On September 18, RSF president Sheldon Danziger appeared on PBS Newshour to discuss the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, noting that while poverty and unemployment rates have fallen, prosperity is no longer widely shared as the economy grows. Danziger also spoke to several publications, including the Washington Post, L.A. Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer, and pointed out that due to inflation and a 13-year period of wage stagnation, American families’ incomes have hardly increased. “Yes, it's terrific that more people are working full time,” he told the L.A. Times, “but if we had a higher minimum wage and companies would pay more, then we'd make much more progress."

Several RSF authors and scholars also appeared in the news this month to discuss the current state of the economy. In an essay for the American Prospect, Visiting Scholar Paul Osterman advocated for a federally funded jobs training program to combat unemployment. “Critics are wrong when they say that, as one solution to underemployment, job training is a failure,” Osterman wrote. “The harder truth is that these programs are not having an impact because they cannot reach scale. They are small and scattered.”

In the New York Times, columnist Thomas B. Edsall cited a new study headed by former RSF scholar Jens Ludwig, which investigated the extent to which moving low-income people to more affluent neighborhoods helped lift them out of poverty. Ludwig and his colleagues found that these moves tended to improve the physical and mental health of the people in the study, but added that “changing neighborhoods alone may not be sufficient to improve labor market or schooling outcomes for very disadvantaged families.”

RSF author William Julius Wilson further noted that participants in the study who were moved out of public housing still tended to be placed in neighborhoods that were segregated and lacked access to employment opportunities and good schools. Robert Sampson, another RSF author, added that many of the participants had lived in extreme poverty for decades, and likely suffered “lagged effects of severe disadvantage” that the study could not account for. Noting that these mixed results indicate the need for further studies on the way in which neighborhood segregation perpetuates inequality, Edsall concluded, “We have to figure out a better way to approach intervention, whether it’s education-based or neighborhood-based or both.”

Click here to see the full list of recent RSF scholars and grantees in the news.