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Title: The Changing Structure of Poverty in the United States: 1968-2012
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: Researchers have long been concerned that a new type of poverty is emerging in the United States: a class of people who dont work and instead are dependent on government income. Another, mostly separate, literature has documented the growth of bad jobs in the economy. In this paper, I take on both of those trends at once, using latent class analysis to look holistically at the structure of poverty in the United States between 1968 and 2012. I systematically describe the class structure at the bottom, identifying classes of people in terms of the level of their earnings, the quality and stability of the jobs they are able to find, their access to unearned income such as personal savings, whether they receive government income, and whether they depend on family or other roommates. I find that two classes grew in size over this period. The first is a class of non-workers who have virtually no attachment to work and depend on income from the government, or on roommates or other household members. The second is a class of unassisted struggling workers who have high attachment to work but often have bad jobs, and who receive little regular cash income from the government. Among the more advantaged classes, the old middle class with a strong attachment to work and high earnings, is giving way to an even more advantaged new middle class, even as the total number of people in the middle classes shrinks. I also find that the correlation between education and class membership has grown over time, with less educated people becoming more likely to be in one of the disadvantaged classes. These changes to the structure of poverty reflect the deindustrialization and polarization of the labor market that took place over this period. The big losses in routinized, mid-wage jobs left growing numbers of people marginalized either in the increasingly precarious lower tiers of the labor market or outside of the labor market altogether.
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Authors: Cumberworth, Erin
Publisher: Stanford University
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Poverty and Welfare
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