uh luke sheriff brown here congratulations on being named the clone professor of social policy and social justice at the ford school of public policy your work including your book two dollars a day has shaped the way policymakers and the public think about poverty and justice in america i quote you all the time when i think of academics making a difference for social justice in michigan in our country in the world luke schaefer is the first name that comes to mind luke congratulations on behalf of the mayor's office when we need thought partners in the work and friends in the fight and boots on the ground we think of you luke congratulations on becoming named the cone professor i have so much admiration for you and your scholarship luke has a great career that embodies the name of that professorship i've always been impressed by your ability to make connections that other people miss whether between research and policy across disciplines or methods repeatedly making the whole more than the sum of its parts we're proud of your scholarly productivity your brilliant teaching and mentorship and how you've become a public intellectual those two things together social policy and social justice because it encapsulates exactly who you are i always have your book close by i refer to it often i assign it to people to read you are a scholar of the highest order with a deep commitment to rigor and at the same time a humble humanitarian heart having a lover of mercy and justice your passion in your dedication for research and teaching about social policy and justice has made the difference we need more luke shafers you have done so much and you will do so much more thank you for you luke is passionate about social justice and and that's in part because he's passionate about people that's how luke is we see that from your work poverty is not inevitable and its root causes are not intractable hal and i know that herman and amalia would have embraced you and your efforts and they would have been honored that your professorship bears their name congratulations luke on the well-deserved honor of being named the hermann and amalia cohn professor of social policy and social justice at the ford school we're so proud of you go blue [Applause] welcome everybody i hope you enjoyed that fitting tribute to luke shafer just wonderful expression i think of all the love and admiration that everyone in this community has for luke so i'm just grateful that you were all able to join us here i'm michael barr i'm the joan and sanford wild dean at the gerald r ford school of public policy it is my great honor to welcome you all here today to be able to enjoy the inaugural lecture for the hermann and amalia cohn professor of social policy and social justice here at the ford school in a few minutes i'm going to invite president mark schlissel who's here up to introduce luke and so in the in the meanwhile i just want to say a few words about the cohn collaborative for social policy here at the ford school the cone collaborative is work that that hal and carol cohn and the ford school worked on together to create it's a collaborative that has three main pillars the cones hal and carol have established five new professorships at the gerald r ford school of public policy which is extraordinary i don't know of any other i i don't i don't know of any other school that's been honored in in that way and and it's my fervent hope that the ford school is uh a fitting place for the cone family to be honored and in some cases remembered for their own contributions to social justice hal and carol are not graduates of the ford school of public policy they came to us because they saw the work that was being done here at the ford school and the impact it could have in the world and i'm just deeply grateful to them for their for their friendship um for their support for their vision for this program as i mentioned the cone collaborator will have five new professors the first of them we're about to honor luke shafer the cone collaborative also has two other key pillars to it the second pillar is support for our wonderful students so the cones hal and carroll are supporting two cohn scholars um here at the ford school marco ramirez is here as our first of the cohn scholars and the third component is support for having a policy impact making sure that we have the resources we need for seed grants for collaboration for interdisciplinary work across our faculty and for the translational work to take that research as luke has done and turn that into real policy action so it is a an extraordinary moment for the school i'm deeply grateful to hal and carol i'm so glad that so many of hal and carol's family are here with us to celebrate today and i'm also wonderful to see so many of luke's friends and colleagues and family here to enjoy this moment with us today so one last round of applause for hal and carol please uh for the introduction of uh the hermann and amalia cohn professor of social policy and social justice i am thrilled to be able to turn over the microphone to our president mark schlissel mark has done extraordinary work advancing policy impact here and across the university community including by having the vision to found and get off the ground poverty solutions which luke so abele has been spearheading for these last five years so it is my delight and pleasure to introduce to you president mark schlissel thanks very much dean barron for the kind introduction and i also want to add my appreciation to our special guests hal and carol and the entire cone family it's really wonderful to have you at this event and to have gotten to know you through the years and hopefully we get to share many more joyous moments in the in the years ahead the generosity of the cohn charitable trust has allowed us to advance interdisciplinary research on policy that promotes social equity and inclusion for all u.s residents it's really a pleasure personally to be here as the dean mentioned this was really poverty solutions in luke or one of the first things i supported after i arrived here in 2014 an obvious no-brainer and you know for me this is what a great research university is supposed to do it's supposed to take scholars and scholarship and look for ways to make a difference in the world and this is just a shining example the greatest universities are both catalysts and crucibles for positive change we're a place where top science and scholarship lead to great ideas and discovery where ideas and discoveries get tested and lead to actions or products new jugs from biomedical research or devices from engineering and as you all know very well in the ford school actions can result in new policies that transform society for the better while our poverty solutions initiative was formally launched in 2016 it began as an idea before that a group of u of m faculty produced a report that found that while research on poverty was being conducted in many academic departments across this institution the scholars were often working independently and unaware of each other and not all of our work was having the impact that it deserved luke schaefer and his colleagues have changed that dramatically thanks to many faculty students and staff and an oppressive array of partners we're realizing the vision of the poverty of the vision of poverty solutions to inform seek out and test new strategies for preventing and alleviating poverty the work achieved an important milestone on march the 11th 2021 when an expansion of the child tax credit was signed into law by president biden as part of the american rescue plan the payments that went out under the expanded ctc have led to a 30 percent decline in food insufficiency for adults with children and a 43 percent decline in food insufficiency for low income households dr schaefer and his colleagues advocated for the expanded credit providing analysis that demonstrated its benefits and in july of 2020 luke testified before congress and after it passed poverty solutions joined detroit mayor mike duggan and a broad southeast michigan coalition to connect families to the ctc and created a website with step-by-step guidance for parents to ensure they actually receive this benefit the white house has called it one of the strongest outreach efforts in the nation and professor shaffer was back at the house of representatives in september to testify on the benefits of making the ctc permanent in addition to serving as the inaugural director of poverty solutions professor schaefer is u of m's first cohn professor his primary appointment is in the ford school and he has additional appointments in our school of social work the law school and our institute for social research professor schaefer is an award-winning author and scholar a carnegie fellow and a policy advisor in the book we just saw shield shamelessly in the video two dollars a day living on almost nothing in america the book he co-wrote with catherine eden we see a portrait of an america that many didn't want to acknowledge an america where families are crushed by poverty and by the systems and policies that perpetuate their desperation in a new york times book review william julius wilson wrote two dollars a day is a call to action arousing both the nation's consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens wilson further deconstructed the political discourse around poverty noting that the rise of each uh the rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the category talk categorical talk about opportunity and the american dream i'm so grateful that professor schaefer and his colleagues have answered that call to action with their monumental work there are many people at this institution that are great scholars and there are many people that are great at public engagement i don't know of anybody that combines those two better than the inaugural hair chair holder of the hermann and amelie cohn professorship of social justice and social policy i introduce professor luke shafer [Applause] oh man a person should not have to talk after all that thank you michael thank you mark thank you helen carol thanks to everyone uh for coming it's a it's a special thing to get to speak to your friends and your colleagues my mom is here she she taught me the importance of stories and the importance of caring about people and um the fun in the everyday i would say and um my partner in crime for 20 years susie schaefer is here my have i've gotten to raise two beautiful children with and it's always the last advisor in the room for me for all thorny problems and moral compass it's great to have clergy in the family and michael my eight-year-old son who has taught has taught me a lot about making small talk he's uh like oh you just go and talk to people about whatever's on your mind so lots of really wonderful collaborators here and i'm really grateful to you all um this is herman and amalia uh hell and carol wright while the family has little information about their early lives they know their values through their children hal's father and aunt both were strong independent individuals courageous in their actions and true to the purpose and principles they drew from their parents i also happen to think herman has a really great mustache sometimes i do wonder if amalia had some of the troubles um correcting the pronunciation of her name that i run into it's it's no it's amalia and and no c in schaefer either is uh what we do a lot of them uh herman operated a hardware store as did his son after him and that's a special connection for me my family had a hardware store for four generations in ypsilanti michigan and i like to think that maybe that's some of the connection this this idea of a shared sensibility that problems are complicated but with the right tools they can be fixed um that's more in the abstract for hal and i uh than in the actual hardware world but um that's the idea germany was their home but with the rise of the third reich hermann and amalia lost their voices and their rights then their home and finally saw their families destroyed they got their children out of harm's way and that's why we get to have hell now but not themselves with justice denied their aspirations were dashed and their values trampled hal and carol honored them by endowing the hermann and malia cohen professorship for social justice and social policy to address issues of social justice in this country so others may not lose their voices and roles in society and thereby we may all benefit from their collective experience and wisdom voice for the voiceless i really admire that and i want to live into that call and as i thought about what that means we actually have a number of people in the room who i think of as having written books that really embodied us so kathy eden has written enough books to complete an entire syllabus that i think meets this criteria and of course i'm really taken with uh associate dean celeste watkins hayes book remaking a life which is all about the hiv safety net and the ways that bringing voices into the beginning of policy led to such a better outcome in the end kristen seafeld abandons families about the safety net and how it leaves people sort of alone even when we provide support we're not there with them and reuben miller's new book halfway home which is about the afterlife of mass incarceration i've been thinking about those works oh by the way all of those books are really great stocking stuffers if you're looking for gups i've been thinking about what it means to voice for the voiceless and on walks with my dog i was thinking about how i don't i wouldn't i wouldn't presume to speak for folks who are marginalized folks who don't have voice in the process but i think it can begin with listening for a voice to have a voice i think is to be heard and to have what you say your ideas your principles acted upon i've got this really wonderful team at poverty solutions where we try to do a lot of work and have a lot of fun at the same time and when we i think about the model that we've tried to build it sort of breaks down to listen research and act to listen is to really let our agendas be driven by the people who were talking with that and that might be in focus groups that might be walking around the communities that we're working in that might be through incredible representative surveys like in the city of detroit the dmacc survey then i have to think about the tools that we have to bring to bear i'm a researcher and so that's what i can do and if i can bring the listening into a conversation with data analysis i believe i can learn more about those challenges the challenges that are lifted up and then i believe we need to act on them so that research turns into the possibility of change that it can empower families to live healthy and productive lives then i think we have to evaluate that to see did it in fact change it's not enough to change legislation right it's not enough to change a system so it works better for families i think we need to take the time to see how much change was there what was the impact so listen research change and that has taken me in a lot of really surprising directions in my career we formed a partnership with mayor duggan in the city of detroit and when i think about the hundred things on my list of action items for reducing poverty and enhancing economic mobility and what was the time the nation's poorest large city by the way we're not the poorest large city anymore um cleveland if you're wondering i think about those hundreds of things the one thing i can definitively say was not on that list was auto insurance but as we started to talk to families uh we started to talk to the mayor who's actually pretty obsessed with this issue community groups we heard about auto insurance and so we wanted to see you know what what does it mean that these auto insurance rates are far too high so our great team member at poverty solutions working with liz phillips and pat cooney asked this national simulator of auto insurance rates to one of the zebra one of the places you might go to figure out what something should cost you please oh please could we have data on auto insurance and they they brought me this table that found that the same policy in 2018 that was costing nationally fourteen hundred dollars was fifty four hundred dollars in the city of detroit that's seventeen percent of the annual income of the detroit family i put a little space between detroit and the rest because one of these things is not like the other so when i see this chart i think about a single mom who has to make a decision about whether or not to go to work and maybe she didn't get the auto insurance in the maybe she's uninsured that day and i think about sort of the decision that she's put in do i not drive uninsured in in detroit her job is probably in the suburbs there's this big mismatch and it turns out we haven't really invested in the kind of public transportation that would have made it possible for her to get to the job she probably has so i think it's a pretty rational decision for her to decide this one day i'm going to take care of the auto insurance but it's going to be okay i need to get to the job because i need to pay my rent and i imagine her getting pulled over for an out tail light and in michigan we've been hiking up the rates of our tickets for many many years and so i think she gets a ticket and then she can't pay that ticket so then she doesn't pay it and then uh in michigan for a long time we had driver responsibility fees which was like a ticket on top of the ticket uh and a couple of years ago actually the state legislature and the governor said you know what this is a good policy we've confiscated about 340 000 drivers licenses 70 000 detroiters had their driver's licenses confiscated and they decided to act but the final piece of the puzzle was the fact that the state was making about 90 million dollars on these fines and fees and that was a pretty big hole in the budget so when i think about that i think about a structural cycle of poverty right positions that we put people in that lead them to have to make tough choices with a lot of risks in any direction so we wrote a report and it sort of connected auto insurance to poverty and economic mobility and i enjoyed the fact it was cited both by governor whitmer and the mackinac center for policy which is a libertarian right of center think tank and it was a part of driving a policy change that happened a couple of years ago and now we're just about getting ready to release a second report while we'll show that so far rates have gone down about 20 percent which in detroit is about a thousand dollars a little bit more than a thousand dollars well that's not nothing on the other hand there's been no change in the disparities between what we pay in detroit and what we pay in other parts of the state and some of the health insurance providers uh we were the the policies were a little bit crude and so we think some of those policies uh uh providers are maybe getting driven out of the market so we try to listen research act and then begin again i had a great student mike evangelist he's gone on to columbia on a post doc who was a joint doctoral student in social work and sociology and we had to get him a field placement so we set michael up with a field placement at a center of lawyers that helped folks with unemployment insurance problems and so he would take the calls and he wasn't a lawyer but he would take the calls and he'd talk to people they'd say i got this weird note i'm not sure what to do about it this thing's happening i haven't been able to get my benefits yet and the lawyers did the work of helping them figure this stuff out and mike came into my office one day and he said you know i'm taking all of these calls that they say they're being charged with unemployment insurance fraud and the numbers were just like tons and tons of people calling and the lawyers were saying they'd never seen anything like that before so he and he i had decided that hey let's actually the number of cases you can see that the state establishing unemployment insurance fraud claims is all public information so let's go take a look and see has there been an increase in the number of people being charged with fraud and mike came back i think this was in the days of like when students would actually bring paper to your office uh so i think he came back with uh this chart so um when i saw this chart i must say i said a few words that i cannot say in front of my mother or carol cohn but as we dug into this we found out that somewhere around 2012 the state of michigan had gotten a new computer system that had an algorithm that was looking back through all of the cases and looking for technical discrepancies and then the computer would actually send a letter it was no human oversight it would generate a letter that would go to the claimant saying we think you've been fraudulent please explain yourself and then if if it didn't hear back in 10 days they just presumed that people agreed that they had been fraudulent and in michigan if you're charged with fraud then you would owe back all the dollars and benefits that you had gotten so let's imagine that's like three thousand dollars right over some period of time plus a penalty which was that amount times four and then it would compound at 15 interest uh just to let's drive the stake in there uh and uh and so uh it turned out there um this computer was just sort of going back in time and we kind of wondered you know are is this right was just like a whole lot of people fraudulent people not getting charged you know earlier on and the lawyers would take cases to the state and they would say oh actually there's just that's that was a mistake we're going to clean that up but there's no structural problem and so we thought there was a structural problem so the department of labor the federal department of labor has oversight over the state unemployment insurance program so after many conversations with cynthia wilbanks i sent a letter to the department of labor saying um we think there might be something wrong happening in michigan with mike evangelis who really was a driver of a lot of this and um steve gray and uh the and we sent it to sandy levin actually and sandy also said to the department of labor hey you should check into this and the the department of labor came and decided to do an audit sort of based on that letter and they took a bunch of cases and they said are these these were deemed fraudulent were these actually fraudulent and uh it came back that they had gotten it wrong at least 20 000 times and uh the the rate of getting it wrong was 93 which i mean that's an impressively high rate though you think like you could almost say if it says you're fraudulent you're not fraudulent and you would have gotten it right uh and so it was this audit right coming in from the federal government that said actually it's not a problem with the people it's a problem with the system and this led to a bipartisan change that meant they could no longer use the computer and on its own and uh and then we started over a little bit of time fighting over um you know should people get the money back that they were wrongly charged and i think that hasn't all totally been resolved over time but sometimes when we're talking about what government should do to prevent and alleviate poverty we're talking about the things that we should do talking about programs really important programs whether they be teachers or mentors lawyers sometimes we're talking about things government shouldn't do and that includes you know charging people 17 of their income for auto insurance and falsely accusing them of fraud i have a lot of my mentors in the room so harold pollock is here from the university of chicago who uh yeah oh harold gets a clap john trotman was who was the guy who said hey why didn't you should go get a phd uh many years ago and sandy danziger both of them helped get me a job here i don't know that it would have happened um and uh and then there's uh sheldon danziger who's here and uh you know sometimes i get into conversation with other people about like their mentors and my mentors and like who gives who gives uh more feedback and i would say well you know you're um your person might have given some feedback but uh i i don't think it's in the same category and and they would say no no you know i mean my person really pushed me so i went i went to the video replay on this and i pulled out the last paper of mine that sheldon commented on and there it is there's a uh i i actually as i was looking at this again i kind of felt like it might be a piece of art so i i titled it composition 17.
Uh and the other thing i really love is like this this was accepted like two months later in the journal of policy and analysis and management which happens to be like one of the best journals in our field so i really don't know how it quite got to this uh there was actually writing on the back of one of these pieces of paper that i just i gave up on so um harold and sheldon um and julie henley and susan lambert they they sort of um i like to say you know taught me to do it both ways right sort of not trying to put your eggs into any one basket methodologically and to look at all the evidence so years ago uh i got to uh i was actually in a meeting with gary freed who is here he was he was wearing a bow tie that day as well uh and um tom buck mueller and uh gary who's a pediatrician said if i could fix one thing about the health care system it would be access to oral health care for children and i was like oh that's pretty interesting and i i started looking into it actually turns out oral health problems is a maybe the number one reason that kids miss school it's a big reason why grown-ups miss work we think there's all this psychosocial challenge of um having teeth that maybe you're embarrassed about let alone that hurt and so i was walking home one day and i i thought i had this like epiphany of like this thing that no one had ever thought about us we should have a mid-level dental provider who can do a lot of the restorative stuff that nobody nobody but a dentist can do it'd be like a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant and so i started to look into it and of course it wasn't a new idea at all i was i was pretty sure this was going to get me tenure but uh it turned out new zealand's actually had these types of providers and have for like um decades and they have eradicated untreated tooth decay in schools because they house one of these mid-level dental providers in every every school so um i did a very academic thing which is to say write a letter that i thought could go to governor snyder to say we should have a commission to see if we should do something like this and uh now i have to tell you now like some of some of my best friends are dentists uh but there are dentists who really don't like this idea actually so my first hate mail i'm proud to say it was from some dentists who really really didn't like the idea of a mid-level dental provider and susie's friends used to joke that they were going to send me like broken toothbrushes in the mail uh so um one of the concerns was oh if you have a provider like this um they won't the care won't be as good it'll be second second rate care so i thought that was pretty interesting you know let's see if that's true of course some of the other things where well people don't show up for appointments and i actually was sure that wasn't true because if you went over on the free clinic day that we have here at u of m you would find like basically the day they announced there's free dental care it fills up um like in an hour seriously like in an hour so um liz phillips who's a um a collaborator of mine uh took the lead in looking at like every study that had ever been written on the quality of care of these mid-level dental providers who've been practicing in other countries for for decades so i consider this table a beat you into submission type table so this reviews every study it's about two dozen and um two things i like about this so like 20 there's 23 studies on the quality of care of mid-level dental providers and all but two conclude that these providers are above the bar and um all of the studies that compare the quality of care of a dental therapist so we're talking about like fillings and extracting baby teeth to dentists actually find that they perform at least as well in some cases a dental therapist performed better so this example to me was like always the importance of a counterfactual right if you're assessing the quality of care it needs to be against whatever the other possible provider was right so if you're assessing a new dental therapist you should compare it to a new dentist like coming right out of school and some of these studies actually found dental therapists were a better quality of care because you can imagine sort of the theory behind this if you're doing fewer things you've got a tighter scope of practice maybe it will be you'll be better at it you'll just do you know the same things over and over again so um in this story uh we i uh we found some partners who actually the university of detroit mercy dental school decided they wanted to do a pilot and steph white actually was here she started doing sessions all across the state just introducing people to the idea asking what would you think about this mid-level dental provider would you be comfortable how would it how would it work with people outside of the oral healthcare field who might have a different perspective than inside and it was a it was a funny circumstance where over a couple of years i was uh working towards a pilot where we were going to train some people uh within a dental school they have basically there's no scope of practice restrictions as long as they're students they can they can do anything so we could up train folks have them work all across the state see if they provide quality care and then they would be there and then we could implement the program and the last time i ever spoke publicly about this there was because of a lot of different people there was enough interest that i always remember i was speaking at the michigan oral healthcare coalition and at the end the hygienists who had really like really liked me before uh were like we don't need any more studies we can just do this and the dentists who had really not liked me before they were like we should really do this study uh there's no there's no need to race into a change and that's when i was like okay well uh maybe it's maybe the time for studies actually passed here and uh and some other people took up the mantle and interestingly the champion of this was mike shirkey in the state legislature and i had this really funny period where i was really cheering him on as michigan became only like the fifth state in the nation to have a dental therapy law while also writing up at after op-ed about what a bad idea of medicaid work requirements were which was also his idea kovid sort of hit and we're still waiting to have dental therapists in the state of michigan there's questions about who's going to train them and you know do they need to be trained here elsewhere so the policies in place but we still have to see if it's going to have the effect that we hope it was a decade ago that kathy eden took a chance on me as an assistant professor uh she invited me up to that school in cambridge the public policy school in cambridge massachusetts i can't remember its name at the moment uh it was like two two or three schools ago for cassie so she can't remember it either um i i don't i don't know if any of you have like a friend uh or a colleague that um you think wow this person is like so much cooler than me and i'm just going to be glad for however long they hang out with me uh uh and that well kathy's been that for me and uh you know just the chance to work with her um has been you know really a a huge thing in my career and it's been 10 years so i think i think we're good going forward she's she's not going to move on to other people but uh it was in her office uh that she had been doing these other studies on other stuff neither of us were really looking at um welfare reform or extreme poverty in any way i was writing a lot of papers about the working about folks who were working and could they get unemployment insurance couldn't what was the eitc like for them and she said i'm sort of seeing all these families who they they don't have any money they might have food assistance and they might have a housing subsidy but it's just striking that there's like no cash in the household and so i got interested in that i was like oh that's uh i was working with this data and i could i could very quickly look now harvard didn't give me an office because they're kind of cheap but i went to the library and i ran these models and it was the predecessor to this chart where we could see you know now we've looked in households corrected for under reporting and then the number of families reporting periods without cash income above two dollars a day you know depending on the data set it doubles the quadruples we've looked at administrative data from the snap program families reporting under penalty of law they don't have any money and we started looking at things like extreme measures of hardship school homelessness counts once we've got 90 percent of the schools in in 2007 these are kids that are homeless or doubled up we see this this striking increase and actually we can chart the decline of tanf uh cash welfare in a in a state with an increase in the school homelessness number so much so that for every hundred cases we lose in a state you see about 14 more homeless kids so we decided that we were going to do you know this project that both tried to look at large-scale data like this and tried to do it both ways try to look at all the data right to get the most cohesive picture and go out and meet families and um my daughter bridget came with me the first time i got to meet families for what became our book two dollars a day and i remember sort of early on getting to know families mike my daughter playing with caitlin and cole who were jennifer hernandez's kids in the book down to visit lauren on the deep south side of chicago lauren's actually bridget's middle name so that's where the pseudonym came from and um starting to ask families like how what do you do when you don't have any money what does it look like and noticing actually a little like divot on the inside crease of some of the elbows of some of the mobs and we started to learn that selling blood plasma was a major economic coping strategy and we saw it in chicago we saw it at cleveland we saw it in appalachia on the mississippi delta it turns out there wasn't enough um you know in the rural places there just weren't enough people um so i got really interested in this had we have we seen an increase in blood plasma sales over some period of time turns out the the plasma trade association is actually proud of the fact that uh we've seen this by 2019 so my great student analytics ocho who's working on this for a dissertation updates this chart every year and sends it to me and it always goes up i actually will probably go down in 2020 because there's some challenges with um kovin but uh i think we're talking about you know when we look at 10 000 10 million uh plasma sales up through about 2004 2005 and then up to uh 50 million as of 2019.
That's a really big increase and it actually turns out the united states accounts for 70 percent of the world's plasma supply and only 40 of the demand so we export the blood plasma mostly poor americans because we can see that these centers are sort of concentrated in very poor communities and communities of color so um when two dollars a day came out and we wrote about this we got a very sternly worded letter and uh from the plasma trade associations and it's it's fine to talk about poverty but could you please mention that plasma is an important component a lot of life-saving treatments so plasma is an important component in a lot of life-saving treatments and and some people we got into this weird stuff where people are like look um eden and shaffer we should shouldn't we uh stop allowing people to sell their plasma i've actually always been against that because i know what the other options are and they're not good and it is true that selling your plasma can save lives and and a lot of people take some meaning out of that so uh but to me like the most important thing was i i'd been sort of noted as a poverty expert in the press and i knew nothing about plasma sales among poor families at all and so wanting to understand like to really understanding what i'm studying right that just brought home the importance that i needed to be in interaction with families i i can't get too close off because then you don't you're just never going to totally understand what you're studying so kathy and tim and i we uh tim our collaborator and kathy's husband who's also here we started we've been really thinking about poverty as a community level issue not just even when you think about structural explanation for poverty uh even in the structural uh we're still sort of problematizing the individual right and saying like poverty is the problem of this person and like society impacts that i've been trying to think a little bit about like should we think about poverty more as a community uh level problem are we all impacted uh by poverty does it impact communities and that got us really interested in just looking at the distribution of poverty across the nation and doing some community level studies we've also been thinking a lot about like income data are imperfect and maybe we should be looking at other measures so we've been thinking about health income health and social mobility and nathaniel hindran and that other guy oh raj chetty they have this incredible data where we can follow a cohort of people who are low income as kids and see you know did they climb the economic ladder as an adult from tax records so it's like everybody in one cohort but it's everybody it's pretty incredible and the amazing thing is you can see like in some parts of the united states the american dream of rising to the middle class or above that it's alive and well a low income family is just as likely to to be at the middle in other communities it's very much not so we decided to take income data we're taking health data and we're taking social mobility and put them all in some models and it created this map event of deep disadvantage for us so the thing that sort of attracts me to this map right like the thing that draws my attention is you can see like the clustering of deep disadvantage so the darkest blue are the places that score the highest on this index they have high poverty poor health outcomes and low social mobility and this region sort of this crescent that comes down towards through mississippi and then down to louisiana and then across that's the that's the cotton belt uh that had sort of the longest history of enslavement there's appalachia in eastern kentucky and then some clusters down in south texas and then out in the west those are those mostly tribal lands and we've been looking at this map for a really long time and thinking like this map actually it really hasn't changed for a long time these are the same communities that spurred the war on poverty that sheldon and others have showed like had a lot of impact the the same communities that were the poorest then are are the poorest now and so that's been leading us to think a lot about history and a set of maps that really sort of taken us we had a student who's been working on the project ryan pearson who brought in a second map that he had seen of the rate of enslavement in 1860 so this is the south a proportion of of enslavement so the proportion of people who look like me putting into bondage people this sort of suggests to me that history isn't it's not a it's not something that we can sort of put in a footnote when we're thinking about this right this is really this is a whole ball game and we've seen that if we bring in segregation rates of segregation in like 1900 the rate of enslavement in 1860 and a couple of other factors from 100 to 200 years ago that are like deeply structurally this is like structural racism at its core we can predict with quite a bit of precision communities poverty rates today we've been thinking about rucker johnson's book right rucker johnson a economist trained here at the university of michigan found in that blip of a moment when we started to integrate schools in the 1950s and 60s after brown we we can see these huge improvements across the board and then we stepped away from that again and now schools are as segregated as they were and it hurts it hurts all of our communities it hurts places it especially hurts black and brown people so history has to be front and center we have to we have to deal with this and figure out how to deal with it and it does from time sort of leave me with a sense that these are big things and i'm not i don't know if we can what's going to push the needle right what's really going to make change happen i do think sometimes change can happen that we can do things that matter that really impact families for the better in the day-to-day right and then sometimes i think we have these watershed moments where we don't we haven't addressed all of it we haven't addressed our history we haven't addressed stratification of well-being but um we can have an impact and after two dollars a day we uh kathy and i sort of joined with eight other co-authors don't ever try to write a paper with 10 people at least if they're you know an interdisciplinary group saying hey we should we should transform the child tax credit into basically a child allowance something that most other countries have and these were our simulations at the time we were looking at a poverty rate of 16 without a child allowance and in the paper we found if you just did 250 a month we could cut that down by like 43 percent that's pretty that's pretty dramatic and more you know to my heart this bar of of people reporting these cash incomes below two dollars per person per day at 1.7 percent that goes down to zero so if we can get this to everyone we can we can eliminate we can make that book a historical artifact so um russell sage where sheldon went on uh was kind enough to publish this paper to publish this idea and uh at some point uh i don't know if i went i was going up i think for full professor and i'll always remember the comment from one of the reviewers uh was like well i guess it's fine for um professor shaffer's colleagues to talk about things that could never possibly be you know true in the united states but of course uh we you know had written a paper marian bitler and her colleagues had written a paper sam hammond is a libertarian who had written a paper talking about this type of proposal and it turns out like it's not a hair brain idea like tons of other countries have already done it right so we can see what happened to those other countries and anyways uh it became sort of the basis of a bill called the american family act uh which had like two senators attached to it at the start and over time got all democratic senators and uh and then uh during covid when president biden was looking for something to do for families with kids who were hit especially hard they popped it into the american rescue plan so um my professorial response to that reviewer whoever they may be is suck it we did some things based on these principles uh in the um during covet and i gotta say i never would have imagined we would do what we did during co-fed uh between economic impact payments and the child tax credit expanded unemployment insurance this chart looks a lot like the one you know when we take the impact of these eips and this doesn't even count the child tax credit we saw these big reductions in poverty we didn't see proportionally larger reductions in poverty among black and and brown children and so we need to do extra policies to get there but we can reduce poverty we've we've shown it right it is it is now doesn't have to be theoretical and uh my team at poverty solutions have been following this this data that comes like every few weeks that shows it's a nationally representative survey the fraction of people with adults with kids is that top line who are reporting they don't have enough food to eat again the measure actually isn't perfect but if we look across a number of measures we see a pretty similar thing where last fall of 2020 we were seeing hardship rise and then we got some cash transfers at the end of december boom hardship goes down arpa happens again it goes down and then the child tax credit happens and we've seen food insufficiency among adults with children drop another 30 percent and now we're at about 20 percent from the start but also look at where we are september of this year to september 20 2020.
i mean these things are just amazing to me we we reduced poverty during the greatest economic crisis of modern times and somehow i sort of feel like we've moved on to talk about how you know there's a little bit of there's there's some inflation i shouldn't be too pejorative and uh and nobody can find workers i just want us to take a minute and say like this is incredible to think food insecurity it didn't go up in 2020 with uh tens of thousands of jobs lost that's just incredible one last slide we've been doing this thing with the mayor and in the state of michigan where we've been we're trying to reach out to families um to say uh you should make sure you're getting this child tax credit because we do know it's the most comprehensive thing we've ever gotten but the most vulnerable and most likely to be left out and we were on the tv we were on the radio community based organizations were talking and then the state of michigan led by steph white sent out two text messages to all of their families on snap who had given them permission to do that hundreds of thousands we saw a 14 000 percent increase in people going to the website and i think an 80 time increase in people making appointments uh with tax advisors so this just speaks to me like when we do figure out how to reach out to families and we reach out about something that they care about um they respond so voice for the voiceless i'm honored to play a role in honoring hermann and amalia and the charge laid out by hal and carol is one that i accept with all my heart over the course of my career so far i've tried to begin with listening to use tools at my disposal to translate listening into action to have my research shaped by the experiences and values of those who often don't have a voice at the policy making table listen then research then act trying to be a part of concrete actions that hold the possibility of empowering families to live healthy and productive lives then we evaluate to see if those changes did in fact make a difference in trying to translate research into action i situate myself in an understanding and much of what we seek to address in a confrontation with poverty is centuries old and change will not come easily but change is also possible both in the day-to-day moments that can help empower families and in the big moments when new systems overtake the old ones in surprising ways in subscribing to this method i have found the world to be a much more complicated richer infuriating fascinating inspiring and beautiful place listen research act begin again thank you i think i blew through all the q and a time michael so you can still do q a okay well thank you for coming and feel free to leave but i'm happy to talk a little bit if people have if you have questions mark so really inspiring luke thanks very much it was just a wonderful talk yeah not being a social scientist this will be sound like a simplistic question uh is transferring money to impoverished people taking them out of poverty seems mathematical you give someone money they're out of poverty the money goes away do they go back into poverty and is there any thinking around which whether this kind of transfer can be catalytic you raise people out of poverty the subsidy goes away but by raising them out of poverty you put them in a position to keep themselves out of poverty this in the long run it's not likely there's going to be political support in our country to continuously raise people out of poverty and we've it's happened in the past it's had support it's lost supported cycles but if you could look for ways to demonstrate a self-catalytic or self-perpetuating nature of that support i think you solve poverty well it's not me but so i think um we don't fully know the answer to this question we know that from a lot of work from natasha and kathy that lump sum transfers can have a really big impact so we do have this earned income tax credit that people get on their taxes and we see it gets it helps people be forward thinking to have a chunk of money it also helps with some of their crises right they're less likely to be in housing hardship but i do think that there's an importance of a stable a stable base so interestingly if you ask a set of americans would you prefer policies that help enhance mobility or increase financial stability 90 say financial stability and so i do think there's something important about a base stability of knowing that i have i have something i can count on no matter how much my job is you know unstable or my family life is unstable i do think that we have some evidence that cash transfers for some amount of time right and that's why i've been a i've been a child allowance person this whole time right i'm not actually ready to get on the bandwagon for uh universal ubi i haven't figured out how to do the math um but uh we've seen you know from a lot of uh studies that aren't uh they're from other countries for example that with a child allowance you actually see alcohol and tobacco expenditures go down that's something a lot of people are sometimes worried about but uh actually turns out sometimes substance use is a response to stress and so if you reduce that stress you reduce that and we have these great studies from tribal lands that have had per capita casino payments that have come and we can see transfers over a period of time reduces criminal justice involvement later on increases engagement in school it can actually improve parent-child relationships so mark i'm not sure uh we don't yet know the answer of like exactly how long does it have to go on and how much does it have to be two that's another i think big question that we we have yet to figure out but the scaffolding is there yeah can you speak to what impact universal pre-k so i can speak i think a lot depends on how it rolls out but what i'll speak to in that is that often the universal program works better than the targeted program and this is a debate that we continue to have in the united states of should we do things just for families who are low income or should we do things for everybody of course doing things for everybody is a lot more expensive but it also i have come to believe that there's a stigmatizing effect to having something that's targeted specifically in the frame of you don't have enough to do right by your kids and so we're going to help you in particular and i think there's also an effect of raising animosity among people who are about just above whatever the threshold of that means test does that means um you you anger people so the nice thing about the universal pre-k is we know that there's a real positive impact right to getting that sort of more curricular enriching type environment and and by making it available to everyone we take away that stigma and robin jacob who is affiliated here with the the fourth goal she's actually shown among uh nurse home visits that uh when you say everybody's eligible for a nurse home visit when you have a new baby it turns out the things don't come with instructions and uh you could probably use a little help and um the single biggest impact of saying everybody is eligible is that low-income families who are already eligible are more likely to get the benefit and in the work that she's done so i i don't i'm not as much of an expert on exactly how pre-k programs should look but it sits on a set of principles of early childhood intervention some of it done here in michigan right with perry preschool we can see long-term effects and this idea of trying to universalize our programs great questions oh we got one in the back what can you tell us about the families who were case studies in two dollars a day and where they are today yeah um so uh we have been in contact with some and uh in others we've lost contact with um some are actually doing really well um some sort of were able to get in a foothold and and just really find a stable place and and we do think there's a lot more um there's just a lot more fluidity between categories than than we often think right where you know going into that project i would think oh there's a working board there's the extreme boar there's some group in the middle that i'll be sure with the call and there's more fluidity to that right if we think about like ray mccormack she was working and then the crisis came so uh yeah some of them are doing better and have gotten to a better place some uh actually things got worse after after the book so and it followed a lot of the same same patterns right uh economic hardship uh also family hardship sort of new cases new moments of abuse right and we i learned a lot about adverse childhood experiences and how common those are among americans as a whole we don't really talk about that but the families in our book were particularly vulnerable to those types of circumstances and that didn't end afterwards uh and one in particular i have not been able to get a register for the child tax credit yet so i'm going through that process with her to try to make sure she actually gets it since she was a part of it maybe it could be our last one i've kept you 15 extra minutes so so a big part of your research focuses on listening um to communities and things like that so i was wondering whether in your personal journey or when you work with organizations how do you get them to shift from kind of knowing what's best or kind of researching what they feel is best versus actually listening to a community whether that be through focus groups or you know community uh engagement um especially kind of in these elite circles and where people think kind of they know what the answer is when you know an actuality something different yeah i um i think some of it is trying to like bring the approach and um so some of it might be if you work with me you you've probably heard the spiel uh before and and so just trying to say it and use very concrete examples is is part of that for me another part is just like there is just there's something very profound in um curiosity and like energy positive energy right so um kathy taught me very early on you know the greatest question was tell me more about that and so really showing that uh you're interested in something that you're learning about something um i think it can be you know it can it can sort of have ripple effects uh with other folks and then they get interested and then they want to like tell you that they saw this interesting thing that they didn't know about right so really trying to change the frame and and i think there's also like a bit of a frame of um trying to understand expertise right so understanding that like professors or folks who work at agencies just generally trying to change the frame to say we don't have all the answers but also sometimes i think we go a little too far with that and we say we don't have all the answers and like we have nothing to offer but i'm going to come listen you know and so i try to say we don't have all the answers and we're going to figure this out together and also the academy has a set of tools that can be really useful in this pursuit that you might not have and i maybe can help you sort of deepen an understanding of uh of an issue so yeah i think it's a it can be a process but i find like the the uh the curiosity is just really it's infectious that was the word i was looking for okay thank you everybody thank you all for coming um thank you again to hal and carol for making this event possible for all you've done to support luke's work the work of the ford school and the cone family that will be part of our community for many many many years to come so thank you all for coming and hope you enjoy the rest of your evening thank you those of you who are wearing your a wonderful cone collaborative t-shirts for amazing out this great event and enjoy your evening take care