Tightrope

“These deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide have been called ‘deaths of despair’ by the Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and that pretty much captures the mortality on the Number 6 bus. The despair arises in part form frustrations about loss of status, loss of good jobs, loss of hope for one’s kids. Inequality is currently believed to be greater than it was in the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, and just three Americans—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—now possess as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population.”

Early in the book, the authors introduce the symbol of the Number 6 bus, the school bus that Kristof and other children in Yamhill took to school. In their childhood, the fact they all rode the bus together seemed to exemplify the rising tide of prosperity that was lifting the standard of living of all Americans. As this quote hints, however, people’s paths began to diverge in the 1970s, with affluent Americans getting richer and more powerful, and everyone else—particularly in working-class communities—facing an increasingly bleak future. The kind of despair that this situation engenders, despair over a bleak future, leads people to higher rates of alcohol and drug addiction, as well as mental illness and suicide—the “deaths of despair” mentioned in this quote.

“Something similar to today’s malaise and falling life expectancy has happened before in the world, in the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, the USSR was still a superpower with a space program, magnificent orchestras and operas, impressive science and mathematics, an empire in Eastern Europe and the capacity to blow up the globe. It was easy for tourists visiting the Hermitage in Leningrad of Red Square in Moscow to be dazzled. Yet all of this rested on an economic and social foundation that was cracking because of the Soviet Union’s disastrous policy choices.”

This quote illustrates a central narrative in the book: that even as America’s economy has boomed and driven innovation and prosperity for the few, life in America has become difficult for many people. The resulting behaviors—including drug addiction—are often attributed to individual failings and weaknesses, but the authors argue they have structural roots. In a similar way, this quote shows that while the USSR was a global superpower, many people struggled with despair, turning to alcohol as a coping mechanism. As the authors go on to explore, the USSR ignored this trend at their peril, as life expectancy declined, and despair deepened. In a similar way, Americans who ignore the systemic nature of working-class malaise risk undermining both the economic and moral well-being of the country.

“Because identity and self-esteem are closely tied to work, a poorly paying job may still be better for well-being than no job. In surveys, self-reported happiness drops ten times as much from a loss of a job as from a major loss of income. Long-term jobless men are three times as likely to be treated for depression as other men. Lack of employment is also associated with physical and mental-health problems, divorce, opioid use and suicide. The crucial gap on these metrics isn’t between rich workers and poor workers, but between poor people who have a job and poor folks who don’t.”

In this quote, the authors are demonstrating one consequence of globalization, automation, and the consequent disappearance of blue-collar jobs: the loss of identity and self-worth that comes from not working. The authors conclude that what people living in poverty are suffering from is not simply a lack of material resources, but also the disappearance of the kind of community and human connection that comes from working in a job in which one feels valued; in many of the people they profile, loneliness and isolations stemming from being out of work have as much of an impact as lack of funds. As the authors will go on to explore later in the book, the positive mental health benefits and sense of identity that come from having a job are one of the reasons they’re skeptical of solutions such as a universal basic income.

“The public frets about cheating with food stamps (the fraud rate is about 1.5 percent) yet doesn’t understand that zillionaires hide assets abroad and thereby deprive the Treasury of some $36 billion a year in taxes—enough to pay for high-quality pre-K and day care for all. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has said that “we confused the hard work of wealth creation with wealth-grabbing.”

In Chapter 4, the authors note that even as many working-class communities grapple with despair, addiction, and poverty, members of a “new aristocracy” in the United States are building homes that rival the palace of Versailles and devoting large amounts of resources to ensuring their children inherit as much privilege as possible. Much of this hoarding happens through the tax code, which wealthy individuals and corporations have manipulated to allow them to pay little to no income tax; they’ve also defunded the IRS to a degree where the agency audits very few tax returns of the wealthy and an even smaller proportion of business tax returns. As noted here, these measures deprive the United States of vast resources that could be devoted to the public good.

“One reason Kevin Green floundered was that he hadn’t graduated high school. That hadn’t been an impediment for earlier generations of blue-collar workers, including his dad, for in the early 1970s some 72 percent of American jobs required only a high-school education or less. By 2020, that will have fallen to 36 percent. One consequence is a plunge in earnings for those with limited education. In the 1970s, a male high-school graduate earned on average almost four-fifths as much as a male college graduate. But that has fallen to just over 50 percent. And those like Kevin who didn’t graduate from high school do even worse.”

This quote speaks to the importance of education in reducing poverty, which has become crucial in the decades since the 1970s. As this quote notes, for much of the 20th century, not having an education was not an impediment to holding a well-paying, unionized job. As the influence of unions waned and blue-collar jobs disappeared, an education has become crucial to finding a decent job in an economy increasingly based on knowledge. This quote also serves as an illustration of the authors’ technique of using individual stories to animate their reflections—in this case, Kevin Green, who grew up with Kristof, is one of the many Americans left behind in the new economy, because he didn’t have a solid education to fall back on when jobs disappeared.

“The failure to imprison any of the Purdue executives shouldn’t surprise us. America rarely prosecutes white-collar criminals. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, despite widespread illegal conduct that destroyed lives around the country, just one banker went to jail; in contrast, back in the 1980s, almost nine hundred bankers were jailed in the aftermath of the savings and loan scandal. Without much discussion, we have created a two-tier justice system. If you shoplift at the grocery store, you can be carted off to jail. But if you steal tens of millions of dollars from the tax authorities or fraudulently peddle dangerous drugs from a corporate suite, you’ll be hailed for your business savvy.”

This quote illustrates one of the book’s important themes: the two-tier system at work in America. In this case, it discusses the two-tier justice system, by which those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis received a slap on the wrist, whereas, in other parts of the book, the authors meet people in jail because of unpaid fines. Another glaring example is that pharmaceutical executives responsible for initiating the opioid epidemic in the United States faced minimal penalties for their actions, and no jail time, whereas thousands of Americans have been jailed for drug offences stemming from their addictions.

“In the United States, drug use and fatalities have soared, thanks partly to street fentanyl. There were 6,100 deaths from illegal drugs in 1980, compared to 68,000 in 2018. Every fifteen minutes in America, another child is born with an opioid addiction. In contrast, Portugal’s experiment proved a huge success. The number of people with addictions has fallen by about two-thirds, and its rate of drug-related deaths is now the lowest in Western Europe.”

The authors here compare the problems stemming from drug addiction in the United States to those in Portugal, which has taken a diametrically different approach to drugs than the American strategy. Whereas both countries faced a drug epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States opted for an approach founded on criminalization, including five-year mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. By contrast, Portugal decriminalized possession of all drugs, even heroin and cocaine, and treated addiction as a disease rather than a crime. As this quote suggests, the latter approach has borne fruit from a public health perspective. The authors call the war on drugs the greatest policy mistake of the second half of the 20th century.

“VARNEY: Am I lucky or not, being who I am and where I am?

FRANK: Yes.

VARNEY: I’m lucky? I’m lucky?

FRANK: Yes you are. And so am I.

VARNEY: That’s outrageous. That is outrageous. What about the risk I took? Do you know what risk is involved in coming to America with absolutely nothing? Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent, a total foreigner? Do you know what risk is implied for this level of success?”

The authors quote from an exchange between the Fox News host Stuart Varney and a Cornell University economist named Robert Frank, in which Frank highlights the role of luck in Varney’s success. The outraged way in which Varney replies reflects how deeply entrenched the idea of meritocracy—that the privileged deserve what they’ve got, and consequently, that the poor deserve their suffering, too—is in American society. This quote is also an illustration of the authors’ technique of drawing on interactions from real life—or in this case, a media interview—to illustrate their points.

“The wisdom that people tend to live up to expectations, or down to them, helps explain success and failure, particularly for men (for reasons we don’t understand, this effect is greater on boys than on girls). There is evidence that this is one of the most insidious consequences of racism, nurturing insecurities and hopelessness, but, as in Cove Orchard, it can also be true of struggling whites. At some level, the Knapps and the Greens absorbed the idea that they were screw-ups, that they wouldn’t get ahead, and then it became easier to console themselves with alcohol and drugs. It also became easier to violate norms and laws, both because the ‘system’ appeared less legitimate and because jail is less humiliating if you’re already an outcast.”

This quote shows how poverty can become a self-fulfilling cycle, as people who believe they won’t ever escape from poverty engage in self-destructive behaviors that ensure they won’t. As this quote suggests, this belief isn’t a matter of individual weakness, but instead reflects conditioning from people’s environments; without positive role models around, people are less likely to be able to imagine how things could be different. Similarly, societal attitudes about poor people being lazy or weak attach stigma to poverty, causing people to lose self-confidence and seek out unhealthy coping strategies, such as drugs and alcohol.

“So a story that began with drugs, sexual abuse and homelessness has been transformed into a tale of resilience and the coming together of a family—because Rebecca happened to be a woman in Tulsa, where Women in Recovery offers this lifesaving intervention. Almost anywhere else, Rebecca acknowledges, she would be in prison and the family would be a mess, but she focuses on the triumph of what has happened here. ‘We still struggle,’ she said. ‘But the cycle stops with us. It’s not going past me.’”

This quote highlights how interventions can make a difference in the lives of people who’ve experienced trauma and deprivation, but also the limitations of these kinds of programs. Specifically, this quote references as Tulsa, Oklahoma, program called Women in Recovery that diverts women away from the prison system, into treatment programs, and ultimately, back out into society. As this quote suggests, the benefit of such programs isn’t just for the women themselves, but also for their children, who face a better chance of escaping the cycle of abuse, neglect, and poverty than they would have if their mothers had gone to prison. However, such programs are still too limited, and more systemic change is needed, the authors argue.

“To see Tani with his trophy was to sense the possibilities when needy kids are supported. It’s the same sensation we had cheering the graduation for Women in Recovery, and the right policies can replicate both kids of opportunities. We say ‘policies’ because there’s a risk that recounting such a heartwarming tale may leave the impression that charity can solve social ills entirely rather than fill gaps. The outpouring of help for Tani’s family was moving, but kids should have housing even if they are not chess prodigies. What we need is not just the dazzling generosity that people showed Tani’s family, although that was transformative here, but systematic solutions to help children even when they don’t know a bishop from a pawn.”

After the authors profiled a young Nigerian refugee named Tanitoluwa Adewumi (Tani), who won a state chess championship in New York while living in a homeless shelter with his family, offers of support flowed in, including an apartment, tuition at a private school, a car for Tani’s father so that he could do his job, and $250,000 in crowdfunded donations. While such offers are generous, they do not solve the problems described in the book. Instead, systemic changes such as initiatives to end child homelessness, which improve the well-being of all children regardless of their abilities, are what is required.

“The gaps in health coverage lead to painful disparities among neighbors. In Philadelphia, a baby born in the mostly white and affluent liberty bell area, zip code 19106, has a life expectancy twenty years longer than a baby born four miles away in the mostly black North Philadelphia zip code of 19132. When life expectancy rests so heavily on where a child is born, we can’t pin it just on the person’s bad choices.”

This quote highlights one devastating consequence of America’s lack of universal health care: the divergent impact this has on the fate of America’s citizens. As this quote suggests, where one is born has huge consequences for well-being, with life expectancy being shorter for racialized and working-class Americans (for the latter group, life expectancy is actually falling). Since poverty is a consequence of policies and structural factors rather than individual failings, which the authors demonstrate throughout the book, the lack of healthcare for people living in poverty is particularly troubling, as it means the country is condemning millions of citizens to poor health through no fault of their own—a practice that makes America unique among wealthy countries of the world.

“Paradoxically, homelessness meant that Marquita was less able to work. Curfews and the need to escort Mason forty minutes to and from his elementary school on the subway limited what jobs she could take, so she lost her hotel job. However, she did find a part-time job as a concierge at an upscale condominium in Washington, where her charm and social skills made her a valued employee. This job was rich with ironies; a homeless woman working in an upscale housing unit of the kind that made Washington more desirable for many, but that made affordable housing more scarce.”

This quote sets up a problem that affects millions of Americans: the lack of affordable housing. Marquita Jones was a single mother making $27,000 a year, barely enough to afford an apartment; when it flooded with sewage, she and her son were forced into a homeless shelter. This story reflects a broader housing crisis, as in almost all of the United States, a two-person household earning the federal minimum wage would be unable to afford rent without spending more than is recommended. Over recent decades, this situation has come to affect a broader swath of the population, including many families like Marquita and her son. This quote is also an illustration of the symbol of the tightrope, in which one misstep can lead to ruin—the loss of Marquita’s housing leading to the loss of her job—although in this case, Marquita was able to recover.

“We were puzzled: Why did some kids avoid peril? And how could we re-create that success? Most of the kids who thrived came from stable, nurturing families attentive to education, while, as research would suggest, those who struggled came from homes with chaos, substance abuse and indifference to schooling. The Jernstedts farmed grass seed and planted in their daughters an expectation that they would go to university; today, one is a professor of botany at the University of California, Davis. We asked the Jernstedt girls where their PhDs and success had come from, and their answer was immediate: ‘We won the lottery without parents,’ as Lisa put it.”

The authors are exploring how some people manage to escape deprived circumstances and conclude that key ingredients are family stability and an emphasis on education. Both were in place for the Jernstedt girls, who grew up with Kristof and went on to successful careers, unlike many of the other people in the cohort. The authors make recommendations for policies that don’t just give citizens money but put in place structures to enhance family stability and community well-being, as well as allowing more people to obtain work that augments their well-being.

“Dale is conservative, partly a legacy of his military experience and partly a reaction to what he sees in his siblings. He has scolded them for their financial recklessness: a brother bought a truck on installments that he couldn’t afford, and a sister purchased the latest iPhone knowing that she probably wouldn’t be able to afford payments on it.”

This quote discusses one of the “escape artists” the authors profile: Dale Braden, one of Kristof’s classmates. Through Dale grew up in a poor, abusive household, and he was a mediocre student whose parents hadn’t had much education themselves, he managed to escape his circumstances by enlisting in the army. In the military, he learned self-discipline and responsibility and earned a college degree—a path out of poverty that has helped many young people from working-class backgrounds. This quote highlights a theme the authors identify elsewhere in the book: that the idea that poor people are lazy and don’t deserve government support is entrenched even among those who are, or were, working-class themselves.

“While Americans sometimes used to blame race gaps on ‘black culture,’ diagnosing the problem as irresponsible black men fathering babies outside of marriage, or as a predilection for dropping out of school and using drugs. But increasingly it looks as if the great black sociologist William Julius Wilson was right when argued, in books like When Work Disappears, that the fundamental problem is a lack of jobs, and in particular the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. At the time, Professor Wilson was commenting on urban African American communities in the inner city, but that tide of joblessness has now reached rural white America—and ‘white culture’ has reacted in pretty much the same ways.”

This quote illustrates a pattern that comes up at several points throughout the book: that the problems now affecting working-class America hit Black citizens first. When an epidemic of joblessness, or of drug addiction, was largely affecting the Black community, people often blamed Black people, often through the racist stereotypes mentioned here. The fact that white communities have shown themselves to be just as vulnerable to the same factors gives lie to these stereotypes. This dynamic has also been a source of frustration for many Black Americans, who’ve drawn attention to the hypocrisy of the current handwringing over the opioid epidemic, for example, when the crack epidemic, which largely affected Black Americans, was met with a collective shrug.

“People are complicated. But it’s certainly true that individuals like Eathan growing up in chaotic single-parent households—especially boys, just as Moynihan had predicted—don’t do as well on average, and then the cycle is often repeated with their children as well. Forty percent of American kids are now born outside of marriage, and four out of five of them will experience the stress of a parent forming new relationships and raising half-siblings. Eathan faced particularly long odds because he didn’t just come from a low-income single-parent family but from one with felony convictions, a history of drugs and violence and a lack of education, compounded by his own decision to drop out of high school.

This quote references a young man named Eathan Green, child of Kristof’s childhood friend Clayton Green, whose experience serves as an example of the intersecting factors that perpetuate the intergenerational cycle of poverty, from a history of drug abuse and trauma to a lack of education. As this quote suggests, no one of these factors is a guarantee of poverty on its own, but taken together, they create a cycle of family dysfunction from which it is nearly impossible to escape.

“Dave was lucky to get arrested, he says: ‘That night saved my life. Had I kept drinking I’d be dead right now.’ He also deserves credit for his work ethic and great determination to overcome his alcoholism. But he was even luckier to be with April and to be embedded in a family that saved him.”

With this quote, the authors are exploring the ways in which marriage is particularly beneficial to men, who experience greater well-being and social mobility when they are in stable partnerships. The irony is that poverty makes it less likely that men will be married, as a lack of employment, potentially compounded by other factors such as a criminal record, makes them less desirable marriage partners. These two factors are what conservatives have ignored in their attempts to champion family structure, but given the importance of family to people’s (especially children’s and men’s) well-being, it is important to find ways to promote family stability more holistically, such as ending mass incarceration, creating jobs for blue-collar workers, and implementing family leave policies.

“How did Amber let it happen? Surely, part of the answer is that she made awful choices, but research also suggests addictive behavior is inheritable, either through genetics or epigenetics, so that as the daughter and granddaughter of people with substance abuse issues, Amber was exceptionally vulnerable. Children like Amber and Andrea in chaotic households grow up with dysfunction, abuse, divorce, mental illness, neglect, economic hardship or parenting by people with addictions—all classic ACEs.”

This quote points to an important theme in the book, the intergenerational nature of poverty. Amber and Andrea are members of the Knapp family, whose experience started the book, and who, at the beginning of the 1970s, expected that their fortunes would rise. By the 21st century, the family had fallen into a cycle of dysfunction. As this quote references, this dysfunction is partially perpetuated through the brain damage done by adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, which are negative experiences that happen before the age of five, when the brain is developing. Even when Amber seemed to escape—she had a good job, and a stable family—patterns and trauma from her upbringing reasserted themselves, destabilizing Amber and caused her to lose everything.

“Here we had a window into the chaotic, contradictor world of American poverty: three televisions, a pit bull, no food, much chaos. While poor Americans may have a color TV and access to hospital emergency rooms, they also have a life expectancy similar to that of Mongolia, a homicide rate higher than in Rwanda and an incarceration rate that is the highest in the world. What we found everywhere in our journey, in white communities or black ones, in cities or rural areas, was that the defining ethos of life in the homes of kids like Emmanuel is disorder, dysfunction, despair and danger.”

This quote takes place after the authors observe the home of Emmanuel Laster, a young boy who was being supported by TOPPS. In Emmanuel’s room—in a dirty, chaotic house, with a pitbull in the yard to prevent people from entering the house to repossess furniture—there were three TVs, which he expected to be repossessed eventually as well. This situation is emblematic of America, in which growing prosperity has expanded access to consumer goods and brought about unimaginable wealth, but has left many people, like Emmanuel, in abject poverty, despite their access to material objects.

“There is rebuilding at the high school as well, with two new giant domes, one for athletics and one for vocational and technical education, including pre-engineering, computer-aided drafting and fabrication, plus metal and wood shop. The building project reflects greater recognition in Yamhill—and in much of the country—that vocational education may be a way to keep students in school, and it is paired with a viticulture program to train students to work in local vineyards. So against all odds, the Yamhill-Carlton schools are making headway. The latest high-school graduation rate is back up to 80 percent.”

Near the end of the book, the authors explore ways in which America can intervene to improve the welfare of the working class in places like Yamhill. A key intervention is education, and particularly, vocational education that prepares young people for the workforce. Through such training programs, as well as a change in policies to reduce the number of students being expelled, the Yamhill high school managed to raise its graduation rate. It is important, the authors argue, to have school programs that align with the labor market.

“We have told stories in this book, more than explored policy alternatives, because we agree with Harvard’s David Ellwood that the first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people’s struggles so that it is less about individual irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world. Yes, the Knapps and the Greens and others made mistakes, but so did we as a society, and America is a lesser nation as a result.”

The authors here explain why they’ve chosen to devote the book to the personal stories of those living in poverty, stories the authors know intimately, since many of the individuals grew up alongside Kristof. This isn’t simply an effective storytelling technique; as this quote suggests, it’s an attempt to humanize those who have been stereotyped and stigmatized by a society that holds poor people responsible for their own suffering. In offering a full account of these people’s lives, the authors acknowledge the areas in which people have made poor choices, but also point to the broader systemic failures that facilitated those poor choices. In this way, the lens for action is shifted away from individual acts, and onto the policy changes that need to be made to enact real change.

“These programs, which would require sensible partnerships with the private and nonprofit sectors, will cost money. Canadians and Europeans pay higher taxes and get universal health care, less poverty and homelessness, lower addiction rates and arguable more human societies, and that’s probably a worthwhile trade-off. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is an idea whose time may have come: polls find more Americans favor raising taxes on the wealthy than lowering them.”

This quote returns to a problem the authors identify earlier in the book: the shrinking proportion of government revenue that comes from income tax in the United States since the 1990s, and particularly from income tax levied on the very wealthy. The authors make a case for why any marginal decrease in innovation that comes from higher taxes would likely be worth it, as it could help fund programs ranging from universal health care to job creation programs. Such an increase wouldn’t need to be drastic, as a return to 1990s tax rates would fund many of their suggestions—and as they note here, such an increase would likely be politically popular.