Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Improved Poverty Metrics Show Aid Does Help

November 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Census distribution chart

A year and a half ago, the Census Bureau announced that it would address a long-sought demand of poverty researchers: For the first time in four decades, it would produce a dramatically different and more nuanced calculation identifying who in America struggles to cover basic living expenses and who doesn’t. We wrote at the time that researchers welcomed the promise of a new metric that could finally help quantify the impact of expensive federal anti-poverty programs. This week, the Census Bureau released its first report on the new Research Supplemental Poverty Measure (so-called because ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
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Poor Neighborhoods Mean Fewer High School Grads

October 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

"There's a lot of talk about how we live in a post-racial society, but that certainly isn't true," says Geoffrey Wodtke, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies the effects of growing up in the bad part of town. He and two other researchers tracked 2,100 children from age 1 to age 17, and they report that children growing up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment are much less likely to graduate from high school. While the results may seem expected, much of the previous research in the field had taken only snapshot measurements of such "neighborhood ... Read More

More like this: Education
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Climate Change, Agricultural Production and Africa’s Poor

May 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

All over the world, prices for food are skyrocketing upward. In China, the annual inflation rate for food is more than 10 percent and, in Egypt, food inflation has reached 20 percent. In fact, public discontent over high food costs has been one of the key factors driving the political earthquake under way in the Middle East. The globe is straining to feed ever more hungry mouths, and climate change might make the challenge even tougher by generally reducing agricultural yields. If food production does take a dive, the world's poor will be hit the hardest and no region will suffer more ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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Save the Poor by Selling Them Stuff — Cheap

April 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The first slide comes up on the white-walled lecture room's double display screens. In capital letters, it declares: "EMPATHY." The 40-odd Stanford students gathered in a semicircle of plastic chairs on the cement floor blink at the screen, awaiting explanation. Almost all of them are pursuing graduate degrees in some form of engineering or business — disciplines known more for unemotional logic and bare-knuckle competitiveness than getting in touch with someone else's feelings. Erica Estrada, a recent Stanford mechanical engineering grad with long, loose black hair, clicks to the next ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Magazine Feature Story, May-June 2011
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Clean Stoves for the Third World

April 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

When the United Nations, Hillary Clinton and Glenn Beck are exercised over the same idea, something must be cooking. Bad pun aside, that's what it is — cook stoves for the Third World that protect life, health and the environment, while answering the age-old question of what's for dinner. In September, the U.N. General Assembly kicked off the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a part of the Clinton Global Initiative promoted by the U.N. Foundation. As for Beck, the Fox News Channel talk show host who is neither for nor against the stoves, he sees Clinton's spending $50 million on ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Protecting the Child Beggars of Senegal

February 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Emerge from your train, bus or plane in Senegal, and you could see them: the children with big, pleading eyes who approached with hands outstretched and palms upturned, carrying large cans around their necks to collect donations. They lingered at major intersections, bus stops and outside the market. They were boys in dusty clothing, often barefoot and often skinny. And if they happened to pass you, be you foreigner or native, they stopped and held out a hand. Some people ignored them. Some people gave a coin, some powdered milk or a few sugar cubes. I first spied Samba Balde and his buddy, ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2011, News and Options
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Foreign Aid for a Frugal Age

February 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As they prepared to take control of the House of Representatives, congressional Republicans were also getting ready to take on foreign aid — with a scalpel or a meat-ax, depending on how one parsed words. U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, conservative South Florida Republican and incoming House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, told Agence France-Presse she wants "to cut the U.S. State Department and foreign aid budgets and use U.S. contributions to force reforms in multilateral organizations like the United Nations." And Foreign Policy magazine suggested that Rep. Kay Granger — a Texan who is ... Read More

More like this: March-April 2011, Not the Editor's Letter, Politics
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The Upside of Teen Pregnancy

January 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Jenelle is a party-loving high school junior in Oak Island, N.C., with blond hair and a metal stud above one side of her mouth. Andrew is a slim, smooth-talking former model with a fondness for alcohol. They've been together three years. Jenelle thought unprotected sex with Andrew would be OK because they'd tried it before and nothing had happened. Now they've got a baby on the way, and Jenelle's determined to keep it and stay with Andrew, too. "We're in it forever now," she predicts. For the stars of the first episode of the recently completed second season of MTV's reality show, "16 ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society
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America’s Hidden Diseases

November 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Millions of poor Americans living in distressed regions of the country are chronically sick, afflicted by a host of hidden diseases that are not being monitored, diagnosed or treated, researchers say. From Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the segregated inner cities of the Great Lakes and Northeast, they say, and from Navajo reservations to Latino communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 20 chronic diseases are promoting the cycle of poverty in conditions of inadequate sanitation, unsafe water supplies and rundown housing. "These are forgotten diseases among forgotten ... Read More

More like this: Health
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Welfare Reform Failing Poor Single Mothers

October 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Stretched Thin: Poor Families, Welfare Work and Welfare Reform

The women at the bottom in America, single mothers on public assistance, are sometimes called "drawer people," the subjects of case files that stay in the welfare manager's drawer, year after year. They are mothers who quit work or can't work because they are ill or disabled, or illiterate, or victims of abuse, or the sole caregivers for an elderly parent or chronically sick child. These so-called hard-to-serve single mothers may include women who fail to apply for the 70 jobs in one month required to qualify for a federal cash grant. They may want to go to school full time, which is ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, November-December 2010, Politics, Views Reviews and Interviews
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