FACTS WE DARE NOT FORGET - Excerpts from a Neglected Government Report on Poverty & Unemployment
In June 1980 the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, under the chairmanship of Arthur I. Blaustein, submitted its Twelfth Report, CRITICAL CHOICES FOR THE EIGHTIES, to President...
...In 1977, the official poverty rate among female family heads under 24 years of age was almost 66 percent, more distant from the rate for their male counterparts than in the late'60s...
...Measured by the official Census data, two facts stand out with respect to the reduction of poverty since the start of the 1960s...
...By 1977, after more than a decade of antidiscrimination efforts, she was 5.7 times more likely to be poor...
...One study suggests that the erratic performance of the postwar American economy may explain that decline: increased infant death rates have been associated with rises in unemployment rates since the 1920s...
...Recent studies based on a national sample of families show how serious the income losses from unemployment can still be...
...The pattern of growth has created a vast population of the economically marginal and welfare-dependent...
...At the end of the '60s, women faced a much greater risk of poverty than men...
...It found that raising the official jobless rate by one percentage point could be expected to increase psychiatric admissions by 3.4 percent...
...Infant Mortality PROGRESS against infant mortality in the United States has stagnated since the 1950s...
...One way of measuring the extent of severe mental illness is through admission rates to psychiatric hospitals...
...But that assumption ignores the noneconomic losses that come with losing a job—the effect on the worker's self-esteem, hopes for the future, and relations with others...
...These findings are backed by studies linking employment and/or laborforce participation rates with reported crime rates across a variety of jurisdictions: cities, census tracts within cities, states, and the nation as a whole...
...The connection applies particularly to crimes against property, but usually to crimes of violence as well...
...The impact is especially severe, too, for women who head families...
...The decline in poverty during the past decade has been almost entirely in families headed by men...
...Unemployment and the compounded impact of joblessness on an individual's personal life serve to isolate the victims from the social ties and family support that they need most...
...and 27 percent had been forced to borrow money...
...The stagnation in national poverty rates and the increasing concentration of the poor in the central cities of the North and West suggest that the development of the American economy in the recent past has had a highly uneven impact on the poor...
...The decline in poverty among Southern blacks highlights this difference even more strongly...
...Many have been lifted above the official poverty threshold by social insurance and welfare transfers, but many have not...
...A main source of the loss of self-respect is the tendency for the unemployed to blame themselves for their situation...
...One reason is that the income gap between the sexes is widest by far among the young...
...Studies reveal that if they can "externalize"the cause of their unemployment, the loss of self-esteem is less: the higher local unemployment, for example, the less the negative impact of job loss on the respondents' self-esteem...
...At the end of the late 1950s, over two-thirds of the black population in the South was poor...
...If one main objective of the War on Poverty has been to achieve racial and sexual equality of opportunity, we are losing— and losing badly...
...In the North and West, and especially in the cities, poverty has proven more resistant from the start...
...But women's earnings are often so low that even full-time work is no security against poverty: more than a third of single mothers with children under six who worked full time at paid labor at some point in 1977 were poor...
...This theme consistently recurs in the research on the impact of unemployment: the devastating emotional impact of joblessness strikes hardest at those with the fewest inner resources, the least ability to cope with it, and the least mobility...
...The rise in death rates from liver disease is directly traceable to increased alcohol consumption under the impact of economic crisis...
...In September 1979 the average weekly unemployment benefit was $89.10...
...There are also a number of indications that putting off marriage because of poor job prospects or unemployment contributes to the high rates of illegitimate births among the poor...
...The measured amount of disturbance for employed housewives fell in between...
...It sets in motion a cycle of deprivation and multiple crises...
...Benefits are generally not available to people who leave their jobs, and not at all to those seeking to enter the work force or to workers in industries not covered by state or federal programs...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) discovered that only 36 percent of their sample of the unemployed had income from unemployment insurance in the previous month...
...A recent analysis prepared by the same researcher for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress examined mental-hospital admissions from the 1940s through the 1960s and calculated the precise increase that could be attributed to rising unemployment...
...In 1967, the rate of poverty among black family heads was roughly 3.75 times that of whites...
...Black poverty—officially 31.3 percent in 1977—was less than a percentage point lower than in 1969...
...Both of these measures proved to be more closely correlated with rates of infant mortality and deaths due to pregnancy complications than the official rate alone...
...But the next several years brought virtually no change in overall poverty rates...
...For the situation of black women has deteriorated sharply in the past decade...
...All other things being equal, if the proportion of the poor who are in female-headed families were to increase at the same rate as it did from 1967 to 1977, the poverty population would be composed solely of women and their children by about the year 2000...
...As far back as 1935 a study of first admissions to state psychiatric facilities found that roughly two-thirds of state hospitals reported increased admissions in the first three years of the Depression...
...Another study calculated that 40 percent of families with an unemployed main earner in the 1975 recession suffered "serious" eco167 nomic hardship...
...In 1978, there were about 1.2 million fewer poor children in families headed by men than a decade earlier...
...Though the evidence is indirect, stress researchers have turned up consistent links between the severity of "life stresses" and the incidence of clinical depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, as well as high scores on scales of general psychiatric symptoms...
...The deepening inequality between men and women is compounded, predictably, when j oined with the division between minority and white: the poverty population is becoming more minority as it becomes more 166 female...
...For example, unemployment rates were strongly associated with many other stressful lifecrises, such as having to move or becoming separated or divorced, all of which are correlated with higher rates of mental illness...
...If anything, the evidence suggests that this trend will continue to worsen...
...Suicide IN ADDITION to the strong links between general psychological well-being and employment, powerful association between unemployment and suicide have also been found, that is, the suicide rate is closely correlated with the official unemployment rate...
...in particular, geographic mobility and "the frequency with which families must be uprooted in order to find new employment" often lead to multiple crises in the lives of the child abusers...
...More specifically, a fair and realistic interpretation of the facts would show that — • Poverty has been minimally reduced since the late 1960s...
...Even fewer (13 percent) had received Food Stamps, and fewer still (12 percent) had received public assistance...
...Even when unemployment benefits and foregone taxes were included, these men lost, on the average, about a fourth of their accustomed disposable income...
...For both races, but especially for blacks, central-city rates of family poverty were higher in 1977 than a decade earlier...
...Most of the reduction in poverty, even during the economic expansion of the 1960s, occurred in the South and, to an even greater degree, generally in rural areas...
...The main source of this startling shift has been the rising frequency of marital disruption, coupled with continuing poor opportunities for decent earnings, and inadequate benefits and supportive services for single women with children...
...The effect is intensified if job loss and searching for new work necessitate a change in residence or a break in ties with friends, relatives, and the community...
...Another study showed that the emotional impact of job loss is hardest on those in lowlevel jobs...
...by 1977, she had 10'/z times the chance...
...The loss of a job, if it cannot be replaced by another job or some alternative way of "organizing one's place in the world," can be the first link in a chain leading to psychosis...
...by 1977, nine times...
...Unemployment leads to increased use of addicting drugs...
...The kind of economic growth promoted in the past ten years has only slightly improved the chances of the poor for decent, permanent jobs and adequate earnings...
...During periods of economic stress normal family and community resources for dealing with the mentally ill may break down or weaken under the impact of general economic crisis, thus forcing more of the burden of care onto public institutions...
...What one writer has called the "feminization of poverty" has become one of the most compelling social facts of the decade...
...A study of stress levels and child abuse showed that, compared with a control group of nonabusers, the child abusers had more often faced what the research called a major "life crisis"—a series of stressful events coming one on top of the other...
...The median family income for these workers was $450 a month...
...The array of government benefits actually or potentially available may make deprivation less severe than it was in the 1930s, but this can hardly be of much comfort to workers trying to subsist on benefits below the poverty level or forced to find cheaper housing...
...Yet there is material here that may move a few members of Congress to propose remedial legislation...
...the economic and social policies of the '70s have made that disparity even greater...
...And at the same time, relatedly, the chances of poverty have also increased for blacks, relative to whites...
...They are much less likely to be able to cushion the blow by having other family members work, and collect unemployment benefits much less often...
...Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1977...
...25 percent suffered a loss of 30 percent or more of their income...
...That was about $27 a week less than what full-time work at the minimum wage would have earned and almost $40 a week below the federal poverty line for a nonfarm family of four...
...Losing a job can set in motion a vicious cycle of other personal catastrophes that are much more difficult to handle for people who lack both the material and emotional resources that a decent, stable job provides...
...Even more striking, the rate of poverty in the North and West has risen since 1969, while the Southern rate has continued to fall...
...among black and Hispanic single mothers, about $1000 below it.2 The crippling poverty of single mothers 2 Seven out of ten families with children headed by a woman under 25 were poor in 1977—three out of four if she was black and four out of five if she had related children under 6. Data from Elizabeth Waldman et al., "Working Mothers in the 1970's: A Look at the Statistics, " Monthly Labor Review, October 1979, pp...
...Recent research shows that this is misleading...
...It has been calculated that if the unemployment rate in Michigan in 1975 (13.8 percent) had been reduced to 4 percent, an often-quoted level of "full employment," the rate of serious crimes in that state would have been reduced that year by 39 percent, or nearly 250,000...
...The most recent studies comparing unemployment and crime rates in individual states have reaffirmed the close relationship between high levels of joblessness and rates of serious crimes...
...To the extent that there have been "winners" in the War on Poverty during the 70s, they have been male—and mainly white...
...In addition, the most rigorous studies tend to come up with the strongest links...
...In June 1980 the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, under the chairmanship of Arthur I. Blaustein, submitted its Twelfth Report, CRITICAL CHOICES FOR THE EIGHTIES, to President Carter (available from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S...
...This suggests that the 1.4 percent rise in the unemployment rate in 1970 was responsible for over 25,000 deaths from cardiovascular and kidney disease over the next five years...
...According to the research, the suicide rate has been so closely tied to change in unemployment over a period of time that it is one of the more reliable indicators of the economy in the United States...
...It is virtually certain that the new Reagan administration will ignore them...
...Department of Labor defines as a "lower living standard...
...More recent studies, using far more sophisticated methods, support the early conclusions...
...The loss of a job may start a vicious cycle, for it often makes it difficult to re-enter the work force...
...The study points out that the high correlation between unemployment and narcotics violations demonstrates how unemployment has a "compound interest" effect on crime rates...
...the improvement that has occurred in the past decade has resulted almost entirely from the expansion of "income transfer" and federal antipoverty programs...
...119 (U.S...
...14 percent reported a monthly total income from all sources of less than $200...
...Unemployment and Crime RESEARCHERS ON the effects of unemployment on crime have increasingly found "general, if not uniform" support for a close connection between high levels of joblessness and rising crime rates...
...The majority of female family heads with children work in the paid labor force at some point during the year, and they fare much better than those who are entirely dependent on income transfers for a living...
...A one-percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate raises deaths from cardiovascular and renal diseases and cirrhosis of the liver by roughly 2 percent...
...A one-percentagepoint increase in the unemployment rate tended to increase state prison admissions by about 4 percent...
...The pace of change is not as fast, but it is significant...
...In 1978, one in five families in the U.S...
...Let us consider first some of the broad contours of poverty in the United States over the past two decades...
...And, as the following sections demonstrate, continued economic deprivation is but one of many reasons why job loss remains a personally crippling experience...
...Poverty among Americans of Spanish origin rose sharply in the 1970s in New England and the Midwest (and almost as much in the Pacific region), while it declined in the Southern and Mountain states...
...But it I In 1977, the poverty rate for persons of all races was 11.6 percent...
...about one in 18 families headed by a man is poor...
...The unemployed face not only the crisis itself, but also diminished finances to cope with it...
...Later infant deaths are more likely to stem from longer-acting environmental stresses directly affecting the child...
...The Report opens with a discussion of "Poverty in America: Myths and Realities...
...They rose during the recession of 1975 over the 1969 level and, in the "recovery" since then, have arrived at a level only about one-half of a percentage point below it.' But that general trend masks a pattern that is less often recognized...
...Women who are confined to unpaid labor in the home suffer considerably more symptoms of mental illness than women who are employed outside...
...Improved benefits have doubtless softened the severity of that pattern, but the overall pattern remains the same...
...Unfortunately, the loss of a car often compounds the problem because it interferes with the search for new work...
...The much more rapid decline in poverty for men has meant that the inequality in lifechances between men and women has grown considerably over the past few years...
...The Role of Social Supports UNEMPLOYMENT represents the loss of one of the most important social ties—the connection to the workplace—that can help cushion the impact of personal crises...
...Long-term studies reveal that the loss of a job—and even the threat of unemployment— can have a striking impact on the physical health of the unemployed or threatened person...
...This becomes clearer when we look specifically at the shifting role of economic growth in reducing poverty...
...more than one in ten had been forced to move to cheaper housing...
...Its effects on the death rate appear mainly within two years of the onset of a decline in employment...
...Although the poverty count has dropped in the past decade and a half, the poverty population is less equally distributed than in the mid- 1960s...
...The BLS 1976 survey found that seven out of ten of their sample of unemployed were meeting living costs by cutting back on spending for food, clothing, and transportation...
...An astonishing nine out of ten single mothers with children under six who did not work in the paid labor force during 1977 were below the poverty line—another comment on the limits of our supposedly "overgenerous" welfare system...
...It is worse, too, to the extent that work is defined as central to their view of themselves and their worth...
...And although some groups have fared relatively well under the antipoverty strategies of the past decade and a half, others have not...
...Other studies have shown that unemployment is not only a source of psychological stress in itself, but also a cause of other stresses that tend to weaken the individual's ability to cope with stressful situations...
...But the rate of poverty among Northern blacks, after nearly two decades of economic growth and civil rights legislation, has declined only marginally in 20 years...
...Current Population Reports: Characteristics of the Population Below the Poverty Level, Current Population Reports: Consumer Income, series P. 60, no...
...The researchers suggest that the precipitating role of unemployment in this series of events is crucial...
...The same study points out that the steadily employed are able to buy the kinds of supports, including better mental health care and legal services, that can help them through a personal crisis...
...Thus, in 1967, a woman heading a family was about 3.8 times more likely to be poor than a man heading one...
...It is among the rising generation of young women, then, that the poverty of the of the 1970s has been most devastating, and the outlook for the 1980s is most bleak...
...reflects their exclusion from steady work and the rock-bottom earnings received when working regularly...
...In 1976, they passed men (and children in male-headed families) in absolute numbers—there are now more poor in female- than in male-headed households, for the first time since the data have been gathered...
...Equivalent data on poverty among Americans of Spanish origin has been collected only since 1972, but the overall pattern is clearly the same...
...Many who lost ajob in the "minirecession" of the early 1970s began by cutting into savings, slicing normal expenses to the minimum, and deferring all nonessential spending...
...As in the case of the aged, the broad statistics mask two key facts about the state of single mothers: even those who are not poor by the official measure are often not far from poverty, and those who also face the burdens of youth and/or minority status are much worse off than others...
...Similarly, the constricting and isolating demands of the unemployed-housewife role, according to a recent study, may help explain the frequent finding that married women tend to have higher rates of mental illness than married men...
...was headed by a single parent, versus one in nine in 1970...
...Loss of a job is seen as one of many "life events" that can place enough extra stress on individuals to cause serious psychological damage...
...Those changes are probably the result of drastic changes in nutrition, high levels of stress and hypertension, increased use of alcohol or sedatives, or increased smoking...
...The Impact of Stress EXPLANATIONS for the link between unemployment and mental health have focused on the concept of stress...
...The Psychological Impact THE LINK between job loss and psychological malaise—from general dissatisfaction to psychosis and suicide—is well established...
...Just as the "successes" in the War on Poverty have been mostly in the South, so too have they been mainly rural...
...The shift in the poor population, away 165 from earners and toward families in which no one works in the paid labor force, corresponds to the increasing proportion of women (and children in households headed by women) among the poor...
...Child Abuse ONE of the most compelling indicators of family tension is child abuse, and studies consistently show that reported child abuse is much more prevalent among the unemployed and marginally employed...
...But progress against poverty has differed not only according to age, but to sex and race as well...
...Unemployment and Deprivation Following a section on the Energy Crisis, and before it gets to such matters as community services, economic opportunity, Ceta, welfare programs and reforms, the Report speaks of unemployment and its effects: The case for the relative painlessness of modern unemployment rests on the assumption that, because of the expansion of government benefits, unemployment no longer results in significant economic deprivation...
...lower income and decreased ability to provide or purchase adequate postnatal care lead to increased risk of accidents, infections, and other preventable causes of infant death...
...Increases in the unemployment rate were followed, after about 15 months, by increased admissions to federal facilities...
...The evidence shows that poverty is not only still with us, but that it is also increasingly immune to the remedies of the past...
...The other, an index of "inadequacy" of employment, included the same categories of people, but only if they were household heads and thus, presumably, most affected by being out of work or in a poor job...
...Further, a number of studies have found corresponding links between juvenile delinquency rates and reported rates of unemployment, and the homicide rate in 51 cities was significantly correlated with official unemployment rates...
...The first and most drastic effect is increased infant mortality...
...the drug use, in turn, leads to much higher rates of property crime stemming from the high cost of maintaining the drug habit...
...In part, the persistence of poverty among Northern blacks reflects the massive migration of poor blacks out of the South during the whole post-World War II period...
...As usual, this effect strikes hardest at those groups least able to cope, materially or emotionally, with the strains of job loss...
...Throughout the period, the rate of psychiatric hospitalization was closely associated with changes in the level of employment in manufacturing industries...
...It describes the myths and gets to the realities...
...Central-city poverty, on the other hand, has declined only slightly since 1959, and has risen during the 1970s...
...In a special survey in 1976 the U.S...
...THE GROWTH OF INEQUALITY...
...Report (deleting all but two of the footnoes that cite the literature...
...The most comprehensive study covering the period of 1852 to 1967 was designed to measure the impact of short-term fluctuations in the economy...
...Thus, one study finds that serious marital dissatisfaction following the job loss of a breadwinner is much more common among the "economically marginal"—those with perennially low income and unstable jobs...
...Most likely, the Carter administration would not have made significant use of the facts and recommendations in the Report...
...Similar patterns were found in Canada, England and Wales, and Scotland...
...The key factor was the degree of "social integration"—including the connection of stable employment...
...The impact is worse when the unemployed are forced to undergo a change in family status, that is, losing the role of breadwinner while another family member goes to work...
...They are that it had ground almost to a halt by the end of that decade, and even at its height it was mainly confined to certain regions and not to others...
...The rate of poverty among Hispanics (22.4 percent in 1977) was less than half a percentage point below the level of five years earlier...
...For example, women in the paid labor force are less likely to show symptoms of depression, and among women who do show such symptoms, those who work outside the home tend to be less seriously impaired than those who do not...
...In samples of various individuals, unemployed housewives showed the most symptoms of psychiatric disturbance and employed husbands the least...
...Only about a fourth of [unemployed] women heading families during the 1975 recession, one study shows, collected benefits...
...A young woman heading a family in 1967 was about five times more likely than a young man to be poor...
...Researchers have linked the incidence of a high number of stressful events—including job loss—to increased risks of heart attack, chronic asthma, respiratory diseases, streptococcal infections, complications in pregnancy, and skin diseases...
...45, 46...
...Deaths of infants less than a day old showed the most striking rise within a year of the economic downturn...
...Similarly, a study of the origins of manic-depressive psychosis among working people finds it closely related to "role loss—defined as removal from the primary social positions and concomitant activities that one uses to organize one's place in the world...
...More important, fewer than half of unemployed individuals collect unemployment benefits...
...164 In 1959, a little over 22 percent of the American population was poor...
...One, the "exclusion index," counted not only the officially unemployed but also those not in the labor force but wanting work, as well as people working involuntarily parttime and those working full-time but earning less than adequate incomes...
...Because they rely on the official unemployment rate, most studies may underestimate the effects of health on individuals without a job and their families...
...The growth of the welfare state since the late '60s, therefore, has had a critical impact on the shape of poverty in America...
...Social supports—family and community—are essential to moderating that process...
...The absence of decent prospects for steady work can lead men to avoid the responsibilities of marriage and women to reject it...
...One study calculates that male family heads in the prime range (35-64) who were unemployed at some point during 1976 lost an average of over $4,000.00 in earnings...
...Of those 14 million fewer poor since 1959, nearly 12 million were accounted for by nonmetropolitan areas...
...Almost one femaleheaded family in three is poor...
...Of the approximately 14 million fewer poor in 1977 than in 1959, 9 million were Southern...
...One study compared people who had faced few stressful events but had many psychiatric symptoms with those who had experienced much stress but seemed relatively unimpaired...
...But the effects of unemployment run even deeper, for they strike not only the jobless themselves but also, in one way or another, their children...
...Again, a key finding was that the factors often cited as mitigating the "new unemployment" made little or no difference in mitigating the impact of unemployment on family life, and family problems clearly increased as the length of time off the job grew...
...This is particularly apparent if we compare their poverty rates with those of white men...
...We have culled a few pages that concern poverty and unemployment from the 174 pp...
...Unemployment can also ptevent families from developing...
...A 1977 study of national crime and unemployment rates estimates that a one-percentagepoint increase in unemployment in 1970 accounted for 3.8 percent of all homicides, 5.7 percent of robberies, 2.8 percent of larcenies, and 8.7 percent of narcotics arrests in that year...
...There are nearly a million more black poor in the Northern and Western states today than in 1959...
...Much of the same picture emerges, too, for the Hispanic poor...
...As the time of unemployment lengthened, they used more drastic expedients: selling off insurance policies, moving into cheaper homes or apartments, and ultimately selling cars and other belongings...
...An increase in psychiatric admissions may reflect factors other than an actual increase in mental illness...
...Effects on Family Life RECENT RESEARCH confirms that "economic uncertainty brought on by unemployment and marginal employment is a principal reason why family relations deteriorate...
...Ens...
...Compared to other advanced industrial societies, the rate of infant deaths has worsened during the past 25 years...
...Most of those single parents are women, and their risks of poverty are almost three times those of single fathers who head families—whose poverty rate, in turn, is more than twice that of married family heads with children...
...In some states, moreover, average weekly benefits are considerably lower...
...A study of the effects of job loss on "urban social distress" in 51 American cities used two distinct indices...
...There are indications that high unemployment also contributes to increased crime by making it more difficult for ex-offenders or ex-addicts to re-enter the work force...
...Patterns of Poverty STAGNATION AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT...
...172...
...The sense of worth is usually regained on becoming re-employed, but for those whose status in their family remains changed, the loss of self-respect is more enduring...
...Much the same "compounding" effect takes place with alcohol: its consumption rises dramatically during economic crises, and the use of alcohol is, in turn, closely associated with serious crime—in this case, particularly with violent crime...
...The study points out that fetal and early infant deaths are likely to be most affected by changes in the health of the mother following economic dislocation...
...The number of poor people in the North and West in 1977 was virtually the same as a decade earlier...
...But that impact has had less to do with reducing the size of the poverty population than with shifting the sex (and, to a lesser degree, the color) of the people within it...
...Women, Unemployment, and Mental Health PART OF the myth of painless unemployment is the idea that unemployed women suffer little because their work is often not financially "necessary...
...Five percent of the sample reported no income sources at all...
...Of those who have, many, even using the most generous definitions, have not been raised to what the U.S...
...Studies of the Depression painted a grim picture of famiklies cutting back on food, dropping insurance policies, exhausting savings accounts, and living on what they could borrow from friends and relatives...
...Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 20402...
...by 1977, only one-third...
...Unemployment and Psychiatric Hospitals UNEMPLOYMENT has a demonstrated effect on the incidence of depression, and studies show that unemployment is linked to more drastic psychological impairments as well...
...A striking effect of unemployment, consistently uncovered in studies since the Depression, is its crippling impact on selfrespect...
...Unemployment also strikes most heavily at younger families, those with preschool children, disrupting family life at a time when stability is needed most...
...By 1977 it had reached four times the white rate...
...The impact on low-income families is most severe...
...also indicates the resistance of the kind of poverty suffered by Northern blacks to antipoverty strategies and economic growth...
...Measured by their relative chances of being poor, the most traditionally disadvantaged groups in American society—minorities and women —are worse off than a decade ago...
...Effects on Health THERE is clear and persuasive evidence that unemployment affects health, in both the short term and the long...
...deaths of older infants peaked three to five years later...
...But there were about a million and a half more poor children in families headed by women...
...The median income in 1977 of single-mother families was only $340 above the poverty level for a nonfarm family of four...
...In addition, by ignoring the limits on the scope and generosity of benefits available to the unemployed, the assumption greatly minimizes the very real economic deprivation many of them still face...
...The resistance of Northern poverty is closely bound up with the greater intractability of urban poverty in general...
...That increase may seem fairly small, but its significance becomes clear when we consider that it is only a relatively sharp drop in poverty among families headed by black men that has kept black poverty rates from leaping still faster ahead of the rates for whites...
...Even if the loss of ajob does not force relocation, it involves the diminishing of social ties with friends and former associates: the unemployed may fear rejection, want to hide their lowered status, or feel too humiliated by their loss of income and opportunities to maintain their personal relations with others...
...Research prepared for the Joint Economic Committee concluded that a rise in the unemployment rate of 1 percent would raise suicide rates by about 4 percent, and the 1.4 percentage point increase in the jobless rate in 1970 could be held responsible for roughly 1,500 suicides across the country...
...In 1975 the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that since the early 1950s the size of the federal prison population had been directly related to the national unemployment rate...
...In 1967, a black woman heading a family had 71/2 times the chance of being poor as a white man...
...It is extremely difficult for professionals and others in high-status jobs to find jobs, but for people in more routine low-level work, emotional well-being is often wholly tied to being able to bring home a paycheck...
...by 1969, only 12 percent...
...Beneath the myth of the "abolition of poverty, then, is the reality of continuing hardship for the aged and a shocking increase in poverty among youth—especially the children of the inner cities...
...This proportion, the study finds, has increased significantly since the late 1960s, mainly because of the longer average duration of joblessness in the recessionary mid70s...
...These figures, moreover, mask the fact that many families manage to cushion income loss only by various coping strategies, from cutting into savings to putting more family members to work...
...The researcher for the Joint Economic Committee calculated that there are clear links between rises in the official unemployment rate and the rate of deaths from severe illnesses...
Vol. 28 • April 1981 • No. 2
