Tightrope

I am only going to say this once, and then I will try my hardest never to harp on it again, as I suspect I have reached my complaint quota on this particular issue ...

When I was 16, I walked into our local weekly newspaper's office and told them I wanted to work for them, and thus I got an internship copyediting the paper and doing some very minor reporting work. One of the first things I remember the editor telling me was that you can't just interview the people you already know. And I know Kristoff and WuDunn worked at much bigger and more important publications than my little weekly, and have won Pulitzers for their previous work on much more hard-hitting subjects than this week's school board meeting, and that's why it bothered me so much that the framing of this book was so much around kids that Kristoff was friends with on the school bus.

OK, shutting up about that now.

This was a broad look at poverty and how America has failed its citizens through unemployment/underemployment, addiction, lack of healthcare, homelessness, incarceration, and more. It includes a lot of statistics, and also a lot of wrenching personal stories. If you don't already know about our country's poorest people, I think this is an eye-opening read of the issues and possible solutions. Particularly the anecdotes in the healthcare chapter regarding people waiting for free health fairs in order to get treatment, and how poverty affects pregnancy, were harrowing to me.

The authors identify as more left-leaning, as do I, and I still found myself having a bit of a hard time accepting that so many of their suggested solutions to reducing poverty and its effects required government policy, programming and funding. Particularly if the super wealthy continue to get tax breaks for just about anything. They outlined some wonderful programs that are helping with keeping kids in school and away from violence and drugs, programs to help women through addiction, etc. and talk about ways of scaling those programs, and to me that sounds like a more reasonable solution than asking the government to step in and intervene (... we've seen how well that worked for the Covid vaccine rollout ...). But as they point out, programs often have unintended consequences. I am still learning.

Other reading if this subject is something that interests, you: Dopesick by Beth Macy.