What me hungry?

After a wait of far too many years (maybe a topic for another post), a study that Craig Gundersen and I conducted on "Food Insecurity and Insufficiency at Low Levels of Food Expenditures" has been published in the Review of Income and Wealth.

In the fall of each year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture releases a report on food insecurity in the U.S. that describes the prevalence of food problems. News outlets take this report and publish stories on the extent of hunger. For example, this year MSNBC reported

The percentage of U.S. households where adults sometimes go hungry or are unable to put enough food on the table declined last year, United States Department of Agriculture figures released on Wednesday showed.

The food insecurity measures are also used by advocacy groups and the government to describe the needs of households and the effectiveness of assistance programs.

The primary food insecurity measure is constructed from responses to 10 to 18 survey questions that people are asked (10 questions if no children live in the household, and 18 questions otherwise). The questions ask about problems of increasing severity from

We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

the least severe condition to

In the last 12 months did any of the children ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn’t enough money for food? (Yes/No)

the most severe condition. People who answer three or more of the questions affirmatively ("sometimes" or "often" to the frequency questions and "yes" to the yes/no questions) are classified as food insecure, "meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members."

Craig and I were interested in how well the measures actually captured food problems. In particular, several of the questions leave room for subjective judgements (for example, how often is "often"). Respondents may also be embarrassed to report problems to interviewers. In addition, respondents may simply forget about problems that they experienced several months ago.

The survey that USDA uses to measure food insecurity also asks people about other, more objective, and more recent food outcomes, including the amounts that they spent on food in the previous week and in a usual week. Craig and I figured that the amounts that people spent on food should be correlated with their reports of food insecurity and that people with very, very low levels of food spending should report high (actually nearly ubiquitous levels) of food insecurity.

What we found was surprising.

Food insecurity and food expenditures are negatively related, as you would expect. However, the correlation is astonishingly weak. Among people in low-income households, the absolute value of the correlation between food insecurity and weekly food expenditures scaled by household size or food needs is less than 10 percent.

More surprising still, when we focus on households with low incomes and very low levels of food expenditures (e.g., expenditures below half of what the USDA says is the minimum recommended healthy amount for a household), less than 40 percent report being food insecure. In fact, at no point along an objectively-scaled food expenditure distribution do people report food insecurity rates much above 50 percent.

We run some follow-up analyses that indicate that the food expenditure and food needs measures are reliable. We also re-examine the relationships for groups where we can rule out other types of reporting problems. The analyses lead us to the conclusion that the weakness lies in the food insecurity measure itself.

The particular problem is the food insecurity is much likely higher among some especially disadvantaged groups than the reported statistics indicate. As we state at the end of the article,

Our findings that food hardships are under-reported at the low end of the expenditure distribution should be disquieting to researchers and policymakers. The data may be masking genuine distress among the disadvantaged households, and the modest relationship with food expenditures may mean that the food insecurity and insufficiency measures will have difficulty registering increases in well-being from policy innovations and economic improvements.

Hopefully, this will give USDA something to chew on.

Let them drink tea

South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer shows his compassion and respect for human life.

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals."

Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said.

In South Carolina, 58 percent of students participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program.

Bauer's remarks came during a speech in which he said government should take away assistance if those receiving help didn't pass drug tests or attend parent-teacher conferences or PTA meetings if their children were receiving free and reduced-price lunches.

Bauer's proposal comes down to taking children's meals away if they or their parents don't measure up.

Teachers will tell you that for some needy children, school breakfasts and lunches are the only meals that they can depend on.

The USDA reports that as the country entered the recession, household food insecurity, that is, the lack of "access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members," was at its highest point since the government began measuring this in 1995. Among households with children, more than one in five were food insecure at the end of 2008.

Food insecurity in South Carolina over the three years preceding the report (2006-8) was nearly a full percentage point higher than the national average.

The voters of South Carolina should send Lt. Gov. Bauer to his room without supper, not its poor children.

Prairie dogging in DC

I'm in Washington for the week attending a yearly research conference sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). The conference covers programs, mostly anti-poverty and family assistance programs, funded by the ACF. There are also presentations on other promising programs, demonstrations, and social experiments.

A striking feature of the conference is the vast array of programs and services (and the accompanying alphabet soup of program acronyms). In one respect this is fascinating. I get to "prairie dog" for a week, poking my head out of the tunnel of my own research on food assistance and welfare programs and getting to hear about other initiatives.

In another respect, you have to wonder how potential clients navigate all of these various programs. The programs address many related issues but typically are run by separate agencies within states and communities. Depending on the state, one program could be in a health department, another in a workforce or employment security agency, others in social service departments, and yet others in agencies for children.

Having many programs means that services can be tailored toward specific issues, problems, and populations. It also means that program staff can become highly knowledgeable about these issues. It is certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach.

The problem, of course, is the services become fragmented and can be hard to find. Despite being a reasonably well-informed researcher, I have trouble keeping track of all of the programs. I can only imagine what a new client would face in trying to determine what services might be helpful or available. Many states and localities do operate "one-stop" centers to help with some groups of services; still the choices are bewildering.

Beyond this, there are inefficiencies associated with potential duplication of services. There are also inefficiencies associated with the administrative overhead for each of the programs.

In many of the presentations at the conference, we've heard about the dire fiscal situation. States are facing very tough budget conditions and paring (chopping?, gutting?) expenditures. The federal government is spending huge sums and running enormous deficits. However, relatively little of this money is being directed toward social services, and the federal government will have to close its spending gap going forward, putting pressure on social programs.

One thing that has not been discussed is the possible consolidation and simplification of programs. Given the budget exigencies and the existence of so many programs, it may be time to put consolidation on the agenda.

Poor now, poor chances later

A new study has come out that links childhood poverty to impairments in working memory. The Washington Post reports

research is providing what could be crucial clues to explain how childhood poverty translates into dimmer chances of success: Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, leaving children with impairment in at least one key area -- working memory.

"There's been lots of evidence that low-income families are under tremendous amounts of stress, and we know that stress has many implications," said Gary W. Evans, a professor of human ecology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who led the research. "What this data raises is the possibility that it's also related to cognitive development."

The article is available on-line and will appear shortly in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The abstract for the article is

The income–achievement gap is a formidable societal problem, but little is known about either neurocognitive or biological mechanisms that might account for income-related deficits in academic achievement. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood. Chronic stress is measured by allostatic load, a biological marker of cumulative wear and tear on the body that is caused by the mobilization of multiple physiological systems in response to chronic environmental demands.

Research already indicates that social mobility from one generation to the next is astonishingly low in the United States. Far from being a shining beacon of opportunity or a "classless" society, children's economic attainments in the U.S. are more closely tied to parents' attainments than in any other developed country.

The U.S. has substantially higher income inequality than other developed countries, with children being overrepresented among the poor. The new research suggests that this inequality is likely to compound itself.

The research also suggests that policies to help poor families, such as work supports, could have "trickle up" effects that improve the human capital and productivity of subsequent generations.