“People think poverty as a
measure of income, but as a lived experience for what it means to
be poor, it tends to involve a lot of other things as well. We have
taken some other dimensions such as low education, lack of health
insurance, being in an unemployed household, and being in an area
with concentrated poverty, where 1 in 5 of your neighbors in below
the poverty line. One of the interesting questions becomes, how do
those different dimensions of disadvantage go together? Is it the
same people experiencing all of those different kinds of
disadvantage, or different people in different places experiencing
different things?”—Richard
Reeves
“Policies need to be better
integrated to work. To alleviate poverty, rarely is just increasing
income going to be enough if you’re facing things like deep health
disparities and concentrations of poverty that carry so many other
barriers that make it much harder for people to move out of
poverty. This sort of a lens just gives you that multidimensional
look beyond income.”—Elizabeth Kneebone
In this episode of
“Intersections,” Brookings experts Elizabeth Kneebone, fellow in
Metropolitan Policy Program, and Richard Reeves, senior fellow in
Economic Studies, discuss their recent research on the multiple
barriers and challenges that complicate the path out of poverty,
and how different dimensions of poverty affect different people
across the country.
Show
notes
The intersection of race, place, and
multidimensional poverty

With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Carisa
Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Eric Abalahin, Fred Dews and Richard
Fawal.
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email to intersections@brookings.edu.