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.

Subscribe to the Intersections on iTunes, and send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu.