Summary of The Injustice of Place by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Injustice of Place by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

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The Injustice of Place is a new book by three top scholars, focusing on America's poorest places rather than big cities. They discover that the country's most disadvantaged communities are rural, often overlooked. The authors trace the legacies of deepest poverty in America, including inequalities shaping health, livelihoods, and social mobility. They argue that these communities share a history of resource extraction and human exploitation, calling for a new War on Poverty, focusing on the deepest need in these areas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Nov 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223091370

Willie M. Joseph

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Introduction

The pattern of gleaming white antebellum homes in America's most deeply disadvantaged places is evident as we travel across the country. These areas often have both desperate poverty and considerable wealth. In 2017, Andrea Ducas at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asked for a project to study the unseen lives of some of America's poorest families, living on cash incomes of less than $2 per person per day. They were intrigued by the idea of studying places instead of people, as the social sciences had a rich tradition of community studies from about the turn of the twentieth century onward.

Ducas raised the question of understanding poverty more holistically if we included not only income as a measure but health as well. When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in 1964, the nation lacked any method of counting the poor or defining how poverty should be defined. Since then, poverty researchers have been locked in endless debate about how poverty should be measured.

To assess the level of disadvantage in a community, they combined traditional income-based measures with other markers, including health. Health outcomes vary tremendously by race, ethnicity, and income in the United States. In 2008, life expectancy for highly educated white males was eighty years, while loweducated Black men had only sixty-six years. A tidal wave of new research showed that a person's health is shaped more by their context (income, family circumstances, and community characteristics) than by their genetic profiles or medical care.

The study of place-based disadvantage incorporated two well-measured health outcomes: birth weight and life expectancy. The researchers recognized the importance of measuring whether disadvantage in a particular place persisted for children growing up there. They used confidential IRS data to create a measure of intergenerational mobility for every city and county in the nation, revealing significant variation by place. The term deep disadvantage was chosen to capture the complexity of the problem when a person's life chances are hindered by multiple conditions or circumstances, including the community in which they live.

The Index of Deep Disadvantage reflects two traditional income poverty indicators, two markers of health (low birth weight and life expectancy), and the rate of intergenerational mobility for children who grow up low-income. The researchers used a sophisticated machine learning technique called principal component analysis to rank the roughly 3,000 counties in the United States along with the 500 most populous cities on a continuum of disadvantage that accounted for income, health, and intergenerational mobility. The study found that the most disadvantaged places on the index were mostly rural, with many communities of Black and Hispanic Americans and large Native American populations.

The most disadvantaged places in America are found in three regions: Appalachia, South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt. Researchers conducted research in the summer of 2019, visiting various locations to engage with residents and community leaders. They also visited Zavala and Brooks Counties in South Texas, where they conducted interviews and visited historical sites. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted these visits, so researchers turned to history books, government reports, and first-person narratives to learn more.

The pandemic-inspired immersion in local history led to a deeper understanding of America's most deeply disadvantaged places. The regions shared a history of intensive resource extraction and profound human exploitation, with the goal of the landowning class to build vast wealth on the backs of those laboring on the land. This economic pattern emerged in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with one industry linked to national and global markets dominating the economy. This pattern held into the 1960s, when King Cotton, King Coal, and others would bow to the forces of automation and competition from global markets.

The book explores the exploitation of communities of color within the United States, focusing on the most deeply disadvantaged places. It reveals that these areas resembled colonies, with the fallout from systems of historic inequality revealing specific themes. Clay County, Kentucky, was once home to salt barons and subsistence farms, but now faces the opioid crisis, a decline in social infrastructure, and a rise in opioid use. In South Texas, spinach and onion fields once thrived but faced extreme hardship for landless laborers, resulting in adult illiteracy rates among the highest in the nation. Local government corruption is also a significant issue, with the FBI arresting officials for voting and collaborating with drug dealers.

Violence is the number one problem facing communities, with Leflore County, Mississippi, being among the most violent in the nation. Marion County, South Carolina, experienced flooding due to hurricanes, with homes