speaker
ah My mom was sort of ah a social worker for the church. It was called a parish worker. She was an artist. ah but She was also always ah ah also a parish worker for our little country church.
00:01:30
Speaker
And as I said, there was a lot of poverty around and and my mom knew every family. And so I grew up, you know, just jumping with her in the minivan and going all over the country, meeting, you know, some of the poorest families who are our neighbors.
00:01:48
Speaker
And ah it was, you know, like now she's a very prominent artist. And, you know, I'm always like, go back to being that mom. That's the mom who knows all these famous people. It was it was a wonderful way to grow up.
00:02:04
Speaker
It really was. And so i went to college in Chicago, and it was a huge shock. I couldn't figure out how all those people lived up in the air in boxes. i mean, I literally remember having this thought, how how is this possible?
00:02:18
Speaker
um But in my sophomore year, I took a class um called Intro to Sociology. And the professor said, i have an extra credit opportunity in Cabrini-Green.
00:02:31
Speaker
Now, I had no idea what Cabrini Green was. It was the most notorious housing project in the United States at the time. i was completely ignorant of this, and but I knew what extra credit was.
00:02:44
Speaker
So I raised my hand ended up spending... um kind of majoring in, you know, in Cabrini-Green and minoring in college. I mean, I really got involved there, first with um the indigent elderly and then with families who are part of a tutoring program.
00:03:06
Speaker
ah So when I went to graduate school, um you know, and I needed to do a project, I knew right where to go. I knew right where to, right, well right where, you know, who who to talk to and and how to get in. You know, usually it would take you years ah to establish rapport in a place like Cabrini.
00:03:27
Speaker
um But i'd been I'd been there for years just doing simple things like um making breakfasts in a church basement and helping kids with their math homework. So um it was a real opening for me.
00:03:40
Speaker
And then I got this job, you know, back then it was hard to make your way financially in grad school. So I got this job teaching college courses to welfare recipients on the west side of Chicago.
00:03:53
Speaker
And so after I teach this class, you know, the students, we kind of have a focus group in the church part. It was also ah the university was renting out a site in the neighborhood in a church place.
00:04:05
Speaker
And um so my students were, ah you know, they were great. I had been taking this course on poverty at Northwestern with this famous man, Christopher Jenks.
00:04:16
Speaker
And we were reading all the tomes and looking at all the statistics. and And he would say, what are you learning in North Lowndale anyway? And I would say, well, nobody can live on welfare.
00:04:28
Speaker
You have to cheat to survive. And I just thought, this well, doesn't everyone know this? Everyone in my class knows this. ah But it turned out that no one ah in the in the world of academia or policy ah knew this. So my first book was really traveling the country for six years, collecting stories from over 400 women on how they survived welfare and low-wage employment.
00:04:52
Speaker
So that was kind of the starting point. And then, of course, ah what people wanted to know after I wrote that book is, um you know, radio and TV talk shows teach you a lot.
00:05:03
Speaker
What they wanted to know is um why did they have the kids in the first place? And why don't they just get married? And so that began a whole new line of work, which I know you're familiar with, really on poverty and and the family.
00:05:20
Speaker
So it kind of one one you know lucky conversation after another. So it sounds like when you went to college initially, you were not necessarily thinking that you would go into this line of work.
00:05:34
Speaker
No. ah it was ah it was I have to really credit one of my sociology professors, David Claiborne. It was a small college, small enough that one of our classes could fit in the back of his pickup.
00:05:49
Speaker
And he drove us all over Chicago. And ah he was the first one, actually, who took me to Cabrini Green and offered this this internship. And I think what what really hooked me was the people in Cabrini were from Mississippi.
00:06:06
Speaker
And I was from rural Minnesota. And I couldn't get my hands around the city. You know how urban people, they just get right to the point. Well, rural people don't do that.
00:06:19
Speaker
So when I got to Cabrini and got to know all these fascinating people, they were like me. They were rural people. They had rural sensibilities. They thought about, you know...
00:06:33
Speaker
You know, for years when I'd go home, I'd say, Dad, how are the crops? My father wasn't even a farmer. He was an educator. But, ah you know, the agricultural way of thinking about life and the rhythms of the seasons and so on were were something I really shared with these Mississippians. So I kind of felt at home.
00:06:51
Speaker
ah So very random, but but I would say that's that's probably what what hooked me. And then, of course, the childhood with my mother, um you know, just having this experience meeting people whose lives were just really different from my own and having that be part of my everyday, everyday experience.
00:07:12
Speaker
When you described yourself and you talked about coming from town, you know, where there was some amount of poverty, are you thinking primarily in terms of economic hardship or, you know, cultural poverty or or do you do would you classify things by different categories like that?
00:07:35
Speaker
Probably not because of how it can be misconstrued. But I would say so in Minnesota, the poverty is white and Native American and I don't pretend to understand Native American poverty.
00:07:50
Speaker
um But many times, kids growing up in poor families in Minnesota, white kids, um they would experience one generation of poverty. It was sort of a ah one and done. And this this pattern is, um and especially when you think of, ah of um even when you think of urban white poverty, it's often a ah one generation and done.
00:08:16
Speaker
ah What was really different is that when I was in North Lawndale, for example, um many of the you know many of the young people that I was interviewing were second and third generation poor.
00:08:29
Speaker
In fact, longer, you know, going back to the history of sharecropping and in Mississippi, And it wasn't necessarily due lifestyle taxes. It was due to the fact that when they came from the South, where there was such extreme cultural restrictions to the North, ah the labor market began to lock them out in all kinds of ways. You know, as soon as blacks moved to North Londo, which was a second place of settlement after the Black Belt. So almost all African-Americans who came to Chicago after 1940 came through this neighborhood.
00:09:02
Speaker
And of course, um, ah The economy is slow to ah incorporate these new workers. There's a ton of prejudice, so they really can't move out of these black neighborhoods.
00:09:14
Speaker
And then as soon as um the riots occur following the assassination of Martin Luther King, all the industry leaves. So we have... Sears, International Harvester, Zenith, the biggest employers in Chicago, just flee this neighborhood, leaving it ah really jobless. um And your work disappears in this neighborhood. So I continue to study North Laundale.
00:09:41
Speaker
I was just there last summer. I'm planning to go again in August. And I'm now interviewing people. ah the those early hopeful migrants, the elders who came with the Great Migration to learn about their lives. But it's it's striking how the the exclusions in the North mimicked the exclusions in the South, except we replaced sharecropping with these jobless, you know, but what the the famous sociologist William Julius Wilson called these jobless on ghettos. and And those continue today. So um I think most of what we're talking about is is structural.
00:10:19
Speaker
um There are always cultural aspects. um Oftentimes, I studied a group of families who left Baltimore high-rise housing um for um more just more advantaged neighborhoods. ah It's just part of the federal moving to opportunity experiment run by HUD.
00:10:39
Speaker
And I followed those ah families with kids for 12 years. And it was striking because when they were living in high-risk public housing, um they would tell me that they were unmotivated, they were unhopeful, you know, they weren't they weren't parenting in the way that they thought they should.
00:10:57
Speaker
i They move out of these environments and and their parenting changes, their outlook on life changes. So I think it's very hard to know, you know, what's kind of structural and what's and what's um cultural because so many have of our parents of the the ways that we go about moving through the world and the kinds of things we think about ourselves and others are so shaped um by our context. So i I guess I've become less and less convinced that much of this isn't isn't structural.
00:11:30
Speaker
You started out with that. I think it was one credit working in Cabrini Green, and you've been doing this for quite a while. So are there things that you have seen that have changed for better or worse in poverty, family life, and maybe anything else you would wrap in with this?
00:11:52
Speaker
First of all, let's talk about the family. So promises I could keep, literally, I was on these radio and TV talk shows and people would ask me, Dr. Eden, I get that no one can live unwell for this.
00:12:07
Speaker
You told that story well, but why didn't they just get married and why did they have the kids in the first place? And this is the this is these are the questions the middle class asks about the poor. And I didn't have any idea what the answers to those questions were.
00:12:21
Speaker
But I'd spent six years traveling the country talking to single moms, and I thought they would probably have something to say about it. So I moved my family, and I moved into um America's poorest small city, Camden, New Jersey, which was really an epicenter of single parenthood, and then the greater Philadelphia area, and um spent you know another half decade talking with hundreds of low-income single mothers, and then eventually absent fathers.
00:12:50
Speaker
about this question. and And you know the story. The story is that surprisingly, low-income single mothers value marriage. In fact, they value it so much they consider it sacred and they don't want to sully it with their own imperfect relationship. So they're waiting to meet both a financial and that kind of an emotional bar.
00:13:14
Speaker
ah But meantime, you know, there there were not a lot of opportunities. Young people are all about meaning and identity. So there weren't a lot of opportunities for meaning and identity. And there was such a strong value on children as ah not as a.
00:13:33
Speaker
um Not as a sort of thing I could brag about, like but as as ah is a place where I can invest and create meaning and value in the world.
00:13:45
Speaker
It's a place where I can contribute you know and And there was no better place. Like, you know, I was 30 before I had kids. And my respondents would often point this out that I was really weird or even that I was selfish.
00:14:02
Speaker
They really saw having kids as a self selfless act and and something that was just an a natural part of life. So ah it was really this this kind of a story that really turned the conventional wisdom on its head.
00:14:17
Speaker
Low-income women do ah greatly value marriage, but they don't and they don't think a poor but happy marriage can survive. And largely the data have borne that out. Now, what has changed about that story?
00:14:31
Speaker
um So in it during that time, ah so I direct a large um ah birth cohort study. So I'm speaking now from survey data.
00:14:43
Speaker
um During that time, among women without a college degree, a fairly large portion had their child, ah you know, before the age of 22, while they were still young or teenagers.
00:14:57
Speaker
In our survey, which is a birth cohort of of ah women having children in 2000, About 40%, and our survey is more disadvantaged than the U.S. population, so keep that in mind, about 40% of them and had a child by age 22.
00:15:14
Speaker
Only 15% of their daughters, we're continuing to follow them for 27 years, only 15% of their daughters have. So this is a huge change.
00:15:27
Speaker
And if you think back to the popular discourse, right, single parenthood was the boogeyman. If only people wouldn't have children in their teens, everything would be so much better.
00:15:41
Speaker
So what's really changed is that very, very few women under the age of 22 are having kids. And many of those that are are immigrant women, and they're married.
00:15:54
Speaker
So the vast majority of young people are saying, I can't have a kid. I got to go to school. I got to get a job. I got to both work and I got to go to school.
00:16:08
Speaker
um And, um you know, the real question is whether that's paying off or not. You said the the birth year was 2000. Right. It is 2026. And so by whatever year, let's say, because I think it was by 22, Yeah, we looked at births that would be, you know, 21 and younger, so less than 22 among both the mothers and then their daughters. So you see this really huge change in um early fertility. you You do see more ah high school completion, at least starting college, but it is not clear whether women's lives are actually better as a result of these of these sacrifices.
00:16:53
Speaker
And in order to be still included in this group by, let's say, age 20 or so, are you assessing these the children? Are you categorizing them or based on their parents' state of income, I guess, at that time. As in the child is, do you categorize someone as living in poverty depending on where they're at as an individual at the age of 20 versus where their parents were at at the beginning or where their parents are at at that time? at the same age.
00:17:27
Speaker
Okay. So we do know that um the the second thing I think that's really changed about poverty, and I think this is really easy to miss and it's profound, and this relates to my book with Luke Schaefer, $2 a day living on virtually nothing ah in America, which which charts the rise in extreme poverty in the United States.
00:17:45
Speaker
ah If you look at poverty statistics, you'll see that we used to have a child poverty rate very consistently of about 20%.
00:17:53
Speaker
We had a big decrease in the 60s through the war on poverty and social programs. And then we really just stayed at 20%. We're now really seeing a ah decline in child poverty.
00:18:08
Speaker
That's pretty consistent. We see some ups and downs with the Great Recession, with the post-COVID period, and so on. But you're you're seeing some declines in child poverty. But what that masks is instability.
00:18:22
Speaker
So what we found in $2 a day is that you are much more likely today in the area of era of welfare reform when you can no longer really get cash assistance in most places.
00:18:34
Speaker
um Mothers are much more likely to work. Single mothers are much more likely to work. But their work is increasingly unstable. And so what you see is not...
00:18:47
Speaker
you know, the regular poor and then the $2 day poor, but rather more and more of the regular poor and the near poor falling into these spells of extreme destitution. And, you know, what's unclear is whether that's kind of a poverty trap, whether that's sets, you know, sort of ah has a domino effect.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah. that then has downstream consequences where people can't really lift themselves up from poverty. And we followed ethnographically about a dozen families over years and, you know, still in touch ah with many of them, although we're not researching them. Now they're just writing to us. And and ah it is very hard. Once families have fallen into that virtually cashless existence, it's very hard then.
00:19:38
Speaker
ah to come back up. So we're seeing this, this it you you know, and then you end up getting evicted. um There are all kinds of things that are really costly to families, even if their overall average annual income ah has and has marginally improved.
00:19:56
Speaker
What we really see is this increasing instability, and that's really baked into the labor market and the ways ah the labor market has changed. As it's fissured, ah subcontracting and and franchising, ah that there are these structural changes in the economy that really have made work for people without a college degree incredibly and increasingly precarious. So that's that's those are kind of the two biggest changes, I would say, that I've seen in in poverty over the last 30 years. I published my my first book in 1997, so next year it will be 30 years since i first published a book.
00:20:37
Speaker
And um it so it's it's been interesting thinking back on what's changed over the last 30 years. you reminded me of something that i highlighted in Making Ends Meet. And it's in the foreword, you know, so there's more that we can get into, but I'll just read it. So if a firm can train someone to do a job in a few days, has no incentive to keep her on the payroll when business is slow, when she misses work because her children are sick, or when she when she irritates her supervisor.
00:21:11
Speaker
I mean, that was a little unsmooth in the reading, but... It's never been more true. Coming back to this cohort, it sounds like the children in this study have, they've remained in poverty or near poverty. And so I couldn't assume, for example, that, or maybe I shouldn't assume, but we could test it perhaps, or you would know, that these children, these daughters not having children before the age of 22,
00:21:40
Speaker
twenty two that I should not assume that that's associated with an improving socioeconomic status. You know, if they had moved into the the the middle tier of income, then you might say, oh well, that's a middle class value as, you i mean, he you didn't say exactly that. I don't want to put words into your mouth, but it sounds like there' there's something else contributing to this. And maybe that's the instability on top of already dealing with challenges of poverty.
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's interesting. we you know We're now interviewing them at age 27, and we'll be able to compare them to their parents at age 27 as well. So the jury is kind of out on how they do long term.
00:22:27
Speaker
um We do um go into the field and talk to families one-on-one, a small subsample of the families, which we did ah when the kids were 19, and you know really so just saw a lot of dislocation.
00:22:42
Speaker
among both the daughters and the sons, you know, struggling through getting that high school degree and then starting and stopping in college, trying to, you're kind of trying to um follow the script, right?
00:22:57
Speaker
um What some conservatives have called the success sequence. You know, you're you're putting off childbearing, you're trying to ah get a leg up in the labor market, you're you're trying to get an education, but it's it's It's in fits and starts. there's There are very few easy entry points. In this other study I told you about where we followed these families for 12 years who had been living in public housing but had gotten this voucher, so we started follow 150 of these kids and their parents for this very long period of time.
00:23:30
Speaker
And only one of those young people ah had attained a four-year degree. It may have been working, he may have been going to school, but because it think it was an incredible struggle for them to achieve upward mobility. So it'll it'll be interesting to see know this great boogeyman of the 90s, the, you know, babies having babies. I think one of the more sensational books was titled.
00:23:59
Speaker
ah This was the social problem that could explain the persistence of poverty. It'll be very interesting to see um how that how that turns out. and And since fertility has been falling now for years,
00:24:14
Speaker
really since 2013 in the U.S., it's kind of a sharp fallout. We were at right about replacement, and then we begin our fertility began declining.
00:24:25
Speaker
ah It'll really be interesting to see if does this lead to a wave of prosperity among the poor? Probably not. ah You know, and in in part because when moms had that source of meaning and identity in their kids, they were really motivated.
00:24:41
Speaker
ah They went to work. They went to school. You know, they had something to live for. ah They had a sense of purpose. And it's it's not clear where that sense of purpose is going to come from if the labor market doesn't come through for them and if higher education proves so difficult to i'll follow through on that they ah or they get a worthless degree, which is happening among many of our kids, many of our kids, the majority of the kids in that 12-year study who did go on to post-secondary education went to for-profit trade schools.
00:25:15
Speaker
And many of those degrees were worthless. When you mentioned just a minute ago that effectively it remains to be seen what these you know daughters who may have children much later, maybe they won't have children, it remains to see what the long-term impacts might be. I was starting to think about the ninety s reform of welfare and education.
00:25:43
Speaker
So, you know, it's it's not like you haven't written about fatherhood and all of that, right? So I want to call that out. I mean, I have doing the best I can right here. And so it's not like you've looked at only one side of this, so to speak, the motherhood side the fatherhood side. But what I was starting to wonder about is,
00:26:03
Speaker
You know, there's all of this talk about more and more men, whether they father children or not, are spending more time alone, you know, gaming, whatever it is that they're doing.
00:26:17
Speaker
And so then I was thinking, well, if someone has to deal with the instability that you're talking about, if they can't get by on welfare alone and it's in, i think it's in Making Ends Meet where you talk about that, then, you know, i could, I could understand finding meaning, finding a sense of purpose in my children, because i I think there's some of that that is built into us as human beings, right? That there's this thing that you you want to get up every morning for.
00:26:55
Speaker
That feels intuitive to me, that it would be on average more natural for women to find it there. Whereas the men can father a child and kind of go off alone.
00:27:07
Speaker
And, but if they're not mothering children, if they're not having children, then I'm starting to think, well, gosh, where might we be in 10 years or 20 years?
00:27:22
Speaker
If you had to project into the future, you know, where certain cohorts end up or what they, that the, the, The next outcome of this change do you have a prediction?
00:27:34
Speaker
So let's go back to welfare in reform. So we used to have ah this program called AFDC, where if you could prove you were in need, ah you the government had to give you the money. And the money was is was very little in some states like Mississippi or Texas.
00:27:52
Speaker
ah And it was relatively generous in places like New Hampshire and Vermont, but it still wasn't enough even in the most generous state to actually pay all your bills. And that's been true of programs for single mothers back back to really the mid-1930s. They've always been insufficient to families' needs. So, of course, families have had to scramble and violate the rules and break the laws just to keep their kids from being taken away by child welfare. um you know So ah the the system prior to welfare reform was a ah terrible system, um but it did provide a ah floor.
00:28:32
Speaker
Now, critics of welfare said, well, what it's doing is iss breaking up the family and it's incentivizing early and unwed childbearing. So people did have, ah you know, so some folks did have very good intentions with welfare reform. The idea was to put the family back together. That turned out to sort of be a ah false premise of that welfare was breaking up the family.
00:28:58
Speaker
um The best, you know, the best economist working on this, Robert Moffitt, has found the effect was very small, only before 1975, and only for white women. So um you that turned out to be a false premise. But the idea that you would kind of Shore up the family, get moms into the labor market, more moms into the labor market um was a good thing. Of course, what we documented making it's mean is they already were in the labor market because they couldn't afford welfare. This pushed them kind of out of the brown economy and into the mainstream economy.
00:29:33
Speaker
ah The really good thing, I think, about welfare reform is is we built a system to subsidize low-wage deployment called the Earned Income Tax Credit so that if you work full-time, full-year at a low-wage job, you wouldn't be poor.
00:29:47
Speaker
And that program has pushed millions of low-income single mothers into the labor force. there Their labor force participation now are is extraordinarily high.
00:29:58
Speaker
ah Except for women with infants, the vast majority are in the labor market. There's very little non-work. But, you know, you've lost this floor because after welfare reform, many states decided to spend the money on other things like their child welfare system.
00:30:19
Speaker
Or um pre-K. My state spends its money on pre-K. So they took that money and they spent it at other things. But um you you did not have a floor. you There was not a program you could turn to and be guaranteed um some sort of check.
00:30:36
Speaker
So, and and that's where the, of course, the instability comes from. The labor market begins becoming more and more exploitative, but there's no floor. And so then you get this $2 a day poverty.
00:30:46
Speaker
So I think, you know, welfare reform has both um good and bad effects. um But what we didn't see was an increase in marriage.
00:30:58
Speaker
And of course, in talking to both the mothers and the fathers, it's not that marriage has gone away. It's not that it's disappeared ah from the lexicon, although maybe for some families it kind of has.
00:31:12
Speaker
um Many people think this is the right way to live and the best way to raise your kids. um But, you you know, because people hold marriage to such a high standard, you know, when their own relationships can't live up to the standard, they ah they don't end up marrying. Now, many do marry eventually, ah but these are more like, um you know, marriages that occur after after your prime family building years and often not with a partner of your, ah that you had children.
00:31:44
Speaker
So, ah you know, the kind of the rise of the involved stepfather is another probably new trend in, in poverty and family life is ah many, many um mothers do so just stay single ah But of those who don't, many of them do find stable partnerships.
00:32:02
Speaker
And ah what we found is that in many cases, those men are very involved with her children and contribute positively. So, um yeah, what's happening with the men is, you know, is scary.
00:32:17
Speaker
We see this withdrawal from the labor market. About half of that is men in and out of the labor market, and half of that is men who seem to be perfect permanently disconnected, at least from the formal labor market, there's no welfare for men.
00:32:32
Speaker
ah There was a small program prior to welfare for reform that has been wiped out in almost every state. So if men don't work, they don't eat. And it's not clear what's really going on.
00:32:44
Speaker
Even in our survey where we had mothers and fathers from the birth, we were following mothers and fathers from the birth. it's It's really hard to contact these men now 27 years after that baby after that baby was born ah We do know that men want to stay involved with their children. We know that they value fatherhood.
00:33:03
Speaker
We know that even if they've had failed past relationships, but they've lost contact with their kids. They try to reconnect with ah with a new family.
00:33:14
Speaker
It's almost like a ah family go-round where you move from one family ah to another to try to enact fatherhood in the way that you desire. And some of those men end up doing pretty well with younger kids, but often they've, they've in fact, the modal man is involved with the younger kid, but is uninvolved with an older child. So they're neither angels nor demons.
00:33:38
Speaker
ah they're They're struggling to enact this father role, but very imperfectly. And again, I think we really have to look to declining labor market activities, ah opportunities for men without college degrees.
00:33:53
Speaker
We've been declining since 1977. You know, that's a long, long time. ah We don't really have the sort of the family jobs that we had in the 50s, 60s, for these men.
00:34:06
Speaker
were these men Oftentimes they've got a lot of behavioral problems. theyre They spend more time out on the street than women, so they're often traumatized. Many struggle with with addiction, and there's violence in the hole.
00:34:21
Speaker
So all of these things are are really serious problems that impinge upon the ability of mothers to secure stable partners for their kids and for fathers to to enact the father role in a in a way that's conducive to kids' well-being.
00:34:38
Speaker
In your research for these, i guess, the younger generation of women that are having children at lower rates, do you imagine that they might end up in a similar place to these men, the increasing number of men that are not in the labor force? Or do you imagine they might be ending up somewhere else psychologically, financially, in some other way?
00:35:09
Speaker
You know, that's a great question. um And it definitely is not something I thought of before. ah So, you know, our safety net is really organized around people with dependent children living in their households.
00:35:22
Speaker
Yeah. In fact, we have a word for adults that do not have dependent children living with them. ah ABODs, able-bodied adults without dependent children. And these ABODs um have seen program cut after program cut after program cut. Even food stamps, you know, you can only get for a couple of months in a four-year period. There's just nothing for them.
00:35:47
Speaker
ah We know that the EITC, on the other hand, which is only really available in its full form to people with dependent children, incentivizes work and participation in the economy. it's my My guess would be that many of these women will have children.
00:36:04
Speaker
We might see their them having children in their late 20s. You know, their college-educated accounting parts are... if you If you go into a neighborhood in D.C., you know, of young people working on the Hill, nobody's got kids.
00:36:17
Speaker
You go into a neighborhood um where you have more career career staffers who are in their 30s, there are baby strollers we everywhere. So you know you may see this kind of mid to late 20s, someone the least advantaged and and then and then the 30s. We certainly don't have any evidence of a ah decline in the desire ah for children. so But I think there's still this delay is probably going to turn out to be historic.
00:36:47
Speaker
Yeah. ah Especially at the bottom of the income distribution. that It's really it within one generation, we might be seeing ah average age at first childbirth um change. That's really astonishing. So you would, you know, and and people, young people are not going to have the support of the safety net during those years because they won't be eligible for tax credits. Right.
00:37:13
Speaker
ah They won't be eligible in many cases for for other safety net programs. um You know, we're going to see fewer of them supported by government-funded health as insurance.
00:37:24
Speaker
A SNAP is going to be um increasingly limited for this population. And you know it's it's unclear how states are going to handle these work requirements. How are we going to monitor in real time whether or not somebody is working and adjust their benefits in a timely way? So all of this is a brave new world. But it is really, really interesting that young people will come of age entering and increasingly vulnerable unstable labor market without a lot of government supports, in part because they waited to have children.
00:38:00
Speaker
Do you think that a potential contributing factor of substance, you know, of of some significance might be that there's less community cohesion or community connection, potentially, amongst younger generations. You know, you may not have your 15-year-olds, perhaps, that in in the 90s, you were 80s, you know, whatever you were you wanted to connect with people, you pretty much had to go out and physically be with them.
00:38:33
Speaker
But now I may lay on the couch and be on Instagram or whatever. And that lack of connection just creates, frankly, in a very simplistic a representation here, less opportunities to create children.
00:38:49
Speaker
know That's interesting. I mean, we do see less dating, less less engagement with sexual activity. um and It does seem to be a cautious generation of young people.
00:39:03
Speaker
But what I can tell you from data is this. ah So how do you how do we meet people in the old days? You know, we used to go to the movie theater or the bowling alley or the roller rink or the um you know the soda shop or whatever. I mean, I i i grew up kind of with all these all these accoutrements.
00:39:23
Speaker
And um one thing we we saw from our work in actually in central Appalachia, ah where um we show up there you know to do research on um on extreme poverty.
00:39:39
Speaker
And what we find is, of course, they're in the throes of an epioidic ah opioid epidemic. and And the county that we end up choosing is the epicenter of this this crisis. And everyone says, well,
00:39:51
Speaker
The reason so many young people are are um turning to drugs is because there's nothing to do for the young people. Nothing to do here but drugs. So this comes up over and over again. nothing to I'm like, this can't possibly be true.
00:40:05
Speaker
And then, um you know, as we started hearing this more and more, I thought, well, we should really check this out. So we went to the U.S. s Census of Businesses. It's a wonderful little census where we could actually look. So what i'm I'm giving you an institutional answer.
00:40:22
Speaker
Look at the number of places in a community that offer things to do. And we were able to look at the extent to which those things to do are atrophying over time.
00:40:35
Speaker
And ah to the extent that places were losing these things to do, what you saw was an increase in opioid deaths.
00:40:48
Speaker
So we actually had some evidence that this claim this crazy claim was was true. And we told um you know we told us some people who really know a lot about this, Angus Deaton and Anne Case. And and ah Angus, of course, won the Nobel Prize. And they wrote the the important book, Deaths of Despair.
00:41:07
Speaker
He said, yes, it makes total sense to me. Yeah. So what what's happening across America, maybe especially rural America, um but also urban America, is the the loss of these institutions that create the opportunity to build social bonds.
00:41:26
Speaker
And, um you know, I used to be the downstairs neighbor of Bob Putnam, of course, who wrote the famous book Bowling Alone ah when I was at Harvard. And I said, Bob, it's it's not just that people are bowling alone.
00:41:39
Speaker
The bowling alley is gone. So we do see this incredible atrophying of places to connect. And this is really affecting young people. And then, of course, the digital age.
00:41:51
Speaker
I was just on Governor Sherrill's. I just co-led her task force on child mental health and online safety. So I'm very into this space that you're in in your head. But.
00:42:04
Speaker
um you know This just exacerbates the problem. I definitely have evidence that as places for young people to gather and build so through social bonds have begun disappearing across the United States, we do see this.
00:42:20
Speaker
um Also, if you look at um data coming out of the Opportunity Insights team at Harvard, ah they measure cross-class friendships. And they find that in the very same areas where we document this loss of these institutional, we call them social infrastructure, following Eric Kleinenberg, who coined the term, but we see this atrophy of social infrastructure. It's not the bridge, it's the bowling alley, the social infrastructure.
00:42:49
Speaker
um Those are also the the places that are least likely to have cross-class friendships. And cross-class friendships are the strongest single predictor of whether you have a lot of intergenerational mobility in a place. like You were referring earlier to this work that shows that if a child in one com meet community moves to another community versus a child that stays in place,
00:43:18
Speaker
They end up having different outcomes, at least in the aggregate. yeah the Place has a tremendous ah influence on us. And and one of the ah one of the reasons is because in these places where social infrastructure has sort of collapsed, we see just this lack of social bonding, including potentially social.
00:43:41
Speaker
um bonding across social classes, which is, it's really how how kids seem to be getting a leg up in these communities with really, really high mobility rates, is that, you know, middle class people and poor people are connecting.
00:43:56
Speaker
And those connections are are helping those poor kids reach the middle class. So let's go back a couple of decades and i forget how you put it, but you you said that something like there aren't, there are not as many family jobs. I think something along those lines. And so when,
00:44:19
Speaker
when the man has a decent job you know it has the potential to care for a family then before he's married before he's had children it seems to me like that potentially puts him in a position where he's a more desirable mate than he didn't have that job and I believe on average, right, that women's labor force participation and average income and so on has been rising.
00:44:50
Speaker
And there's a lot of research that I don't know here, but I i believe on average that, you know, women, when they look for a mate, right, are looking across the class spectrum and up, not too often down.
00:45:08
Speaker
And whereas that's not always the same for men. And so I'm wondering if as the average person you know, income status of women has risen, that that's also then contributing to the fact that, yeah and and men has either stayed the same or lowered, I don't know what the research is at the moment, that there are just fewer men ah up in the class hierarchy, income hierarchy above women.
00:45:35
Speaker
This is exactly right. So when you look at marriage, Increasingly, there's a simple college divide, right? The college educated are marrying.
00:45:49
Speaker
The non-college educated not marrying. And it's it's really pernicious in part because the higher in the educational system you spectrum you go, the more people are likes are marrying likes.
00:46:06
Speaker
So college-educated women are marrying college-educated men, and they're very seldom. ah they They do marry down some, in part because you have to now. There are more college-educated women. ah More women are going to college than men. and this is this is part of the problem.
00:46:23
Speaker
ah ah So some women are are marrying down, but are they're marrying the best educated or the best able, the but highest earning of the non-college men.
00:46:34
Speaker
So what the non-college women have left is a very, um you know, it's it's not a very brosy picture. ah so the So the necessity that because there are more women than men now going to college, the necessity that women marry down means that the pool for non-college educated women is really not looking good.
00:46:57
Speaker
Yeah. So not college educated men are, are marrying college educated women, but women are marrying down. as ah Women are marrying down, i think about a third of the time now.
00:47:10
Speaker
And they're really getting, you know, that maybe it's somebody with an associate's degree who's got an HVAC company, or maybe it's ah like my, my friend in Baltimore, whose husband started his own business ah right out of high school.
00:47:22
Speaker
ah So those men are, are, are marrying college educated women. Yeah. And you're kind of taking all of the of the most marriageable men out of the pool for the non-college educated women, leaving them really without without potential partners or without obvious potential partners.
00:47:44
Speaker
So this is this is one of the most fascinating changes. You know, women always got their status by marrying up, but now too many of them went to college. So you've really changed the demography of the problem.
00:47:59
Speaker
Coming into this conversation, one thing that I wanted to ask you about was the concept of marriage. You know, if that's changed within certain groups or maybe more broadly, potentially. But then as you're talking about that, I'm also thinking about does the meaning of marriage, if I can separate that from just the idea of marriage, the ideal of marriage, you know, has that changed over time?
00:48:27
Speaker
Because if I'm a 15 year old woman and I, if we go back to, I don't know, the 1950s or sometime in the past, and I'm thinking, well, people like me get married by the time they're, I don't know how old,
00:48:41
Speaker
18, 20 years old, i I'm going to think about marriage very differently from being a 15-year-old woman in the year 2000. And then, you know, we pick out any individuals here, men or whatever.
00:48:55
Speaker
And so, one, I wanted to ask you about the concept of marriage potentially changing over time as you see it, but also as we're talking about a change i don't know if it'll be long term or not of marrying down to some extent if that influences the concept of marriage as well So the meaning of marriage is seeing a radical change.
00:49:22
Speaker
um and and And the great sociologist Andrew Cherland has written about this, I think, better than anyone. um But in he's a survey guy. But you can see it in interviews in the community over the years.
00:49:35
Speaker
So it was, you know, it was really more of a practical institution. um You know, two people side by side accomplishing um the the production of a household where you could raise kids.
00:49:49
Speaker
And then it became much more about the adults, much more about adult ah fulfillment. um Anthony Giddens talks about it as a pure relationship. ah Andrew Cherland talks about it as a companion in marriage.
00:50:03
Speaker
And I just had a student who who did interviews with college seniors in Japan and the United States asking them about the meaning of marriage. And, you know, they they're like, well, we I need a guy with a high EQ.
00:50:19
Speaker
I'm like, what's going on here? you know, they they want men who are like soft and fuzzy and who know how to communicate. You know I want a guy who can really hold his own in a conversation at a cocktail party.
00:50:32
Speaker
You know, it's it's it's really fascinating. But it's the standards for marriage have just really gone up. And um so the middle class are are finding these peer relationships and they're divorcing a lot less. Yeah.
00:50:46
Speaker
They're finding them in their late 20s, early 30s, and their their divorce rates are way down, especially from the 1980s. um But on the poor, these same set of exploit ah um expectations have trickled down.
00:51:00
Speaker
And they, too, are looking for soulmates. And it's just, you know, given what's happening with the with the marital pool, it's much harder to find them. It's astonishing to me that we we see this persistence of this cultural. ah Marriage has almost become more significant, more sacred, maybe in part because everyone doesn't have to do it anymore.
00:51:21
Speaker
You know, it's I think we argue in Promises I Could Keep that that the lack of a cultural parity to marry has allowed it to become more special because people can say, no, I'm not going to settle for that.
00:51:33
Speaker
And so you don't really see people settling. ah either know These women who are marrying down, that's that's a great source of a ah dissertation because you can imagine that the egalitarian norms that you learn in a college classroom, hopefully,
00:51:51
Speaker
um may not be matched by a working class guy. So I would predict, even though it's very unwise to predict, that there would be more friction among those couples and higher rates of divorce, because potentially because there's friction and in gender roles. you know the I guess Claudia Golden, the economist who just won the Nobel Prize, says that there's sort of this flexible egalitarianism in the United States.
00:52:19
Speaker
ah you know Among the elite, we've kind of learned how to share roles, and men are doing more housework and doing more of the childbearing and all of this stuff. um But when you start seeing this kind of reverse marrying down, it's very, it'll be fascinating to see um whether there's enough glue to hold those couples together, given these maybe different visions of how the family should work.
00:52:42
Speaker
So you have egalitarian women, traditional husband, more traditional husbands, And maybe that worked, you know, that when men were the ones marrying down, they got the traditional wives and they could stay at work as long as they wanted.
00:52:55
Speaker
it' So um another burden might be that her career and, you know, she own ends up out-earning him. All we know from the data is generally yeah she doesn't out-earn him, but she's closer.
00:53:08
Speaker
She's closer to being a parody. And that would be interesting also to see what that led to in terms of um the battles between the sexes in the home.
00:53:19
Speaker
when When you described yourself, you referenced having a lot of, you talked about having a lot of conversations with people, you know, that were poor, dealing with challenges of poverty. And it seems to me in reading a lot of your work, sitting down across the table from someone must give you a much richer sense where there are gaps in the In the data that, you know, someone who's doing primarily desk research would, the the understanding that they would have.
00:53:56
Speaker
Yeah, this has been, this has been my shtick. So, you know, back in the day, or and this is still sort of true. You have your quantitative people over here and you have your qualitative people over here and they don't talk to each other.
00:54:14
Speaker
But my mentor was um a numbers guy, Christopher Jenks, one of the best numbers guys in the in the business. And my other mentor was Howie Becker, who is probably the best go-talk-to-in person in the business. And that so i from the very beginning, and i'm I'm not good at math, but I i love statistics. I had this i had this dual training training.
00:54:41
Speaker
um I don't know. It's like, this is the magic is when you're in conversations with the, the, the, uh, go and talk to people are in conversation with, with the numbers people. And, you know, I've co-published with economists and quantitative sociologists and, and, ah behavioral scientists that have really never done an in-depth interview. And those, I just have a cola but a paper from a collaboration like that on on violence in the West Side of Chicago coming out, I think today, in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal.
00:55:18
Speaker
So that's where the richness is. And all of the mysteries that I've explored start in the quantitative world. And so I'm an avid I'm avid consumer of that sort of information.
00:55:34
Speaker
like I eat it for breakfast. Luke Schaefer, one of my very ah frequent ah co-authors, you know, he's is a complete numbers guy, although I drag him into the field and make the make him meet the families and he loves it, you know, but...
00:55:50
Speaker
ah Yeah, it's it's the conversation of the two methods. And I also think like if you want to have any kind of policy influence and you're a qualitative person, you need to engage with that world of numbers.
00:56:04
Speaker
And if you're a quantitative person and you want legislators to actually listen to you, you know, if you want your books in in the in the bookshelves of, you know, ah the nation's lawmakers, you've got to you've got to know something on the ground about how people actually live. You've got to have the stories.
00:56:24
Speaker
Humans, you know, humans are convinced through narrative. So the narratives of the numbers are kind of the magic. And I wish more qualitative researchers would be sort of less hostile to quantitative researchers.
00:56:39
Speaker
ah There's a lot of openness among quantitative researchers for the kind of information we could produce. ah if If anything, i think, you know, maybe it used to be that the quality of people were sort of dismissed.
00:56:54
Speaker
um But now I think there's a lot of interest. And, you know, I know leading economists are now collaborating with qualitative sociologists to try to figure out what the data that they're collecting mean. And that is a really positive development. We just need a lot more of it.
00:57:11
Speaker
It seems to me like one advantage that you get if you are sitting down talking to an individual or family and you have 100 people in your study or 300 families or whatever the number is that You get a lot of opportunities at bat and you learn from those repeated attempts, just like, you know, well, we're, you know, we referenced people, you know, increasing social isolation and spending more time online and all that. You get less opportunities to make friends, to recover from making a bad joke, whatever it is.
00:57:53
Speaker
Well, then that's not to say that you're, it's, it's not a value judgment, right? Like you're not a bad person necessarily, but it, it's just harder to get good at that thing.
00:58:05
Speaker
I do have a story about that. um So oftentimes the real learning comes from the unguarded moments where the extra stuff, you know, my Minnesota ne naivete can kind of benefit me sometimes, but I was just, there was a mother in, in, um in Promptious Psychic Geek and ah we got to be friends and I was just hanging out with her.
00:58:30
Speaker
And we went to the pizza hut and her son, Shalik, was with us. And um she kind of, she had broken up with Shalik's father. He had actually left her and got another woman pregnant right around the time Shalik was born. So it super painful.
00:58:49
Speaker
And ah so at this lunch at, you know, the pizza place, She sheepishly yeah admits to me that she's pregnant ah and Henry's the father.
00:59:06
Speaker
And then she just looks at me and she says, so this is the moment where everything changed for me. She says, someday i'm going to plan my babies like you white women do.
00:59:20
Speaker
You know, you have to have your fancy house and your fancy car and your college degree, and then maybe you decide you'll have children. And I was floored.
00:59:32
Speaker
Like, ah yeah, you are right. I am selfish. You know, look at what a great mom you are. Look at what you're sacrificing for. you It just hit me.
00:59:45
Speaker
ah It just hit me, ah you know, between the eyes and So it's the moments like that, you know, like sitting around in that a church parlor in North Lawndale when, um you know, I'm telling my students that I'm taking this course on poverty with Christopher Jenks.
01:00:02
Speaker
And they say, well, you know, nobody can live in welfare. Everybody's going to cheat to survive. So that that one sentence is... is probably the most important sentence in my entire career.
01:00:16
Speaker
i was able to to prove that. But it all came from just this this off conversation. So you're you know you're just in you're just in the mix. you're it it's You spend so much time. You're kind of going through the process of collecting data. But you're also just hanging out.
01:00:34
Speaker
And you're having meals. and you know and every once in a while, you just get lucky. Actually, one of the things you were just talking about illustrates something. I gave a keynote on Friday, and one of the things that I was talking about was inspiration.
01:00:51
Speaker
And said, inspiration can feel random, but for inspiration to really be a value and to be reliable, it has to be has to result from attention.
01:01:05
Speaker
that it's not enough to have the inspirational idea. It's to pay attention to what was just an idea and then say there's something there.
01:01:16
Speaker
yeahp And you've had a few of those. And actually, I think I remember that story from Promises I Can Keep. There were some other things that stuck out that I referenced when I talk about culture change with organizations. I remember in Promises I Can Keep,
01:01:31
Speaker
It might have been at the end in like an afterword or something. You all say something like, you interviewed, i can't remember, 200, 300 women, whatever it was, over a long time frame.
01:01:45
Speaker
And something like, almost none of them said that they had close friends or any friends at all. And that's something that I don't know how much that has shown up in your other work. But to me, that really stuck out and then helped to give color to other information that I have encountered as I then am able to piece things together and use them for my own work and understanding of the world.
01:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, the the social isolation is really ah profound. ah And it's so it's a way of keeping safe. So when when being good is, you know, we see this all over the data.
01:02:25
Speaker
um When being good means being alone, isolating oneself. When being safe means that you have to isolate yourself because other people are are hurt seen as sources of trouble and problems rather than sources of support. You see that a lot, I think, in high-violence neighborhoods.
01:02:44
Speaker
But in general, if you have to be isolated to be good and stay safe, there's something wrong with the society around you. And I think these kids are right, that in the context in which they live,
01:02:57
Speaker
It is the smart thing to be isolated. Yeah. in order to say stay And of course, this affects young men more than young women because if you um get involved in street life, you know, like in our work on violence and in North Lawndale, and this is also the work of my colleague Megan Kang,
01:03:15
Speaker
um you the only, if you get involved in street life, the only safe way to withdraw is to what she calls some become hidden, become forgotten.
01:03:28
Speaker
So you stay in you stay in the house. If you could share, you know, one or two things that would help the average person in the middle class or a policymaker understand something about poverty or family life in America that you feel like would really move the needle.
01:03:45
Speaker
Or maybe if it's not for a policymaker that, you know, or for me as a donor to causes or a voter. Yeah. Maybe it's just to develop empathy. You know, if you had one or two things,
01:03:58
Speaker
Do those come to mind immediately? Like, Eric, it would help to understand this. I think you have to rub shoulders. you You know, I tell all my graduate students, here's the, at the end at at the end of the semester, you know, they're all doers. They're all public policy students. So they're going to go out and solve poverty.
01:04:16
Speaker
I said, the first thing you should do is form some cross-class friendships. With young people. ah um So that's, you know, we just, there's overwhelming data that that is really meaningful.
01:04:29
Speaker
You know, in your in your personal life, try to diversify, you know, choose, think about where you live. You know, are you so obsessed with providing the very best school in the entire school district for your kids that you live in an all-white neighborhood without any poor poor folk?
01:04:47
Speaker
My parents didn't choose to do that. And, know, I went to a pretty bad high school, actually. But I'm so grateful to them for just, you know, saying that this is this is real. This is the real America.
01:05:02
Speaker
And we we need trucks expose our kids to this. So my kids have grown up, you know, they've been following me around. They're in their 30s now, following me around in all these places. They have met these respondents. They have, um they've had a front row seat. And there's just such a remarkable ah young women.
01:05:22
Speaker
So, you know, you can think about that, just diversifying your life second. um You know, if you have a limited time, but you really want to give back, there's an organization called Board Effect. I gave a keynote last night for a local organization in Princeton called Housing Initiatives of Princeton.
01:05:38
Speaker
And they're just a group of concerned citizens who have gotten together and formed a nonprofit to help house citizens. People from Princeton, you know, people living in the Princeton area, help house them and keep them housed stably. It's a remarkable organization. And I will tell you, people say, oh, how can you do this work? It must be so hard, so depressing.
01:06:07
Speaker
It is the best way to spend your life. It is, ah first of all, I mean, talk about every day I say there is so much lost potential.
01:06:19
Speaker
You know, these young guys in Chicago that are violence involved, they don't always do beautiful things, but they're, that you know you just see what people are capable of and who they are, you know, beyond the the veneer.
01:06:33
Speaker
So um I think it's incredibly hopeful. It'll make you more hopeful. It'll probably make you more satisfied, too, and because suddenly you really don't need a bigger TV.
01:06:46
Speaker
I feel like it's wrapped into a little bit of this, you know, you said when you were talking about rubbing shoulders, but also coming around to hope.
01:06:58
Speaker
I think it was research from Robert Putnam. I think that he and some of his collaborators had put out some research in the early that that the they found that trust was lower in the most diverse communities, on average, the trust of your neighbor and all that. and And there was a lot of, you know, sort of, back then we didn't have the term clickbait, right? But there is clickbait like headlines, right? Sensational headlines. So he's very controversial.
01:07:34
Speaker
Right. and But I think, as I recall the work, and They did a lot of follow-up to understand why was this. And one of my big takeaways was it's not so much about being around.
01:07:50
Speaker
is You can't just live next to someone who's different from you. You have to feel like you're a part of something together. Yeah. And, you know, so that came to mind when you talked about rubbing shoulders. But then also when you mentioned hope, I was thinking about, you know, what gives you hope for the future? But also like for me, it seems like there has to be opportunities to feel like we're in this together. Yeah. I don't know what those are.
01:08:21
Speaker
But it's it seems to me like you believe that must be a potential. I don't know if you for us to feel like we collectively are are in this together. Going back to this point about social infrastructure.
01:08:37
Speaker
So we have thousands of nonprofits in this country. And whenever I meet a representative nonprofit organization, they say, well, what should we do? and I say, we should all be endorsing dramatically increasing the budgets of public libraries.
01:08:56
Speaker
There should be a special fund for people who want to stand up the corner cafe. These kinds of these ah big brother, big sister groups. You know, Pat Sharkey has a famous, my colleague Patrick Sharkey, who's a wonderful criminologist, um has this finding that um the great, he's looking at the grape the recent great crime decline.
01:09:23
Speaker
And he really finds that the best single predictor of this of this crime decline is the a presence of nonprofit organizations in a community. it It seems that the social glue that brings us together can be found.
01:09:39
Speaker
ah in these organizations, you know, that that um maybe like housing initiatives of Princeton, right, that are that are kind of providing this connective tissue.
01:09:52
Speaker
So that's where I would look at. for hope I mean, you know, I would love to see our our some of our religious congregations re-energized. I think that's been a huge ah loss in American life. I mean, there are pluses and minuses ah to religious communities. I'm part of one of them. And sometimes it's a soap opera, but, you know, it's it's a coming together of people who are really different from one another in a sustained long term relationship.
01:10:21
Speaker
i would really you know We have a kind of a cool um organization in Baltimore called We Our Us. And it's a collaboration between ah a local ah product between local local Protestant a clergy and the Nation of Islam.
01:10:37
Speaker
And this group of men, because it's the nation, it's very male-focused, this group of men walks through a portion of Baltimore that where people are in trouble.
01:10:51
Speaker
And ah people strike up conversations. every Everyone who marches has an app on their phone. If you need a job, they'll find you one. If you need ah um a bed in a rehab center, if you're ready,
01:11:07
Speaker
um they'll drive you to Philadelphia for an open bet. And so this is one of the organizations that's been, but we don't really know. It's very hard, you know, sort of to suss out what's causing what. But um finally, you know, many, many years after after Freddie Gray was was killed at the hands of the Baltimore police, ah we're finally seeing this just dramatic drop off in homicides in the city.
01:11:36
Speaker
And it may well be that organizations like We Are Us that are building these cross-class friendships and connections. And then, you know, after these guys come back from wherever they that they need to go, ah they begin marching alongside of the of the original We Are Us members. So it's... So these kinds of little things that made maybe don't seem like much, I think this is where the social glue is that that begins to rebuild the community. So social infrastructure, nonprofits, anything that allows people to come together for good.
01:12:15
Speaker
So another thing I always tell my students, you should really think about running for office. My brother was ah a local ah county DA a for a while. You know, in order to get elected, do you have to literally go to everyone's house.
01:12:30
Speaker
You learn things about, you know, he he'd discovered this group of people um in ah in an underground sod house, you know, having dinner by candlelight.
01:12:42
Speaker
He also found a lot of meth labs. But, you know, you just, I think running for office is a great way to to get to know America. and when you've and And we needed a ah more diverse group of people a running for office.
01:12:57
Speaker
In my prior book, $2 a Day, we really recommended that people um get trained up. and And there are organizations like Run for Something that really help young people.
01:13:08
Speaker
ah You know, in many places where there's really a lot of economic to distress, the same elite families have run things for like 100 years.
01:13:19
Speaker
Or sometimes more. And a lot of, you know, a lot of times it's been just been a tremendous corruption. And so, you know, its especially this is from the book, The Injustice of Place, especially in areas that really have an entrenched elite and a lot of poor folk.
01:13:37
Speaker
ah We need exciting, young, fresh candidates with a different set of biographies and some lived experience. If someone wants to buy your books or read your other work, where would you direct people?
01:13:53
Speaker
Yeah. So please, you know, you can buy it off of Amazon, ah but you can also, um you know, go to your local bookstore. So suss out my page on on Amazon dot com and then contact, you know, my local bookstore is Labyrinth in Princeton. Contact your local bookstore and try to try to order it there.
01:14:14
Speaker
um That's what I would recommend. But ah I you know, you can you can go on my website um through the Princeton website and and see these.
01:14:25
Speaker
I love each one of these books because I loved the process of meeting the people behind them. Yeah, go to the Amazon page and then order from your local bookstore if you can manage it.
01:14:37
Speaker
I think I said this before we started recording, but oh was really happy that you agreed to speak with me and I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. So, doctor, i really appreciate you being here. Thank you very much.
01:14:53
Speaker
It was a joy to talk with you honestly. And you made me think about things I hadn't thought about before. I appreciate that. Thank you.