poverty is a state of mind essay

Why poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of society

Research Investigator of Psychiatry, Public Health, and Poverty Solutions, University of Michigan

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As the Senate prepares to modify its version of the health care bill, now is a good time to back up and examine why we as a nation are so divided about providing health care, especially to the poor.

I believe one reason the United States is cutting spending on health insurance and safety nets that protect poor and marginalized people is because of American culture, which overemphasizes individual responsibility. Our culture does this to the point that it ignores the effect of root causes shaped by society and beyond the control of the individual. How laypeople define and attribute poverty may not be that much different from the way U.S. policymakers in the Senate see poverty.

As someone who studies poverty solutions and social and health inequalities, I am convinced by the academic literature that the biggest reason for poverty is how a society is structured. Without structural changes, it may be very difficult if not impossible to eliminate disparities and poverty.

Social structure

About 13.5 percent of Americans are living in poverty. Many of these people do not have insurance, and efforts to help them gain insurance, be it through Medicaid or private insurance, have been stymied. Medicaid provides insurance for the disabled, people in nursing homes and the poor.

Four states recently asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for permission to require Medicaid recipients in their states who are not disabled or elderly to work.

This request is reflective of the fact that many Americans believe that poverty is, by and large, the result of laziness , immorality and irresponsibility.

In fact, poverty and other social miseries are in large part due to social structure , which is how society functions at a macro level. Some societal issues, such as racism, sexism and segregation, constantly cause disparities in education, employment and income for marginalized groups. The majority group naturally has a head start, relative to groups that deal with a wide range of societal barriers on a daily basis. This is what I mean by structural causes of poverty and inequality.

Poverty: Not just a state of mind

We have all heard that the poor and minorities need only make better choices – work hard, stay in school, get married, do not have children before they can afford them. If they did all this, they wouldn’t be poor.

Just a few weeks ago, Housing Secretary Ben Carson called poverty “ a state of mind .” At the same time, his budget to help low-income households could be cut by more than US$6 billion next year.

This is an example of a simplistic view toward the complex social phenomenon. It is minimizing the impact of a societal issue caused by structure – macro‐level labor market and societal conditions – on individuals’ behavior. Such claims also ignore a large body of sociological science.

American independence

Americans have one of the most independent cultures on Earth. A majority of Americans define people in terms of internal attributes such as choices , abilities, values, preferences, decisions and traits.

This is very different from interdependent cultures , such as eastern Asian countries where people are seen mainly in terms of their environment, context and relationships with others.

A direct consequence of independent mindsets and cognitive models is that one may ignore all the historical and environmental conditions, such as slavery, segregation and discrimination against women, that contribute to certain outcomes. When we ignore the historical context, it is easier to instead attribute an unfavorable outcome, such as poverty, to the person.

Views shaped by politics

Many Americans view poverty as an individual phenomenon and say that it’s primarily their own fault that people are poor. The alternative view is that poverty is a structural phenomenon. From this viewpoint, people are in poverty because they find themselves in holes in the economic system that deliver them inadequate income.

The fact is that people move in and out of poverty. Research has shown that 45 percent of poverty spells last no more than a year, 70 percent last no more than three years and only 12 percent stretch beyond a decade.

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics ( PSID ), a 50-year longitudinal study of 18,000 Americans, has shown that around four in 10 adults experience an entire year of poverty from the ages of 25 to 60. The last Survey of Income and Program Participation ( SIPP ), a longitudinal survey conducted by the U.S. Census, had about one-third of Americans in episodic poverty at some point in a three-year period, but just 3.5 percent in episodic poverty for all three years.

Why calling the poor ‘lazy’ is victim blaming

If one believes that poverty is related to historical and environmental events and not just to an individual, we should be careful about blaming the poor for their fates.

Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially responsible for the harm that befell them. It is a common psychological and societal phenomenon. Victimology has shown that humans have a tendency to perceive victims at least partially responsible . This is true even in rape cases, where there is a considerable tendency to blame victims and is true particularly if the victim and perpetrator know each other.

I believe all our lives could be improved if we considered the structural influences as root causes of social problems such as poverty and inequality. Perhaps then, we could more easily agree on solutions.

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• Homelessness
• Health disparities
• Health gaps
• US Senate health care bill
• US health care reform

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Poverty Is Not a State of Mind

By Charles M. Blow

• May 18, 2014

Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush, the didactic-meets-dynastic duo, spoke last week at a Manhattan Institute gathering, providing a Mayberry-like prescription for combating poverty in this country: all it takes is more friendship and traditional marriage.

Ryan said: “The best way to turn from a vicious cycle of despair and learned helplessness to a virtuous cycle of hope and flourishing is by embracing the attributes of friendship, accountability and love.”

Lovely, Mr. Ryan. Really, I’m touched. But as every poor person in America will tell you, you can’t use friendship tokens to pay the electricity bill, and you can’t simply hug the cashier and walk away with groceries.

Furthermore, the statement makes a basic and demeaning assumption about the poor: that they suffer a deficiency of friendship, accountability and loving relationships. That, sir, has not been my experience. Poverty is demonstrative not of a lack of character, but a lack of cash.

For Bush’s part, he said: “A loving family taking care of their children in a traditional marriage will create the chance to break out of poverty far better, far better than any of the government programs that we can create.”

My qualm with the statement is the insistence on a “traditional marriage.” Loving families, of any formation, can suffice. While it is true that two adults in a home can provide twice the time, attention and income for a family, those adults needn’t necessarily be in a traditional marriage. Yes, marriage can have a sustaining and fortifying effect on a union and a family, but following that argument, we should be rushing headlong to extend it to all who desire it. In some cases, even parents living apart can offer a nurturing environment for children if they prioritize parenting when it comes to their time and money. Not all parents have to reside together to provide together.

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How Poverty Affects the Brain and Behavior

• Cognitive Development
• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Immigration
• Socioeconomic Status

Poverty holds a seemingly unbreakable grip on families, neighborhoods, cities, and entire countries. It stretches from one generation to the next, trapping individuals in a socioeconomic pit that is nearly impossible to ascend. Part of the fuel for poverty’s unending cycle is its suppressing effects on individuals’ cognitive development, executive functioning, and attention, as four scientists demonstrated during the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science, held March 12–14 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In an Integrative Science Symposium on cognition, behavior, and development in socioeconomic contexts, the researchers shared findings on the psychological effects of living with scarce resources and low socioeconomic status (SES) versus abundance and security. But speakers also emphasized that evidence on causes and effects of poverty already is sufficient to inform policies designed to alleviate economic disparities.

“We know a lot,” said psychological scientist Cynthia García Coll, a child development researcher who is provost at Carlos Albizu University in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “There’s a moral issue here. How much more do we have to talk about the fact that poverty is not good for human beings?”

The bulk of the symposium centered on the effects that money, in scarcity and often even in abundance, can have on the mind. And researchers opined that studies at the crossroads of psychology and economics exemplify true integrative science.

“If we keep this interaction between child development scientists, economists, neuroscientists, [and] cognitive scientists going,” said APS William James Fellow Martha J. Farah, “I think it’s very likely that we will develop a better grasp of how poverty impacts brain development and people’s life chances and what kind of intervention tools might be effective.”

Brain Development

Indeed, decades of research have already documented that people who deal with stressors such as low family income, discrimination, limited access to health care, exposure to crime, and other conditions of low SES are highly susceptible to physical and mental disorders, low educational attainment, and low IQ scores, noted Farah, a University of Pennsylvania professor. But studying the effects of childhood poverty on brain development, Farah has investigated whether growing up in disadvantaged environments depresses cognitive processes equally or whether certain abilities are more compromised than others. She and her colleagues have found that memory is particularly vulnerable to life in low SES settings. And one of the specific factors impacting memory is parents’ ability to be responsive and supportive under the stressful circumstances of poverty.

In her lab, Farah and her colleagues examined data from a developmental study that had been tracking a cohort of children for more than 20 years. When the children were age 4 and age 8, research assistants made home visits to record various details about their upbringings. They looked, for example, at cognitive stimulation in the home, such as the presence of books or educational toys. They interviewed mothers and caregivers and observed their interactions with their children. They paid particular attention to how much warmth and care each child received from a mother or caregiver.

Farah’s team then examined results of cognitive tests given to the children when they were in middle school, and found that large amounts of cognitive stimulation at earlier ages enhanced the children’s language development. They also found that high levels of parental nurturing at ages 4 and 8 promoted better memory performance by middle school.

Farah cited more recent research showing a link between SES and hippocampal volume — an indicator of memory performance. A 2012 interdisciplinary study led by Columbia University cognitive neuroscientist Kimberly Noble, for example, identified smaller hippocampal volume among low SES children and adolescents compared with their high SES peers.

A major implication of the cognitive neuroscience research on development, Farah said, is that it challenges the widely held notion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their circumstances.

“Surveys have shown that a very common view about why poor people are poor is that they don’t try hard enough, they’re irresponsible, they make poor decisions, they don’t stay in school, et cetera,” she said. “But … neurons don’t deserve blame or credit. They don’t expend effort. They don’t have good or bad behaviors. They just behave according to the laws of the natural world.”

Studies also show that poverty in the earliest years of childhood may be more harmful than poverty later in childhood, García Coll said. She cited studies from scientists like developmental researchers Greg Duncan (University of California, Irvine) and Katherine Magnuson (University of Wisconsin–Madison), who have found the first 5 years of life to be the most sensitive period for the damaging influences of economic deprivation. Duncan’s longitudinal research, for example, has shown that low family income is more associated with difficult circumstances in adulthood when it occurs before age 5 as opposed to later in childhood.

Examining the other end of the spectrum, some researchers have found that adolescents from highly affluent families show particular vulnerabilities to psychological problems across multiple domains. APS Fellow Suniya S. Luthar of Arizona State University, for example, has found that economically privileged youth are more distressed — with high rates of substance abuse, mood disorders, and rule-breaking behaviors — than their peers.

Some of these findings were demonstrated in a project called the New England Study of Suburban Youth, an ongoing longitudinal assessment of about 350 suburban middle school students. Luthar and her colleagues began studying this population in 1990 and have found that health and behavior issues, popularly nicknamed “affluenza,” emerge around 7th grade and can get worse over time.

García Coll has focused much of her research on the children of immigrants and has found in some samples that first-generation immigrant adolescents had lower levels of juvenile delinquency, better test scores and academic performance, and more positive attitudes compared with their American-born peers.

“There’s something about acculturating to a society,” she said, “where they consider you poor, minority, and/or deficient, and they’re not giving you any support for who you are or whom you should become — a bicultural individual. But at home you’re getting some hope, at least. There’s an immigrant dream.”

But, she added, these advantages steadily decline in subsequent generations, a pattern called the immigrant paradox. This means children and grandchildren of immigrants will have increasing rates of health and behavior problems if we do not intervene.

“It’s something I call, ‘becoming American might be hazardous to your health,’” she said.

This generational trend emerges even in sexual behavior. Using longitudinal data on Latino individuals in the United States, García Coll and her colleagues measured adolescent sexual risk behavior by asking participants questions about their sexual behaviors, including use of condoms and birth control, age of first intercourse, and number of sexual partners. They found that risky behavior among third-generation teens, particularly girls, was higher than that of first- and second-generation adolescents, even when controlling for variables such as family income, parents’ education, and age of onset of puberty.

Scarcity and Bandwidth

APS Fellow Eldar Shafir of Princeton University takes a different perspective on poverty, looking at its impact on behavior and decision-making. And the data show that poor people make far more astute decisions than popularly believed; they weigh tradeoffs, pay special attention to prices, and juggle resources carefully, he said. But their intense focus on stretching their scarce resources can absorb all their mental capacity, leaving them with little or no “cognitive bandwidth” to pursue job training, education, and other opportunities that could lead them out of poverty.

In a series of experiments, the results of which were published in 2013 in Science , Shafir and his colleagues found that an individual preoccupied with money problems showed a decline in cognitive function akin to a 13-point drop in IQ (similar to losing an entire night’s sleep).

The researchers began their study in a New Jersey mall, randomly recruiting 400 participants of various income levels. They asked subjects to ponder how they would solve hypothetical financial problems, such as paying for a car repair. Some participants were assigned an “easy” scenario, such as the mechanic’s bill running just $150, while others were assigned a “hard” scenario, like the repair costing $1,500. The participants mulled over these scenarios as they performed some tests designed to measure fluid intelligence and cognition. Subjects were divided into “poor” and “rich” groups based on their income.

The researchers found that in financially manageable scenarios both groups performed equally well on the tests. But when faced with difficult scenarios, participants in the poor group performed significantly worse on the tests compared with those in the rich group.

To confirm these results and explore poverty’s influence in natural settings, the researchers then tested more than 460 sugarcane farmers in India, who typically find themselves poor before the annual harvest but wealthy afterward. Each farmer performed better on cognitive tests postharvest compared to preharvest, Shafir said.

“Basically, when these guys with the same education, the same health, had plenty, they functioned about 10 IQ points higher than when they had scarcity,” he said.

This type of problem clearly shows up in major financial decisions, Shafir’s research shows. In a 2012 study, he and a team of behavioral economists attempted to explore the reasons that cash-strapped borrowers frequently are attracted to and besieged by predatory lending practices (e.g., payday loans). The experimenters randomly assigned student volunteers to either a rich or poor role. Those in the poor group had less of a resource — time — available in a money-making game. The participants played multiple rounds of the game, and in some conditions could borrow time from future rounds, but with interest. (For example, for some participants, a borrowed second of time would actually cost 2 seconds from the next round.)

The researchers found that rich participants tended to avoid high-cost borrowing, but poor participants were quick to take a loan, overborrowed, ran out of time faster, and ultimately left the lab with less money when the game was completed. Behavior like this often is attributed to the poor being myopic and exhibiting less control, except that here the “poor” participants were Princeton students. Scarcity can affect even the privileged.

Shafir suggested that policies and services aimed at helping the poor should factor in the weight that poverty has on a person’s cognitive function. This could include simplifying the typically complicated job applications and other forms that are especially challenging to fill out for people with overly taxed mental resources. Without those accommodations, society is actually hampering a person’s ability to succeed, he argued.

“And if you look at it that way,” Shafir said, “we are constantly violating the International Bill of Human Rights, which obligates us to do what we know can lead to improvement in the life conditions of the less fortunate and [the] disenfranchised.”

A Data Hub to Measure Well-Being

Despite the dramatic economic growth, immense technological progress, and substantial increases in average disposable income seen in numerous countries over the last 50 years, doubts have been raised, both in the social sciences and in society at large, as to whether people in those nations really are better off.

Social scientists in Europe have built an empirical way to “map out” societal trends, giving psychological scientists, economists, and other researchers data that they can use to better understand the causes and consequences of social transformation, says sociologist Jürgen Schupp of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin).

Schupp, who spoke in the Integrative Science Symposium on cognition, behavior, and development in socioeconomic contexts during the International Convention of Psychological Science in March, directs the research unit of DIW Berlin’s Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study. That project began in 1984 as a longitudinal, multiple-cohort study of private households. Among the data captured in the SOEP are living standards, availability and quality of work, societal distribution of prosperity, educational opportunities, health and life expectancy, and subject experiences of life satisfaction.

The results, which present longitudinal indicators of such trends as household income growth and the length of time individuals live in poverty, have become major parts of government economic reports.

References and Further Reading

Farah, M. J., Betancourt, L., Shera, D. M., Savage, J. H., Giannetta, J. M., Brodsky, N. L., … Hurt, H. (2008). Environmental stimulation, parental nurturance and cognitive development in humans. Developmental Science, 11 , 793–801. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00688.x

García Coll, C. T., & Szalacha, L. A. (2004). The multiple contexts of middle childhood. Future of Children, 14 , 80–97.

Guarini, T. E., Marks, A. K., Patton, F., & Garcia Coll, C. T. (2011). The immigrant paradox in sexual risk behavior among Latino adolescents: Impact of immigrant generation and gender. Applied Developmental Science, 15 , 201–209. doi: 10.1080/10888691.2011.618100

Hackman, D. A., Betancourt, L. M., Brodsky, N. L., Kobrin, L., Hurt, H., & Farah, M. J. (2013). Selective impact of early parental responsivity on adolescent stress reactivity. PLoS ONE, 8 . doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058250

Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013). Poverty impedes cognitive function. Science, 341 , 976–980. doi: 10.1126/science.1238041

Noble, K. G., Houston, S. M., Kan, E., & Sowell, E. R. (2012). Neural correlates of socioeconomic status in the developing human brain. Developmental Science, 15 , 516–527. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01147.x

Racz, S. J., McMahon, R. J., & Luthar, S. S. (2011). Risky behavior in affluent youth: Examining the co-occurrence and consequences of multiple problem behaviors. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 20 , 120–128. doi: 10.1007/s10826-010-9385-4

Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2012). Some consequences of having too little. Science, 338 , 682–685. doi: 10.1126/science.1222426

WE SHOULD ALL STANDUP FOR POVERTY REDUCTION ESPECIALLY IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

My granddaughter and are wonder if involving peer groups within school can help pull some students into new perspectives on themselves and family. Can organized groups within school help? Has this been studied and where?

Thank you- great work!

Thank you for your service to humanity… I greatly appreciate the knowledge!!

Great work! Thank you!

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Housing Secretary Ben Carson Says Poverty Is A 'State Of Mind'

Pam Fessler

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson appeared on SiriusXM's Town Hall hosted by Armstrong Williams earlier this week. Larry French/Getty Images for SiriusXM hide caption

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson appeared on SiriusXM's Town Hall hosted by Armstrong Williams earlier this week.

When it comes to poor Americans, the Trump administration has a message: Government aid is holding many of them back. Without it, many more of them would be working.

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney said as much when presenting the administration's budget plan this week to cut safety net programs by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years. The administration also wants to tighten work requirements for those getting aid, such as food stamps, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

"If you're on food stamps, and you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you're on disability insurance and you're not supposed to be — if you're not truly disabled, we need you to go back to work," he said.

On Wednesday night, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson — whose budget to help low-income households would be cut by more than $6 billion next year — added his own thoughts. He said in a radio interview that "poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind."

Trump Budget Deals 'Devastating Blow' To Low-Income Americans, Advocates Say

Carson — who himself grew up in poverty to become a widely acclaimed neurosurgeon — said people with the "right mind set" can have everything taken away from them, and they'll pull themselves up. He believes the converse is true as well. "You take somebody with the wrong mind-set, you can give them everything in the world (and) they'll work their way right back down to the bottom," Carson said.

Anti-poverty advocates say both Carson and Mulvaney are fundamentally wrong, that most low-income people would work if they could. And many of them already do. They just don't make enough to live on.

"All Americans, but particularly one of the top federal anti-poverty officials, should understand that the main causes of U.S. poverty are economic, not mental," said Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America. "Overwhelming facts and data prove that the main causes of poverty are low wages, too few jobs, and an inadequate safety net – not some sort of personal attitude problem."

He and other advocates say the image of millions of able-bodied people sitting around collecting checks doesn't match reality. About two-thirds of the 42 million people who get SNAP benefits are elderly, disabled or children. A majority of SNAP families with kids have at least one person who's working, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Olivia Golden, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), says one of the biggest obstacles to getting people off government aid is the lack of decent-paying jobs.

"Two-thirds of poor children live with an adult who's working," she says. "So working is no guarantee of being above poverty."

Golden says Carson's suggestion that poor people are lazy or somehow at fault is "an idea that through American history has been an excuse for really bad policy decisions." She cited lack of investments in education, and says the comments are especially egregious given the president's budget proposal. It calls for steep cuts in education, health care, job training and other supports for low-income Americans.

Golden argues that, rather than discourage work, government support — such a food aid and health care — can encourage people to seek and keep jobs by helping them to stabilize their lives. She says it's easier to work if you aren't worried about being hungry or sick.

Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute also thinks Carson is wrong about poverty being a state of mind. "Poverty is being poor," says Tanner.

But he agrees that government benefits can sometimes be a disincentive to working, because people make an economic decision about whether they'll be better off if they take a job. By the time they calculate the loss of benefits, taxes they'll have to pay and the cost of employment — such as child care and transportation — it's often not worth it.

He also thinks that some people stuck in poverty do make bad choices — such as dropping out of school or getting pregnant — that worsen their economic outlook.

But Tanner says many poor Americans have to deal with conditions that are not of their making and prevent them from getting ahead. He thinks the answer isn't cutting government aid, but dealing with the barriers to work, including a lack of education and a criminal justice system that leaves many — especially African-American men — with criminal records that prevent them from getting hired.

Joel Berg thinks raising the minimum wage would also help, as would making housing more affordable for low-income families. The Trump budget would cut some of these programs, overseen by HUD Secretary Carson.

In presenting the budget, OMB Director Mulvaney did offer this assurance for those people who are getting government aid. "We are going to do everything we can to help you find a job that you are suited to and a job that you can use to help take care of you, yourself, and your family," he said.

He didn't provide details other than to add, "If you're in this country and you want to work, there's good news, because Donald Trump is President and we're going to get 3 percent growth, and we're going to give you the opportunity to go back to work."

Mulvaney also promised that the administration would not kick "anybody off of any program who really needs it ... we have plenty of money in this country to take care of the people who need it."

Defining just who does and doesn't "need it" will likely be a big part of the debate as Congress considers what to do with the president's plans.

Poverty Is Just a State of Mind

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• Elizabeth A. Throop  

Part of the book series: Culture, Mind, and Society ((CMAS))

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American dominant culture understands poverty as a defect of character, not a result of a structurally unjust economic system. People who are poor are not poor because they lack money. They are poor because, in America’s dominant culture, there is something wrong with them emotionally, morally, subculturally, or behaviorally. People in poverty in the United States are largely viewed as individually responsible for their own economic circumstances, and they must be punished in this view (see Ryan 1976 and Schneider 1999 for representative takes on the issue). This appallingly cruel perspective has a long history in the United States despite its patent falsity, going far beyond the “blaming the victim” nonsense furthered by allegedly liberal social scientists and providers of social services (including social workers, psychotherapists, counselors, and other purveyors of the “helping” professions).

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Throop, E.A. (2009). Poverty Is Just a State of Mind. In: Psychotherapy, American Culture, and Social Policy. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618350_3

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Poverty is a State of Mind: Influence of Spiritual Poverty on Well-being

How it works

• 1 Defining Poverty
• 2 The Pervasive Challenge of Poverty Throughout History
• 3 Visualizing Poverty Through an Ancient Arch
• 4.1 References

Defining Poverty

The word poverty evokes strong emotions and many questions. But I define poverty as a chronic, debilitating condition caused by multiple synergistic adverse risk factors affecting the mind, body, and spirit. But some describe it. Poverty is complicated. It’s not the same for everyone. For the purpose of my speech. I would like to share with you my experience where I can see the 7 types of poverty. Situational, generational, absolute, relative, urban, rural, and spiritual. But I would like to focus more on being mentally poor.

Spiritual poverty. The way I see it, being spiritually poor affects all kinds of poverty, like buildings collapsing into ruin.

The Pervasive Challenge of Poverty Throughout History

Throughout history, poverty has been one of the greatest and most pervasive challenges facing mankind. While the apparent toll is usually physical, the mental and emotional damage it inflicts can be even more debilitating. If you think about the term ‘mentally poor,’ our modern society underestimates and disregards poverty and misses much of the meaning it conveys. I thought it was. So I started thinking about the impact of poverty. Meaning not defined in a dictionary. Rather practical.

Visualizing Poverty Through an Ancient Arch

So what does poverty mean? I want you to imagine a stone arch, but most ancient arches weren’t paved with concrete like they are today, so they were probably near other stones to keep the peace. The foundation, or so-called Springer, complies with protection against natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. The side piece, or what we call the bustier, connects the jumper with what is called the keystone, which is placed in the top center of the area. Capstones play an important role in holding Earl together. Without the capstone, the whole of Earl perishes. As in our lives, if our hearts are poor and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ are poor, our lives perish. Jumpers represent a temporary need and become useless once the Keystone is gone. The same applies to Boussoir. This is a good example and comparison. If neither of us can meet our spiritual needs, live in poverty, and prosper spiritually, we lose all the joyous blessings we could have had an increase.

A Call to Nourish Our Souls

Before I leave my talk, I invite you to nourish our souls by spending more time reading the scriptures, spending more time studying, and focusing more on the Savior throughout the day. Making these changes will have a big impact on your life. More peace and happiness.

• Banerjee, A. V., & Duflo, E. (2011). Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. PublicAffairs.
• Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
• Sachs, J. D. (2005). The End of Poverty. Penguin Books.

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Justice for All? Why We Have an Access to Justice Gap in America—and What Can We Do About It?

• June 13, 2024
• Nora and David Freeman Engstrom; Q&A with Professor Pamela Karlan
• Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession
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On a recent episode of the Stanford Legal podcast, Professors David and Nora Freeman Engstrom , co-directors of Stanford Law School’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession , delve into what they describe as an access to justice crisis in the United States. In three-quarters of civil cases in state courts, they say, at least one party lacks a lawyer, usually because they cannot afford one. And, as they explain, this pro se crisis is just a small part of a much larger problem.

Stanford Legal co-host Pam Karlan , the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, interviewed the Engstroms about the roots of the access to justice crisis, how it impacts individuals and families—and what can be done to fix it.

The following is an edited version of the full podcast transcript, which can be found here .

Pam Karlan: On one hand, people often think there are too many lawyers in the United States, but then there’s this countervailing issue of there not being enough legal services. 

Nora Freeman Engstrom: In the United States, we have plenty of lawyers, but people’s ability to get access to justice is actually pretty dismal. In three-quarters of civil cases in state court—and state court is where the vast majority of cases are litigated in this country—one side lacks a lawyer. Sometimes, both sides lack a lawyer.

Pam Karlan: What kind of cases are we talking about here where three-quarters of the people don’t have lawyers?

David Freeman Engstrom: Generally, these are low-dollar, but highly consequential cases. They tend to be debt collection actions, evictions, mortgage foreclosure actions, and a lot of family law claims, including child support enforcement actions. There are approximately 15 million cases a year where at least one side lacks a lawyer. Another feature of these cases also really stands out: These cases tend to pit an institutional plaintiff—for instance, a bank, a credit card company, a corporate landlord, a municipal housing authority, or some other government agency—against an individual defendant without a lawyer.

Pam Karlan: And we’re not even counting in the cases where people don’t get to court in the first place: individual plaintiffs who’ve been defrauded or wronged, who would go up against a corporate defendant if they had a lawyer or the resources.

Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yes, the pro se crisis—all those folks in court without counsel—is really just the tip of the iceberg. Below all these folks we see are all these cases that never make it into court at all. These are people with rights that are violated but never vindicated. And it’s exactly as you say: It’s the person who has an uninhabitable apartment, but never seeks to enforce her right for habitable housing, or the person who’s jerked around by the insurance company and never gets the claim paid and just ultimately shrugs her shoulders and gives up, or the woman who’s being abused by her spouse and never gets that domestic violence restraining order that she needs.

Pam Karlan: Why can’t people get lawyers for these kinds of cases?

David Freeman Engstrom: The Stanford Law Review had a symposium last year on access to justice, and Nora and I wrote an introductory essay in that symposium that I can commend to the listeners. It’s titled “ The Making of the A2J Crisis ,” and in that essay, we roll through all the different causes.

One issue is attribution. Many Americans don’t even necessarily know that the problem that they have is a legal problem in the first place, and that’s really important to keep in mind. They don’t even know that they should resolve a certain matter by going to court.

Another issue is expense. Legal services are really expensive. Anyone middle class or below is priced out of the market for legal services that cost, on average, $300 an hour. And, although there is some legal aid to help people, there’s clearly not enough , and, adding to the insufficiency, there are restrictive rules that limit what types of legal services can be provided and by whom.

Pam Karlan: But why are we seeing such an uptick in pro se litigation rates? There’s some evidence that, over the past few decades, pro se rates have more than doubled.

David Freeman Engstrom: Yes, rates of pro se litigation is up sharply, although assessing the exact amount is challenging. But why?

In the Stanford Law Review essay, we note that, interestingly, poverty rates haven’t really changed so much in recent decades. What has increased is economic precarity. Most American households can’t really weather any significant financial hit, and so when they get hit with health care bills that they can’t pay, or fall behind on their rent, they descend into poverty and debt collection actions, and evictions frequently follow—and it is these cases that are really choking courts. These cases overwhelmingly end in default judgments: The defendant fails to show up because the defendant has no meaningful legal help.

Nora Freeman Engstrom: All this is bound up together. For example, once your wages are garnished pursuant to a default judgment, it sure is harder to pay rent, and if you’re not paying rent, then it sure is easy to get evicted. And it cuts the other way, too. Once you’re evicted, it’s really hard to keep your job, and it’s hard to keep your family together, and so legal problems have a way of cascading on one another.

Pam Karlan: And none of these cases that we are talking about would be done on contingent fee cases, correct?

Nora Freeman Engstrom: That’s mostly right. The access to justice problems David and I are focused on are particularly acute in areas where lawyers charge by the hour—areas involving housing, families, and debt collections. But they’re not isolated to these areas. A lot of people think, for example, that there’s no access to justice problem in the personal injury sphere because, if you’re hurt, you can get a lawyer on a contingency fee basis. That’s right if you’re a high wage earner and you’re really seriously injured. But it is not necessarily the case if you are an elderly person or a child. As I’ve written about , there are access to justice problems that afflict certain areas of the personal injury ecosystem too.

David Freeman Engstrom: Right now in the American legal system, the most numerous type of case is consumer credit debt collection actions. If you look back 30 or 40 years, torts and contract actions were neck and neck on state court dockets. Now, torts have largely fallen away for a variety of reasons, and contract claims, which include debt collection claims, are ascendant. The question is: what happened? It is a really interesting part of all of this and something that you really need to understand to have a full, 360-degree view of the problem. The debt collection industry has learned to leverage a lot of technology, what you would call robotic process automation, to build the pleadings and everything else you need to do in order to generate legal filings and then get them into court. About 60 percent of these cases are brought by debt buyers–that is, entities that buy tranches of debt from the originators, and then use all of this automation to assembly-line filings. However, restrictive rules that say that only lawyers can practice law mean that technology is not nearly as available to the individual defendants on the other side.  

Pam Karlan: Let’s talk about restrictions we have on the provision of legal services. The United States is different from other countries where there are all sorts of people who provide legal services. Nora, could you tell us a little bit about how we ended up in this situation?

Nora Freeman Engstrom: As we have said, lawyers are expensive and they’re the only game in town. I call this the two-door problem, which is: If you have a legal problem, or you’re trying to vindicate or defend your legal rights, and you’re going to make your way into court, you’ve got two choices in the United States. You can represent yourself. Or you can hire one of these very expensive lawyers. You can imagine a third choice, right? Like, some sort of “lawyer lite.” Like when I have a sprained ankle, I don’t need to go to a full MD. I can go to a physician’s assistant or a nurse practitioner. Some problems are smaller and more easily addressed—and often better addressed—by someone without a law degree. But in the United States, we don’t have a third door. We have no third option—nothing between a full lawyer and going it alone.

Now, in terms of how we ended up in this situation, it’s fascinating! I am just finishing a paper entitled Auto Clubs and the Lost Origins of the Access-to-Justice Crisis that I wrote with James Stone, a Stanford Law grad who was a fellow at the Rhode Center last year, that sheds light on this. The paper tells this origin story by recovering the lost history of auto clubs. We explain that, in addition to the roadside assistance that we have today, the AAA of yesteryear provided legal services, and actually a lot of legal services. You could go to your auto club if you were in a car accident, and you thought the other person was at fault, and they would represent you. Or, if you were at fault, they would represent you. They would represent you even in criminal matters and provide a defense. Essentially, by joining an auto club, you had a lawyer for all things auto.

Pam Karlan: So, what happened? Why did the auto clubs stop providing legal services?

Nora Freeman Engstrom: It’s a crime in nearly every state for a non-lawyer to supply legal advice or assistance, and those laws have been around for a long time. It’s these laws, called unauthorized practice of law restrictions, that create the two-door problem I just discussed.

Now, auto clubs weren’t running afoul of those laws because lawyers employed by the clubs were providing legal assistance. So, you might be thinking: how is it that a lawyer providing legal assistance is going to run afoul of an unauthorized practice of law rule, designed to prevent the practice of law by nonlawyers? In the 1920s and 30s, the organized bar developed an argument. Never before had there been rules banning what was called “the corporate practice of law,” which is to say lawyers working for non-law firms. Yet, in the 1920s and 30s, the bar simply created a new prohibition. Pursuant to this new prohibition, not only can nonlawyers not practice law. Additionally, if a lawyer is not self-employed or employed at a law firm, the lawyer is also engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. That’s also a no-no. A lawyer’s relation to his client should be personal, and the responsibilities of the lawyer to the client should be direct, they said. Pursuant to this new idea, the bar argued that it’s improper to have things like auto clubs where the lawyers were working for the club and providing legal services. 

So, peddling this newly minted prohibition, the bar shut down the auto clubs. And this wasn’t an altruistic move. They weren’t worried about consumer harm. All evidence suggests that the auto clubs were booming, and people were quite thrilled with the services that they received. We argue that the bar fashioned a new argument at a time when the organized bar was under a lot of financial strain, and they wanted to crush the competition. 

Pam Karlan: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the innovations that you’re now seeing to try to address the access to justice problems we’ve discussed?

David Freeman Engstrom: There is a movement afoot in the United States, across many states, to relax the usual rules that say that only lawyers can practice law and to try to open up a space for non-lawyer alternative legal services providers. That can include what I refer to sometimes as “human non-lawyers.” These would be along the lines of a nurse practitioner, or a physician assistant. But these providers could also include non-human non-lawyers, i.e., software-driven models of legal provision. This is an important moment, and I think the success or failure of this movement to open up this space for new types of legal services, and new delivery models, is really going to shape the future of the civil justice system. We have advised multiple state supreme courts on how to responsibly relax those rules. And we’ve also done what we think is some really neat empirical work looking at what has happened in the first two states that did this, Utah and Arizona. In both states, there was a liberalization of these rules to create a little more space for non-lawyer legal services providers.

Nora Freeman Engstrom: The big question is: what happens if you relax Rule 5.4? That’s the modern version of the rule, created in the 1920s and 30s, that says lawyers have to practice in law firms or as solo practitioners. They can’t work for things like auto clubs.

David Freeman Engstrom:   We are seeing a lot of interesting new service delivery models. Law firms have started to develop tiered legal services, with, for instance, a purely software-based, do-it-yourself tier at the bottom. In the middle, something that involves perhaps a paralegal or a paraprofessional. And then at the top, full representation by a lawyer.

Given the tangle of unauthorized practice of law restrictions, in most states, law companies like LegalZoom are currently limited to what we call document assembly. But, in Utah and Arizona, LegalZoom is using the rule relaxation to hire lawyers to supplement those document assembly services. A lot of non-law companies that just provide, for example, immigration services can now layer in some legal services, so they can provide more wraparound services that they couldn’t offer previously. There’s a company in Utah that helps people achieve expungement of their criminal record in a software-based way. It’s a very robust user-friendly platform.

Pam Karlan: Can you touch on what is happening with generative AI?

David Freeman Engstrom:  One of the many things that generative AI brings to the table is “mapping”—the ability to take a plain language description of a legal problem that someone is experiencing. It can take a plain-language description and map it to what we would call a legal ontology in order to understand what the possible actions and outcomes would be, and then come back to the individual who would otherwise go without meaningful legal help with a roadmap for what to do next. That’s real promise, but also, frankly, peril. Generative AI makes these tools much easier to create, but we need to ensure that these tools are high quality and trustworthy.

Listen to the Full Podcast

David Freeman Engstrom and Nora Freeman Engstrom co-direct SLS’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession , the premier academic center working to make the civil justice system more accessible, equitable, and transparent. 

David, the LSVF Professor in Law and an expert in civil procedure and administrative law, focuses his current work on the future of courts and legal services in the age of AI. His book, Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, was published last year. He currently serves as the Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication, which will offer courts guidance on the millions of low-dollar but consequential cases, including debt and eviction, that shape Americans’ lives each year. He also co-founded the Filing Fairness Project, an ambitious, multi-state collaboration to modernize court technologies and increase access. 

Nora, the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law, is a nationally recognized expert in both tort law and legal ethics. In her far-ranging scholarship, she explores the day-to-day operation of the tort system, including the system’s interaction with alternative compensation mechanisms, such as no-fault automobile insurance and the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. For the American Law Institute, she serves as a Reporter for the Third Restatement of Torts: Miscellaneous Provisions; a Reporter for the Third Restatement of Torts: Medical Malpractice (read recent coverage here ); and as an Adviser to the Third Restatement of Torts: Remedies.

• Child poverty will be a test of Labour’s fiscal prudence

Its MPs, members and voters will want rapid action on a totemic issue

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F or a taste of the pressures that Labour will almost certainly soon be grappling with, watch a recent interview with Sir Keir Starmer on Sky News, a broadcaster. Pushed on how he would help families struggling with rising taxes and high energy bills, the Labour leader asked voters to trust his instincts: “It’s about who do you have in your mind’s eye?” The interviewer moved swiftly onto child poverty: could Sir Keir pledge to remove the two-child limit, which means families on benefits get no extra support beyond their second child? “I’m not going to make promises that I can’t keep,” he said.

Sir Keir and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves , have spent years building a reputation for fiscal prudence. As a result they now face the prospect of being elected by millions of voters they are bound to disappoint. Tackling poverty would not be the only let-down but it is a good case study of how a Labour government would struggle without money. There are few more urgent causes for the party’s core voters, many of whom work in public services and charities. It is the reason many activists and MP s—and several members of the shadow cabinet—got involved in politics. But the best the party can offer, at least for now, is modest change.

It is true, as Sir Keir likes to point out, that the last Labour government was successful in reducing poverty, particularly among children and pensioners. But that government made little progress in its first term between 1997 and 2001 because, as now, it had committed to tight Conservative spending plans. When it did start lifting people out of hardship, it was due to a booming economy spurred by global tailwinds. That allowed it to “throw money at the problem”, says Mike Brewer of the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank.

The picture now is worse. The overall level of poverty, defined as households with income below 60% of the median, has hardly budged since 2010, hovering at around a fifth of the population. But poverty has deepened. There are now some 6m people “far below the standard poverty line”, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, another think-tank. In 2022 around 4m experienced destitution—meaning they struggled to stay warm, dry, clean and fed—more than double the figure from 2017. In another change, hardship is now predominantly experienced by those in work, often owing to high rents.

Set against this backdrop, Labour’s proposals are timid. None of its five missions focuses on poverty. Its manifesto calls the mass dependence on food parcels a “moral scar on our society” but says little about fixing it. The party wants to develop an “ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty” but so far it has pledged an extra £315m ($400m) for free breakfast clubs (around 90p per pupil per day, depending on take-up). It will review Universal Credit, a welfare payment, so that it “makes work pay and tackles poverty”. Even if growth does tick up, there is little prospect that Sir Keir will find himself atop a government flush with cash, as happened in the 2000s.

The manifesto does offer one clue about how Labour may be thinking about squaring this circle, although it is not a promising one. The party says it will enact the socio-economic duty in the Equality Act of 2010, which would require public bodies to “have due regard” to the outcomes of all their decisions on inequality. That is more likely to gum up decision-making than to tackle poverty. A review of its implementation in Scotland and Wales found it had just created more paperwork.

In the near term the two-child limit is likely to become a totemic issue . There is plenty of evidence that this policy, which came into force in 2017 and was designed to encourage parents on low incomes to work more or have fewer children, has simply pushed children in large families into poverty. That ends up costing the state more. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, another think-tank, scrapping it would lift around 500,000 children out of poverty and cost £3.4bn per year by the end of the parliament. For now Sir Keir is making no promises. It is hard to see that position being tenable for long. ■

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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Expectation management”

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