> I would be equally thrilled if someone did something similar in the United States to see how our poor and working poor make ends meet so that we can stop making crap up in our own prejudiced and biased minds.
Part of the problem is that you can find a huge corpus of studies that support pretty much whatever position you want to take.
- You think poor people are shiftless layabouts who spend all their money on trivial garbage? There's a whole series of think tanks putting out papers that agree with you.
- You think poor people are noble hard workers who through sheer bad luck or malice by the upper classes have ended up in a place where they can barely get by?
I could get you a 1,000 pages of studies by Wednesday on that.
and so on.
Because the studies are so voluminous, you can also find almost impossibly fine-grained studies, like "A study on petroleum energy costs as a percent of net-income for single white mothers in non-coastal states" or whatever.
It takes almost impossibly focused and thorough critical thinking to assemble conclusions from this flood and it turns out taking meaningful action is even harder.
While I totally agree with your basic sentiment about finding data for a particular confirmation bias, I really just mean an objective study that tracks urban and rural patterns across different areas of the country. It would be even more awesome if each state would have one done since state laws can really effect what supplementary income programs are available and to whom. It would be great to have that comprehensive picture BEFORE trying to take meaningful action or for an opinion. I'm just looking for raw data without a prescribed hypothesis. The simple question, How do they do it?
I'm not looking to give answers as to reasons for their situation... I just want to know how they survive from one area to the next in that situation.
I would bet that there's some studies out there that are like that. I only have a passing interest in the topic, but I'm sure there's various journals and thinktanks where such a study must have been performed at some time.
Don't forget the folks using a study's results to justify a program directed at a totally separate demographic (inner city study tried to applied to rural area or vice versa).
One of the really interesting problems is scaling up pilot programs to large scale. There's no end of successful pilot programs. What's been found however, is that when you try to scale a pilot program, who's members are usually made up of highly motivated/qualified specialists, and try to incorporate people who aren't invested in the program/who aren't specialists (often because there simply aren't enough to populate large-scale programs), many pilot programs turn into failures.
It makes policy decisions, even at the state level, very difficult.
In addition, the best "do-ers" to execute pilot programs aren't always (perhaps even are rarely) good educators for the next round of specialists to scale up the program. They'd rather be on the ground than writing documents about best practices. So a lot of institutional knowledge from the pilot programs are lost.
There's probably a good opportunity for an app/service/startup that makes recording this institutional knowledge more seamless for the on-the-ground "do-ers," but I'm not sure what the business model would be.
> There's probably a good opportunity for an app/service/startup that makes recording this institutional knowledge more seamless for the on-the-ground "do-ers," but I'm not sure what the business model would be.
Most government social programs take bids for outside companies to do technical assistance or manage the grant's data. Get an office on K Street in Washington D.C. and bid on that part of the grant.
There's literally thousands of them.
http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/411382_surve.pdf
http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/SpendingPatterns...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14690040
http://www.uctc.net/access/23/Access%2023%20-%2007%20-%20THE...
http://www.americaspower.org/sites/default/files/Trisko_2014...
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/~/media/publications/PDFs/nut...
http://www.npc.umich.edu/publications/u/working_paper06-36.p...
Part of the problem is that you can find a huge corpus of studies that support pretty much whatever position you want to take.
- You think poor people are shiftless layabouts who spend all their money on trivial garbage? There's a whole series of think tanks putting out papers that agree with you.
- You think poor people are noble hard workers who through sheer bad luck or malice by the upper classes have ended up in a place where they can barely get by? I could get you a 1,000 pages of studies by Wednesday on that.
and so on.
Because the studies are so voluminous, you can also find almost impossibly fine-grained studies, like "A study on petroleum energy costs as a percent of net-income for single white mothers in non-coastal states" or whatever.
It takes almost impossibly focused and thorough critical thinking to assemble conclusions from this flood and it turns out taking meaningful action is even harder.