Poverty in Western Wisconsin
 David Trechter
©March 30, 2008 @ UU Society of River Falls

About one hundred and twenty years ago, a writer said of America,

“Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.”  

Jacob August Riis, “How the Other Half Lives:  Studies of the Tenements of New York” – 1890.

My talk today will focus on whether or not Riis’ observations of urban America near the turn of the previous century have relevance to the America of today and, in particular, if they have relevance to those of us who live here in semi-rural western Wisconsin.  

What do the data say about the divide between rich and poor in America today?  One of the standard ways we measure the “haves and have nots” in a country is the “Gini Coefficient” (named for the Italian statistician Corrado Gini who proposed it in a 1912 paper).  The Gini Coefficient takes values between 0 (absolute equality) and 1 (the top one percent of a society has all the income).  According the CIA, which routinely calculates the Gini Coefficient for countries around the world, the U.S. Gini Coefficient in 2007 was .45.  Let me give this number some perspective in three ways.

First, if we look back in time – between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s the U.S. Gini Coefficient was fairly consistently calculated as .35.  So, since the mid-1980s income in the US has become a substantially less equally distributed – moving from .35 to .45 is a very large change.  

Second, let’s compare the current U.S. Gini Coefficient to those of other developed countries around the world.  Gini Coefficients in other developed countries vary from the very egalitarian (Denmark = .24, Sweden = .23, Germany and Norway = .28) to the moderately egalitarian (Switzerland = .34, Netherlands = .31, Japan = .38, Australia = .35).  So, the U.S. is between 10 and 20 percent less egalitarian than virtually any other developed economy.  

Third, let’s compare the U.S. to the countries of Latin America, which have traditionally been among the least egalitarian societies in the world – Brazil = .57, Argentina = .49, Mexico = 46, Costa Rica = .50.  

In short, the distribution of income in U.S. today has much more in common with the banana republics and latifundia-driven societies of Latin America than with our historic experience or our economic peers.  The last time the U.S. Gini Coefficient was as high as it is today was on the eve of the Great Depression in 1929.  That, it should be noted, was at the end of a decade of deregulation of financial markets and general governmental inactivity – think Calvin Coolidge.  It was a time not unlike the current era except that we have been on a deregulation/declining governmental activism for the better part of 3 decades at this point.

Additional data indicate that Jacob Riis’s contention no longer holds.  Mr. Riis, as noted at the start of this talk, said that the top half of society knew and cared little about the bottom half.  Suppose we arrayed households by their income level from the poorest to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet at the top and divided them into 5 groups with equal numbers of people in each (quintiles).  If you consider the total income in society as a pie, the poorest 20 percent of the US population in 1970 got a slice of the income pie equal to 5.4% of the total, the richest 20% got a slice that claimed about 41% of the pie.  Since 1970, the proportion of the pie claimed by each of the 4 poorest groups (the bottom 80%) has stayed the same or shrunk – only the richest quintile claimed a bigger slice, they now receive about 50% of total income.  The poorest quintile’s share shrank over this period from 5.4% to 3.4%.  So, it isn’t the top half today who know and care little about the bottom half, it is the top 20% who know and seem to care little about the bottom 80%.

The growing disparity has come about for a number of reasons.  

The wealthy have been helped by:
The poor have been hurt by:
So how have we fared in western Wisconsin?  This is a relatively a relatively prosperous state.  Compared to the U.S. as a whole, Wisconsin:
Within Wisconsin this is a relatively prosperous region.  Pierce County (about average for the 7-county region) compared to the state as a whole:
And yet . . .

One year ago the Center that I direct at UW-River Falls did a survey of households in 7 western Wisconsin Counties (Chippewa, Barron, Dunn, Pepin, Pierce, St. Croix, and Polk Counties) that had incomes less than $40,000 per year.  According to the 2000 Census, there were nearly 50,000 households in this region that had annual incomes of $40,000 or less.  We heard from about 900 of them.

In the questionnaire we asked them about issues they are facing with respect to health care, employment/income, transportation, housing, legal issues, child care, and nutrition.  We created what we called a “hardship index” based on the respondents’ answers to 26 questions in the survey.  For example, these families were asked if
The category of concerns that had the largest negative impact on their households was health - (nearly half identified health concerns as their number one concern).  
Only 9% of the households surveyed said that they hadn’t been affected by at least one of the 26 items we included in our hardship index.
In short, the other half, the lower half, that Riis wrote about 120 years ago, are with us in western Wisconsin.

The core beliefs of Unitarian-Universalism, which we recited at the start of this talk, speak of the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” and “justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”  The focus of UUs is not on conformance with dogma handed down from some authority that, with the grace of God, will help get us into heaven when we die.  Rather, our focus is on making this world a better place through ethical behaviors that are, in effect, their own reward.  Because of our focus on improving this life rather than waiting for paradise in the next life, we, it seems to me, should have a particular commitment to improving how the “other half lives.”

For the dozen or more years that I have been coming to UUSRF we have been, mostly, internally focused.
These are still pressing concerns.  They are also worthy goals and each contributes to what makes these two hours a meaningful part of our lives.  But is it enough?  

Since moving into this building, we have seen our numbers increase substantially.  The challenge before us, I think, is to translate our concern about this world as expressed in our Covenant and our increasing numbers into concrete actions that make a difference in our communities.  Whether it is
The opportunities to contribute to a better community await us.  Where do you think we should put our efforts?