Examining multidimensional poverty

“People think poverty as a

measure of income, but as a lived experience for what it means to

be poor, it tends to involve a lot of other things as well. We have

taken some other dimensions such as low education, lack of health

insurance, being in an unemployed household, and being in an area

with concentrated poverty, where 1 in 5 of your neighbors in below

the poverty line. One of the interesting questions becomes, how do

those different dimensions of disadvantage go together? Is it the

same people experiencing all of those different kinds of

disadvantage, or different people in different places experiencing

different things?”—Richard

Reeves

“Policies need to be better

integrated to work. To alleviate poverty, rarely is just increasing

income going to be enough if you’re facing things like deep health

disparities and concentrations of poverty that carry so many other

barriers that make it much harder for people to move out of

poverty. This sort of a lens just gives you that multidimensional

look beyond income.”—Elizabeth Kneebone

In this episode of

“Intersections,” Brookings experts Elizabeth Kneebone, fellow in

Metropolitan Policy Program, and Richard Reeves, senior fellow in

Economic Studies, discuss their recent research on the multiple

barriers and challenges that complicate the path out of poverty,

and how different dimensions of poverty affect different people

across the country.

Show

notes

The intersection of race, place, and

multidimensional poverty

With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Carisa

Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Eric Abalahin, Fred Dews and Richard

Fawal.

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