Hello morning so on a research trip to Chicago I spent some time at a public computer lab where I met a young single mother who was going online to try to find a job did this right green one the green one of course it’s the green one it’s not working that’s the green one thank you so I met this young single mom she was in this computer lab going online to try to find a job and she’s been doing this day after day and week after week and as I was sitting with her looking at the screen I realized why this was not working she typed in a search phrase it was a company name and job and up would pop all of these websites many of which had it looked like they were affiliated with the company she was searching for but these were third-party sites some of them even had the logo of the company but these were lead generators and the site would ask her for a lot of personal information she’d fill out her job history her address her date of birth her criminal history she dutifully filled it all out but she never managed to submit an application for the job she was seeking when she opened her email I saw dozens of messages hundreds of messages for for-profit beauty colleges and resume help sites and no messages from any of the companies she was applying to work for even she knew that there was something fishy about this but she had been in the system and after serving time for a minor drug offense and trying to get assistance for her family to survive she had learned that you follow instructions and you don’t ask questions and you don’t make a stink and I tell you this story because I want you to understand what she’s up against and what we’re up against if we’re going to try to help her I’m here to talk about information poverty that is the unequal availability of quality information and the way that scarce or deliberately misleading information makes economic inequality worse I don’t have first-hand experience of economic hardship but what I do have is a sense of moral responsibility toward a hundred million Americans who are live below the poverty line or who struggle every day to stay on the other side of it I think that there is an aspect to this reality that we need to talk about which is that the information environments we all move through are not equal so I come to this as a journalist background journalism I am NOT an economist but I’m going to play one up here on the stage for a minute while I walk you briefly through an economic framework that my co-author in this research James T Hamilton lays out in his book all the news that’s fit to sell how the market transforms information into news I promise there’s not going to be any math so according to this framework there are four different types of demand for information there’s entertainment demand which doesn’t really require an explanation consumer demand which is what sort of goods and services should I buy producer demand which means information that we need to earn a living so that could be information about education choices about finding jobs or information that we need to do our jobs and then there’s voter demand or what you might more broadly call civic demand information who should I vote for how does my government work how do I make change for the most part and I’m gonna put an asterisk here the market provides the first three types of information reasonably well certainly there’s a never-ending supply of consumer and of entertainment consumers have a lot of information options especially if you’re going to buy a new phone or remodel your kitchen and for producer information there are college rankings there’s Glassdoor trade publications maybe databases that you your company subscribes to but when it comes to civic information there’s a market failure by which I don’t mean that there isn’t a market for civic information there is you all know that there is but I mean is that the market exchange itself does not account for all the costs and benefits to society when reporters show up to a City Council meeting to keep an eye on our local elected officials we all benefit from that and when an investigation changes a policy and that saves lives those lives get saved whether or not the people whose lives are saved ever know about the story let alone whether they pay for it so it makes it you may be thinking okay market failure so what well it makes a difference when a harvard-trained economist says there’s a market failure for civic information because that sort of thing gets people’s attention and it can help us make policy change and I’ll tell you that Jays work has been really instrumental in growing the field of nonprofit news so in general the incentives that exist to provide information are stacked against people facing economic hardship they don’t have as much money to spend on subscriptions their attention isn’t as valuable to advertisers and political campaigns assume that they won’t vote so they’re not that interested in trying to persuade them to that’s one of the reasons why you have news deserts some cities and some neighborhoods have less buying power so there are tensions less valuable to advertisers or they’re not as well able to support news outlet through subscriptions or membership and here’s where the asterisk comes in not only is there a market failure for civic information for everybody but for poor communities there’s a market failure also for consumer and producer information information about jobs and education so again I want to be clear about what I mean by market failure I mean that the exchange itself does not account for all the costs and benefits to society I mean that this is society’s problem when people don’t have information about good jobs they end up with shitty jobs and they need public assistance to survive when people don’t have information about good housing their public cost associated with that and with eviction as we learned about yesterday conversely when people do get information that helps them pull out of poverty that benefits whole communities if you want to buy a $300,000 house you can get lots of good information but what if you need a two-bedroom apartment on a bus line if you’re trying to choose between Dartmouth and Columbia you’re gonna have a lot to draw on but what if you’re trying to make a choice between your local community college and University of Phoenix online if you’ve got money to invest you’ll find information about how to what if you’re broke and you’re thinking about how can I get a loan for $200 to keep the electricity on where do you turn for information that you can trust historically we’ve had a really paternalistic attitude in this country toward people who are struggling financially there’s this idea that the poor don’t know what’s good for them that they’re irresponsible and lazy I mean you’ve heard all of this right but science tells us otherwise there is a body of behavioral economics research the people experiencing poverty are not intellectually or behaviorally any different than anybody else even in simulations in a lab researchers have found that thinking about something that makes you stress out about your finances weakens your ability to solve problems and make good choices that is true for every single one of us the chronic stress of financial hardship is like pulling an all-nighter every day of your life if you think your attention is scarce try working two jobs taking buses to get there all while knowing that you have 17 dollars and 38 cents in your bank account people that don’t have much money have no slack and so their mistakes are more expensive and that creates a cycle that is very hard to pull out of and the people who profit off of poverty know all of this what information is available about payday loans rent own furniture and for-profit colleges is designed to take advantage of the effects of scarcity on our ability to make financial choices online and offline people facing economic hardship aren’t just encountering information deserts they are trudging through swamps of misinformation all while experiencing toxic stress all too often the systems that exist that are supposed to help people in poverty add to their mental load applications for food stamps since programs are deliberately long and confusing and hard to fill out our system of aid uses information as a barrier to weed out the undeserving poor I’m going to tell you about how we can do this differently my friend Sarah Alvarez was a reporter for public radio in Detroit who wanted to do more to directly help people facing economic hardship more than half of the residents of Detroit rent their homes and as a renter you could through no fault of your own find yourself out on the street if the property that you’re renting has unpaid taxes or a lien so Sarah started outliar media which is a non-profit news and information service around housing as a reporter she knows how to access court records property tax records and inspection reports she buys cell phone numbers of Detroiters in large batches and she sends them texts through a platform called ground-source on mass with an offer I’m a reporter if you send me an address I’ll check the public records and I’ll find out who owns this property and if there’s anything that you need to know about it this way she’s able to provide information to people in a way that they can really easily access it because everybody has a cell phone that can at least text and it prevents them from being swindled and possibly being made homeless and through these interactions Sarah is able to see patterns that inform her reporting about housing for the larger community of Detroit this information that’s flowing from the ground up is terribly valuable to her as a reporter out layer media is an example of three strategies that can help us improve the quality of news and information for low-income communities she’s using data she’s taking advantage of bundling and she’s applying the lessons of behavioral economics I know data gets talked about a lot and we all use data and our jobs in one way or another and there is a really great critique out there about relying too much on data and not enough on narrative yes and there is a lot of data out there that could really help people if we could get it in their hands so date Sarah is not dumping spreadsheets on people or quoting statistics at them or sending them to a database she’s like a data concierge she knows where to look and she’s the one searching and making the sense of it and giving it to them in a way that’s useful and that is so powerful and it is the value that we as communicators can add to data so that we can put it in the hands of the people who need it bundling is a way to deliver information to people that they might not otherwise be able to access or know that they need newspapers were a great bundle until the internet came along and in the case of outlier the bundle is the cellphone bundling is also a feature of all kinds of other social services so tax prep at the library wraparound services at a shelter think about the bundles that are already part of your work and the information that’s being conveyed in those bundles or could be behavioral economics teaches us to consider the context in which people are receiving information the timing of when you give it to them what kind of cognitive load they’re under Sarah gives people exactly what they need how they need it and it’s simple and useful I came to this work after a career as a journalist and one of the things that you learn as a reporter is to ask the question how is it supposed to work and then how did it actually work when we talk to experts they can tell us the answer to the first part of the question but only people navigating these systems can tell us the answer to the second part you can talk to the good people at HUD and your local housing agency and they can tell you how section 8 supposed to work but it’s the person trying to find a decent apartment with a section 8 voucher in your community who will tell you how it actually works and what sort of information they need and how they need it the user experience of poverty is what should drive the information that we produce to alleviate poverty and economic hardship people will tell us what they need if we listen thank you [Music]