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2017 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

2. (Re)Discovering Poverty and Economic Underdevelopment: Michael Harrington’s

The Other America: Poverty in the United States

verfasst von : James L. Greer, Oscar Gonzales

Erschienen in: Community Economic Development in the United States

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

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Abstract

The USA experienced extraordinary economic growth in the 15 years following the end of the Second World War, so much so that it was possible to envision the end of hardship, impoverishment, and individual or familial economic stagnation, or worse, relative or absolute decline. The fears of national policy-makers in the closing years of the war—that all elements of the Great Depression would revisit the American political economy as millions of service men would return to civilian life and attempt to find jobs in a stagnant private economy unable to absorb workers, and economic distress would necessarily commence again—did not come to fruition. The reservations of informed policy-makers as well as academics did not, gratefully, transpire. Almost immediately, all sectors of the US economy, benefiting from the long years of enforced minimal consumption to support the war effort, rebounded unexpectedly. The American housing sector, in many ways the most significant drag on the nation’s economy throughout the long Depression, took off immediately, adding hundreds of thousands of new homes annually to the nation’s housing. Still, even as residential developers, large and small, constructed stunning numbers of new homes, they were unable to meet the demand for housing, now financed by long-term mortgages insured by the federal government. Manufacturing shifted with amazing ease from the vast war machine that had provided the bulk of armaments for the victorious Allies to the production of consumer goods. Jobs were plentiful, wages were increasing across all occupations, and even working-class jobs not only provided higher remuneration than blue-collar jobs but were also now largely protected by union contracts.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Market Failure and the Possibilities of Community Economic Development

Nächstes Kapitel The CDFI Industry: Its Origins and Development

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Byrd L. Jones, “The Role of Keynesians in Wartime Policy and Postwar Planning, 1940–1946,” American Economic Review, Vol. 62, Nos. 1–2 (Mar. 1, 1972): 129–123; William J. Barber, Design Within Disorder: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 158–168; Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 372–381.

Michael Harrington. The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962).

According to Alan Berube, “Since the late 1960s, the Census Bureau has tracked poverty in America using a measure developed by Social Security Administration researcher Mollie Orshansky in 1963. That measure was originally based on a family food budget and an estimate that families spent about one-third of their income on food. It provided a ‘poverty threshold’ that varies by family size, and which has been updated annually for inflation ever since.” Alan Berube, “The Continuing Evolution of American Poverty and Its Implications for Community Development”, Investing in What Work (San Francisco: Federal Reserve Bank, 2012), 56.

John Kenneth Galbraith. The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). A few years before the publication of Harrington’s book, economist John Kenneth Galbraith published an influential book where he argued that America has become an “affluent society” that had peaked in its economic development, regardless of concerns about inequality and poverty.

Harrington, The Other America, 6.

Harrington, The Other America, 68. One factor that contributed to an understanding of racial discrimination in the country, particularly among the elite of the East Coast, was “the role of the Freedom Riders, a group of black and white young people who traveled to the South in order to help blacks assert their right to vote. President Kennedy’s youthful earnestness and charm promised an America more sensitive to the many problems that were festering just beneath the surface of social life.”

Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 141–142; Gary Orfield, “Does Desegregation Help Close the Gap?: Testimony of Gary Orfield, March 22, 1996,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Summer, 1997): 241–254.

According to Maurice Isserman, “The readers Harrington was speaking to were themselves citizens of the affluent society, whose consciences he sought to stir. And among those readers, reputedly, was President John F. Kennedy, although whether he actually read the book or the lengthy and favorable review by literary critic Dwight Macdonald that appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in February 1963 remains in dispute. Either way, according to James Sundquist, a political scientist who was involved in early discussions of antipoverty legislation, The Other America brought to an end “piecemeal” thinking about social problems in the Kennedy administration.”

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Raymond Vernon, “The Changing Economic Function of the Central City,” James Q. Wilson, (ed.), Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 7–18; these phenomena were astutely articulated during the Great Depression in St. Louis. See St. Louis Plan Commission, “Urban Land Policy” (St. Louis, St. Louis Plan Commission, 1936). This “Urban Land Policy” plan was, in fact, a commissioned report to Harlan Bartholomew and Associates that provided a strikingly blunt assessment of the daunting (and likely insurmountable) problems confronting the very compact city of St. Louis. The analysis in this stunningly astute public document anticipated each of the fundamental characteristics of what became known 30 years later as the “urban crisis.”

Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 130–132.

O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 131.

Louis Wirth, “The Ghetto,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 1 (July, 1927): 68–70; see also James F. Short (ed.) The Social Fabric of the Metropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), especially Paul Frederick Cressey, “Population Succession in Chicago, 1898–1930”; W.I., Thomas, “The Immigrant Community,”; Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, “Male Juvenile Delinquency as Group Behavior”.

O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 127–130.

Bennett Harrison, “Ghetto Economic Development: A Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1 (March, 1974): 1, 13–17; Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 318, fn 19. The size of these initiatives can hardly be overstated; these Ford Foundation grants represented extraordinarily large resources (tens of millions in today’s economy) that were focused on the concentrated poverty areas of these cities.

David J. Erickson, The Housing Policy Revolution: Networks and Neighborhoods (Washington D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2009), 36–42; Robert Zdenek, “Community Development Corporations” in Severyn T. Bruyn and James Meehan (eds.) Beyond Market and the State: New Directions in Community Development (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 113–122; Sean Zielenbach, The Art of Revitalization: Improving Conditions in Distressed Inner-City Neighborhoods (New York: Garland, 2000), 230–234.

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The White House. “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later.” Washington, DC. January 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/01/08/war-poverty-50-years-later. Others, however, focus on the failures of the War on Poverty, particularly the stagnation that occurred from the mid-1970s to the present. See Paul Ryan’s report for the House Budget Committee, http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/. Ryan emphasizes the level of expenses in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other services that do not target the poor and that are not means tested. He argues, “There are at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans. For instance, there are dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 different food-aid programs, and over 20 housing programs. The federal government spent $799 billion on these programs in fiscal year 2012.” It is important to note that Medicare represented a vital aspect of poverty reduction for the elderly. Economic theory suggests that private insurers will exit catastrophic insurance markets, such as the market for the elderly, where costs related to the last years of life may cost millions of dollars. After Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, most private insurers charged exorbitant rates that were higher than monthly mortgage payments to cover insurance in the city. When the private sector will not provide reasonably priced insurance for catastrophic events, the government sometimes steps in as an insurer of last resort.

Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, 21–37. Moynihan, however, presented an historically myopic view: he ignored the substantial work of women’s groups—Jane Addams and her many colleagues at Hull House in Chicago as well as the extraordinary policy work of the General Confederation of Women’s Groups that brought to fruition numerous social welfare programs for Civil War veterans, women, and children pensioners, and, not to be ignored, the franchise for women as an Amendment to the US Constitution beginning in 1920. See Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge: Belnap Press, 1992).

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Mark Pinsky interview, June 11 2015.

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Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 32–34.

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Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 11–20.

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Mettler, Submerged State, chapter 2.

Alexander von Hoffman, “Calling Upon the Genius of Private Enterprise: The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Liberal Turn to Private-Public Partnerships,” Studies in American Political Development, 27 (Oct., 2013): 177–178.

Alexander von Hoffman, “Calling Upon the Genius of Private Enterprise”: 176–178.

Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr., The American Political Economy: Macroeconomics and Electoral Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/ford_foundation.html.

Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 223–229; D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 96–97.

Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Wall: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970).

Steven E. Andrachek, “Housing in the United States: 1890–1929”, in Gertrude Sipperly Fish, ed., The Story of Housing (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 125–128.

A. Scott Henderson, Housing & the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 211–214.

Alexander von Hoffman, “Calling Upon the Genius of Private Enterprise”: 165–169.

Kevin Fox Gotham, “Separate and Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235,” Sociological Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Mar., 2000): 20–22; Alyssa Katz, Our Lot: How Real Estate Come to Own Us (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 7–11; Michael Westgate and Ann Vick-Westgate, Gail Force Gail Cincotta, The Battles for Disclosure and Community Reinvestment (Cambridge: Harvard Bookstore, 2011), 135–136.

Titel: (Re)Discovering Poverty and Economic Underdevelopment: Michael Harrington’s
verfasst von: James L. Greer
Oscar Gonzales
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US
Buch: Community Economic Development in the United States
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-49790-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-349-69810-3

Copyright-Jahr: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-69810-3_2

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