Tag: escaping poverty

It’s So Much Harder to Escape Poverty Than You Might Think—It Can Take Decades and an Incredible Streak of Good Luck

The following article by April M. Short was posted on the Alternet website April 29, 2017:

It’s So Much Harder to Escape Poverty Than You Might Think—It Can Take Decades and an Incredible Streak of Good Luck

A homeless man sleeps under an American Flag blanket on a park bench on September 10, 2013 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. As of June 2013, there were an all-time record of 50,900 homeless people, including 12,100 homeless families with 21,300 homeless children homeless in New York City. SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

In order to get out of poverty, you have to basically be extremely lucky for almost 20 years, according to a new bookThe Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by economist Peter Temin.

So many deep-seeded factors have lead to the economic and wealth inequality in the U.S. today (from slavery through to the new Jim Crow prisons crisis of today, to technological shifts, to globalization, corporatization and so much else) that few Americans stand a realistic chance of ever changing their economic status. Writer Gillian B. White explains this in a detail in an April 27 piece in the Atlantic, which sums up Temin’s new book.

In the book, Temin explains the problem via a concept he calls the “dual economy.” He divides the American economic system between an “FTE sector” of college educated, computer literate, high-salaried people (he estimates these make up about 20 percent of the roughly 320 million Americans); and the “low-wage sector,” (which represents the majoirty of the nation).  Continue reading “It’s So Much Harder to Escape Poverty Than You Might Think—It Can Take Decades and an Incredible Streak of Good Luck”