Amy Castro Baker: 

They don't have people pressing them the way that mayors do, city councils do, where we have poverty ever-present and risk ever-present. So when I think about policy innovation that's driven by data, where I see the best innovation happening right now is on a local level, where you have people saying how do we innovate? How do we rethink what we're doing, because our people need help yesterday, not 10 years from now. 

Regina Baker: 

Because the poverty measure is flawed and many researchers are agreeing to that point, and so when we think about these trends in poverty, the real question is, well, are we even capturing the population that we would associate with poverty? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

And people want to work, and so what's interesting to me is that a lot of the pushback that I get around guaranteed income is this fear of large dis incentivizing people to work. 

Regina Baker: 

More and more families, middle class families are finding it hard to stay afloat and then thus dipping into poverty, right? 

Brandon Baker: 

Welcome to understand this, a production from the Office of University Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm Brandon Baker. By now, it is not news that the US suffers from tremendous wealth inequality and an unusually high poverty rate compared to other advanced countries in the world. With people of color and children disproportionately effected, and COVID-19, to be sure, has only exacerbated and exposed this problem. 

Brandon Baker: 

As part of Penn Today's feature spotlight on data science, we took the opportunity to unpack how data science and the emerging availability of data has changed the approach to reducing poverty, or as the case may sometimes be, how it has failed to move the needle and left data gaps that are yet to be filled. 

Brandon Baker: 

Gathered for a discussion about how data can move us toward justice is Assistant Professor at the School of Social Policy and Practice Amy Castro Baker, who is studying the impact of guaranteed income, and Regina Smalls Baker, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, who studies poverty and poverty risks. Together we are the Bakers, joined for a collaborative conversation about how to solve another of the world's most overwhelming problems. 

Brandon Baker: 

All right. Welcome to the podcast. I appreciate you both taking the time to do this... so exciting. I was hoping you could both start by introducing yourself. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you study here at Penn. 

Regina Baker: 

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I'm Regina Baker. I'm Assistant Professor of Sociology at Penn. My research focuses specifically on how micro and macro factors create and maintain poverty and inequality. My current work focuses a lot on poverty and poverty risk, particularly looking at mothers and children. Also, I look at the roles of political and historical contexts in understanding inequality, so really understanding the importance of place. For example, I look at regional disparities and the importance of historical context to understanding these inequalities, and also I do a lot of work on racial inequality and socioeconomic disparities more broadly. 

Brandon Baker: Great. Amy? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Yeah. Hey there. Thanks for having me. Amy Castro Baker, and I'm an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Policy and Practice. I'm also the codirector of the new center for guaranteed income research, which we're launching this week at Penn. Most of my work focuses on economic justice. That's the large conceptual framework that my work sits within. That's everything from gender disparities in mortgage lending to the generational wealth gap, and then more specifically right now, I'm really focused on guaranteed income and universal basic income. 

Brandon Baker: 

And why did you both get involved in this work? Just sort of like a back story of why you took so much interest in these topics. If either one of you wants to start with that. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

My work started out as a researcher studying mortgage foreclosure. I'm a social worker by training. I started out doing community development in West Philadelphia, and this is the early 2000s, and I was watching this trend take place in the communities I was working in at the same time as on the mayor's Commission, or excuse me, Blueprint on Homelessness, and we started to see this new trend of former homeowners, they were older black women, coming in looking for referrals to the homeless shelter, who were homeowners. This is not a typical trend that we would see. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

I was really driven by that as a practice question, is to see what is happening in these communities that I'm serving in and simultaneously happen to be starting my PhD at the University of New York, so what I realized now as I was watching the early seeds of the foreclosure crisis happen, and some really predatory lending take place within the city of Philadelphia and in some other surrounding boroughs and zip codes and really started to dive into that and explore it to say: How are we watching a generation lose housing and lose wealth? We are turning back the clock on progress, and that really was the impetus for my work moving forward. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

How I ended up studying guaranteed income after studying gender and race of mortgage foreclosure was that Stockton, which is where we're pilot testing the idea of guaranteed income, California, was the foreclosure capital of the country. It was the place that experienced the worst of what capitalism has to offer, so it made sense for it to be a good place to test a way to disrupt poverty. The best way that I can say is to say, as scientists, we could spend our whole entire careers telling everybody how big and bad 

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everything is, but at some point we have a responsibility to take a risk and try to disrupt that trend, and that's really kind of the arc of where I've landed thus far. 

Brandon Baker:
Yeah, well that's the spirit of this podcast, so that's good! That's a happy, here. How about you, Regina? 

Regina Baker: 

One big factor is that I grew up in the South and my families are from the South, and just seeing the poverty and the racial inequality there, it joined up into something that been always [inaudible 00:06:07] now. I wondered why are things this way? When I was in undergrad, I double majored in Sociology and this program called Leadership and Community Service and all those process in the Leadership and Community Service major had a service learning component. 

Regina Baker: 

For me, going to a homeless service center for example and working in the Department of Family and Health Services and seeing these families deal with so many issues and try to really understand what systematic factors are contributing to this, and my Sociology major was a complement to that because it helped understand what I saw on the day to day on the ground and these different service settings. 

Regina Baker: 

Then I went on to get a Masters in Social Work, as well, and there this work that I'd done in community and doing community needs assessments, particularly in my hometown in Savannah, Georgia and working in the neighborhoods with the highest poverty [inaudible 00:07:07] this, again, reinforcing systematic issues that are contributing to these inequalities that we see across families. Just really, me as a researcher, want to understand why things are the way they are, and thinking beyond just the individual, but also thinking about macro factors that play a role in these inequalities, as well. That's what got me started in this particular area. 

Brandon Baker: 

Thinking about the big picture, what is the state of poverty in the US, right now? What are some of the trend lines that we're seeing? 

Regina Baker: 

I guess I can speak to that question. One thing I think is important to think about poverty in the US context-wise is that when you look at poverty in the US and compare us to other rich countries, poverty in the US is really high. We have a really high poverty rate relative to these other countries who are richer countries, right? When we look at trends over time, we see things such as the vast racial disparities in poverty, but even though over time as the [inaudible 00:08:16] does report what the highlight... Poverty is declining. Declines in poverty or making declines in racial inequality is happening, but the fact of the matter is we still see large disparities between groups in poverty. 

Regina Baker: 

We see that minorities, particularly Black or Latinos and Native Americans have specifically higher rates of poverty. You see children are the largest segment in terms of thinking about one particular age group of the poor. How poverty is particularly high in the US, and also I think it's important to thinking about 

Page 3 of 17 

poverty in general in the US is the fact that our poverty measure is flawed, so the numbers that we get are definitely a vast under count of poverty, and particularly don't capture material... What point I think is important to underscore when thinking about these poverty trends is that the poverty measure is flawed, and many researchers are agreeing to that point. When we think about these trends in poverty, the real question is, are we even capturing the population that we would associate with poverty? 

Regina Baker: 

There has been a lot of research done on material hardship, for example, and finding that many people who are experiencing material hardship... Thinking about the ability to afford your rent, or the ability to afford your medical bills, or food insecurity, these are things that we associate with being poor, but many of those families who experience those hardships aren't captured in the US poverty measure. They make more income than their threshold because their threshold is too low, and so I think when we see these trends in general, it's bad enough that we have such high rates of poverty compared to the other places, but we got to think about the fact that we're not even capturing the extent to which we think about poverty, the substantial meaning of poverty. We're not even capturing many individuals, and so in reality, the issue is actually worse than it appears on paper. 

Brandon Baker: 

Is that an American problem, or is that something that happens elsewhere, too? This inability to track what is poverty. 

Regina Baker: 

[inaudible 00:10:32] American. Other studies are better in terms of thinking of all measures or having [inaudible 00:10:36] measures or thinking about well being or other different ways of looking at poverty, whereas the US... our typical poverty measure, this absolute poverty measure, outdated poverty measure that came about in the 1960s, and really hasn't changed much except for standard inflation. It's definitely an American issue in terms of thinking about poverty and poverty measurement. Other countries do a better job at capturing the extent of poverty. 

Brandon Baker:
And how would you say housing intersects with this problem, Amy? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

In every facet, right? Housing historically has been the way that you accumulate wealth, if you aren't coming into it from a generational perspective, right? If we take a long view or historic view, we had decades where black and brown people and single women were locked out of home ownership, right? There was this real gap in terms of having that wealth building vehicle, and when we look at what happened post recession, most people have not recovered, so there was all this talk before the pandemic hit about how the economy is coming back and we've rebounded, and we really haven't. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

In some measures, we have rebounded, but the average household has not. In fact, people are experiencing more risk than they have before, and that really is not just from the pandemic. A lot of it has to do with the fact that most people lost wealth during the recession that they haven't pulled back because of those drops in the housing market, so there's really a lot of economic fragility there that we 

Page 4 of 17 

often miss. One, again is that loss in home ownership wealth, but then two is the cost of rent. You cannot afford fair market rent in any state working minimum wage. You just cannot do it. The two drivers I really see of poverty in the US, are one, lack of affordable housing, and two, income volatility and people are basically working more and making less, and over time that shows up as poor public health indicators. 

Brandon Baker: 

And what are the measures we've taken in policy to address this so far? It's clearly not working very well. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

It's such a good question. Which part, right? I think the biggest issue is that if we look at our safety net and our economy as a whole, we keep trying to address current problems with old solutions. We haven't had a meaningful adjustment to our safety net or the way that we think about disrupting poverty since really the 60s and 70s. The market technology underwriting the way that the entire system works is drastically different from that period in time. There is a reason our safety net is failing. On the one hand, I would argue that it was designed to fail from the get-go, but really our current policy solutions do not match the scale of income volatility that people experience, meaning your income going up and down every month. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Prior to the pandemic, and I have no idea what these numbers are now, but 43% of American households were experiencing income volatility, meaning their pay is going up and down on a monthly basis, which means we can't budget. You're ineligible for a lot of products, that type of thing, so you're really fluctuating constantly, but yet our social safety net and even the way that we think about data and collect data is on a typical annual basis, and it doesn't really account for that month to month disruption and risk. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

There's lots of new tools that people are thinking about using, and if anything, the silver lining, I believe, of the pandemic is this is an opportunity to rethink the way that we want our social contract to look, and to really rethink the way that we take care of one another. The way that we engineer the economy does not have to be the way that it is right now, so there's lots of other tools we can employ to address systemic injustice. 

Brandon Baker: 

It sounds like big data has probably changed the game of tracking poverty in the past 20 years. What do you think the biggest differences are in a practical sense? 

Regina Baker: 

I think that aside from... We have the normal census data that we do every year, census counts. We have these [inaudible 00:14:56] measures or these annual measures of poverty that we get, but I think in terms of thinking about how the other surveys [inaudible 00:15:04] look at poverty beyond just the census measure. The census measure, thinking about [inaudible 00:15:10] snapshot in time, but thinking about these other surveys such as longitudinal surveys, particularly, that help us look at families over 

Page 5 of 17 

time that I think are important to think about in terms of poverty dynamics and being able to capture things such as transitions in and out of poverty, which I think are really important and Amy touched on that point, as well. When you have these census measures, they give you a snapshot [inaudible 00:15:41] 1.5, but is that really getting at the issue? 

Regina Baker: 

If you know that poverty can be very transitory in terms of thinking about people going in and out of poverty itself. Being able to capture that I think for having these other types of data sets, longitudinal data sets that we're able to get that information, that more fine tuned information on families, for example, which I think is important. And then just thinking about the broad array of data that is available in terms of what you want do you want to understand in terms of thinking about poverty? 

Regina Baker: 

For example, I'm really interested in not only the individual factors, but also the macro level factors, and so being able to build these multilevel data sets that include not just individual level data, but also data from state policies, for example, or being able to leverage historical data, this multilevel dataset to really get at a different dynamic that are influencing and shaping poverty and people's poverty experiences. I think that over time, the tools are allowing us to be able to get those different types of data and really, like I said, get a more nuanced picture of what's going on helps us better direct the issue. 

Brandon Baker:
Right. What is some of the information typical included in these data sets? 

Regina Baker: 

For example, longitudinal data... Take a big survey where you might have data on just what does the house look like? Demographics. Family structure. What are the type of labor markets, employment activity of these families? We might have data on health and well being factors, as well. Some of these surveys also look at networks and social support and resources available to families, so there's really a wide range of data that these surveys help capture to hopefully help understand these experiences of families. 

Brandon Baker: 

Is it mostly survey data that's being used or is there any information being drawn from things like Facebook or mobile phones or I know satellites are sometimes used as indicators of street lights and stuff like that to measure potential poverty. How is that factored in in modern day analysis of data? 

Regina Baker: 

While these standard data sets have been [inaudible 00:18:25], in terms of the standard demographic data or the data surveys or interviews and things like that, but now we are seeing, with social media and with Google and all these other different types of technology, we are seeing more research pulling from those, as well, to better understand what's going on. 

Regina Baker: 

I remember when I was at Duke and there was a study being done in policy, where they paid the families' phones, and so they were able to... They had different apps and stuff on there, and they would 

Page 6 of 17 

track their activity and what they were doing, and so all this additional data, just really nice in the sense of adding a whole other layer, a whole other realm to poverty research that wasn't previously even thought of in terms of traditional surveys. I think about that, as well. 

Regina Baker: 

Mobile network data... There's a big [inaudible 00:19:36] in terms of social media and the role that that plays in terms of people's access to information, for example, and things like that. The advance in technology has definitely been something that scholars have been looking at in terms of thinking about what are creative ways that we can also look at the poverty experience and people in these situations to better understand that situation, as well. 

Brandon Baker: 

And how do you use data in your Stockton experiments, Amy, to help you better understand what's happening there? 

Amy Castro Baker:
A whole bunch of ways. 

Brandon Baker:
I know. It's such a broad question. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Yeah. Before I get to that, just real quick on your last question about surveying poverty, I there's a few things that get left out. The first one, I'd say, is that I think one of the vexing questions right now is to what degree is big data reproducing inequality or creating new forms of inequality and then how is this scale and asymmetry that's present in that system obscure in those processes? There's ways in which big data is moving so quickly... By definition, it's constantly in flux, but there's no way for you, as a consumer and activist or an organizer to get any sense of what companies actually have on you. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

One example, or I can give two quick examples. One would be the underwriting process of mortgages. All that our protective legislation does is it says that you can have access to the market and you can't be discriminated against based on age, race, sexuality, family status, but it doesn't say anything about what happens to you once you're in that lending pool, and those lending pools are governed by big data. They're governed by algorithms that have assumptions about who you are based on profiles that people pick up about you with all those cookies that we're leaving all over the internet. The ways in which that's shaping and shifting inequality and poverty, we really don't know yet, and so it's really an open question and part of a barrier, really, to resisting some of these systems, because you can't resist and deconstruct what you can't see. That's the biggest struggle when it comes to thinking about big data, thinking about [inaudible 00:21:55] poverty. 

Brandon Baker:
Are there any thoughts out there about how to resolve that? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

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So many. That's not particularly my area of expertise, but I think the one thing that I would say is that at this point in time, when it comes to big data and the money that is made off of, for instance, social media, so on all the tracking cookies that are left when we're using Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, pick your platform... We don't benefit from that at all. It is 100% profit. It's not taxed. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

One of the people often ask me, if you were to do a guaranteed income, how would you pay for it? I think one of the leading ideas of how you pay for it is by taxing companies for that data. It's your data. It belongs to you, so why not tax it? Taxing the companies, not the individuals, and then have that income go back to the average citizen as a guaranteed income. There's no reason we cannot do that, right? Right now, it's just profit, and there's an awful lot of... It's in lobbying that prevents people from knowing what it is that's happening in those spaces. 

Brandon Baker: 

Said Nelson Mandela in London's Trafalgar Square in 2005 at a Make Poverty History rally, "overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right. The right to dignity and a decent life." What I'm getting from this is that data as it relates to poverty can kind of be a double edge sword. It can support and reinforce what's already happening, but also be used to better understand what's happening. Is that a fair assessment? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Yeah. I think so, and the other thing I'd add is to say you can only measure what you actually count, so there's been really strategic decisions that have been made throughout different political policy eras about how we collect data and who we collect it about. There's a reason why we cannot say how many queer people in the United States are experiencing poverty. We can't do it at scale because we exclude them from our large data sets. We have regional data sets that might collect that information. It's pretty hard to make that case nationally and to even figure out where that particular group is at because we don't count them, right? And that legislative invisibility, which is what we call it in the policy space is it generates inequality because you can't budget and you can't advocate for numbers that you don't have. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

There's a real strategic reason why certain groups will advocate to not collect data about particular populations because once it's there, there's power in numbers, and you can actually show people how large a problem is, how small, and how it might need to be remediated. It's a very political decision, and this is why there's so much hand-wringing over the census. We need people to be counted because that determines how we allocate funding and resources. It's not an accident that these fundamental processes of our democracy are suddenly being called into question, while at the same time we have this giant rise in inequality. That's not an accident. It's happening for a reason, be it intentional or otherwise, injustice as inertia. 

Brandon Baker: 

This idea only really tracking what you can count makes me think of what you said earlier, Regina, about how people weave in and out of poverty, too. Is that a more modern phenomenon and how do you even begin to address that problem? My hunch is that that would relate to things like people who work in the service industry or the gig economy, that sort of thing. People who are a little more transient. 

Page 8 of 17 

Regina Baker: 

I am thinking about if it's a modern problem. I would first say that I would think that being in and out of poverty would be something that over time relative to the time period, but just thinking about modern times in terms of thinking about the recession or right now during the pandemic, thinking about the fact that the middle class as a whole is not as thriving as it used to be, right? There are many people in the middle class who are struggling, and those people who based on the census measure, our poverty thresholds or whatever, above the poverty threshold and we see on paper have enough income, but like I said, that's specific not capturing the hardship that they are experiencing or the fact that they might be a health problem away from finding themselves in poverty, or experiencing a pandemic and losing their job and finding [inaudible 00:26:43] income drop. 

Regina Baker: 

I think that we think about these big events that are happening in modern times, like the housing boom and the Great Recession. The housing bust and the Great Recession, and now the pandemic, more and more families, middle class families, are finding it hard to stay afloat and then thus finding them dipping into poverty. I remember teaching about the middle class in my course last week and talking about the number of families in the US, over 40% who couldn't afford a $400 emergency, and it came up, and it included many families in the middle class. I think that- 

Brandon Baker:
And that's the middle class. 

Regina Baker: 

Yeah. Right. It includes the middle class, and so thinking about when things happen, and then the drop below that poverty line. When things are happening, they're happening more and more, and with the pandemic, you're seeing it even more. Just last week, it talked about eight million more people in poverty now as a result of COVID than there were before the pandemic, so there is a very real issue to think about in terms of data. 

Regina Baker: 

Our normal sense of data isn't going to capture that, so that's one of the things that's problematic because you think about the ability to address issues that families are dealing with and when that data is not designed to do that, that's a problem. I was just talking about this with a colleague, recently, in terms of the need to have better data and data that tracks people over time, so you can better track your omni-trend and see the extent, too, what people are going in and out of poverty, but at the national scale, that's not being captured well, at all. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

That's such a good point, Regina. I think, too, about how different data speaks to different audiences, right? Do we need better data? 100%, and she could not be more spot on about the gaps that we have in terms of longitudinal poverty and how things change over time, but at the same time, we also know full well a lot. What we do know is the economy is not working for most people. That we are seeing rising rates of poverty, inequality. We're not closing the generational wealth gap. It's getting bigger post recession, and then of course in the pandemic, and we know some things about how we ought to remediate it, and that we leave that off the table. 

Page 9 of 17 

Amy Castro Baker: 

I think part of the problem is... I say this oftentimes and my students laugh at me, but I think that as scientists, we're terrible story tellers. We're really, really atrocious at translating what we know to be true as researchers into a format that's palatable for most people that they can understand. If scientists told better stories, we'd all be wearing masks, and there probably would be a lower infection rate of COVID right now, right? It's that we do a terrible job of creating narrative, and so I think sometimes what we need to do is to think about data in more than one way at the same time, and to say what types of data move the public? What types of data move politicians? What types of data shift public discourse, and then what type of traditional empirical data do I need to speak to my peers and to policy makers, right? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

You have to push on both of those things at the same time in order, I think sometimes, to see a shift, so you can get resources allocated to filling some of these gaps that Regina's talking about of saying, we don't have these, we don't count them, or they're not there, but yet we also know in our bones, right? I'm just putting language to what people feel every day. They wake up. They know that they're working more, they're making less, and their health is poor. I don't need a data set to know that. I know that by looking at my neighbor, and it comes down to who we privilege in the economy, and whether or not we choose to address those things. Is that really the type of country that we want to be? I'm not sure that it is. 

Brandon Baker: 

How much do you think that's failure of storytelling versus people perhaps just not... Sort of like a magical thinking sort of thing where people are so emotionally charged with the subject that they don't even want to look at it? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

It's a lot of different things, and there's not... It took us several hundred years of injustice to get to the point where we're at now. There's no one cause or one solution, right? It's multifaceted. On one hand, I think it's that we don't understand the lived experience of poverty and injustice. That's part of it. Two, like I mentioned prior, I think that we don't do the best job at being public scientists and making sure that we're creating data that has a purpose. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Why do this? Why study poverty and inequality if you're going to do nothing but stay at Penn and write papers about it? That's really important. Yes, we need tenure. Yes, we need to build research centers. Yes, we need to build knowledge, but that only matters to the degree that we actually use it to impact the world, and so that's really where those pieces come down and say how do you reimagine yourself as a scholar and are you willing to take a risk, right? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

I will be rewarded if I stay within the confines of the academy and do everything in a very predictive way, but that may get me far professionally. It might not necessarily get me that far in terms of policy impact or the broader goals of what I and others might see of my work. It's a number of different things, and some of it is a failure of imagination, and some of it's just what's incentivized within academia. 

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Brandon Baker:
And what kind of wrench of COVID thrown in all of this? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

I think a good wrench, honestly. I really, truly do. I study unconditional cash transfers, which I lead the Stockton experiment prior, and what we're doing is we're giving $500 a month, every month, for two years to people no strings attached. They can spend the money however they like. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

When we started this experiment in Stockton, our mayor had, at this point, I think [inaudible 00:32:59] were doing the planning, every one told Mayor Tubbs he was crazy. I was told I was risking my tenure case by even working on the project, and people said it was absolute madness, like you can't just give people money for free. What are they going to do with it? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Fast forward in time, you have the pandemic, and at the moment of great political divisiveness, at the end of the day, so [inaudible 00:33:22] President Trump, he did sign the CARES Act, and it wasn't enough by a long shot, but we did have a cash transfer that was bipartisan, so we do have bipartisan support, right now, for thinking about new ways to approach poverty. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Yes, it's a wrench, but I also think that it's pulling back the veil on what people who've been living at or near the poverty line for a long time have always known, and it's for example, the conversation, so yes, it's a wrench, but I also find that it is a moment ripe for opportunity to think about new ways that we can address what is that people are experiencing. 

Brandon Baker: 

Either of you can answer this question, but do you feel like people are actually connecting the dots of the stimulus and the unemployment benefits with things like UBI? Is this translating to the reality and realization among the public and policy makers that we do have an incredible poverty problem that we need to deal with? 

Regina Baker: 

I think that particularly with the pandemic, it definitely shed a light on these issues. It really made it clear... I don't know whether or not it answers your question, but it really highlighted the fact that we have [inaudible 00:34:48] families who are struggling economically and who are relying on these low wage jobs, for example, the jobs that have kept society going during this time. Thinking about the essential workers and those on the front line and that coming to the forefront and people realizing that and with the CARES Act, like Amy said, is the perfect example in terms of thinking about this bipartisan effort in the fact that we are able to work together at some point to do something. 

Regina Baker: 

It's just sad that it took a pandemic to make that happen, and there are [inaudible 00:35:30], but the fact that it was possible to have that conversation, and it gets to a point where, okay let's do something that can help better the lives of many of the Americans who are dealing with these issues right now, and 

Page 11 of 17 

I think that it definitely... It doesn't solve the problem. We know these issues are still there. We know that even with the CARES act, we still know that inequalities are rising. There's a [inaudible 00:36:05] at Columbia, at their poverty center, finding that if things stay the way they are in terms of unemployment and whatnot, the projected poverty rates are much higher, even with the rates are projected to be higher than those after we had the Great Recession, right? 

Regina Baker: 

As a result of the pandemic, which is ultimately going to exacerbate these inequalities that we have, and when I think about the kind of work that I'm doing that looks at racial inequality and understanding the gaps between inequality... For example, we find that looking at the black and white poverty gap, employment makes the majority of the gap in terms of thinking about how much people are working, [inaudible 00:36:55] and whatnot. We think about that and think about the fact that they're in this time, people are losing jobs and whatnot, and you think about the high unemployment rates and the rates being particularly high for certain minority groups. What does that mean in terms of thinking about the overall inequalities that are widening over time? 

Regina Baker: 

We got the CARES Act. That helped for the time being, but that money ran out, families still need help. These gaps are exacerbating or are getting larger, and it just brings the person back, okay, what are congress doing, now? Unfortunately, the conversation hasn't been consistent with... We have other events happening that are taking the forefront in terms of congress's time and energy, right now. Even though they did a good thing in terms of the CARES Act and passing that, you still have these issues. These inequalities are still widening, and the progress needs to be made, but it's not at the level or point that it should be. 

Brandon Baker: 

How would either of you grade policy makers application of data so far in these relief bills? When the CARES Act first went through, I remember all people could talk about was poor people getting too much unemployment or was it fair that, I think the number of cutoff, I think was $75,000 for the stimulus check. That sort of thing. Did that all feel rooted in reality and real data or is that... Did you feel like that was a made up figure from policy makers? 

Regina Baker: 

For me, you hear congress and stuff, "this money is more than [inaudible 00:38:50]" or what have you, but at the end of the day, I'm still like "okay, but we know that so many jobs are vastly underpaid, and we know that even for the activity that we do in my class, minimum wage job is not enough to keep people afloat, right?" 

Regina Baker: 

There's an activity that we do in my class where we calculate if somebody works full time on a minimum wage job, which would be rare, but let's say they work full time. They make [inaudible 00:39:27], they still would come up short. They would still not make enough to be above the poverty threshold, and when you think about things like that and the jobs that are available, and it [inaudible 00:39:38] when you make some of these comments, it's just so... What data are you basing it on? 

Regina Baker: 

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It's definitely a valid question to think about these things because I think about these policy makers. You think about more so these incentives being rooted in reality and being rooted in stereotypes and value judgments and things like that that have played a big role in terms of scholarship and debates around why people are poor in the first place. I think that that definitely is the [inaudible 00:40:15] that. It's not necessarily rooted in data when they make these comments trying to justify why things are... Why they would or wouldn't do these things. 

Brandon Baker:
Amy, do you have any thoughts? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

In terms of the CARES Act, specifically, there's some new data out from my colleague, Dr. [inaudible 00:40:36], who, she's a labor economist, and one of the things that she just demonstrated in her paper was that even as that extra $600 a week of unemployment benefits is going away, employers actually saw more applicants per vacancy as the CARES Act was expiring, so that's just one recent data point. One of many, and what we know is that people want to work. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

What's interesting to me is that a lot of the push back that I get around guaranteed income is this fear of large dis incentivizing people to work. I was like, "no, we're not." First of all, when it comes down to the amount of money we're talking about, if someone can explain to me how you can live on $500 a month in the state of California or anywhere in the United States, that sounds pretty amazing, so let me know your Unicorn secret, please. No, we're not talking about abolishing work. What we're talking about is allowing people the freedom to choose work that has dignity and work that doesn't degrade the health of themselves and their families. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

And so when we look at the CARES Act, we do see the seeds of some data driven decisions around what people actually need to get by and to maintain their health in the middle of a pandemic and maintain stability for their families, but again, it's not enough. Really, to take a step back and ask the question of, even when we do have the data, why is it that we don't listen? We have paper after paper after paper demonstrating that when you assist people who are living paycheck to paycheck or are experiencing unemployment, most of them continue to look for work. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

We have a large body of data around unconditional cash transfers, and there is absolutely zero evidence that it impacts the labor supply in any way. What it does do is it shifts how often people are working, so people reducing, let's say their Uber hours in that third shift, from 60, 70 hours a week to more normal, palatable, 40 to 50 hours a week, which allows people to be healthy. When I think about grading policy makers, per se, on the policy level, I do see some seeds of hope, as I mentioned before because there's components of the CARES Act that are based on data. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

The place where I really see the best innovation happening is on the urban level. You have this dysfunction and [inaudible 00:42:50] that's happening in Washington. We're seeing a lot of innovation 

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being led primarily by young black mayors, and primarily by mayors on the coast but also in some other cities, as well, where they don't have the luxury of time. Congress, senators, even the oval office, they have the luxury of time. They don't have people pressing them the way that mayors do, city councils do, where we have poverty ever present and risk ever present. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

When I think about policy innovation that's driven by data, where I see the best innovation happening right now is on a local level, where you have people saying, how do we innovate? How do we rethink what we're doing because our people need help yesterday, not ten years from now. I also think about Vincent Reina's work at the School of Design, where he's helping to design these rent release programs all across the country. Those are being led by mayors, who are saying, what's the data on lack of affordable housing, and what do we need in order to keep our essential workers safe and housed in the middle of a crisis? If you're looking for the places that we're using data to drive policy, I would point to cities. 

Brandon Baker: 

That's interesting. It sounds like more people are actually looking to the data. There's some success there, but where it's more a value judgment, to borrow a term from Regina from earlier, then less success. And it's interesting because it does seem as if despite all the data that we now have at our fingertips, we are still stuck in this value judgment mode with poverty. Why is that and you mentioned you have some seeds of hope, but is that likely to change in the future? Is that cultural? Is that natural? 

Amy Castro Baker:
I wouldn't say it's natural by a long shot. I'd say first and foremost- 

Brandon Baker: I hope not. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

It's rooted in anti-blackness. That's what this is about, right? This stuff is rooted in anti-blackness. It's rooted in the myth of the welfare queen. These were intentional strategies that were built by the right in the 80s, and we still see that shame and blame associated with the safety net that pushes people away from getting benefits, frankly, that they're owed, and that they... because they deserve as human beings. It's a real logic behind, for instance with my project is one example of many like this, giving people cash no strings attached is saying, you matter because you're human. You matter because you're breathing. You matter because you are a human being. You have inherent dignity, value, and worth, and there ought to be a floor that we do not let you fall beneath. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

The reason that this causes so much disruption and so much angst is because it's pushing back against many decades of saying you only matter based on what you produce in the economy. And really shaming and blaming, frankly, women of color... Blaming them for the position that they're in. We've locked them out of upward mobility job opportunities and then targeted them with risky products [inaudible 00:45:50] recession, right? I do think that it's a moment where we are having a more honest conversation about structural injustice and about the ways in which the economy is really rigged. 

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Amy Castro Baker: 

It's hard to say to predict the future, but I've been doing this work for a really long time, and I have more hope right now than I have in a long time despite how dark it is because when I have people on the far right and the far left for different reasons, but actually having a conversation about the social contract, that actually opens up space for coalition building and space for thinking about how do we reknit the way that we're doing these things? Again, like I said prior, so much of this comes down to narrative, and really challenging this idea of who's deserving and who's undeserving. The degree to which we can undo that binary really comes down to deconstructing these assumptions we have about work. 

Regina Baker: 

I was going to say I totally agree with what Amy said in terms of thinking about the narrative that we've had. Long [inaudible 00:46:55] narrative over time, like Amy said, rooted in anti-blackness, and one example is I think about the work of one of my colleagues, [inaudible 00:47:02] at Columbia who did this study basically looking at [inaudible 00:47:09] for needy families across states and the amount of money that states allot for different programs under the way that they get [inaudible 00:47:20]... 

Regina Baker: 

Basically they get this money, and not all states use it for cash assistance. Some states use the money that [inaudible 00:47:33] for needy families for other things, such as unemployment programs, family strengthening programs, or how they get out of [inaudible 00:47:38] family structure and whatnot, and what they find is that states that have higher black populations, those states are more likely to use their [inaudible 00:47:50] fund for programs such as strengthening marriage, as opposed to other places that have lower black populations, they're more likely to use that [inaudible 00:48:02] money for cash assistance. 

Regina Baker: 

That's a small example, but an important one in terms of thinking about those value judgments and the reasons why people are poor, and how there's this common perception that when it comes to a certain group of people, the reason that they're in that situation is individual, behavioral decisions that they're doing, but in another context, it's not the case, so that's definitely something that's had a stronghold in terms of thinking about poverty and poverty policy and the ways we approach it. Again, as Amy said, modern times does give us some hope in terms of thinking about getting on the right track in terms of addressing these issues in a more adequate way, but still that narrative is still so [inaudible 00:48:56] and so strong, and that's rooted in the history of our country. 

Brandon Baker: 

I like to close these podcast conversations by asking what gives you hope. I think it's important that we all hold on to hope even in these times. I think I'll specifically ask because we're two weeks away from our election, what are some signs of hope that we see in that? Is there anything good that might come out the other side as it relates to dealing with poverty? 

Regina Baker: 

In terms of thinking about hope in general, one thing that gives me hope is thinking about the younger generation, and being in the classroom and for example, watching the news and whatnot and thinking 

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about young people and what they're fighting for and advocating for. That definitely gives me hope. You give me hope as a teacher. 

Regina Baker: 

In terms of thinking about it, when you grow up, not grow up, but go off and be in civic positions and some of these movers and the shakers of the world in terms of really thinking about these issues in a way that is so necessary to better address them. In terms of thinking about the specific issues that are important in driving these inequalities. 

Regina Baker: 

Definitely young people today give me hope in terms of thinking about the future moving forward, and just looking at voter turn out. Looking at my home state of Georgia, they've had a record number of [inaudible 00:50:45]. Thinking about the people who have been mobilized to address these issues have been put on the forefront given the pandemic and given all the racial injustices that are coming to light. I think for me, I see some hope in that in terms of thinking about the future and the direction that we're going. Also with that, thinking about how people are becoming more creative in how addressing these issues and whatnot. What is the data and policy and things, so that definitely gives me hope in terms of thinking about the long term. 

Brandon Baker:
How about you, Amy? 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Okay. I'd say three things. First when we take the long view of social welfare history in the US, also most democracy, we tend to have advances in our social safety net and the way that we design policy to actually meet people where they're at, following economic crash. We typically have two things that always happen when there's an advance in the safety net. One there's a massive economic downturn, and then two you have a period of activism and civil unrest that follows that. That's not necessarily on the left, right? It happens on the right, as well, and so we are absolutely, without question, living through late state capitalism. What we're emerging into, I don't know. I don't think there's really language for it, yet, but without question, we are experiencing massive economic downturn that we're not going to recover from by doing things the same way. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

At the same time, we're also living through this moment of US history where civil unrest is at the forefront, as it should be. What that does is it creates a window of opportunity to say, again, how do we have narrative shift? I think that gives me a lot of hope because it means that we are in a place where we can actually take a step in a different direction, which is fantastic. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

And, two, one piece of evidence I give to that is the other day I was driving my daughter home from school, and we were listening to Marketplace because my four children have a professor for a mom, and the host used the phrase structural racism on Marketplace, and my daughter froze and said, "mom, they just talked about structural racism on Marketplace," and she had a point, right? Even as a teenager, she 

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had a point. That is not conversation that we were having on an economic program on NPR even a year ago, and so it shows that we're at a reckoning. 

Amy Castro Baker: 

Third, the other thing that I would say is again this issue of mayors. I'll close out with this, and people can hunt it down if they're interested. One of the things I'm working on right now is the Mayors for a Guaranteed Income Initiative, and we have more than 25 mayors across the United States that have banded together to say, "we want empirically driven, pilot policy programs where we figure out how does cash work to alleviate poverty?" 

Amy Castro Baker: 

When you see people saying, "I'm going to take a risk like that, and not only am I going to take a risk like that in my own city, but I'm going to do it with data, and I'm going to do it in a way that centers the voices of people who have experienced marginalization over decades, not just because of COVID." I think it means that we're in a spot where we can actually push back against some of these things. What will happen this election, we'll see, but I definitely think that from where I sit, the seeds are there to actually have a more nuanced conversation that really centers real people in the policy making process, rather than these avatars of assumption that we tend to have about who's deserving and undeserving. 

Brandon Baker: 

Thanks for listening to Understand This, a production of the Office of University Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Like what you heard and have a subject you'd like to hear discussed in a future episode? Send all notes and feedback to BKBaker@UPenn.edu. For all the latest news, views, and breakthroughs, check out Penn Today at PennToday.UPenn.edu. And for notifications about future episodes, subscribe on Apple Music or your preferred audio listening platform. 

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