Radiolab - Radiolab Presents: On the Media: Busted, America's Poverty Myths

Episode Date: January 18, 2017

We love to share great radio, even if we didn’t make it. Today, On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone tells Jad and Robert about a mammoth project they launched to take a critical look at the tales we tell ourselves when we talk about poverty. In a 5-part series called "Busted: America’s Poverty Myths,” On the Media picked apart numerous oft-repeated narratives about what it's like to be poor in America. From Ben Franklin to a brutal eviction, Brooke gives us just a little taste of what she learned and shares a couple stories of the struggle to get ahead, or even just get by. Go check out the full series, it’s well worth it. You can hear all 5 episodes of Busted here or subscribe to On the Media in iTunes (or wherever you get your podcasts) to listen to this series or all their other great work. "Busted: America’s Poverty Myths" was produced by Meara Sharma and Eve Claxton and edited by Katya Rogers. They produced the series in collaboration with WNET’s Chasing the Dream; poverty and opportunity in America. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.           

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. This is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say who you are. Okay. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad.

I'm Robert Kroats. Jad's been gone for a while, so you might have forgotten that. But he's here again. I'm back. So glad to be back. And today. Today, we are featuring our... Those people you just heard.

Yeah, these are our pals from down the hall at On the Media. With part three of our series, busted America's poverty men. Because a little while back, Brooke Landstone, she put together a wonderful set of stories. Five in all, I believe. About poverty in the United States. And it's a pretty amazing series. And we figure part of what we should do here always is present not just our work, but great work that's happening around us. So we decided to bring Brooke into our studio.

Hello. Hey, nice to see you in our territory. All right. She came to talk about what she found and to play us parts of this series, which we think you're going to dig. I have to say that, except for my comic book, which tells you a lot, it was the hardest thing I've ever done professionally. Really? You know, breaking down a ridiculously complex story into little components and then putting it through the on-the-media Play-Doh extruder, so it came out media-shaped. And the thing is, is what we do at On the Media is we examine the prevailing narratives and use those as a way to discuss the reality.

Must I forever be a beggar? So if you haven't heard it on the media, you definitely need to listen to On the Media. It's like required listening these days, especially these days. But in this series, what Brooke does is she sort of goes episode by episode and examines one by one. one, the big media myths when it comes to poverty. You know, like that in one episode she talks about, you know, the myth of laziness that poor people are just lazy. In another episode, she tackles the myth of the social safety net, you know, that someone's

going to catch you when you fall. That's right. The upward mobility myth, the one that paints America as a nation where everyone has an equal chance to surmount any obstacle and advance from rags to riches. It's an idea sewn on our shores by a founding father, himself born into poverty. Benjamin Franklin. He's the youngest of ten sons, and his sister Jane is the youngest of seven daughters. Benny and Jenny, they're called when they're little.

Their father's a candle maker and a soap boiler. Historian Jill Lepore, author of Book of Ages, The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, writes that Jenny and Benny are close. He teaches her to read. They spend their childhood making soap and dipping candles. Benjamin is an apprentice to his brother, who's a printer. And when he's 16 or 17, he runs away to Philadelphia, and he eventually opens up his own printing shop.

And he does so well that Franklin actually manufactures most of the paper in the colonies in the 18th century. He opens up and owns a whole lot of paper mills. Paper in the 18th century is made from rags. And so Franklin, in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, prints these little notices, bring in your rags, cash for rags. Ben sends them to his mill to be pulped. Franklin, though, also gets the license in Pennsylvania to print paper currency.

So Franklin literally turns rags to riches. And that's really where the notion comes from. Oh, interesting. So the phrase rags to riches comes from Ben Franklin, having opened up a bunch of paper plants, and then paper was made from rags, and he printed currency and made tons of money doing that, hence literally rags to riches.

Thus enriched and, of course, esteemed, for his service to the new nation, he recounts his rags to riches saga in a groundbreaking memoir. The only stories of lives at that point are the stories of the great of kings and princes. And Franklin starts out as a pauper, essentially. So he publishes this autobiography to be a model for young men. He wants to tell the story of having made his own rise. This is not to slight the man who helps draft the Declaration of Independence, invents the lightning rod, his stove, bifocals, the flexible catheter, and the glass harmonica you're hearing now,

and who also launched the first lending library and also the first publicly supported hospital. Clearly, Ben does not want the poor struggling for books and medicine, but as a general principle, he's okay with struggle. He famously wrote, The best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it, and that the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves. He's responsible for himself and his great success and his success alone and people in his life that depend on him or on whom he may have depended for support. He erases them. And that becomes so much a part of the literary tradition of American autobiography. So it's like the original

pick yourself up by your bootstrap story is like a Ben Franklin. Yeah, but as we mention the peace. One notable absence from Ben's book, his sister Jane, married off at 15 to a near-do-well with a history of mental illness passed on to two of their sons. And when most of her 12 children died too young, Jane raises their children and their children's children. Her whole life, she's constantly trying to scrabble together some kind of a living by taking in borders, taking in laundry, making the family soap. But the fascinating thing in remembering how important that story is to our sense of the American past is Benjamin Franklin's sister endures the fate that almost everybody else in the 18th century does. She remains in the

station to which she's born. And she writes with love to Ben that some impediments are just too hard to break through and that far too much potential is squandered through an accident of birth. And that's the story of Jane Franklin's life. She's this brilliant woman struggling, you know, to figure out how to get firewood for her many, many, many, many children, taking care of Franklin's parents whom he abandoned, who were sick and destitute in their old age. He comes to Boston and erects a giant monument to their memory that really just celebrates him and his generosity.

The historical record is asymmetrical. We know so much more about the people who thrive and so little about the people who don't thrive. You really have to think hard. What is this story telling me? What is it not telling me? What is Franklin's autobiography telling me? What is it not telling me?

Who's missing here? I love that part, by the way. I did too. It occurred to me that the myth, if it is a myth, the story that Ben Franklin told about being an American boy and about the upward potential of that, where if you started poor but sharp, you could knife your weight at the top. And that story is still true in many people's minds. Yeah, I mean, it started with Ben Franklin, but that's exactly the point we're making. in the show. Ever since, the self-made man has been the avatar of the American spirit, especially in politics, starting with old Hickory Andrew Jackson, right up to Hillary Clinton citing her drape-making

dad and Donald Trump claiming he grew his fortune from nothing, but a small multimillion dollar loan from his father. Likewise, the 2004 election featured Dick Gephart, son of a milk truck driver, John Edwards, son of a mill worker, and Barack Obama, son of a son of a goat herder, leading John Stewart to ask Daily Show's senior political analyst Stephen Colbert. Are they laying this on a little thick? Does it ring hollow if everyone trumpets this bootstrap story? Wow. That's pretty cynical, John. I mean, I, for one, connected with what they were saying. Then again, I myself am from humble origins. My father was a poor Virginia turd miner.

I'm sorry? He mined turds, John. That's why I believe in the promise of America that I, the son of a turd miner, could one day leave those worthless hicks behind while still using their story to enhance my own credibility. In terms of the idea of the American idea of upward mobility, the bootstraps myth, clearly it happens enough so that it persists.

But what is the case you have? It might happen enough to make it more likely to be in America than to be in the Philippines or in Argentina or in Mexico. Right. Like, is there some kind of analysis that says how many people born into a certain social place end up moving up? Like, what percentage of Americans throughout the course of their life actually do better? Well, the way that you measure this generally is how many people go from the. bottom of the fifth income bracket to the top. And for America, on the average, it's about 7.5%.

Wow. That's not bad. Which is... Israeli, it sounds a load of me. Really? Yeah. I would imagine I was hoping for a bigger number. But it's twice that in Canada.

It's twice that nearly in Denmark. It's better in Australia. So we decided to look at the numbers, the hard numbers. Denmark is 11.7, so that's much better than America. Canada is at 13.4, which is... That is double. Roughly double. You know, there's a bunch of countries all across Europe that do better than we do.

So, you know, when it comes to this basic measure of upward mobility, not only are we not unique, we're sort of toward the bottom of the pile when measured against similar countries. Wow. Are you sure? Yeah. And the crucial thing to remember is that even within the U.S., your chances of moving up varies incredibly from one place to another. There's a famous researcher named Roz Chetty at Stanford. And he showed that in some regions of the country, your chances of moving up, are really good, the best in the world.

Places like San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Salt Lake City. I'm looking here, San Jose 12.9 percent. San Francisco, 12.2, DC-11, Seattle 10.9, Salt Lake, 10.8. But when you get to Columbus, 4.9, Atlanta, 4.5. Milwaukee, 4.5. Charlotte. It's 4.4. In Memphis, it's closer to 3%. Wait, just so I understand what we're talking about, this is the percentage of people who are able to sort of move on up.

Yeah. So it sounds like the bootstraps myth is pretty much not there, except if you're, like, born in San Jose or a place like that. Yeah. Yeah. So that just shows that your likelihood of moving up is based on where you are even more than who you are. Let's listen to more of that story.

According to Roz Chetty, the worst performing neighborhoods are correlated with segregation, income inequality, single-parent families, poor schools, and lack of social cohesion. These neighborhoods are very often black and overlooked when officials set budget priorities. Chetty says that government can effectively begin to boost mobility by investing in and fixing those neighborhoods. Meanwhile, it can do a better job of moving families, especially with young kids, out of them. 25% of the gap in earnings between blacks and whites is driven simply by the fact that blacks tend to grow up in neighborhoods that are much worse on average than whites. The government already spends more than $20 billion annually on housing vouchers calculated to enable poor families to rent in better areas, but they can take years, even decades, to get. And when they get them, most states allow landlords to refuse vouchers, and they often do. So these families wind up where they started, paying a savvy slumlord much more for much less,

because there's no place else for them to go. In 1863, the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the emancipation proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given. any land to make that freedom meaningful. Martin Luther King at the National Cathedral in Washington, 1968. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. Just go up to him and say, now you're free.

But you don't give him any bus fare to get to town. And the irony of it all is that at the same time that the nation failed to do anything for the black man, it was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor, but not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. It provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize our farms.

And to this day, thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every year not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. In 2003, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a famous study in which researchers responded to help-wanted ads

for clerical administrative and customer service jobs in the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe. They applied with names associated with whites like Greg or blacks like Jamal, based on naming data for babies born in the late 70s. The white names produced 50% more callbacks. A white name yielded as many more callbacks as an extra eight years of experience on a black resume. In another study based in New York, whites with criminal records got more callbacks than blacks with clean records. So much for bootstraps.

E.B. White once wrote, Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men. Indeed, surveys find that wealthy people are far more likely than poor ones to say hard work is what leads to success and to credit hard work, above all, for their happy lot in life. Of course, hard work and talent matter, but they offer no guarantee. As Robert Frank, Professor of Economics at Cornell University, observes in success and luck, good fortune in the myth of meritocracy. He says success may also

hang on the month or location of your birth, not to mention the wealth you're born with. But when we compose our personal narratives, those things recede into the mist. As Frank found, when confronted by Fox News host, Stuart Varney. Am I lucky or not? Yes. Who I am and where I? I'm lucky. You are. Lucky. Okay. And so am I. That's outrageous. That is outrageous. What about the risk I took? Do you know what risk is involved in coming to America with absolutely nothing? Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent, a total foreigner? Do you know what risk is implied for this level of success? I do.

Is it luck that you hold a tenured position? Yes. That's nonsense. I am insulted by what you said. Well, you are going against the American. Against the American dream. Look, if you come to America with nothing and you play by the rules, you work hard, you get discipline inside yourself.

You marry and have children in that order, okay? You do all of those things. You play by the rules. You will make it in America, and luck has nothing to do with it. That's not true, sir. I got in my cab leaving the studio, and, of course, only then did I think about all the fat pitches he had thrown my way that I'd completely failed even to swing at.

Frank, speaking sometime later at New York University. He said he'd come to the USA with nothing. He had a degree from the London School of Economics. That's coming to the U.S. with nothing. He had somehow overcome the handicap of working in America with a British accent. Americans love British accents. He said he took risks.

Well, what's a risk? I looked it up. Miriam Webster, risk is the possibility. that something bad or unpleasant, such as an injury or loss, will happen. He took risks and he succeeded. Well, that means by definition that he was lucky. Full stop. But I didn't have the wit to point that out.

But what does it matter pointing it out? Well, as Frank notes, several studies suggest that when we feel gratitude, we're more generous to strangers, when we're reminded of luck's importance, we are more likely to plow some of our own good fortune back into the common good. But we underplay luck, because we can recall our own struggles far better than the fateful but fuzzy role of chance, and because the very idea corrods our faith and free will. But mostly because, like Benny Franklin, we're deeply invested in our own autobiographies. Take me.

My parents went broke a couple of times once we had to put off. all our stuff out on the lawn to be auctioned. I went to college almost totally on aid. But I always knew I was going to college. Even on nights when supper was left over Kentucky Fried Chicken, I brought home from the job, I knew that this was temporary. So I can say, wow, I'm really self-made.

But I know I'm not. Sure, I always kind of knew I was lucky. But not until working on this series did I really begin to understand what that. that meant. Hard work is real, but bootstraps are bunk and social mobility a myth. Unless a nation chooses to build the infrastructure, the roads on which a person can move upward, you pretty much can't get there from here. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll take a look at another myth about poverty with Brooke Gladstone and you'll hear an interview

that just when I heard it just like stop me cold. Sam calling from Denver, Colorado. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. Hey, we're back. I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. And we're back talking to Brooke Gladstone from On the Media

about a series of stories that they broadcast called Busted, America's poverty myths. We've already gone through the myth of upward mobility, but this next one, it gets... a little more personal. And a little more downward. Let me just say that one of the most important parts of this whole enterprise for me was to let people tell their stories as fully as they could in their own voice. And that was the case with Margaret Smith.

She's the woman we meet in Chapter 4. Yes. But can you set up the conceit? So we did the myth of the bootstraps. This was the myth of the safety net. That's what this was about. And I'm Brooke Gladstone, with part four in our series Busted America's Poverty Myths.

This time it's the myth that America's social safety net, though imperfect, still is able to catch people in economic freefall before they slam the pavement. But there's no way to confront that myth without conveying how that sounds. So prepare yourself for the narrative equivalent of Boom Splat. And I talk about how many, many people only have $1,000 or less in savings and that a majority of people would not be able to save themselves from a relatively inexpensive,

from our point of view, short-term emergency. And so what I was trying to do in that episode, was to describe the way that people put their lives together and how fragile those arrangements are. And Margaret was an example of that. So get ready for that boom splat, I mentioned at the top, the sound of someone crashing through the safety net. Hello, how are you?

You can come on in. Recorded here at the YWCA Family Center clean and orderly homeless shelter in Columbus, Ohio. My name is Margaret Smith, and I have six children, five boys and one girl. The reason I ended up in the shelter is because my son was shot outside of our house. He's 17. He knew the girl. He used to date her, and he didn't want to be with her anymore.

She came with some guys, and they shot my son six times. He's like, Mom, help me. I feel like I'm about to die. I said, you're not going to die on me today. All the kids were sitting there they were watching. I'm seeing his blood, a good shot of his neck. So I grabbed the blanket, put it around his neck, put a knot in it. I told my 15-year-old daughter, I said, I need you to put your hands right here

and apply pressure to his neck. My 11-year-old went to get a pillow off the couch to elevate his head. He said, sis, he keep talking to me, talk to me, talk to me. The ambulance finally got there. As he's in ICU fighting for his life, I go home three days later, I go to the landlord to pay the rent. She tells me, did you get the eviction notice? I said, what eviction notice?

She said, well, you have a three-day eviction notice. So I called the attorney that was over the property. The idea was made a mutual decision to leave in 45 days, but I let him know that I can't leave in three because I'm still at the hospital. You had violated your agreement in their view because you had committed a crime. It wasn't for lack of payment. It was because a crime was committed on the property, but it wasn't the people that lived in the property that committed the crime. He was a victim. So I ended up in the shelter. I lost my job. I worked at the customer rep for a southern Connecticut gas,

of the gas company. They couldn't hold my position. They had me go through Aetna to see if they would get it approved under disability. They denied it. So they couldn't hold my position. For the four weeks, I needed to take care of my son. So they terminated me. So not only did I lose my place, I lost my job, and I ended in the shelter. And not only that, all my kids are spreaded out at different places. My son is still healing. He still had nurses, physical therapy, and it's just breaking my heart that I can't be with my kids. Where are they? My son is at my mother's.

My daughter is at her aunts, and my other son is at her cousins. And I have the two the youngest ones with me here. It's just been a nightmare. I've been trying to find places. But every time I go to the place, they ask, well, how are you going to continue to pay the rent? I'm going to go to work and pay the rent like any other normal person

would do. Just right now, my main focus is getting my children back together in the house. Me and my family were a victim of a crime, so why should we lose everything because of what someone else created for us? It's not fair. Tell me about your kids. My oldest son, that's one. He's a diabetic. He's 23. Very good kid. He helps. me with the children while I work. My other son, Raymond Cook, is the one that was shot. He was 17 years old. Every morning, he would get the kids off to school, which was down the street from my house,

and then he would go to school. So by him being in the hospital, that was ruined because I didn't have the kids in daycare because I felt like I had enough older kids. We could pour together and make this work. So everything was just all. screwed up. My 15-year-old is my daughter. Tierra Cook, straight down a row student, plays basketball. She wants to be a lawyer when she grow up. She's trying to get a scholarship.

My 11-year-old, his name is Alon Smith. He is so supportive. When I was at the shelter in our room, I just broke down crying. And he grabbed me, and he said, Mommy, it's going to be okay. And he put my big head on his little shoulder. You see, with some skillful juggling, she'd maintained a stable, if fragile, life for her family. But a lethal ex-girlfriend swept in like a hurricane and blew it apart. Margaret has health insurance for the kids and food stamps, but no money. There's a lifetime limit on cash assistance of 60 months, and Margaret had used it all up.

Many years ago, when her father died, she required long treatment to overcome a suicidal depression. Later, she had diverticulitis. Then she had to have a mass in her throat surgically removed. Then a hip replacement. She needs another one, but obviously that'll have to wait. Now she has to get all those balls back up in the air. I've got to get my kids out of here. We didn't come a long way from the projects

to me moving, living on my own, the last seven years, paying regular rent. I didn't ever want to go back to the projects. I lived there all my life. that project will destroy, especially young men. You don't have a chance. You got people that's in the gang over here. It'll swallow your kids up. I had to go.

But it came to my house. So this is what I say to people. Even people that's got money and power, don't walk around with your head up high. Some people look at you like, oh, you're beneath me, you're this and you're that, but I'm still a person. I have a heart. I have ambitions.

I might not have got there yet, but I'm working towards it. You treat people how you want to be treated, whether they have a dollar in their pocket, a penny, or you, a millionaire. Because you never know when it's short term. Anything can happen. You might be on top of the world tomorrow, but it can end for you the next day. And you'll go through poverty what we're going through. James Baldwin, once observed,

anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. If you're poor, you pay more for public transit because you can't afford a monthly pass, or you rely on old cars that break down and cost more to fix while paying gas prices that have outrun your wages. You pay more for car insurance because of where you live. You pay more for rent than your place is worth.

If you're poor, you're unlikely to eat healthy meals because healthy food costs an average of $45 more a month, tough on a minimum wage. You can't buy any food cheaply because it costs more in poor neighborhoods, and without spare cash, you can't even save by buying in bulk. You're less likely to have a bank account because of soaring fees and penalties. Your cash checks at places that take a cut. You also pay a higher percentage of your income in state and local taxes than the rest of us do, and so on. It's death by a thousand cuts and no way to staunch the bleeding. As Baldwin wrote,

one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever. You are 30 by now and nothing you have done has helped you to escape the trap. What is worse than that is that nothing you have done and as far as you can tell nothing you can do will save your son or your daughter from meeting the same disaster and possibly coming to the same end. Like, I know that people construct their lives in such a way where there's zero margin for error. On some level, I think every parent who isn't made of money lives in that state where at any moment you have to drop everything to go deal with a sick kid or whatever.

But this was that ordinary experience taken to a degree that was shocking. It was truly shocking. That you could see somebody making it and then suddenly they fall and they fall so hard. and so quickly. And for no other reason than they just got luck, you know? Mm-hmm. See, for me, to hear that, like,

so yes, the shooting was uninvited and unexpected, but then comes the eviction, and then comes the refusal to amend or in any way postpone the eviction in the face of what is an obviously horrific. Well, that's stupid left. Because people, sign leases saying if there is any police action on your property, you have an instant

eviction. I mean, it is an instant. It's three weeks. And they won't stop it. They won't stop it for anybody. I've heard this over and over again. That wasn't just because of some recalcitrant landlord. That is what goes on every day in America. That's book Gladstone from On the Media. What we've played you was part of a series called Busted, America's Poverty Myths, produced by Mirasharma and Eve Claxton, edited by Kachia Rogers. They produced a series in collaboration with WNAET's Chasing the Dream, Poverty, and Opportunity in America. You can hear all five episodes of Busted if you go to onemedia.org slash poverty. You can also subscribe to the media on iTunes or wherever to listen to all five of the episodes there. We would definitely recommend you do that because there's so much more than we were able to get into, and it's great.

I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crillwich. Thanks for listening. This is Jacob from Dallas, Texas. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abimrod. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is a senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwan, Latif Nassar, Melissa O'Donnell, Arian Wack, and Molly Webster. with help from Tracy Hunt, Nicar Fatali, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.