Transcripts For CSPAN2 Kathryn Edin And Stefanie DeLuca Discuss Income Inequality 20170408

Festival at the key school and welcome to our panel income inequality in todays america. We are here to talk with Stephanie Deluca and kathryn edin. Am going to read their bios and then offered an opportunity to discuss their books as well as offering you all some come as some questions so we will get started. Stephanie deluca is an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins university. Shes a sociologica a sociologie to inform education, housing policy and she was awarded a William Grant Foundation Scholars award to study residential mobility, neighborhoods in family life among very poor families in the south. She is coming working on a mixed message study on longterm neighborhood in School Equality as well as childrens education outcomes. She contributes greatly to national and local media including baltimore sun, washington post, education week. Atlanta, the new yorker and the National Public radio. And National Public radio. Transcendence work is been published in several academic journals and should present her work as part of an exhibit at the National Museum of american history. She was appointed to the Macarthur Foundation Research Network on the effects of housing on Young Children as a fellow at the Century Foundation and as a member of the policy Advisory Board at the reinvestment fund. Dr. Deluca under phd in Human Development and social policy at Northwestern University and bachelors degree in psychology and sociology at the university of chicago. Please welcome dr. Deluca. [applause] kathryn edin is one of the nations leading poverty researchers working in the domains of welfare and lowwage work, family life and neighborhood context. The hallmark of a research is our direct indepth observations of the life of low income women, men and children. Dr. Edin has authored six books including the one she is here to discuss today, 2. 00 a day living on almost nothing in america, and some 50 journal articles. She is a bloomberg distinguished professor of sociology and Public Health at Johns Hopkins university. Formerly shows a professor of Public Policy in management at the Harvard Kennedy school and chair of the Multidisciplinary Program in inequality and social policy. Dr. Edin is a Founding Member of the Macarthur Foundation funded network on housing and families with Young Children, and it has been of the Macarthur Network on the family and the economy. They are both coauthors of the seminal 2016 publication coming of age in the other america, the other book to discussed today which was nine Years Research between 20032012 on Baltimore City kids from impoverished neighborhoods. It tracks of progress in various areas including education, employment, family status, mental and physical health, and risk behaviors. Please welcome dr. Deluca and dr. Edin once more. [applause] so lets begin with both of you taking some time to discuss the books that year to talk about today. Well, thanks so much for spending your saturday morning with us. This ithis is a real treat to b. So im going to take you back in time with main about 2003. So i just finished a phd in Human Development and social policy in chicago and moved to baltimore to take a job at Johns Hopkins, as somewhat of an expert on urban poverty. Except in the five years that it took to do my phd, i had managed to not speak to one single poor person myself. Let alone a poor person of gold. You can get a phd in iraq that, right . Crunching numbers are really important policy changes in neighborhood data, but it is perfectly respectable to do that but im from the southside of chicago, and back there you dont really feel like you know anything unless youve talked to someone in person. At least thats how i was raised. At some point it was just getting to be too much. I had to get away from the numbers and get into the streets of baltimore and joined a project that kathy had actually started a few years before. Our journey began quite a while ago together. So i started this project looking at the impacts of housing policies in Baltimore City, and i fell in love with baltimore and was transformed as a scholar. My going into the neighborhoods in baltimore, i was told precisely to never go to when i first moved here. The first interview that i can remember that really changed the game for me was with a young man. Ability to interview him in east baltimore e. Meadow st. And i have 32 pages of Interview Questions them i had memorized the soweto use paper and pen when we do interviews because the kind of makes it feel like youre at a Doctors Office or doing a survey and that ruins it. But it may be hard to believe this but i was not very good back then. I wasnt yet at doing interviews with anyone but i wasnt the best person on the team for talking to young men. Again, says very little about the team that anything else. I wade through a couple of active drug used to go into juvon house into the back deeper a home kitchen and savannah try to talk to them. We want to understand what the impacts of neighborhoods and families and schools and growing up in poverty, went into with all these questions. In the first few minutes juvon as very polite and he sang yes maam, you know, maam. But its not jelling, right . Its not working. I had no choice but to go off script and i said what kind of music do you like . He said i would like heavy metal music. I said i really liked heavy metal music when i was growing up and thats what kids can like kids on the southside it is listened to heavy metal music instead of really doing bad things. It just made it seem like were doing bad things and not getting into trouble. He said i like greek mythology. I said i really like greek mythology. Physics, isaac did. Physics ate nothing but math with double sites mixed into it. Then we are on fire, right . Its jelling. We got to all the questions about poverty and school being in disarray in baltimore and the challenges of having grown up in a highrise in east baltimore, highrise in downtown that was eventually torn down and living in east baltimore. At the end of the interview he said, you are pretty cool for a white girl. And if were going to high School Together we might have been friends. And i thought wow, that went well that i got some sociology out of it and we had some fun. I would never, it would take seven years to understand that these Passion Projects that juvon was talking about would be so important. It would take years to figure that out. I just thought the unit had gone well and i was on my way to being sociology his next barbara walters. But why were we in east baltimore, why were we in baltimore to begin with . This goes back a bit to the late 1980s, early 1990s. Ive been to become clear that instead of, instead of innercity poverty reducing in the wake of the civil rights era, the Voting Rights act, the Fair Housing Act of the cities, innercity poverty had increased and become more concentrated. William julius wilsons work on the true disadvantage had made this really clear. Others would say such as late and american apartheid racial segregation what we thought had gone away at also got worse and had become enormously deleterious to the lives of families and children. And number obvious was this failure of urban policy evident than in the highrise projects in our inner cities across america. In the early 1990s at the federal government did two things to respond to the journalistic account of children being hurt of nonstop Drug Trafficking and violence in neighborhoods like east and west baltimore. The first thing that happened, the federal government decided to tear down the largest highrises in our American Cities so it is deemed topic to the families and children inside. The second thing is an experience of moving to opportunity was born. That would give families and children in five cities, new york, chicago, l. A. , baltimore boston a chance to leave highrises and moved to lower poverty neighborhoods. Things in baltimore wer or so de that both programs came here. This is what a Research Project was born, to try to understand how the fortunes of families and children who at companies communities come how they would change if they had a chance to leave. Thats our project got started. We learned quite a bit about the power of housing policy. Ill say one quick thing about that. Which is its not just the family and child is born into but the neighborhood he or she grows up in that shapes he our fate. We now have over 30 years of evidence pointing to this clear compelling fact that we know enough to act on this. Neighborhood poverty is a liability. And diminishes the life chances of our most vulnerable children, especially children of color. What we saw happen in baltimore are in normas intergenerational gains in Educational Attainment and other behaviors as a result of the children having left of the projects through these programs we study. Just one example. The 150 young men young men and women we followed from the ages of zero to ten when the parents signed up for the chance to leave the project through ages 1524 over a decade later, these children grew up in households were only about a third of them had a primary caregiver who had a High School Diploma or a ged. Sorry. Over 70 of these young people would go on to finish high school in this next generation. 13 growth as a caregiver that that had tried college or trade school. Half our sample would want to do that. 70 of High School Grads took enormous intergenerational gains in baltimore of all places. Because of housing policy about these kids to live part of the childhood in neighborhoods that were safer with more working neighbors and less worried about gunfire, more role model for what was possible in life. Parents also enjoyed Mental Health benefits on par with best practices and antidepressant medication therapies. Moving out of the dangers. Housing policy as house policy. They were the kinds of parents that they felt like that always wanted to be but couldnt be. This is one big lesson we learn that intergenerational disadvantage is inevitable. We can change it with social policy. We know this now. The second thing we discovered goes back to the passion project that i first observed with juvon in that kitchen in east baltimore. The single biggest predictor of young people being on track by the end of our study in School Working or both which was most kids as i said, we saw this big intergenerational gains but what explained the difference between 80 of the kids are on track and 20 that had not managed to get their was something we called identity project. Finding a passion, something to be about, create an outlet, a hobby, a job, activities you did with your friends or in making music, japanese animation, greek mythology, debate, raising puppies in the kitchen cabinet. Whatever, whatever, it came in a million different colors. We saw this incredible resilience and he came in a number of different forms. Some of this was kids by themselves to escape route that engage. We sat down with vicki in west baltimore and in 15 minutes she couldnt take it anymore. We just had not come to think wanted to talk about. Do you all want to see my birds . She had been racing pigeons in a backyard, and thats where she went when she need to get away from the carousels 13 at more people circling in the house they are night which helped a lot when vicki was prone to bouts of anger. She had a chance to escape. We sought more institutionally support identity project, especially for young men in the form of jobs or activities like the police explores leak. Late. We met a number of young men who when we met them said as you can see im a working man picked because they had a badge on for the Johns Hopkins security, or a police explores badge or the scrubs for a certified nursing assistant job like gary had. These uniforms were a point of pride in their neighborhoods, a point of social inclusion and a point of being, and a point that distinguish them from being a likely suspect when they were stopped by the police. In addition to as martin said a reason to think bigger about what comes next. Its not just about cleaning the dining room at burger king. Its about something bigger than that. And his identity projects were the very same that sparked the grid we heard so much about, the last five or ten years. The grid that really dissing bush is the key to get ahead and continue. That doesnt come out of nowhere. It needs to be sparked. We saw this with tony who took an internship through youth works ended up in university of maryland with the Pharmacy School delivering specimens and mail to doctors. He said being about this kinds of people, thats what gave me the spark. He literally use the word sparked my interest to become a pharmacist. He couldnt afford to enroll right away. Every semester he would finish a couple of courses, take this list off the bridge, check them off, keep going. Thats great. So we saw this in all of these expenses that let kids say im about something. Im not about the street. Im not about these friends. Im about these mentors and teachers. That was our second big lesson of the book, that young people ages 1524, those thoughts or loss caused by Public Policy debate in favor of much younger child policy, zero to five, preschool and reading programs. These young adults are announces assets with enormous potential. Especially in cities like baltimore. But what weve seen as a retrenchment, the kind of funding and policies that provide the raw material for the identity projects to form in the first place. This support in part we think, whats been pulled away in favor of accountability policy in schools but also because of the sense that these young adults are threats, not assets. Because we have never experienced such levels of racial and economic segregation in our history as we have right now, because of this we are virtual strangers to each other because we live in such different communities. In the kinds of stories kathy and susan and i were able to share in this book between the other america would be scheduled working so hard to get ahead and still struggle and the america, the wealthy were isolated from each other. What this isolation does is allow us to be vulnerable to really poor sources of information like those images in april 2015 of the few kids who were throwing bricks after the death of freddie gray. If anything, we found that these kids are the exception, not the norm. Fewer than one out of five young people ever turn to the streets. But you would never know that just watching the news. We think this kind of isolation breeds, dementia support for Public Policies like those that would be invested in youth centers, arts and sports and Music Education and so on. So to big takeaways, housing policy is a game changer, and Youth Investment policy can be a game changer. Even in a least likely place in central baltimore. Its really hard to leave that store and move on to the story of 2. 00 a day. So compelling. Often think of poverty is a matter of character right . Its about laziness or its about a lack of mainstream norms or values. The profound thing about what this experiment did, it would be an experience arcades and participated in. Simply move the same family to a different place. And it wasnt even the best place to it were not moving to the park. There may be moving to hamilton or bel air or a suburb, in a suburb of baltimore, and yet there lies were so powerfully transformed. So it speaks to the power of place as stephanie said and the power of investing in young people. Its really a very hopeful story because its hard to change peoples character, but its not so hard to change the places in which we allow children to grow up. So 2. 00 a day also has its origins in baltimore. And the book came about by accident. All the books i think have their origins or else studies have their origin story. I was actually in baltimore for the summer, teaching at harvard at the time to meet these kids that stephanie just talked about and to interview them and to hang out with them. So my family moved to baltimore for the summer, and you know, so we were in the homes of these young people and the parents. And one day my assignment was to knock on the door of this young women act would involve her family over the years that we hadnt seen her in a long time. We knew she had a new baby, and so we went to the homes on madison avenue, kind of tucked into the shadow of the prison. We knocked on the door and ashley came to the door. You do this for a while, you could tell when something is wrong, right . So ashley is not making eye contact. Shes visibly unkempt. Shes passing her child from shoulder to shoulder to comfort the baby is crying, she tried to comfort the baby, but shes neglecting to do the critical thing that all parents know you got to do when you have an infant, right . You put the hand here to keep the babies had from rocking as you move the child pics of this wasnt happening. We follow ashley up the stairs, and you get to the apartments and there is virtually nothing there. Theres a couch, a single mattress on the floor with a torn fitted bugs bunny sheet, fitted sheet. There is a table but was only three likes, so it is useless and it is shoved up against the wall and a single chair. So ashley sits on the chair and i sit on the floor. And just by coincidence, my seat gives me the perfect view of the kitchen cupboards. At this particular apartment there are no longer any doors on the cabinets. And i can see that they are empty. So i begin talking with ashley about, you know, the transition to adulthood. The themes that stephanie outlined, but i soon, something else, some other set of questions were popping up in my mind that im thinking wait a minute, there is no food here. I dont see any baby formula. So back at the very beginning of my career and early 1990s, my graduate advisor convinced me to spend my 20 \20{l1}s{l0}\20{l1}s{l0} running around the country interviewing poor single mothers about their budgets and half of these mothers were on the old welfare program. So i had done that for six years, various parts of the country talking with single moms about their budgets. And i had written him id written a book about you couldnt survive on welfare in any of the places that i been, but you also can survive on lowwage work and so on. If you spend six years doing something, its hard to stop doing it. And so i began to interview ashley about a budget. And i was really stunned, if id written book about welfare, about how you could survive on welfare in the early 1990s prior to of course the landmark welfare reform of 1996. I was shocked to learn that there was no source of household income, no cash from disability or retirement. No cash from the current welfare system that came into being after welfare reform. Its called tanf, temporary assistance for needy families. No income from work. None of the three adults in the household had a job. At the time there was also no footsteps come into household although the family was later enrolled in the food stamp program. You never know when you have, when youre going to have an epiphany. This is really a moment of epiphany for me. I thought to myself could it be in the worlds most advanced capitalist society, right, that people are actually living without cash . Could it be that since the landmark welfare reform 20 years ago, a new kind of poverty had arisen, a poverty so deep that we didnt even think to look for it . So i kind of put that epiphany in my back pocket, but i did, because i did finish the state of the transition to adulthood the study cash but i did say to ashley, when we interviewed people we pay them for the time. So we gave her 50, and i was really worried about her and the baby and i said can i come back tomorrow . I have a few more questions to ask you. I was going to bring her and the baby some things, and she said sure. So you can imagine my shock when the next day, the Research Team arrives and theres a knock on the door, and theres ashley. Shes obviously gone and gotten a home perm, you know, she looks terrific. Shes walking down broadway avenue to the goodwill and shes bought a pant suit, use pantsuit. Pantsuit. Shes wearing the pants suit, and quite literally either she has deposited the baby with her mother for safekeeping, she quite literally has a spring in her step and she announces that she has forgotten we were coming but shes off to look for a job. So some of you out in the audience may be skeptics. I, too, have a pretty skeptical nature. Im thinking 50 . Could it be that the presence of just a little cash is really the difference between ashley day one and ashley day to . Could it be in the worlds most advanced capitalist nation that theres something vital about cash for social mobility, for hope . So i wont tell you the rest of the story of 2. 00 a day. 2. 00 a day weaves together the numbers are best National Surveys with stories weve been gathered following family for many months and years across four sites, across the nation, chicago, cleveland, appalachia and the mississippi delta. We find a dramatic rise in 2. 00 a day poverty. Over the last 2 20 years. Its a very dramatic rise and it keeps increasing every year, okay, because our safety net in the aftermath of welfare reform has all but crumbled, right . We have fewer, well, i wont get into that. Its really a story about people how people live and try to survive apart from a safety net and the incredible costs that are borne by families who have to survive with no source of cash income. You know, probably, i will just end with this. The most profound story, the most profound impact that this project out on me was, i went repeatedly to the mississippi delta during this period to this tiny little town. I cant tell you the name of the town because then you could identify the characters in the book. But the tiny little town near clarksville mississippi and i met a young girl there named tabitha. And tabitha had lived most of her life, most of her life under the two dollars a day threshold. Her mother had to sell half the food stamps at 50 cents on the dollar just to pay the utility bills. So the receipt in the winter. It gets very cold in northern mississippi. That winter it that some as low as nine degrees. Although bit of her condition. And summers and would often top 110 degrees. So tabitha and his siblings just, the hungry skits youve ever seen. They were just so hungry. And after id gotten to know tabitha, we were sitting out in front of the old woolworths in clarksdale which is a coffee shop, and this is where the freedom riders had come from a very historic location. She wanted to tell me something. She wanted to tell me a story about being hungry. She related this story, being 15 and being inbox on facebook by her teacher. Her gym teacher said ive been watching you since you were young. Waiting for you to mature. He then asked her to come to his house after school and promised her food if she would have sex with him. So this is how vulnerable our children are without a safety net. So she engages in this liaison with the gin stuffer, stuffing her backpack full of food for her starving Little Brothers and sisters. Finally, she cant take it anymore. She tells another teacher and theres this kind of miraculous story of this teacher wh not ony gets her out of the situation, but gets her out of town into a swanky Orting School in memphis where she manages to be the first person an in the family to graduate from high school and go to college. But after she related this story, there was this pause and then i said, tabitha, what did it feel like to be that hungry . And she said, it feels like you want to be dead. Because its peaceful being dead. So in the end of the book without you have a really terrific chapter on what we can do about this. There are strategies all the way from the local community to local and state government, to the federal government, to the nonprofit sector. But what i would urge you to do is to not only read the book and think about how you can be involved, both as an individual and an advocate, but i also urge you to go out and find someone like tabitha, to form a relationship with that person. Because its really that tides the ties between second turn all this around. Thank you. [applause] both of your books seem to discuss the ways in which federal policy as a relates to housing, food or cash benefits and he was receiving them and was not has a profound impact on generations of families. Can you talk about why some of these families are not receiving thesthose benefits and what cane done in the future, i guess, by their average citizen to ensure that more people are receiving what they need . So im going to talk about two policies. One is the housing choice voucher which i mentioned earlier. We spent 18pound out a on this program, only house one out of four families who need housing. So its like winning the lottery. Yet most families receive this voucher in debt, channel back to moderate to high poverty neighborhoods. What we know now after 30 years of research is that neighborhoods are vital. Not just families and neighborhoods themselves are a vital source of child development. And so we can certainly do better than were doing with the policy that is already in place. This is a new policy. And there are other ways to inclusion of zoning to great Affordable Housing opportunities in neighborhoods where kids dont have to be best to go to better schools. They go to better schools because at the same bus stop middleclass and white peers pick so i think one thing that is extremely important is housing. We have a Housing Affordability crisis on one level and we have a place of crisis where people live that exacts a enormous toll finalized we know that neighborhood violence diminishes the cognitive capacity of children. And growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood reduces the chance of High School Graduation precipitously. So housing policy is a key piece here, our housing policy infrastructure is fragile. Its subject to lots of local windwhims and decisions. So one important thing to do is to be vigilant about what were doing with housing locally and whether we are all promoting fair share housing policy. We also not the federal level had has there been a Strong Agency and so theres lots to be looking out for their but we have this very precious and very powerful social policy tool hud. The other policy around Higher Education, around or private schools here so one of the things that without in our book is that the most common pathway to college for the young adults in baltimore that we talked to come half of whom went to college, the most popular way to do college was to do it at a forprofit trade school. Only 17 out of 150 young people people went to a fouryear college. Most of them and started at a forprofit school. Many went to Community College as well but the forprofit schools are particularly important right now, we know theres lots of activity around monitoring and regulating the schools that we really need to be watching because theres a lot of potential rollback of moderating some of the schools. And why do we care about that . What we learned is the young people in baltimore, these youth who i described as being optimistic and having got the memo about what theyre supposed to do, theyre supposed to work, go to school. They are so eager to launch, and they cant imagine four years, too much happens in four years. And college is an abstract fuzzy idea. Whats not fuzzy on the commercials on television every day about forprofit schools. They see people doing work in Dentist Office and welding. And they think i can do that. And jump quickly into these are private schools that have a net price for poor children that is three to five times higher than the university of maryland year. So the inverse of maryland graduates 85 of its students in six years and cost about 76 a year for year for a poor student. Anyone about forprofit trade schools can cost 15 25,000 a year. Youre supposed to finish in 18 months. This rarely happens. Do the math. You could cover three years at university of maryland for one Certificate Program in hvac at a forprofit trade school. Most of these young people in the come even with the short duration programs not finishing. They dont know that phlebotomy bejewel out to be sticking people with needles and they dont have the stomach for that. They quit and trike in paying tuition all over again. The credits dont transfer. This is a calm an in my mind and nobrainer institutional lover that we can Pay Attention to their weve got these eager young people are ready to launch and want to go to school. They want to work. The lasting what to do is be on the corner. They jump into these for profit schools and they are vulnerable to the structure of the schools which it neutralizes their potential in many ways. When did work well they can work really well and theres some incredibly high performing dental hygienist programs but they are about 50k. Its very expensive. These are two policies as, the housing policy and the Higher Education peace around the forprofit schools thats a new conversation took weve been talking for a long time about four year schools and thats incredibly important for thinking about inequality but when wer we thinking about basc survival and stabilization and getting into a workingclass job at the very least, the schools can be predatory at worst are just confusing interlink these efforts at best. So really important things to be paying attention to. So the rise in two dollars a day poverty is not just because of a troubling safety net although thats an incredible, incredibly important story. Its also about the nature of work, the changing nature of work. After welfare reform we saw an unprecedented number of single mothers enter the labor market. And they began to redefine themselves as workers. By the time we started the two dollars a day study we were jut struck by how more than anything else people in our study, even these extremely poor people, identified as workers, wanted to the workers, and had deep work history. Take a look at the statistics come if you follow a poor child over the course of a year, 90 of poor children live in a household with an adult who has been in the former formal labor market. Support is really predated the lives of the poor in a profound way. It probably always has but for single mothers we really saw this historic rise. But as you all know, work is fracturing. The workplace is more and more fissured. This is especially true for unskilled workers. So there are not enough good jobs to go around. Very few lowwage employers will employ you fulltime if you get a job for 15 an hour at my local Grocery Store chain, and then try to take a second job that have to schedule around. They will reduce your hours to five. We have the rise of zero hour oncall contracts where youre simply sent home when the foot traffic slows, are you told not to come in at all, or your hours are reduced to zero for months at a time during a slow season and all of these forces are affecting parents. These are not jobs are teenagers. These are jobs. Our taking trying to raise children rent it we need to figure out a way not just to realize that sometimes it wont work and you do need a safety net but also we need to attend to work and to attend to the fact that the changes in our labor market are impacting the most vulnerable of our citizens, even when they get the memo that they are supposed to work and they really see you work as part of their identity. At this time i would like to invite the audience to ask any questions. You can step to the microphone on the isle there if you have anything to ask of our panelists. Concerning the Higher Education peace of it that you talked about, with the forprofit schools, have you both met with Community College people in the Baltimore Area to ask them why theyre not providing those types of jobs, not jobs, but education for those types of occupations . So you know, thanks to give me a chance to talk about my next study. Theres always the next study. So i just sat down a couple of weeks ago with the president of, Vice President of Baltimore Citi Community College. And the head of the college and Career Readiness to talk about this. And say look, you know, they both have problems they want to solve. The Baltimore City schools are interested in this big information problem. Students get that they should medico to commute to college and they enroll at dccc intros. Morgan state and, these are the lights at the end of the table. They provide this incredible inspiration for the future pic at the same time they are incredibly beleaguered and underfunded place that struggle. But Baltimore City schools are interested in figuring out how to provide that information, sort of a know before you enroll program. And we are trying to launch a study to help them better understand the decisionmaking process that is going on for their High School Juniors and seniors. At bccc theyre of forgot, they have a catalog upon catalog of these programs. So does bccc. You can learn hvac, massage therapy. They are called noncredit programs which i think they might want to change the name but are they going to the schools to recruit people . That are College Fairs but thats a quite enough support. And so im encouraged by the fact that theres a lot of interest in the leadership at bccc to figure out how to do this better, how to get students, i mean come anything from even saying what does fulltime coursework, is this a ninemonth window for a 12 month window seating theater Financial Aid . Lots of strategies schools are willing to embrace and still learning about the needs of the students. Baltimore City Committee college is a fraction of the price, a young man innercity said you dont see people and commercials writing jobs that went to bccc. But the forprofit goods of his incredible commercial. They spend more on advertising than starbucks. So anyway, we are starting these conversations and thanks for bringing that up. I think this is morally urgent but its also economically vital for us to understand this transition and how to better supported so the students dont end up swirling over and over again with all the debt and no credentials. I worked at cannes to care which is a forprofit chain of Day Care Centers tender care. It was amazing to me the way they treated their employees. Once the ratio i had twoyearolds and might have one adult for every six children. Once i got down to six children in the class, they sent that other staff member home. So they are not guaranteed a 40 hour week and less the thing schema. I went in and getting seven dollars an hour as a College Graduate and they raised me to 81 year, the next year they raised, they went back to seven because they couldnt afford to keep the ratio of what the parents had to pay so that they could afford it to what they were paying their staff. So it was a catch 22 all the way around and i would volunteer to go home when some had to leave because i didnt need the money. But those kids were working, they were High School Graduates and working for less than 40 40 hours a week and supporting single mothers supporting children. It just wasnt fair or right, but it was the nature of economics involved. Yeah, so its interesting, very, very compelling story. So this isnt the typical story that we see, and what happens then is about this instability in the workplace sparks housing instability, which leads families into often repeated perlis double ups or even homelessness. Those conditions make it hard then to be reliable employees even at bad jobs. And as you can imagine over time this really wears on individuals in ways that affects their health, that affects their concentration. Psychologists have shown it even affects their ability to engage in longterm planning. When youre spending all of your Mental Energy just trying to survive, youre not able to have the cognitive bandwidth to engage in longerterm planning. The way you look at what these folks have to do to survive in between these bouts of ad jobs, its truly heart wrenching. One of the ubiquitous Survival Strategies we documented, we began noticing that almost everyone, affect everyone in our study had a different insight other elbow david. This was from frequent plasma donation. So that tiny bit of cash these folks felt they had to generate, you know, to pay for socks and a for the kids. You cant pay for socks and with your food stamp your medicaid card cant pay her utilities. So watching jessica from Johnson City Tennessee trudged down the hill a half hour walk, theres 111pound woman, to literally give away her lifeblood for a few dollars twice a week, you know, that get you, right . It turns out that since welfare reform, plasma sales have grown dramatically in the united states, just between 20042014 they grew from 5 million, the 32 million. America now provides 60 of the plasma for the world. We are known as the opec of plasma. So all of these factors lead us to a least hypothesize that we may, for the first time in american history, have created a true poverty trap where you end up swirling in between Survival Strategies in ways that are so consuming and depleting that you are no longer able to experience mobility from poverty over the life course. The other thing was when he got down to the one to six ratio with the twoyearolds come if youre out on the playground and something, someone had to go to the bathroom, you had to take all six kids in. So they had to go to the bathroom so often, we have these wonderful curriculums were lucky to get because theyre constantly and at out of the bathroom with his kids. So it was just, that was just poor management but it was the economic realities of the situation. Right. Real catch22. Hello. When i was 16 i was married, and i completed high school and worked two jobs, leaning stalls and cleaning kennels. It didnt pay much, but i graduate high school and i always drew pictures. I was a good but i did it. Eventually my husband at the time hit me so i moved home. I was 50 pounds overweight and started running. And i did art and i went to prince georges and i won the 800 and the 1500meter races. I won first place in the art show here so i just kept going. And eventually i come i competed dartmouth, yale, boston. I did new york. I got in that and that just took it all away. So all im saying is responsibility. Youve got to youve got to work hard to make it. All i can think of is like ben carson turkey came from a really tough place and look at what he is now. Hes great. And all i know is, i hold the american flight out there and to think about people asking why, and i say because people are willing to fight for our freedoms and die for our freedoms. Its the least i can do is hold that flag. Thats all ive got to say. You guys have a good day. Thank you. Responsibility and priorities. Thats whats important. The future, the kids. Thats whats important. Just teach them to take care of themselves and work hard because thats how you make it. Thank you so much for that. We have one more question and then we are going to wrap. I hope im not offtopic, but i was wondering, is anybody working on addressing the changing Work Environment because of automation . And where are they going with it . Yeah, so she asked about automation. Most economists, i was on facebook last week talking with, you know, the industry experts, and our jobs are not going to disappear overnight but the workplace is going to change a lot. There are a lot of jobs that are going to be automated so we really need to rethink what it means to work. Work is really important as the last speaker just said, to be american ethos. To work is to be a citizen really in many ways in the united states. So we will probably going to need to rethink work. Theyre so much work to be done at the market isnt, you know, providing for. We have too much trash in r street. We dont have enough highly qualified childcare centers. Our classrooms are too large. Our parks need better monitoring. We need more park rangers. So theres so much work to be done in society, and our Public Libraries are often not open enough hours and so on. So thats one of the big challenges were going to face the next 50 years is how do we rethink work or rethink citizenship and a lot of european countries, citizenship extends beyond work and really envelops Community Engagement and volunteerism. Answer may be our communities in figures were actually be much richer because we will have redefined work and citizenship in ways that bring us closer together. Thank you because this time we are going to thank kathryn edin and Stephanie Deluca. [applause] their books are available in the exit. You can purchase them and they will sign them. And we will be there to sign them. And chat with you oneonone. Thank you. [inaudible conversations] good morning again. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you have been listening to an author discussion on income inequality. This is live coverage on booktv of the 15th annual Annapolis Book festival. In about ten minutes the next all the panel will begin. The topic is criminal justice and we will be back live with that in just a few minutes. Some of the current bestselling nonfiction books according to the washington post. The question was getting back to the topic are hospitals killing us. I mean, quite frankly ill just say i think thats ridiculous. I mean, i work every day with people that gives their all to provide the very best care they get, the best Healthcare System in the world when you say either mistakes made in any Health Care Organization or any system . Of course there are. Doesnt need to be a commitment to constant improvement, which is to go back and get a root cause analysis of what the mistakes are and see to it that they are not duplicated . But theres just no part of me at all based on my experience that would suggest that there is anything widespread like that that is going on that anybody should worry about. I disagree. And again just respectfully, i think a case of a hospitals are killing people. We saw it in los angeles earlier this year. Their work and dos could be scopes into patient and let every system directory and a transfer to other patients many of them died. So there were actual deaths in hospitals because the scope was designed improperly, wasnt clean properly and there was activex i think the notion and i think i hope what the session will get to is that we in medicine are not perfect. We in medicine have to get a lot better. When we start to look at the system, resistant bacteria major problem in the world today. The World Health Organization estimated that would be 50 Million Deaths from resistant bacteria in 15, 20 years begin raising thing is this is the coolest story ever. Three days after that announcement those the discovery in maine, probably guilty scientific discovery ever to come from the state of maine. Nothing begets maine. My family is from maine. Antibiotics all come from back to evict bacteria made it to attack of the bacteria to get resources. We thought we had them all. This clever group from maine took back the soil and they put into the cultures. They create new bacteria that would never grow without soil being in the media. An identified a new bacteria that at its own antibiotic and it killed every drugresistant strain we saw. So all of a sudden three days after this proclamation we had a potential answer on it. The hard part though is how to make sure that happens . How do we make sure that this drug, nobody wanted the drug. You have to save it until every of the drug fails. Who wants to do a drug that is on can be used in a couple hundred people a year . Nobody. We need to fix the system to make it right. We need to look at hospitals and say where are the errors happening and had we make it better . Every hospital in the country, the best or the worse, make errors. How would we learn from it works we dont go back and say what do we do right and wrong . We dont go back and say how to make it better . Youve all been a hospital. Most people at one point. Its not a fun place. The food not very good. Theyre waking you up all night checking a blood pressure. Do we really need at 3 a. M. Blood pressure . Most of the time the interest no. Sleep is wobbly very important for them. I do think we need to redo hospitals. You are changing for the outpatient. Thats the trend all over. The trend is going to be i think even greater because when you go to one of the Doctors Offices, they draw your blood, check your blood pressure, your weight. They collect data and in the call you with the result. Results. Its not a very efficient system. The office of the future would be you prick your finger at home, send it in, check your blood pressure, or when you do something remarkable which is have a discussion. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org