Poverty, not the Poor: How Recent Research Changes Our Understanding of the Causes of and Policies for Reducing Systemically High Poverty in the U.S

This review explains how and why the U.S. has systemically high poverty. Descriptive evidence shows U.S. poverty is: (a) a huge share of the population; (b) a perennial outlier among rich democracies; (c) staggeringly high for certain groups; (d) surprisingly high for those who “play by the rules”; and (e) pervasive across various groups and places. This review then discusses and critiques three prevailing approaches focused on the individual poor rather than the systemically high poverty: (i) behavioral explanations “fixing the poor”; (ii) emotive compassion “dramatizing the poor”; and (iii) cultural explanations both dramatizing and fixing the poor. The essay then reviews political explanations that emphasize: the essential role of social policy generosity, political choices to penalize risks, power resources of collective political actors, and institutions. This review demonstrates a long emerging, but ascending and warranted, shift away from individualistic explanations of the poor towards political explanations of poverty.