Read The Blackwell Companion to Sociology Online
Authors: Judith R Blau
For example, a study by Dhesi and Singh (1989) of economic inequality between
religious caste groups in Delhi, India, in 1970 revealed negligible evidence of
discriminatory earnings differentials for the lowest Hindu caste members despite a wide gap in earnings between them and higher caste members. Their educational levels were so low that they would rarely be direct rivals of members of the higher castes for preferred occupations. In a sense, there was nò`need'' for
upper-caste Hindus to exercise direct discriminatory actions in the labor market toward the lowest-caste members because the latter could not even get in the
game. In contrast, Dhesi and Singh found substantial evidence of discriminatory
differentials in earnings between Sikhs and upper-caste Hindus. Sikhs, unlike
lower-caste Hindus, on average possessed the education levels that would make
them stronger and immediate rivals for the occupations typically held by upper-
caste Hindus.
The endogenous model of discrimination suggests a rich and as yet largely
unexplored research agenda with US data. One way to approach this is to
estimate discriminatory earnings residuals over time and then see if the variation through time can be explained by changing labor market conditions for white
males. Do the discriminatory residuals for blacks become larger when economic
times are harder for whites (and white males in particular)? If so, there would be strong evidence to support the linkage we hypothesize between widening interracial inequality and widening general inequality.
14
Rediscovering Rural America
Bonnie Thornton Dill
Although concern about poverty in the United States has focused attention
primarily on urban neighborhoods where the largest number of poor people
live and where poverty is most visible, poverty in rural communities is severe and connected in many ways to the urban issues that capture attention. For decades,
central cities have been the destination of choice for displaced rural workers
seeking better wages, opportunities, and living conditions. Appalachian coal
miners, black sharecroppers, Native Americans who left the reservations, and
Latino farmworkers flocked to urban America in search of jobs and economic
opportunity. Economic transformations of the past two decades, however, have
created a much more complex flow of human resources.
Sizable numbers of Northern blacks are returning to Southern rural home-
places (Stack, 1996). Latinos are moving from cities to rural communities: in
California they are seeking agricultural work (Allensworth and Rochin, 1996);
in the Midwest they are finding jobs in manufacturing (Green, 1994; Gouveia
and Stull, 1995; Stull et al., 1995; Amato, 1996); in New York they are leaving
cities in search of more affordable rural housing (Fitchen, 1995). At the same
time, educated rural youth continue to leave their home communities and
migrate to cities in search of improved employment opportunities (Pollard and
O'Hare, 1990; Lichter et al., 1995). Some rural communities are experiencing a
growth in newly arrived professionals, vacation home buyers, retirees, and
commuters. The impact on poor women, children, and families who live there,
however, is often mixed (Bradshaw, 1993).
Prolonged economic growth in the USA since 1945 has resulted in a pattern of
bifurcated development in rural areas, with some areas growing and flourishing
and others remaining economically stagnant or declining. This chapter focuses
on the people and communities that have been hardest hit by industrial changes
and contemporary economic restructuring. The stresses in these communities are
Rediscovering Rural America
197
characterized by a decline in resource-based industries, the loss of manufacturing jobs, increases in low-wage service sector work, limited economic development,
precipitous declines in family farms, a steady decrease of small-scale rural
entrepreneurs, a shrinking rural middle class, and a widening gap between
rural and urban income.
Finally, rural areas are also characterized by patterns of long-term, persistent poverty concentrated in particular rural places: the southern black belt, the
Lower Rio Grande Valley, in Appalachia and Native American Indian reserva-
tions in the West and throughout the country. The poverty that has engulfed
these and other communities like them affects the live of hundreds of thousands
of men, women, and especially children.
In this chapter, the term rural is used interchangeably with the term non-
metropolitan. The metropolitan±non-metropolitan distinction refers to termin-
ology developed by the US Office of Management and Budget in 1983.
Metropolitan statistical areas usually include an urbanized area with a popula-
tion nucleus of 50,000 or more, as well as nearby communities or counties that
are economically and socially integrated with that nucleus. Non-metropolitan
counties are not linked with large cities or with communities closely tied to large cities (Duncan, 1992).
Rural poverty is concentrated in the South, where over one-half (53.6 percent)
of the rural poor live (US Department of Agriculture (USDA), 1997). Its rates
also tend to be highest in areas with high proportions of minorities, children,
elderly, the less educated, and workers employed in extractive industries and
government (Lichter and McLaughlin, 1995). Native Americans, blacks, and
Latinos living in rural communities are among the poorest people in the United
States. Their poverty rates are almost three times greater than those of rural non-Hispanic whites (USDA, 1997).
Rural children have a higher risk of poverty than urban children. In 1995, 3.2
million rural children under the age of 18 (22.4 percent) lived in families with incomes below the poverty level (USDA, 1997). Although rural children are
more likely than urban children to live in two parent families with at least one employed adult, 59.9 percent of rural poor children live in single parent families.
And rural family incomes remain at or near the poverty line.
Many of the places where these children and their families live are places that
have had high concentrations of poor people over long periods of time. In 1990,
these long-term, persistently poor counties had an average poverty rate of 28.5
per cent ± a rate more than double that of all other rural counties and many
central cities ± and were home to 30 percent of the rural poor (Summers, 1995).
The poverty of these communities is the result of years of disinvestment. In some places, it represents the continuation of patterns of subsistence that resulted from the mechanization of agriculture and natural resource production generations
earlier. In other cases it reflects a legacy of racial segregation and disenfranchise-ment (Swanson et al., 1995). In still other cases, it is the result of more recent structural transformations in the manufacturing and service sectors accompanied by slow economic growth and high unemployment. In most places today, it is
the result of the intersection of several of these factors.
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Bonnie Thornton Dill
Links between children, families, and communities are vital to understanding
and addressing poverty in rural America. This chapter seeks to provide a frame-
work for beginning to understand rural poverty ± specifically the poverty of rural children, women and families, and communities.
Rural Economies in the 1980s and 1990s: the Effects of
Restructuring
Despite popular imagery, rural communities today are not organized primarily
around family farms and agricultural production. In fact, fewer than one-third
of the jobs in rural communities are in any way related to agriculture. The
other two-thirds of rural workers are employed in the manufacturing or ser-
vice-producing sectors of the economy (Pulver, 1995). The result is that rural
economies were as deeply affected by global economic restructuring of the
past two decades as were urban economies. Beginning in the late 1970s, rural
communities experienced an accelerated loss of farms and farm jobs, a loss
of factory work and jobs in natural resource extraction (such as mining,
forestry, and fishing), and a growth in low-paid service jobs (Gorham, 1992).
Thus, while rural workers were more likely to be employed than urban
workers, low wages combined with low levels of transfer benefits kept many
rural workers below or near the poverty level (Adams and Duncan, 1992;
Tickamyer, 1992).
The income gap between urban and rural workers increased in the 1980s as
a result of economic restructuring. Rural areas particularly hard hit by restructuring were those whose economies were not diverse but were structured
around one or two industries. Additionally, restructuring had a significant
impact in rural communities because service sector growth generated mostly
low-tech, low-wage jobs. The 1980s ushered in another pattern in rural com-
munities. The flight of industries and people from the snowbelt to the sun-
belt meant that some rural communities experienced considerable economic
growth, while others declined (Bradshaw, 1993). According to a report by
the Economic Research Service of the USDA (1997), rural economies have
benefited from the economic expansion of the 1990s, in that they have experi-
enced slightly greater employment growth and wage gain than urban areas as a
whole.
Despite these encouraging signs, however, rural communities still lag far
behind urban ones. For example, rural median household income is only about
77 percent of that of urban areas, and for black households and female-headed
households rural income is only half the rural median. The poverty rate for rural children has remained virtually unchanged, in part because rural workers are
still more likely to receive wages that either maintain their family in poverty or lift them only slightly above the poverty line (USDA, 1997, p. 5). In fact, rural communities may still be distinguished from urban ones by several basic
features:
Rediscovering Rural America
199
. higher poverty rates;
. more long-term, persistent poverty;
. less spatial concentration of poor people;
. fewer of the behavioral patterns associated with concentrated urban
poverty;
. people of color are poorer than both their urban counterparts and their
non-Hispanic white rural neighbors.
Explanations of Rural Poverty
In explaining rural poverty there are two approaches in the recent literature. One approach is examining the opportunity structures of rural places, through the
study of the historical and contemporary patterns of economic and social orga-
nization. The second approach is assessing the human capital resources of rural
people, through analyzing education, work experience, family structure, and
cultural patterns.
In providing an overview of rural poverty in the 1980s, Deavers and Hoppe
(1992) state unequivocally that its causes involve an underinvestment in both the human capital of rural people and the economic structure of rural places, which
relied heavily on low-skilled, low-paid manufacturing jobs. Tickamyer (1992)
focuses her research on the structure of labor markets, arguing that ``people are often poor because there are limited opportunities to work and receive wages
in their own labor market'' (p. 55). Based on her analysis, race and gender
differences were more likely a result of differences in the opportunities for
work within various labor markets than of the characteristics of the people
themselves.
Lichter et al. (1993) find that although individual rural workers have human
capital deficits in education, cognitive skills, and work experience, they receive fewer economic rewards than their urban counterparts for the work experience
and education that they do have. Lichter and Costanzo (1987; see also Shapiro,
1989) show that non-metropolitan poverty levels are higher than metropolitan
poverty levels, regardless of education, and that at each educational level non-
metropolitan rates of underemployment and unemployment exceed metro rates.
Rural communities offer low returns to human capital because rural labor
markets are characterized by a proportionately higher share of jobs in periphery or competitive industries, low rates of worker unionization, a lack of diversity of employment opportunities, and high levels of occupational and industrial segregation by race and gender in geographically and socially isolated locations
(Summers et al., 1993).
Living in rural communities increases the likelihood of experiencing long-term
poverty. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1967 to 1985,
Adams and Duncan (1992) examined long-term poverty in metropolitan and
non-metropolitan areas and found that, in contrast to the long-term urban poor,
rural people who experienced long-term poverty had higher labor force partici-
pation rates. Low earnings, low transfer benefits, a large gender gap in wage
200
Bonnie Thornton Dill
rates, and a growth in the number of female-headed families are some of the
factors which suggest that labor market strategies alone will not raise wages
sufficiently to end rural poverty.
Lichter and McLaughlin (1995) sought to examine the impact of deindustrial-
ization and the shift to a low-wage service economy on rural communities