Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Shipler visited Bowdoin on Monday to meet with students and professors, and deliver a lecture based on his most recent book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Shipler sat down with the Orient to discuss what led him to research poverty in America and some of the lessons he drew from the experience. Here are excerpts from the interview.
Orient: When and how did you make the transition from news reporter to author?
Shipler: The first time it occurred to me that I might do a book was when I was in Moscow [reporting] for the New York Times. There was a lot I was absorbing about the Soviet Union that I didn't feel I could get at adequately in the newspaper format. Now, what you can do in a book is to look at an issue through a lens that enables you to see longer currents and themes. [...] I began gradually to realize that, after 20 some years at the Times, as much as I enjoyed working for the paper, I really wanted the time to dig more deeply into subjects.
O: You get at the human faces of issues in your books.
S: I've always been interested in people's attitudes, the way they see one another, the way they identify themselves, how their group dynamics operate back and forth. I enjoy talking to ordinary people, and I like getting into people's lives as much as they will allow me to, to try to unravel they way in which they think. To me, that's a great challenge, and when it illuminates larger problems and public policy issues then it's really worth doing.
O: Why write a book about "the working poor?"
S: Well I think it's dawned on me that I am on a quest to understand my own country. I began with race, which is perhaps the most vexing problem, which led me naturally to poverty, which has always been a problem that has interested me. I wanted to write about people who were working and in poverty because I thought taking the job issue out of the equation might reduce the moral weight of the issue. In America we value work as a moral enterprise. People who don't work, for whatever reason, are often denigrated and condemned. So I figured, well, let's take a look at people who do work but are still poor.
O: How might colleges and universities as institutions help alleviate poverty?
S: I suppose the most important step for colleges and universities is to serve as gateways for what sociologists call "upward mobility"?to make sure that their gates are open to children of poor families who have the ability to succeed in college. But then there's the question of who's paying, and that's a very different one. The federal government needs to get into this game in a much more active way, by increasing grants and loans far beyond what exists now to enable students from modest backgrounds to attend college.
The other dimension is service?that is, students becoming involved in anti-poverty organizations or other institutions that touch the lives of the poor in the communities where they study or where they live. It is a very important part of the growing experience. Even if you don't end up working in an anti-poverty organization as an adult, you will have had the experience, and that will shape your perceptions of the problems and make you aware in a way that would not happen otherwise.
O: You hope that The Working Poor is unsettling to both ends of the political spectrum. Do you see any common ground?
S: No, I don't?less and less, actually. There are a couple of programs that have had bipartisan support over the years but seem to have less of that now. There is a deep devotion to the ultimate good of the private sector in managing the economy on the Republican side. I don't know any Democrats that would reject that, [but] there's an understanding that it's not a perfect system. You do have to fill in the gaps with government. That's the basic debate that's been around for decades. It's not joined very sensibly, though, as such. We don't really discuss [the question of poverty] openly. Instead, it's all done symbolically.
O: The subtitle of The Working Poor is "Invisible in America." What makes them invisible?
S: I think they're invisible as poor people because their jobs are like camouflage that allows them to blend in. It's counterintuitive, given our American dream, to regard people who are working hard as "poor." It doesn't compute for us. I think that by and large people haven't seen working people as poor because they have a job. "The poor" means, in our lexicon, people who aren't working, although if you think about it, in most places in the world, poor people work. So that's part of it. Another part of it may be?I've always felt that Americans don't like problems they can't solve, and often we turn away from them. We're problem-solvers in this country. When we come up to a problem we can't solve, we define the problem in a way that lends itself either to simplistic solutions or to a throw up your hands, it's-not-our-responsibility approach.