#mark rank

[tergueta-blog]

Everyone is Likely to be Rich and Poor

It turns out that Americans move up and down the income scale a lot.

According to an article, “From Rags to Riches to Rags” by  Mark R. Rank (a professor of social welfare at Washington University):

54 percent of Americans will experience poverty or near poverty at least once between the ages of 25 and 60

56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent

Rather than talking about the 1…

View On WordPress

[betweentheselungs]

I often use the analogy of musical chairs to help students recognize this disconnect. Picture a game with ten players, but only eight chairs. When the music stops, who’s most likely to be left standing? It will be those who are at a disadvantage in terms of competing for the available chairs (less agility, reduced speed, a bad position when the music stops, and so on). However, given that the game is structured in a way such that two players are bound to lose, these individual attributes only explain who loses, not why there are losers in the first place. Ultimately, there are simply not enough chairs for those playing the game. The critical mistake that’s been made in the past is that we've equated the question of who loses at the game with the question of why the game inevitably produces losers. They are, in fact, distinct and separate questions. So while characteristics such as deficiencies in skills or education or being in a single parent family help to explain who’s at a heightened risk of encountering poverty, the fact that poverty exists in the first place results not from these characteristics, but from a failure of the economic and political structures to provide enough decent opportunities and supports for the whole of society.

"Rethinking American Poverty", by Mark Rank