Subtitle: Poverty, Assets, and the American Dream
My summary: Assets, not income but wealth, is what keeps people (families, communities) out of poverty; US poverty-reduction programs ignore, or sometimes rule out, asset accumulation; the US could help the poor build their own assets and become self-sustaining for less money than we spend on helping the middle-class and rich accumulate assets; there are examples of useful programs in several very different circumstances.
I'm going to back up and read the earlier books on how assets are at least as important as income, because the numbers look interestingly explanatory. First on the list is Assets and the Poor, .
The case studies were cheering, in that the projects they cover did at least some good where much was needed; they also cover widely varying assets, from house equity to community interaction to 'soft skills' to natural resources to small-business competence. Some of the principles carry over between; the successes tended to work with people who were the most nearly successful of the poor, and let them recruit others by example.
The Battle Creek neighborhood rescue did something unexpected and clever; they put work and money into raising house prices, without worrying about gentrification. Battle Creek (built mostly for cereal factories) still has a fair number of owner-inhabited houses, and not a lot of risk of gentrification, and the reasoning was that dropping house prices were causing rational owners to put less and less maintenance into their houses, as they couldn't have gotten the equity back out. Loaning money to rehabbers, and street-landscapers, reversed the cycle in at least some blocks, before all the original inhabitants sold to developers.
Overall, the book is cautious and practical and determinedly bipartisan, repeatedly pointing out how many programs there are to subsidize middle-class saving, how clearly salaried workers benefit from default saving, how helping asset accumulation leads to self-reliance and self-restraint, etc. And who could be against self-reliance?
Well... I like the summary of the post-WWII plutocratic political program being one of risk transfer. If you transfer a lot of risk to other people, you will eventually be able to buy anything else you want at a penny on the dollar when the dice come down against them; "The time to buy stock is when blood is in the streets. " Late Victorian Holocausts makes a good case that this practice is how Europe, especially England, overtook the wealth of what is now the Third World; and even some case that this was intentional. There had been, for instance, large public works for irrigation and flood management and famine relief, which were supplanted by markets in good years (when it was not too politically expensive). Their lack in the bad years left nations impoverished. There are public goods that pay off rarely and are still worth their price.
*****
Off in metaphor land, I thought of buffered soils and delayed neutron fractions. Soils with good buffering don't change as rapidly as outside influences push them; e.g., they have stocks of nutrients or charge held in reserve. Without buffering, shocks are more often lethal to plants, which makes the whole system even more susceptible to the next shock. Nutrient stocks are obviously an asset, and they are metaphorically appropriate because they're usually built up over a long time; the fraction of organic material that breaks down most slowly is important.
On further thought, I don't think the slow neutrons are a good metaphor for assets, although they may be a second-level metaphor; a society with a sufficient number of asset-buffered actors in it is... easier to regulate? I don't think that's what Jefferson expected from sturdy independence. Never mind.
ISBN: 0815706200
So wrote clew in Cities. , History (21st c.). | TrackBack