Future Hindsight

We're revisiting our conversation with Mark Rank, a poverty expert, professor, and author of Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. We discuss the true causes and systemic nature of poverty, and poverty reduction as being both moral and smart public policy.   Musical Chairs American poverty is a bit like a game of musical chairs. The US only has good opportunities for 8 out of 10 Americans, meaning 2 people always lose. Instead of adding new opportunities or chairs, we shuffle the opportunities around, but 2 of every 10 people still end up without the opportunities. This shows that poverty is a result of the systems we have in place, not personal shortcomings, and if we continue shuffling the opportunities, we will continue having a poverty problem.    Poverty Myths Being poor in the US is subject to several damaging myths that make it harder to reduce poverty rates country-wide. We think of a poverty rate between 10-15% of the US population, but shockingly 60-75% of Americans will spend at