Tag: poverty

#FirstWorldProblems hashtag thrown

Lisa Schweitzer

This item crossed my desk via Business Insider’s Fboo feed. Here’s the original ad.

Business Insider then posted a follow up, reporting that people got angry over the ad largely because the #FirstWorldProblems label on twitter means exactly that: a sardonic admission that these aren’t, in fact, real problems. The ad, therefore, alienates the very people who are actually aware of their privileges.

Yah, sure, whatever, taking a tweet out of context may not be fair, but, jeez, people, this is a world where you get tweet about your minuscule problems while other people die for lack of water. So, yes, fair would be an issue, but not the issue you’re making it out to be. If the misinterpretation of the tweets leads to greater awareness about people living in poverty, who cares? If you have the ability to look sardonically at your own problems that are not problems, then let other people use that, too. It’s not about making you feel validated for being aware of your privilege: it’s about raising awareness about poverty and resource deprivation in Haiti.

This week’s readings in the Urban Context

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

My students are looking at poverty and oppression this week in the urban context. Students can pick from:

 


Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown by Dr. Javier Auyero and Debora Alejandra Swistun:

Surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in Argentina, a highly polluted river that brings the toxic waste of tanneries and other industries, a hazardous and largely unsupervised waste incinerator, and an unmonitored landfill, Flammable’s soil, air, and water are contaminated with lead, chromium, benzene, and other chemicals. So are its nearly five thousand sickened and frail inhabitants. How do poor people make sense of and cope with toxic pollution? Why do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? How are perceptions and misperceptions shared within a community?

 

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

In a review from Reason:


A new book challenges that stereotype of the idle poor and their supposed quiescence before the market economy. In Off the Books, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh posits that if a transaction occurs in the ghetto and no one writes it down, it still counts as trade. His sprawling study of Chicago’s seedy South Side unearths a lively world of exchange in a supposed economic graveyard.

 

There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up by Lance Freeman

In this revealing book, Lance Freeman sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: how does gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition? To find out, Freeman does what no scholar before him has done. He interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. By listening closely to what people tell him, he creates a more nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods.

 

For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities
AbdouMaliq Simone

Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa’s burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For the City Yet to Come, AbdouMaliq Simone argues that by overlooking all that does work in Africa’s cities, this perspective forecloses opportunities to capitalize on existing informal economies and structures in development efforts within Africa and to apply lessons drawn from them to rapidly growing urban areas around the world. Simone contends that Africa’s cities do work on some level and to the extent that they do, they function largely through fluid, makeshift collective actions running parallel to proliferating decentralized local authorities, small-scale enterprises, and community associations.

Rolf Pendall discusses the deconcentration of poverty

Lisa Schweitzer

I’ve been wanting to post this essay for some time, but I keep forgetting. Rolf Pendall, over at the Metro Trends Blog, discusses the deconcentration of poverty in post-Katrina New Orleans and Stockton.

The money observation:

Two metros—New Orleans and Stockton—present extreme examples of poverty deconcentration and falling poverty. In New Orleans, poverty and concentrated poverty both fell after Hurricane Katrina devastated poor and high-poverty neighborhoods. The city, the 2010 Census reveals, lost over 11 percent of its residents between 2000 and 2010. Its estimated poverty rate also fell from 18.4% in 1999 to 14.6% in 2006, 2007, and 2008 because the storm destroyed so many low-cost housing units. Indeed, the share of New Orleanians living in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped by 9.4 percentage points. Since 2009, however, poverty is rising again in metro New Orleans.

His discussion of Stockton’s trends is equally as insightful. Go read.

Camden, NJ, Chris Hedge’s “indictment” of academia, and poverty reporting

Lisa Schweitzer3 Comments

I recently became rather annoyed at Chris Hedges pointing his finger at academics as liberals who have abandoned working people and progressive causes. This NPR story was circulated via the delightful Frank Popper via Facebook, which started up the usual whine that “professors have all this power and they don’t use it, or one proffie was mean to me once, so clearly academics have abandoned The Cause.”

Sure, yeah–universities are corporate–heaven knows I work at one. And there are plenty of academics that are only out for themselves. But what annoys me about Hedges–and the response–is that it’s so knee-jerk, one-dimensional and stereotyped. Can professors be abusive? Sure. Why would they as a group be any different than any other people when they hold the position of “boss”? People are people, with human failings, in every context. If we weren’t all working at essentially the same place with essentially the same people, Dilbert wouldn’t be as funny as it is.

But when you want to rage against the machine, you might want to ask: is the person/institution you are raging against capable of

  • putting hundreds out of work to give themselves supra-normal profits with one decision?
  • stealing people’s pensions and impoverishing elders?
  • torturing and killing your family and neighbors?
  • writing $163 million dollar checks like it’s nothing to get yourself elected into a highly influential public office?

My colleagues and I certainly make a comfortable living, but we had to save to buy our small houses and condos–we are, simply, not in that league, except for those who came in with family money.

I’m not saying big-money universities are good thing or that they have clean hands. I’m also willing to believe that higher education should take their lumps at budget times with everybody else: I’m unprepared to put higher education before foster kids in the state’s budgets, at least not without more study.

I AM saying that Yale and Kansas State are worlds apart in the influence they hold, and treating them like they are the same–or that they are in the same power universe as a Goldman Sachs or the Meg Whitmans of this world strikes me as being both inaccurate and a bit self-serving of Hedges. After all, if everybody BUT you has abandoned the poor, then suddenly you are very very important as the Voice of The Poor. There’s a little too much “don’t blame you, don’t blame me, blame the guy the behind the tree–those other people, the media, academics, Rush Limbaugh” about Hedges, who lined his nest quite comfortably I suspect when he was part of the mainstream media, whom he says is Part of the Problem, at the New York Times.

And that’s the irritating thing. Hedges, Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein make a pretty comfortable living being “the voice of the poor.” Now, I think Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed, is excellent. But if I’m in moral hazard territory because I make my living researching poverty rather than solving poverty, I kind of have to wonder whether what they are up to is really all that better than what I do or don’t do.

Here’s an example of how Hedge’s arguments are rather self-serving and contradictory:

In this issue of the Nation, Hedges has an article about Camden, NJ: City of Ruins. Nice enough piece, only there is little of substance that hasn’t already been said by an academic, Howard Gillette, Jr., in his book published five years ago: Camden After Fall. (If you haven’t read it, drop what you are doing and read it right now, along with American Project by Sudhir Venkatesh)

So the question: are academics really the craven sell-outs who don’t grapple with hard issues and poverty, or does Mr. Hedges need to read more?

At some point, all of us who write about poverty and inequality run the same danger: leering instead of doing. I’m all for people writing about Camden–the more attention it gets, the better, unless the attention is on the leering side, which Hedges’ piece comes pretty close to doing in the way he trades on the images of strong, spiritual black women.

Every year or so, some senator decides he’s going to live on food stamps–and finds out that living on food stamps sucks. Quelle surprise. Or some some supermodel puts on a fat suit and discovers! OMG! That being pretty has given her unearned perk after unearned perk. Or somebody decides to live among the homeless, and discovers that homeless people are human beings (wow!) and have souls but live hard. Why can’t we believe it when the single mom on food stamps tells us that it’s not enough to sustain a family? Surely, single moms do say such things. It’s pretty simple to me: it’s not that we don’t believe her, it’s that we don’t care to intervene either publicly or privately, and after the senator’s “discovery”, we go back to business as usual. Ditto with all those other examples: we go back to stepping over homeless people, etc.

That strikes me as a much bigger, more authentic source of trouble than whether proffies are doing right by the poor. No, proffies aren’t. Most of the rest of the world isn’t, either. So what is academia? Is academia represented by celebrity scholars like Joe Stiglitz, or people, like my colleague David Sloane, who has worked for years with poor neighborhoods to virtually no celebrity–but to fairly substantial efficacy?

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Until we are all safe, there is no justice or sustainability

Lisa Schweitzer

This story in the LA Times breaks the heart. Two dozen teenage girls, vanished. The logical conclusion, given the location close to major US and Mexico markets and the crap police response, is that they are being sold into prostitution.

I wonder if the people who are doing this would be considered as dangerous as Al Qaeda? A shooting rampage or a bomb that killed two dozen would be spectacular news, but a story of the systematic immiseration of these young women and their families appeared quietly in the LA Times. Kudos to Ken Ellingwood for showing that somebody at the Times still cares about real news instead of what Michael Jackson’s cousin’s dogsitter was doing the day Michael died.