“On Culture, Politics, and Poverty”

Abstract

The Great Recession, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter: all have helped raise public consciousness around issues of economic disadvantage. Leading figures from both major political parties have debated these issues, and the popular media has reported on a wide variety of stories relating to poverty and inequality. Everyday conversations among millions of Americans now include casual references to the 1%—and the 99%.The U.S. is “exceptional” in its economic deprivation relative to other wealthy countries. This includes extremely high levels of economic insecurity, skewed income and wealth distributions, and lower rates of social mobility. In the past two decades, social scientists have begun to focus more attention upon the influence of political forces in shaping this uniqueness in cross-national context. These scholars aim to address the dramatic rise in economic inequality and shortcomings in perspectives that narrowly focus on economic growth or demographic characteristics, and they are aided in the new availability of cross-national data sets, increasing methodological sophistication, and a greater willingness to question dominant modes of thought. Among the current leading alternatives to the standard economic growth or demographic arguments, explanations focusing on the role of political forces such as social policies and labor unions have performed particularly well in explaining cross-national variation and current trends in poverty and inequality.The following conversation, excerpted and edited from the forthcoming book Poverty Insights, features four thought leaders exploring the politics of poverty and inequality. Among the issues Lawrence Eppard, Noam Chomsky, Mark Rank, and David Brady discuss are the political and cultural forces responsible for the significant variation in economic deprivation across wealthy countries. A number of other influential scholars and intellectuals in the fields of poverty and inequality are, in interviews and conversations rather than traditional journal articles or essays, contributing their insights to this project, to be published by Oxford University Press.These scholars share a common perspective: that America’s exceptionally high rates of poverty and inequality are largely the result of structural failings. How we think about economic disadvantage as a nation impacts the policies developed to combat poverty and inequality—social problems that inevitably occur in the absence of collective action.