IRP Book Talk: Luke Shaefer on The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

Siers-Poisson [00:00:06] Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m Judith Siers-Poisson. For this episode, we’re going to be talking with Dr Luke Shaefer about the new book that he coauthored with Kathryn Eden and Tim Nelson. It’s titled “The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America.” That was published by Mariner Books. Dr Shaefer  is the Herman and Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He’s also a professor of social work and the director of Poverty Solutions, also at the University of Michigan. Luke, thanks for joining us today.

Shaefer [00:00:48] It’s really a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Siers-Poisson [00:00:51] As I just mentioned, your recent book is titled “The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America.” How would you say that looking at place-based disadvantage is different from focusing on individuals or a certain demographic group?

Shaefer [00:01:06] Social science has a history of looking at community studies going back many generations. Most notably, I would say, William Julius Wilson and his landmark book, “The Truly Disadvantaged,” right, really starts to flesh out this argument that being poor in a place where everybody else is low income or most people are low income is sort of a compounded disadvantage compared to, to growing up poor in a more affluent place. You can think of all of the different ways that this can impact folks in terms of connections to job opportunities, right? So you have social networks and social capital. And I think seeing more and more research come out showing how incredibly important it is to have connections across the economic ladder for social mobility, sometimes exposure to, tax events. Right. So you have environmental, issues as well. And violence too, right? Where we know that poor communities are sort of victim to, to more violence in the community. And we know the impact that that can have on kiddos especially. So it really is a matter of looking beyond the things that we know, for families and, and how they operate when they don’t have enough. And thinking about all of the contextual, environmental factors and the networks that people are embedded in. And I think one of the things that our book really tries to do is broaden out that conversation in understanding. So much of the research on place-based disadvantage has been about communities and, even more so, communities embedded in large cities. And I think one of the arguments that we’re making in this book is that as you look at a lot of the data coming out on differential outcomes, not just poverty, but health and social mobility, you can see community-level effects, place-based disadvantage in very poor rural communities as well.

Siers-Poisson [00:03:09] You and your coauthors created a measurement tool that you call the Index of Deep Disadvantage. What elements and data did you bring together to create that?

Shaefer [00:03:19] Coming out of our work on “$2 a Day,” I think we were really interested in trying to really think about what people mean when they say the word “poverty.” And, you know, government statistics and most scholarship really takes this approach of saying poverty is a sort of measure of whether or not your resources add up to a threshold that we say is enough. Ever since we sort of made that the dominant way to measure poverty, we have been vigorously debating exactly where the threshold should be, what should be counted as resources. And we came up against some of that in “$2 a Day.” You know, we’ve been debating questions about measurement error and whether or not we’re measuring income well enough. And I think the challenge with that debate is that you can kind of never get out of it because, you know, when we have a poverty measure that is this semi-arbitrary threshold and a selection of resources, you almost are thinking of it as both the input and the output, right? It’s like it’s what we’re trying to measure. And then it’s sort of, it’s validated on the basis of how well it meets the logic. And so we wanted to think more broadly about this for ourselves. And there have been some folks that have done this, but mostly with individuals, you know, so when we think about sort of multidimensional poverty rates, they often take individuals and say, rather than just look at your poverty rate, we’re going to look at some of these other factors as well. And there’s a lot of merit to that, too. But you sort of end up kind of in the same place of arguing, you know, what should be included or what should not be. So we wanted to take a place-based approach, and we really wanted to look at outcomes that we thought, you know, were difficult to argue were not salient to Americans. And so we kept, you know, the poverty rates and deep poverty because we thought that was important in understanding the depth of poverty from our own work, but then added in some health outcomes, you can think of, you know, health at the start of life that we know is very socioeconomically and racially determined in this country, using as a proxy sort of low infant birth weight and then health at the end of life. We know, you know, there’s this huge span of of how long people live, you know, more than a decade difference between some counties in the United States, of how long you can expect to live through the average life expectancy. And we know that’s the culmination of a lot of factors, including sort of the environment that you that you live in and your resources. So we had income and then health metrics. And then we added this incredible data from, Chetty and Hendren and their colleagues that tracked social mobility. So this is a measure that looks county by county and city by city and says if you grew up poor or what are your, you know, where do you rank on average in a place in adulthood? And so it’s really a measure of social mobility. We think it’s important because it’s one thing to be poor if there’s a pathway out of poverty, and it’s another thing to be poor, if your expectation is, that that’s where you’re going to be. So we wanted to use all of these factors and we put them into an index using principal component analysis that really sort of weighed, you know, their correlation, but also the different variation that they brought to the table. And with it, we were able to rank every county in the United States and every large city. So that’s 500 cities by these three factors. And, you know, these three buckets of income, health, and social mobility, and, you know, we were really just very struck by what we saw. The map that it creates is not totally dissimilar to a map that you would get if you just plotted sort of county and city poverty rates across the nation. But it does give like a lot of really interesting insights, like deeper insights, where we had some places in say, South Carolina, where the poverty rates were not so bad, but life expectancy was really, really low and social mobility was really, really stagnated. And then we have other places that had sky-high poverty rates, but where life expectancy was quite high and social mobility was quite strong. And so the Index allows us, I think, to get more under the hood of what’s going on in these places and, sort of gets us to a deeper understanding and also protects us against measurement error in any one of the buckets. So we’ve got data coming from all sorts of different sources. And there are sort of, in our view, sort of acting as a check against each other.

Siers-Poisson [00:08:13] So the places that ranked high on the index, so deeply disadvantaged, you visited those places and spent time in those places. What do they have in common that you and your team were able to see or eventually kind of teased out?

Shaefer [00:08:30] Yeah. The first surprise, and, Judith, I’d like to say this is a book of surprises for me. Like I did not expect to write, us to write, most of the chapters in this book, honestly. And the first surprise really was when we looked down at the most disadvantaged place, the places that had high poverty rates, you know, really poor health outcomes, really poor mobility outcomes. They were really, disproportionately rural places. And like that bottom hundred, there’s only nine cities. And it’s, you know, it’s really dominated by rural communities, rural counties that stretch across Appalachia and through the Cotton Belt, down in South Texas and then out west. You have some pockets that are almost all sort of Native Nation, tribal lands. You know, this is sort of one of those insights, I think that, I maybe had some sense that poverty was, was worse, at least measured with the official poverty measure. I think a lot of the new ways that we’re thinking about measuring poverty pushed up poverty in large cities because they take account of cost of living. But this was an apples to apples comparison. Right. And we’re looking not just at the poverty rates, but also health and social mobility. So to see these rural communities really pop up very high. It led to some reflection by me at least, and, and I know my coauthors, where we had spent the majority, the vast majority of our time studying poverty in urban and northern cities. And so whatever else can be said, I think it was clear that we’re missing a big piece of the puzzle of where poverty is deepest in this country. So, as you said, yeah, we went out and we started to get to know these places. So our, our sort of research method, we call iterative mixed methods approach, where we use the data to understand the big picture and then try to use qualitative methods to really enrich that understanding. So we and our students went and spent considerable time. And, each one of the clusters that we find, Clay County in eastern Kentucky, Marion County and South Carolina down into the Mississippi Delta, Leflore County and down to South Texas, Zavala County and Crystal city, Brooks County, and in South Texas, we did interviews. You know, we spent time getting to know folks who are low income, who are community leaders. Then because of COVID, everything sort of ground to a halt for a little while. And that really ended up, I think, enriching the final product because we delved into the history of these places. And that’s where we really saw that there was this an incredible commonality. We’d have these research team meetings and somebody would say, you know, I’m, I’m in Crystal city, South Texas, and they’re really proud of being the spinach capital of the world. And they’re these statues of Popeye that are, you know, one in the town center that we all got selfies with, and, you know, one at City Hall. So, you know, when irrigation came to South Texas, a lot of the ranches got split up into farms. And it really became like the, you know, the cornerstone of tabletop vegetables for, for the entire nation. So spinach, onions, things like that. And, you know, this was an industry that required a very large, pool of low-wage labor and was controlled by a small number of elites. And those elites controlled, you know, for, generations, controlled every sort of aspect of society down in Leflore County, somebody, you know, one of our our folks says, you know, Leflore is, like, the cotton capital of the world? And, you know, the big annual event is the Cotton Ball, and there’s, you know, they they crown a cotton queen. And I think sort of the story of of cotton is probably more familiar to, you know, lots of folks in our field. But understanding like that was, an industry that really, obviously just utterly dominated, the Cotton Belt, sort of that large swath along that, the Deep South. Kind of like, you know, the tabletop vegetables. That was something that, it was exported. It was financed by northern banks, you know, it was used to fuel the Industrial Revolution and textiles and, and, you know, mass production as, as time goes on. So it becomes this sort of crop that is, you know, not just central to the region, not just central to the United States, but, you know, a lot of it’s been sent over to the United Kingdom for, generations. And it required a very large, low-wage labor force that was forced and, you know, first sort of enforcement of that work through slavery. And then that was reproduced through Jim Crow. And tobacco in South Carolina follows a very similar path. So they move from cotton to tobacco. And that’s the place where we are is where they discover bright leaf tobacco that makes cigarettes possible and spurs an entire industry that impacts of the world, obviously right? and then up to Appalachia, where you had, you know, always one industry. First it was salt, then it was timber, and then it was coal and the means of control were less violent and less brutal, but everything was sort of wrapped around to, to sort of protect that industry and to protect the labor force, and to protect the power of the folks who control it. So that’s why, you know, to us, what was fascinating was learning the individual histories, that are all different and nuanced, but also this overarching story of places that came to be dominated by single industry and all the different ways that, power was exerted to, keep that labor force in place.

Siers-Poisson [00:14:43] Well, and you use the term “internal colonies,” and that whole system that you just described feels very colonial. And it it really harkens back to the plantation model, too, which had been in place in many of these locations.

Shaefer [00:14:58] Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So, we really started to see it through this prism of being internal colonies. And by that, I mean, you know, you have places where, the majority of the people who live there don’t have full citizenship. Obviously through slavery. But then Jim Crow really reproduces slavery in this incredibly brutal way. You know, we write about the use of lynchings, you know, which we, come along sort of the scholarship of Ida B. Wells and really call lynchings like tools to basically make it impossible for Black Americans to, to rise up economically, right. They were tools of economic oppression at their core. And, interestingly, like some of the players in South Texas actually come from plantations, in the Cotton Belt. So cotton sort of, it’s extractive of the soil. So as time goes on and at the beginning of the 20th century, people, a lot of people moved to South Texas. And they take some of the lessons from, you know, dominance, from the Cotton Belt. And you can see a lot of that reproduced in South Texas and also sort of modified in ways because of this, like flow of of labor coming across the border. And we get the migratory patterns of, farm labor, where folks, you know, start out in the fields in South Texas and then, you know, move up, up through the upper Midwest and then to Michigan in my state, you know, for cherries and then back down. And a lot of the political decision making was made when migrant laborers were out of town, sort of to continue to reinforce that power. So we weren’t the first ones to use language like this. I think one of my favorite parts of the book is an appendix. Like, takes it all the way back to Frederick Douglass, who, you know, refers to a nation within a nation. Internal colonies have been sort of used to describe certain situations. So I think what we did was try to put a broader framework around that and not just use it to understand one case study, but use it to understand a set of patterns that are happening in different parts of the country, but really sort of fit the same mold. When we got to that, then it felt as sort of as I think you were just alluding to, like it was pretty obvious. You know, we started looking into some of the literature on colonialism internationally. And you see, you know, so many of the same themes of places that, have, you know, the legacy of that as being mired in corruption, government corruption, some research on violence. And so it was almost like one of those things where I’d never seen it before as something. But then when I did, it’s like, you can’t stop seeing it, right? It’s like, oh my God, how did we miss that? That’s like a way of understanding what’s gone on in some of our poorest places.

Siers-Poisson [00:18:04] So, Luke, you and your coauthors write at length about the quality of education for the poor in these communities as really dismal and also influenced by racism, and also that need for cheap labor, regardless of race. Tell us more about what commonalities you found about education in these areas.

Shaefer [00:18:25] Yeah. The historical record really makes clear, you know, not just like one quote or two quotes, but lots of lots of documentation where people who control power in these places are saying if we educate people, they’ll just demand more wages and they’ll just compete with us for these jobs. And so there’s for a long time, well, that’s an explicit policy of just having very separate and unequal education. And again, I think people understand this history most, in the Cotton Belt. I think we’re sort of most familiar as we should be. But the same types of things really play out in South Texas, over the same period where you have segregated schools. And then when you can’t have segregated schools, there are still ways of like segregating, you know, resources within schools, and in Appalachia and in Kentucky, actually, a Supreme Court ruling actually says the state was completely out of line with how different the levels of investment in education were between central Appalachian counties and the rest of the state, in different parts of the state. So this is sort of a clear tool, over time of, of just really dividing sort of the investment in human capital and in large part to sustain the sort of the dominant economic system in our view. And, you know, one of my favorite, passages of the book that I’ll just mention briefly is on segregationist academies. So when finally, when states are, like, forced to reckon with Brown v Board and really start to, segregate their schools, there becomes this movement to start private schools that, you know, are often called segregationist academies throughout communities in the South. And and again, like, once we saw them, you you saw them everywhere, and, and there are these, you know, online groups of people who went to segregationist academies who are like, sort of didn’t realize it at the time and are now grappling with that. And these places, you know, the Citizens’ Council, sometimes referred to as the White Citizens’ Council, actually published, step-by-step guides of like, how you start a segregationist academy. And a lot of it involved, like taking resources directly from the public schools and using sort of any means that was available to shift those over to the, the new segregationist academies, private schools. And you had some that, you know, were well-resourced and then you had others that were really like in churches where the teachers were not as qualified. And so it’s this fascinating history, I think, of the the nuts and bolts of structural racism. Right. How there’s separate and unequal sort of educational institutions are perpetuated even after, you know, the Supreme Court ruling saying that, you know, people have to have access to, equal education. And then also that, like a lot of times the schools were not of high quality. And so there is this, I think, story of almost shooting themselves in the foot in a way, because of this commitment to, segregation in schools.

Siers-Poisson [00:21:40] You said that that’s an example of structural racism, which it clearly is, but it’s also an example of that corruption that you’ve mentioned a couple of times, the funneling of resources away from people who arguably need them even more than others might. What were some of the impacts of the many kinds of corruption that you saw? Not just that, how did it affect people in feeling connected to or empowered to be part of, of local government, for instance?

Shaefer [00:22:11] Yeah. Another thing that I really didn’t expect to write about, was, was government corruption. But in every single place we were in, there was a fairly recent case. You know, listeners might be familiar with the Brett Favre welfare scandal from Mississippi. So I won’t go into that much detail on that. But like the bigger story on that, it’s just incredible. You’re talking about, you know, 80 plus million dollars that was really made away with from money that’s supposed to go to poor families. So in that case, you have a very direct sort of money being taken out of that bank account of the poor families to enrich, you know, celebrities and, nonprofit, quote unquote, leaders and government officials. But, down in South Texas, in Crystal city, you know, the FBI swarmed City Hall, like, in 2016 and arrested, I think, all but one member of the city council and the mayor for all sorts of, you know, racketeering and other, charges and in Appalachia, you know, we just see account after account of city officials being in league with drug dealers, you know, really being about padding their own pockets. And, you know, as your question suggests, the challenges are multifold. The first is that, you know, you’re really taking the people who should be trying to do good things in the community, and a lot of times they’re not. And and they’re taking the resources that should go to investments and whatever they are and using them for themselves. And then the second is that sort of deep distrust of government that when these things go on, you know, people might not know the specific scenarios, but everyone in these communities know. And actually there’s, you can look at a map of perceived corruption and government, and it looks an awful lot like our map of deep disadvantage, right. There’s a very high correlation. And so people, they have no faith in government. And we were we were really struck by the fact that we would we would often ask like what could government do, what could philanthropy do that would make things better. And people really they did not have faith that either government could really make things better or the philanthropy could either. So there was a real lack of faith. And then, you know, the final thing I think, is that we would see in some cases that those families that had controlled the town for generations, like in Appalachia, that were doing the stuff, and sometimes it was from community leaders who had sort of risen up and, and, you know, we would like to think do better. But when the only model that you’ve ever had is, is one of, you know, sort of enriching yourself, like, I think we sort of assume that if people come from communities, you know, they access power. They have like often no training. Right? And nobody’s, sort of helping them out. They have generations of the elite, you know, from the community, having controlled the community. They they reproduce a lot of those patterns. And then and then that, I think, allows the nation to sort of be excused. They feel like they have any responsibility for what’s going on.

Siers-Poisson [00:25:25] You mentioned that some local officials would be basically turning a blind eye to the drug dealers or getting kickbacks, things like that. And we’d be remiss not to mention the impact of the opioid crisis on these communities. And they several of them were really ground zero for the opioid crisis. Briefly, Luke, why were these areas so vulnerable to that type of exploitation?

Shaefer [00:25:49] Yeah, as we look at the historical record, they were really targeted by Big Pharma. And some of the reasons why we think they are is that, you know, this was particularly in Appalachia and in Appalachia, you had a lot of people who had been in, mining and sort of related industries that are physically difficult. And so there were, just a higher concentration of people who had a lot of pain. And we’re dealing with sort of long-term health issues and connected to that, a lot of people who had disability payments and public health insurance. So there was a revenue stream. And you combine that with the sort of health infrastructure of the place being, many doctors were, like family physicians or, you know, individual like community and family physicians. And the argument was that they were more susceptible to prescribing opioids. You know, they’re just easier to sway for Big pharma. And so it’s almost like a confluence of events. You know, I think some people think these places were not that… Look, that there wasn’t sort of as much of a microscope. So I think they sort of felt like this could be done without, you know, raising a lot of eyebrows. And, and so I think all of those things are why that would be like the opioid crisis really started there. And then over time it evolved into illegal drugs and really continues, you know. I feel like we as a country feel like we have gotten a handle on the opioid crisis, but we we really haven’t. We’re still at sort of historic peaks of overdose deaths. And just a lot of it has evolved from prescription drugs to, illegal substances.

Siers-Poisson [00:27:41] We’ve been talking about so many layers of deep disadvantage and I would say trauma. And we’ve really just scratched the surface. I think some people hearing about these living conditions might wonder why people don’t just leave. And how would you respond to that?

Shaefer [00:27:59] Yeah. It is, it’s a question that we hear a lot, and, I think that there are layers, to the answer. One is that it actually takes money to move. And if you are in a bad circumstance, one: you might not have the money, but also too you have deep uncertainty about wherever you’re going, like, at least I know the landscape here, right? At least I know what the bad is. And if I move somewhere, if I had the money to do it, I would be like, totally a fish out of water. So there’s, I think, a fear of moving. And then there is this deep connectedness to the place. Many of us, as Americans, are connected to the places where we live. We sort of feel, a connection. And so, you know, I hope that our book is one that shows like a lot of the beauty, in these places. And you have to take, you know, things like the, the spinach festival every year down in South Texas. I think it’s important to know the history and and also, you know, there’s a school community event where everybody gets together and they crown the spinach princess and the spinach queen. And there is there is a love for the places. Sometimes the physical beauty of the places, that I think keeps people connected to them. And then finally, I think more and more research shows that, there is a history of a lot of people moving. Right. If you think about the Great Migration, there is a huge move of millions of millions of Black Americans. And the places that they moved to all changed. Right. So this is where sort of moving, the opportunity, I think, really comes against of a very big problem that all of these northern cities that that had more economic opportunity, they changed and they became more segregated, and they set up policies that had a lot of the same impacts, you know, might not be as explicitly violent, but, you know, the, the segregation and, and sort of the warding off of opportunity is all there. And so, you know, I think all of that explains why a lot of people do move, but a lot of people have this connection and they fear the unknown. And I think they have a sense that the places that they’re going to might not end up better than where they are.

Siers-Poisson [00:30:24] As you said, there are some very positive, even beautiful things about these communities. And there are some people who, as I read their stories, they were real rays of hope. They’re often local people who are working to improve their communities and the living conditions of their neighbors. Is there someone who really inspired you and gave you hope as you heard what they were trying to do?

Shaefer [00:30:48] Really so many, we met folks in every community that were just really inspiring and sort of fighting the good fight and and trying to do great things. Pastor Ken, in Appalachia, who, you know, works with others and organizes this incredible March Against Drugs in the early 2000s that a lot of people think of as a real turning point for Manchester and Clay County. There’s, Principal Boyd Shaw in Greenwood, Mississippi, who has started a school that is really trying to bring like a lot of the enriching aspects of, of of some of the private schools to, a more integrated student body. They’re committed to these places, just sort of going back to that, that deep love of places. And we really started to see, I think folks who, you know, come from families who have been among the elite sort of saying, you know what, the ways that we’ve been doing things, they haven’t worked out for us the way that we would like them to. And and so maybe it’s really time to sort of chart a different path and to sort of give up some of the historical ways of doing things. So, you know, you only need to go to one place to find someone who’s really doing inspiring work. I remember meeting this young woman in not one of the communities that we were in, but one of the other ones that we went through as we started doing our initial scout work, and she she had a full-time job, and she also just organized the only food pantry in the community for people. So she would get up at like 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning, drive into the the, the nearest food bank and like, load up all the groceries and bring them. And you know, this was… I think she was in her 20s and you know, just that commitment was really inspiring, even though these places really they don’t get a lot of the resources. You know, to compete for government resources, you need grant writers, you need innovation and human capital. And a lot of these places that’s in short supply. And they don’t have the money for matching funds. And so they’re really sort of fighting against all of the things working against them.

Siers-Poisson [00:33:04] Going back to your Index of Deep Disadvantage, you and your coauthors and your fellow researchers also looked at places that scored with the highest levels of advantage to find elements that those places had in common. What lessons can be applied to those places who are dealing with very deep disadvantage?

Shaefer [00:33:26] Once again, the Index surprised us. We might have been assuming that, I was sort of thinking it might take us to places like Newton, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. But, the large majority of the places that we’re on, that, the top of that Index are once again, rural communities, often in the upper Midwest. So northern Minnesota, actually in the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and some down into Nebraska. So Kathy and Tim, God bless them, they did another road trip and they they drove through a lot of these places. We started to look at a lot of the history. One thing, that we looked at was, was the fact that a lot of these places are predominantly White. Vast majority White. So they, you know, you have sort of more access to, I think, a lot of the resources, you know, government that rather than actively working against you, maybe is working more for you. But there are also a lot of other places in the country that are, you know, have the same percentage of White residents that don’t look anything, you know, as good as these places, Appalachia, for example. But through Ohio, Michigan, Maine, and so these places were exceptional, even if we’re just looking at that group. So we look back in history, and interestingly, the one thing that we found was that, these places where those that had high concentration of homestead properties that trace all the way back to the 1862 Homestead Act. So that was an Act that sort of made property ownership widely available. It only passed because Southern lawmakers, you know, had left Congress. And, had left the Union. And so it was able to get passed before, you know, it had been blocked because of concerns. Yeah, the Homestead Act. We can we think we can see the rippling impacts of that even today, where you have many, many small family farms, sometimes that are rented and like larger, you know, corporate farmers use them. But still the assets are broadly shared and homeownership is incredibly high. Inequality is extremely low. Life expectancy is extremely high. And so once again, we think, you know, this broader investment of bringing more people into the pie and the things that that can do. You know, really we came away was thinking, that’s one of the lessons that we want to take away from it.

Siers-Poisson [00:35:57] Well, Luke, thank you so much for spending the time with us. It’s a fascinating book and I really appreciate you discussing it with us.

Shaefer [00:36:04] My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Siers-Poisson [00:36:06] Thanks so much to Dr Luke Shaefer. He joined us to discuss the new book that he coauthored with Kathryn Eden and Tim Nelson, titled “The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America.” You can find a link to the book in the program note for this episode. The production of this podcast was supported in part by funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. But views expressed by our speakers don’t necessarily represent the opinions or policies of that office or of any other sponsor, including the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Music for the episode is by Poi Dog Pondering. Thanks for listening.