The UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity (a.k.a. the “Edwards Center”) has at long last announced its first bit of real news!
Yes, it’s true — today, Sept. 7, there will be a press conference and lecture given by John Edwards himself on the subject of “the mission and programs for the center. He will introduce staff and field questions.” The announcement also reassures media sycophants that “Edwards will be available to speak with media representatives after completing the question-answer session with lecture attendees.”
The announcement includes three other events — these are human gatherings well known for their poverty-solving ability — as well. They are:
• “UNC Assistant Professor of Public Policy Dan Gitterman will moderate a discussion on poverty between Edwards and Jack Kemp, founder and a co-director of Empower America and former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.” This will take place on Oct. 31.
• Shortly after that, on Nov. 3, there will be an all day “summit conference” (which towers above other conferences in the same way a blue-ribbon committee puts to shame all other committees) on “The Shifting Landscape of Poverty: Bridging the Gaps in Poverty Research and Policy.”
• Finally, on Nov. 22., UNC Kenan Professor of Sociology Arne Kalleberg will monitor a panel discussion on “The New Poverty: Low-Income Work.”
The title of the panel discussion is priceless. Did you know there’s a new poverty? It’s new and improved – a darn sight easier to discuss superficially than that fussy old poverty.
I can’t pretend to be surprised that the Edwards Center has found itself a new poverty, however. I’ve written frequently on Edwards’ inability or unwillingness to tell the difference between actual poverty and simply being poor in America, and on how that problem leads him to make proposals that would, if anything, make things worse for the impoverished.
But making that distinction apparently muddies the focus groups. As Edwards himself admitted, “Policy nuances matter in governing, but for the most part, most Americans are looking for somebody who they know has a strong set of beliefs and that they’ll always be steady and stick by them.”
So Edwards, despite being handpicked to head a center at a major public research university to study poverty, has always (one is tempted to say studiously) avoided distinguishing between being poor, which is a relative measure, and being impoverished, which is an absolute one. Poverty implies privation or the inability to address one’s most basic needs. Being poor means lacking wealth relative to one’s neighbors in that one is unable to address one’s wants.
Now his center will discuss seriously (at least the press release gives no indication of irony) that the “new poverty” is “low-income work.” No doubt that is to prop up Edwards and his UNC colleagues’ pet idea to solve poverty: Raise the minimum wage! It also helps them dodge a significant, academic problem confronting it: namely, it doesn’t address poverty at all. (In fairness, however, studies show that given the choice between addressing the center’s foundational issue or sticking with a feel-good issue that affects a much broader segment of vot— er, people, fully 100 percent of well-coiffed, media-darling politician-turned-academics who swear they’re not running for president in 2008 would do the same.)
Raising the minimum wage only helps those poor workers who either retain their jobs or are employable at the new, higher wage rate. For the impoverished it does nothing at all, but it would make it harder for them to find work. It also would have inflationary effects that consequentially hit the poorest the hardest.
As my colleague George Leef put it, “Economists have known for at least a century that if the government artificially raises the price of labor, less labor will be demanded. The minimum wage is one of those feel-good nostrums that politicians fall back on when they need some way of professing their deep compassion for the poor, but it’s actually counterproductive.”
But of course George wrote that before the Edwards Center discovered the “new poverty.”