INTRODUCTION
In Challenge to Affluence (1963), the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal coined the term under-class, which he defined as “unemployed, and gradually unemployable and underemployed persons and families at the bottom of society” (p. 38). His concept was strictly economic, and said almost nothing about the demographic characteristics or skin colors of these persons and families.Footnote 1 Myrdal was writing at a time when the overall American economy was still healthy. Nonetheless, he saw that it already contained a poverty-stricken and immobile substratum “in the basement of the stately American mansion” (p. 49).
Since then, the economy has undergone frequent traumas and the population in America’s basement has grown. Although the racial makeup of that population needs more study, a sizeable proportion is African American. Moreover, many of the stereotypes with which the people at the bottom were burdened have persisted for generations, placing a further roadblock to their escape from poverty. In addition, better off Whites have sometimes used versions of the same stereotypes to harass middle-class Blacks and impede their further upward mobility (Feagin and Sikes, Reference Feagin and Sikes1994).
The fragility of today’s American economy and the dismal state of the labor market are further enlarging the economic substratum about which Myrdal was writing. At the same time, the economic and social gap between that substratum and the rest of society will widen, further distancing the bottom of American society from its higher strata, and even from fellow Americans with incomes closer to the poverty line. Judging by the consequences of the Great Recession and earlier economic crises that victimized Blacks more than other groups, an ever larger proportion is likely to be Black.
WHAT SHOULD WE KNOW ABOUT THE PEOPLE AT THE BOTTOM?
Despite all the research into American poverty, amazingly little is known about the occupants of the bottom stratum. Neither demographers nor the agencies that collect income data seem to have obtained much information about them. Likewise, qualitative researchers too rarely inquire into the incomes of the poor people they have studied. Indeed, much of social science seems insensitive to the existence of several levels of poverty. Surely the distinctions between poverty levels matter, but while the very poorest people may face the same problems and crises as other poor people, these are likely to be more intense, longer lasting and even permanent.Footnote 2
Researchers should get to work to determine how people at the bottom exist, cope with, and suffer from their minimal income and their maximal inequality. The resulting studies should provide America with a thick description of the bottom of their society. Such studies should focus particularly on the conditions that need to be eliminated, and the policies and politics that would begin to do so. Studies of how people survive and even triumph over these conditions are also needed in order to debunk and fight the stereotypes that stigmatize them, and that can be used to oppose anti-poverty policies. Although some people will always be at the bottom even in the richest society, policies to improve the conditions of those at the bottom will reduce the gap between them and the rest of society.
The remainder of the paper will report some of what little we know about the people at the bottom, but concentrate largely on some of the questions that need to be asked about them. Many of these questions will be derived from the existing sociological literature on poverty.
WHAT DO WE KNOW?
Myrdal’s basement and society’s bottom are metaphors, and are not easily turned into empirically useful concepts. Perhaps one could ask people at the lowest income levels if they feel themselves to be at the bottom of society, but even if they may feel that way, they may not want to admit it. A better start is to begin with a quantitative measure of the country’s bottom income level. Two such measures are already in use.
One measure, devised by the U.S. Census, is termed deep poverty. It is set at an income of half or less of the official poverty line income: currently about $6500 for an individual and $11,500 for a family of four per year. A second measure, developed by social scientists Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer, is called extreme poverty. It describes living at the World Bank’s global definition of poverty: on $2 per individual per day or $2920 per year for a family of four (Shaefer and Edin, Reference Shaefer and Edin2013). This figure is roughly equivalent to living at 13% of the official American poverty line.
The two measures permit a few basic statistics about the people at the economic bottom of society. By the Census Bureau definition, 6.6% of the population, or 20.4 million people, lived in deep poverty in 2011. This population made up 44% of all poor people in 2011 (Shierholz and Gould, Reference Shierholz and Gould2012). Applying the Shaefer-Edin definition of extreme poverty indicates that 4.3% of all households with children were living on less than $3000 in 2011.Footnote 3 That percentage rose from 1.7% of all households with children in 1996, an increase of 159% (Shaefer and Edin, Reference Shaefer and Edin2013).
Not much more is known about the populations in deep and extreme poverty themselves. The largest number are White, but proportionally more are non-White. 4.4% of all non-Hispanic Whites, 10.5% of Hispanics, and 12.5% of Blacks were living in deep poverty in 2011. Fully 23.6% of single parent families were living in deep poverty, about a fourth of father-headed families, but only 2.4% of all married couples with children were earning at that level (National Center for Law and Economic Justice 2012). Most of the states with the highest proportion of people in deep poverty in 2011 were in the Deep South and the Southwest, but the the District of Columbia topped the list that year.
Shaefer and Edin report that about half of the population in extreme poverty in 2011 was White, the rest being Black and Hispanic. Almost 40% were married, another 50% were families headed by single mothers. These kinds of data and impressionistic evidence from a range of sociological and journalistic sources suggest that the people at the bottom can be divided into the following overlapping types:
1. The Unemployables:
Households in which people who would otherwise be working are victims of chronic physical, emotional or cognitive impairment, and/or old age but for a variety of reasons are not receiving any or insufficient retirement or disability payments. This category also includes ex felons, the imprisoned, and people with arrest records that make them unemployable in many states.
2. The Long-term Unemployed and Severely Underemployed:
People in the mostly rural but also urban pockets of deep and extreme poverty, including Appalachia, the Deep South and America’s biggest cities. This population also includes young men who are family or household heads, probably mostly Black and Latino, who have never found full-time employment. It also includes previously poor people who lost their jobs during and after the Great Recession and have been made even poorer by long term joblessness, and old people without Social Security.
3. The Severely Underpaid:
People employed at below minimum wage jobs and in the so called underground economy; also those ineligible or otherwise unable or unwilling to obtain monetary and other material benefits to which they are entitled, notably disability payments, T.A.N.F. benefits, food stamps, and child care credits, etc.
4. The Casualties of Poverty:
People who are not disabled but have been overcome by the catastrophes of poverty and also lack access to informal support systems and formal helping facilities. A significant number are likely to be multigenerationals, people mired in deep or extreme poverty for two or more generations who can now can longer get out (Gans Reference Gans2011; Sharkey Reference Sharkey2012).
If and when the labor market is restored to good enough health so that the unemployment and underemployment rates will decline and the labor participation rates will rise again, some of the recent arrivals at the bottom and old timers may be able to leave. Blacks, but also other darker-skinned people, will, however, be held back by racism even if they are able bodied and otherwise qualified to move out of the basement. Moreover, at this level of society, racism is not the laissez faire form of middle-class society (Bobo and Smith, Reference Bobo, Smith, Katkin, Landsman and Tyree1998), but a brutally overt variety that further penalizes people fighting for their survival. Blacks are probably always the most vulnerable, and I would not be surprised if a number of rural Black families (and even some urban ones) have endured deep poverty for many generations. There must also be some who have been living in extreme poverty for that long, but it is hard to imagine that many families at such a low-economic level could have survived over this time span. A significant proportion must have been too disabled or too defeated to establish a family that could raise children, and premature deaths among adults and children were undoubtedly very frequent.
WHAT ELSE MUST WE LEARN?
Obtaining data about the people at the bottom of society requires agreement on one or more measures of income levels, which could be current measures of deep and extreme poverty. It would require the U.S. Census and other agencies to collect and report at least the basic economic, social, and other data about them that it already reports about other population categories.Footnote 4 Once agreement is reached on quantitative measures of bottom level poverty and the needed data are gathered, they should be analyzed and reported by census tract or other local area so that researchers seeking more detailed data can focus on these areas and their populations in various communities across the country. Even before such data are available, researchers can look for areas and people likely to be in dire straits. Although some such areas have already been studied, they tend to be of special and visible populations of the very poorest, such as the homeless, the people on Skid Row, and occupants of the remaining public housing projects. Now researchers must look for the more typical areas housing people with bottom level incomes.
When such areas are identified, interviewers and ethnographers can make contact with residents who live in deep and extreme poverty. Studying them is not easy, since many may be hard to reach for one or another reason. Others may not want to cooperate with researchers and some will surely make researchers uncomfortable. Also, the areas in which they live are sometimes dangerous and frequently unhospitable to outsiders. Intrepid qualitative researchers will find ways of establishing research rapport in these areas. Then interviewers should collect family and life histories, including work, income, residential, medical, and other histories. The interviews should tell us how people obtain and live on minimal incomes, how they spend and what they must forgo, especially in the triage situations they surely face all the time.
In addition, interviewers should obtain data about people’s social and community lives and the networks, both formal and informal organizations and institutions, in which these lives are taking place. The life histories will enable researchers to understand the periods of security and insecurity these households have experienced over time. Interviewers can also obtain data on the major problems, crises, and catastrophes that their interviewees have endured, which ones they have overcome, and how, and what they are doing to deal with still existing problems.
Generational histories must be sought as well so that adults in deep or extreme poverty for at least two generations can be interviewed about what they know of the lives of earlier ancestors. Perhaps the researchers can even discover when, how, why, and which ancestors of theirs first hit bottom and found themselves living in extreme poverty. Interviews will provide some basic information, but much of the needed data about life at the bottom of society must be collected ethnographically. The best method may be an open ended and broadly framed community study that yields descriptions and explanations of everyday community, social, work, and familial life. Ethnographers can be on the spot to see typical and atypical events for themselves and can study what people do and not just what they say they do.
Thus, researchers can observe the routines and habits people develop for the ups and downs they face at society’s bottom as well as the sources of pain and the opportunities for satisfaction and enjoyment.
Particular Areas of Inquiry for Interviewers and Ethnographers
General Community Life
The first task is to discover whether the basic formal and informal institutions, organizations and agencies found in poor communities with incomes closer to the poverty level exist or are absent among the people at the bottom of society. Whether and how they connect with the population they are intended to serve (and control), and whether and how that population connects with them or fails to should be looked at as well.
Further, researchers should ask whether and how the very poorest constitute a spatial community, or whether they are scattered among poorer people of somewhat higher income. Such a study can also test the notion of concentrated poverty, determining whether and what negative—and positive—effects follow from living in deep or extreme poverty as well as high levels of spatial concentration (Wilson Reference Wilson1987). Such a study is most needed in White areas at the bottom of society, for the existence of concentrated White poverty would show that it is not a Black phenomenon. That in turn might reduce the use of concentrated poverty as a term for blaming poor Blacks for not always living up to middle-class standards of behavior.
Economic Life
The workplaces and other income sources at the bottom of society are undoubtedly very different from those available to people near to and above the official poverty line. People in deep poverty may be in the most underpaid sectors of the working poor population, many of them in the informal economy (Venkatesh Reference Venkatesh2006). However, the most urgent economic question is how people in extreme poverty obtain their daily $2 income and how they can survive on it.
Familial Life
Ethnographers need to look intensively at familial life and how it is structured, as well as what kind of support, security, and stability it provides or withholds from its members. Given the importance of respect and self respect, especially among poor males, the ways in which families are able and willing, as well as unable and unwilling, to supply it is crucial. Researchers need to look especially for reasonably happy and well functioning families, and how they manage to achieve such a state on a very limited income. However, researchers must also explore family life when parents and single parents, and even multi-parent families are stressed out or otherwise diverted from fulfilling minimally necessary parental roles, and how children and adolescents deal with the effects.
Do children at various stages of childhood and adolescence search for parental substitutes, or can they and their peers find substitutes especially in their own informal groups without much adult participation? Perhaps even more important, researchers will need to see how single adults, especially older ones, many of whom probably many suffer from the very worst poverty, survive or fail to survive.
Problems, Crises, and Catastrophes
Ethnographers can observe how different problems develop and are dealt with, both by people with and without familial and other informal as well as formal social supports. Such studies should focus especially on the varying levels of the problems, particularly on catastrophes—permanent crises for which there are no solutions. Especially important are cumulative crises which result in part from preceding ones and lead to yet others. A typical example, faced frequently by single mothers are crises initiated by a child’s illness, the mother’s job loss resulting from her absence from work, and the subsequent economic and other crises, including possibly eviction. Which crises terminate in catastrophes that put an end to, at least to what counts as, a normal existence at the bottom of society?
More needs to be learned as well about the effects on physical and emotional health of lives rarely free of problems, crises, and catastrophes. Special emphasis should be placed on levels of stress and clinical depression and how they are dealt with, as well as on periodic or chronic stress disorders. If these occur, do they resemble post traumatic stress disorders suffered in natural and manmade disasters and in combat? Does anyone survive such disorders and extreme poverty sui generis without permanent physical, social, emotional or cognitive damage?
Coping
Another question calling for answers is whether and how people cope with and survive deep and extreme poverty. What solutions, if any, have they found, for example, to deal with regularly occurring and cumulative crises. What sources of satisfaction can be found in the face of constant problems and crises? Are people able to develop daily or other routines that offer some stability and security, and when is the search for excitement a more satisfying solution.Footnote 5 What sources of diversion, entertainment, and escape are most readily available at the bottom of society?
Do the very poorest people, especially those in extreme poverty obtain or invent distinctive cultural toolkits and tools (Swidler Reference Swidler1986) that help them cope, and if so how? Can effective coping tools be identified, and if so, could they help inspire or guide policies that would provide relief from some of the noneconomic problems of deep and extreme poverty for a larger population? One would also want to know how successful coping affects response to opportunities for upward mobility, even if only to incomes at the official poverty line. Does coping help or hurt seeking to escape from the bottom of society? For example, if lowered expectations enable people to cope with problems and crises, do they also operate to interfere with upward mobility?Footnote 6
Ethnographers must attempt to discover whether people are aware of their position at society’s bottom, how they react to that awareness, and with what levels of resistance, protest, anger, and resignation, if any. Above all, the researchers should observe whether people try to move up in the socioeconomic pecking order and if so, how—and someone ought to find and interview those who have been successful.
Crime and Violence
Criminologists have been studying street crime among the poor for decades, but more needs to be known about whether and how such crime differs at the bottom of society. The same is true of the study of criminal and violent gangs, which is currently undergoing another revival (Goffman Reference Goffman2014; Papachristos Reference Papachristos2007; Rios Reference Rios2011; Venkatesh Reference Venkatesh2000). Such studies must include nonviolent gangs, those that do not sell drugs or engage in other money making enterprises—normal adolescent peer groups that are called gangs only because its members are poor. However, the majority of adolescents in society’s basement who do not belong to any such groups should be given the most attention. Researchers should examine their community, and other aspects of their social lives.
Since gangs seem to have flourished for generations, in some cases similar ones with much the same structures, more needs to be known about what functions these gangs perform for their members. Do they help compensate for the absence of other social supports, including familial ones; do they aid young people to develop self respect and learn how to deal with disrespect? Do they offer members a chance to be and feel useful? And what equivalent groups, if any exist at the different stages of adulthood? The current media and other publicity given to interpersonal violence in poor ghetto neighborhoods suggest that the incidents of such violence and the contexts in which they occur should receive special attention.
The constant police shadowing, frequent police violence, as well as the criminalization and incarceration of young Black and Latino males is now being studied (Black Reference Black2009; Goffman Reference Goffman2014; Rios Reference Rios2011; Wacquant Reference Wacquant2009), but further research is required at the bottom of society and especially among poor Whites. Poor communities in which these police actions do not take place must be identified as well.
The Racial Hierarchy at the Bottom
Three conflicting hypotheses deserve testing. The first proposes that the very poorest people must so concentrate on survival that ranking other people or discriminating against them by phenotype is of very low priority. The second is that people at the bottom engage in the same ranking as everyone else, and are perhaps looking even more intensely than the more fortunate for people who are socially, morally, and otherwise inferior to them. A third and related hypothesis suggests that the bottom of society is embedded in the same racial hierarchy as its better off strata: one in which Whites are at the top and Blacks at the bottom, except in areas where Latino income is significantly below Black income. In that case, one would want to know whether deeply and extremely poor Whites, Latinos, and other non-Blacks act in concert to keep Blacks at the bottom and also increase the income and status gap between themselves and Blacks.
Comparative Research
When more is known about the extremely poor, comparative research should be done to identify the similarities and differences of populations at the various levels of poverty. How are areas in which poverty is deep or extreme socially different from those in which most people have incomes closer to the poverty line? And are these areas treated differently by institutions and organizations ostensibly established to help, for example welfare agencies and charities?
Looking at income variations among the poor also provides another opportunity to test the concentrated poverty hypothesis; whether the poverty related behavior patterns considered problematic or in violation of mainstream norms are better explained by the concentration of poverty than by levels of poverty (Gans Reference Gans2010). If concentration, as measured by percent poor in a designated area is the significant causal variable, these behavior patterns should be the same whether people’s income is near the poverty line, or at deep or extreme poverty levels. If these patterns increase or worsen as income declines, then poverty itself is clearly the major causal variable, with all the policy implications this suggests. Since most current research in poor communities is taking place in Black and Latino areas, studies of poor White areas are essential to determine similarities and differences caused by race.
POLICIES AGAINST DEEP AND EXTREME POVERTY
Perhaps the very first step of the policy-oriented part of the proposed research is the creation of a more dramatic vocabulary, for example by calling the two kinds of poverty desperate and catastrophic. Concurrently, policy-oriented researchers should revive the now almost forgotten connection between war and poverty. However, they should use it to insist that the victims of deep and extreme poverty are the most serious casualties of the class warfare that takes place in all hierarchically organized economies. Then they can argue that these casualties deserve benefits that resemble those granted to casualties of other wars.
The next step is to acquaint better off Americans with the bottom of their society and what life is like there. Ethnographies are particularly useful in such an enterprise since their narrative approach may gain them a public audience beyond the academy. Researchers can identify the structural and cultural forces and agents that operate in and shape life at the bottom of society, thereby demonstrating also that the bottom is at the same time a basement of the larger structure that is society. A related research question that also shows the extent to which bottom and higher strata are connected would examine whether and when people at the bottom accept mainstream values and treat them as ideals to be pursued.Footnote 7
Such research should also lay out the reasons why people cannot gain access to the monetary, cultural, and other tools needed to achieve these values. Policy-oriented researchers would then be able to ask what kind of supports would enable people to pursue mainstream values now and in the future. Data on the extent to which the very poorest Americans strive and even achieve these values are important for policy making. These data may help policy-oriented researchers attack some of the blaming terms and punitive legislation with which people at the bottom are held down and which conservatives and others use to sabotage anti-poverty policies.
Whether research that describes the lives, problems, and triumphs of the people at the bottom of society will encourage political support for anti-poverty policies is, however, another matter, and itself an empirical question. Bottom of society research may come up with some policies tailored to distinctive conditions in that part of society, but the best policy to help its population is a universal anti-poverty one that decreases the huge and ever increasing economic gaps between the nonpoor and the poor. Specific policies include creating new jobs in the country’s physical and social infrastructures for those who can work, including supported work positions for people who have been out of the labor force for too long. Raising the minimum wage and providing nearly equivalent income support to those who cannot work or find work is essential.
Temporary and permanent disability payments to the many unemployable people at the bottom of society—including healthy ones who have become permanent economic victims of a dysfunctional labor market—would relieve some of their pain and suffering. Housing subsidies and other supports to make the lives of the defeated poor reasonably comfortable should be provided as well. The long-standing interest in eliminating childhood poverty and the current interest in early childhood education should be used to determine how to help children move out of the bottom of society. Policies that can be implemented both with and without the aid of parents or other guardians are needed, but without taking the children away even from unsupportive families.
Current experiments with community and school programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone and others should be adapted for the special conditions at the bottom of society. The most important goal: to enable not only the most talented and ambitious children, but also the academically and otherwise average ones to escape from the bottom. That escape may have to be supported until and even beyond the last year of education, to try to make sure that the program graduates are not forced to return to the bottom of society. Education alone cannot and never could eliminate poverty.
The multigenerationally poor may need even more specialized aid, and more than a generation may be required before the children of multigenerationals can move very far above the bottom of society.
POLITICAL CONCERN ABOUT DEEP AND EXTREME POVERTY
Needless to say, the likelihood of these or any other supportive policies being enacted is currently minuscule. The polity almost never helps people who lack economic and political power and will be even less helpful when the economy is as unequal as it is presently.
Then too, some better off people seem to obtain special satisfaction in imposing additional pain and suffering on the people at the bottom of society. Others may gain that satisfaction by imagining the very poorest people to lack the moral qualities that enabled them to be better off. Others cannot see that the poor lack access to the mainstream routes of upward mobility, and yet others believe they live in a zero sum society and fear that the poor will obtain public funds which should go to the better off.
Whatever their motives for making sure that the people at the bottom of society remain there, the better off also help to perpetuate the blaming language and injurious images used to stereotype and stigmatize people at the bottom. Blaming them for their failure to improve their position in society can then be used to block policies that would do so. As I noted earlier, however, the same blame game is also used to block better off racialized minorities from improving their position in society. For that reason alone, members of such minorities are sometimes in the same boat as their poorest co-racials. As a result, they should have a direct interest in improving economic and other living conditions at the bottom of society.
