APA hosts conversation on deep poverty

The American Psychological Association hosted a National Conversation on Deep Poverty on March 1, 2019 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The event explored the challenges that the 18.5 million Americans face living at half of the federal poverty level ($12,000 a year for a family of four) and proposed solutions to what many people call an epidemic. Maureen Bunyan, a 44-year veteran television news anchor in Washington, D.C. (ABC7/WJLA-TV and CBS9/WUSA-TV) moderated the discussion. The event was free, open to the public and livestreamed on APA’s YouTube channel.opens in new window

APA President Rosie Phillips Davis, PhD, ABPP, asked panelists to examine why deep poverty persists in America. She spoke of her childhood living in deep poverty, which is one reason why she is using her presidential year to focus on psychological science as a catalyst to better understand and solve the problem of poverty. She noted that she has formed a working group of psychologists who study poverty to report on evidence-based solutions that can help move the needle on this issue.

Clarence Anthony, MPA, executive director of the National League of Cities, talked about the women and people of color in cities across the country who live with the negative impacts of deep poverty, including lack of health care and housing and quality water issues. Anthony asked how best to develop policies for those who just can't get to the next rung of the economic ladder.

As a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, Caroline Ratcliffe, PhD, has focused her career on persistent poverty, looking at the data over almost 40 years to understand the experiences of children in poverty and how they relate to success in adulthood. Ratcliffe said the data show that children born to poor parents are less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to have consistent employment in their 20s and more likely to be persistently poor.

J. Lawrence Aber, PhD, psychology and policy professor at New York University, spoke in part as an author of the National Academy of Sciences' report, "A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty," which he said documents the causality between child poverty and children's mental health and learning. Current policies are helping to reduce poverty, Aber said, and a series of policy changes could further reduce child poverty by 50 percent in 10 years.

Panelists also discussed the differences between poverty and entrenched poverty; attitudes toward poverty; comparison of poverty rates in the United States and other industrialized countries; and federal, state and local policies that promote institutional poverty. For more information, visit APA’s Deep Poverty Initiative.