Poverty, Relative and Absolute

Jonah is joined by Scott Winship – the director of Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and fresh off the heels of his position within Senator Mike Lee’s Social Capital Project. Jonah asks Scott about the persistence of poverty in American society, and what progress has been made both recently and over the long term. Then, they get into why some of the obstacles that have to be removed in order to lift poor people up are more intractable than others. In part, Scott thinks that these difficulties “show how we’re hardwired to think about these problems in economic terms rather than in terms of social bonds,” and that certain data may blind us when searching for the real issues.

Show Notes:

-Scott’s research at AEI

-Richard Burkhauser on poverty in the 60s versus now

-The Social Capital Project

-Raj Chetty on people doing better than their parents

-Mr. Piketty’s big book of Marxiness

-Jonah and Peter Beinart

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