Chris Rufo joins the podcast to talk about poverty in America. In his new documentary America Lost, Chris spent five years exploring life in three of America’s forgotten cities—talking directly to the people impacted by floundering economies. But this film doesn’t just paint a dire picture—it also offers hope through real world examples of communities rebuilding.
Chris is an Adjunct Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He is a filmmaker, writer, and policy researcher and has directed four films for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including his latest film, America Lost. He is the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty, and is a contributing editor at City Journal. He has appeared on NPR, CNN, FOX News among others.
Transcript
Beverly:
And welcome to She Thinks a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg and on today’s episode, Chris Rufo joins us to talk about poverty in America. In his new documentary, America Lost, Chris spent five years exploring life in three of America’s forgotten cities, talking directly to the people impacted by floundering economies. But this film doesn’t just paint a dire image. It gives real world examples of communities rebuilding and offers hope, and I think all of us could use a little hope right now during this COVID-19 pandemic, which is why Independent Women’s Forum is highlighting American ideals of ingenuity, generosity, and kindness. From Americans donating blood to companies providing free food and housing, it’s a beautiful reminder that we’re in this together. Visit iwf.org or check us out on Facebook and Twitter and follow our campaign using hashtag in this together to learn more about the campaign.
Now to Chris. Chris Rufo is an adjunct fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He is a filmmaker writer and policy researcher and has directed four films for PBS, Netflix and International Television, including his latest film as we mentioned, America Lost. He is the director of the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth and Poverty, and is a contributing editor at City Journal. He has appeared on NPR, CNN, Fox News among others, and it is a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today. Chris, thank you so much for your time.
Chris:
It’s great to be with you.
Beverly:
So, let’s jump right on and into your new documentary, your new film. As I mentioned already, you’re exploring stories of three American towns. There is Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California. Why did you choose these cities to document for five years?
Chris:
Well, these cities are metaphors for thousands upon thousands of cities and towns across the United States that are going through hard times. And what’s particularly poignant about these three cities is that you have a Northern industrial white working class city in Youngstown. You have a kind of Southern predominantly African American urban community in Memphis. And then you have a Latino and multiracial city in the West in Stockton, California. So together they represent not only all of the three geographic regions of the country, but also the major racial demographics of the country. And what the film shows is that despite the geographic and racial differences, many people in poor communities are going through the same challenges, confronting the same problems and grappling with the same solutions.
Beverly:
I actually grew up close to Stockton, California. So I’ve been there are many times and have seen firsthand some of the struggles that they have there. I’m curious with your five years of interviewing people, what was that process like? How did you figure out who am I going to talk to? What were those five years like? How often did you visit the cities? I just find it fascinating that there was so much research and background that went into this.
Chris:
Yeah. It was a process that developed and changed quite a bit over time. When you first set out to make a film, you have one idea and then the film that you end up making oftentimes ends up something quite different. I think what happened is that I approached it like I think most people do that have maybe a college education, some background in public policy. You’re looking at places and you’re asking two questions. How does the economy work, and what kind of public policies have leaders implemented in this place? And those are the two primary lenses with which we view American cities and a whole host of other problems. But what I discovered over time and required much deeper research, much deeper field work and much deeper thought was that the problems in these three cities are no longer predominantly economic problems or public policy problems, but at this point they’ve become cultural problems, social problems, familial problems, and they go two or three levels deeper than we’re typically thinking about.
What I realized is that this wasn’t going to be the kind of film where you drop in, you do some interviews over the course of a year or so, and then you fly out and you wrap up the story in a quick and kind of easy way, but it was going to actually require following real people and real families over a long period of time and really trying to understand the deeper implications of American poverty and struggling American cities.
Beverly:
Was it hard to get individuals to agree to be part of this, or were people willing to share their story?
Chris:
Yeah. It’s a bit of both. So first off, you really end up casting a wide net. For this film, we interviewed and talked to and met thousands of people across these three cities before we were able to really dial down on the people that we wanted to show and participate in the film. But because you’re asking folks for a pretty long commitment, we want to kind of be in and out of your life over the course of multiple years, we really looked for people that not only had a compelling story, that had some sort of drama that was unfolding, people that had good camera presence and kind of a good sense of participating in a film, but also people that were really excited to tell their stories, because we knew that if we were going to follow people over a long time, they had to have a real intrinsic motivation for participating.
We did, again, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pre-interviews and field interviews before we settled in on the nine main stories that we follow in the film. And I think that really pays off because in a documentary you’re following people’s real lives, and your selection of the individuals who you’re going to put on screen is the most critical choice that you’ll make.
Beverly:
And when we think about poverty, you already alluded to this, we automatically think of money, that the reason people are poor is because they don’t have enough money. I think even in Stockton, California, there they tried the universal basic income or some type of direct payment to people in that city for a while. So often when people are struggling financially, there’s this push to give them money, so whether through safety nets or direct payments to people. Did you find that most of the people you had talked to had received some type of government assistance, and how did they view the assistance they got? Would they say that that was actually beneficial for them, or do they view it as harmful?
Chris:
Yeah. You have a pretty wide range of experiences and thoughts and opinions. But I think one of the things that was common not amongst all, but I would say with the people that I spoke with, is that they were receiving whether it was food stamps or the earned income tax credit if they were working or disability payments or section eight housing vouchers. A lot of these folks are involved with the kind of welfare state system, but I’d say the strong majority of people didn’t like it. They didn’t want to participate. They had some sense of shame about participating, and they really felt like the way towards a better life was to be financially independent, to be economically self sufficient. But because of how many of these programs are structured, people found themselves really trapped in a web of these social programs.
One of the things that I think is lost in our debate, whether it’s people on the left saying we need more social programs or people on the right saying we need fewer social programs, what I observed is that the very kind of existence of many of these programs is not really geared towards the individual experience of the people that are using them. But in fact, they’re viewed by the majority of people who participate as cumbersome, bureaucratic, hard to deal with, restrictive of their opportunities, and it becomes this kind of bureaucratic maze that you’re forcing people to navigate through that has all these conflicting incentives sometimes good, sometimes bad. But all we’ve really just kind of a practical nightmare to engage.
I think that what I saw is that despite good intentions from policymakers in designing some of these programs, the actual outputs were not leading people towards economic self-sufficiency. We’re not leading people towards necessarily better outcomes. You have I think an elite opinion that is based in social science and it’s kind the college educated way to think about it that says these things are universally good. We’ve designed them intelligently. They should function. But the story on the ground and amongst people who are most familiar with them from the consumer perspective, tells quite a different story.
Beverly:
So, from these individuals, if they think that the bureaucratic system is hard to navigate, they obviously don’t think that this is the best way to deal with helping them during their time of need. Did they talk to you about what they thought would be most helpful? What is it that they would say, okay, if I was going to get ideal help, here’s what it would look like?
Chris:
Yeah. We did, we talked in long conversations with folks, but what I think the big takeaway for me was is that when you ask people, what do you need, what would help, what are you struggling with, what are your issues, what causes you to stay awake at night, what are the things that cause you the most pain and suffering? I mean, really getting into the deep human experience that they’re going through, almost never was the response “Well, I really would like a government system that is designed to do X, Y, or Z.” They were almost always deeply personal and psychological and social issues. It was “I’d really like to see my kids again.” “I really am hurt because my father’s child is in jail, and he hasn’t come around for five years” or, “I really feel like I went through this traumatic experience when I was growing up, and it affected me in this negative way.”
So, you have a lot of really human challenges that a bureaucracy by definition is really not able to address. And what I saw as the things that actually worked in real life, it often wasn’t strictly financial or strictly programmatic or some sort of mechanism of social science. It was real one-on-one human relationships in these communities between people that had these kind of thick ties together. The faith community plays a huge role in a lot of these cities, and it was really not so much a question of how can you equalize the material circumstances of people. It was more a question of how can you uplift people from that personal, spiritual and social point of view that was really best delivered and in many times only delivered through those kinds of relationships that exist on the ground that aren’t, again, primarily economic and aren’t primarily political or policy driven.
Beverly:
And as you mentioned there, it’s about relationships, but plenty of people feel that they don’t have strong connections to family. You mentioned faith based organizations, places of worship can provide that community and that family life for people. Are you also seeing though other types of nonprofit organizations or communities that are focusing on outreach? I know the opioid epidemic is something that you do have communities focusing on, but what did you find for many of these people who felt like they didn’t have a connection to family or faith? Did they have an avenue to try to find that personal relationship with people?
Chris:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the million dollar question, and it becomes very difficult. And I think that certainly I know people that had connections with nonprofits and kind of grassroots outreach groups and in many cases that those were helpful. But I think at the end of the day, people want to see their intimate and close relationships restored, and that’s very hard to manipulate from the outside. And one of the biggest problems I saw with certainly the public programs, but then even many of the nonprofit programs is that they were designed to help, but once you have a professionalized system, the relationship quality changes, because if I’m going to you for help, but I know that helping me is your nine to five job and you’re getting paid to do it, it really shifts psychologically the relationship. And the things that I found to be cases, again, the most helpful were people who were from the community who were helping not because of a professional imperative, but because they were truly desiring to help and to change.
And it’s not something I set out to document. It’s something that actually quite surprised me, but I think that religious organizations and religious institutions and small scale churches often open in small storefront were almost to the exclusion of most others, the organizations that delivered the most for the people that were suffering. And they were also able to give clear moral guidance, something that we’ve shied away from as a culture even talking about. But for a lot of these people, I think to their own testimony, as they would say, are suffering from a kind of disordered life experience and really benefit from that clear and convincing and persuasive bottom up moral order that’s provided not through secular and values agnostic organizations, whether public or private, but through religious conviction and religious communities.
Beverly:
And the time that we are in now with COVID-19, of course, we have more people unemployed than ever before, more economic need than ever before, but there’s also the documentation of loneliness that exists, drug use and depression going up during this time. And so from the lessons that you learned or what you observed as you went through this, what do you think are some of the important tools as a country we’re going to need to think about for people who’ve lost their jobs or people who have been quarantined and don’t have families? Are there any lessons that we can take from the documentary to apply to today, knowing that of course when you set out to make this film, you did not know we were going to have a global pandemic and so many people unemployed, but what do you think we can take from this film?
Chris:
Yeah, I mean, I think that the film is more relevant than ever in this moment when you have probably 35 million people losing their jobs in a matter of months. You’re going to have whole cities, neighborhoods, towns that are going to be going through a deep economic decline,~ and I think that what policymakers need to understand now, before it’s too late, is that when you destroy an area’s economy, the consequences extend far longer than just those immediate economic decisions. And when you destroy the economics that kind of gives people that breadwinning capacity, that gives people a structure, that gives people a sense of meaningful work, that gives people a means for improving their lives, when you take that away, you see knock on social consequences that can be devastating and that can last for decades.
So, for example, Youngstown, Ohio. When Youngstown, Ohio lost their steel mills, really between the 1970s and the 1980s and 1990s, when those jobs disappeared, you started seeing a massive uptick and really a kind of a pandemic and epidemic level of drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, domestic violence, homicides, dependency on public programs, all of those things that we worry about, all of those kind of negative social consequences. Those things can emerge very clearly from economic disruptions, and we really need to think clearly that obviously you have to try to squash the virus. You need to do everything that you can to prevent people from getting sick, prevent people from dying, but you also need to think long-term on the back end, are we going to be creating a decades long ripple effect that really shatters people’s lives from the inside out?
And unfortunately, I don’t think that that’s been a huge part of the discourse because people are so scared of the media threat, but I think what the film shows is that those problems can continue for such a long time and can become endemic, that you really need to tackle that. You really need to take it seriously, and you really need to have that kind of economic engine that provides people with a sense of vitality, a sense of mobility, a sense of hope and a sense of just community organization.
Beverly:
And before we go, from your personal perspective, was there an individual or a family that you still keep in touch with, or that really their story grabbed your heart as you went through this? And if you could maybe share that, because as we were saying earlier, this film also talks about hope and that there is light at the end of the tunnel. And so what would be a story arc of one of the individuals that you worked with?
Chris:
Yeah, so one of the characters, the main character in Stockton, California is a gentleman by the name of Mike Dougherty. When I met him, he was just getting released from prison. He had a long history of crimes and addiction and problems and struggles, had never really worked, was affiliated with street life and street crime, and was really at his wit’s end. He had a baby daughter that when he went to prison was just a month old, and when he got out was about a year old, and here we are meeting with him and he’s trying to put his life together.
And on the surface, you could say this guy has very little chance, but what I learned about Mike is that he was passionate, dedicated, articulate, intelligent. He drew a terrible hand in life early on and made bad choices, suffered the consequences, but was really able to tap into some of those universal human desires, the desire to be a good father, the desire to have a family, the desire to provide in a legitimate way. And you follow him over the course of the film as he’s struggling with that, trying to get his first job ever when he’s 28 years old or trying to make amends with people from his past, or trying to provide and take care of his girlfriend and the mother of his child. And you follow him through this messy journey, but what happens in the end of the film, without spoiling it, is that you have a sense of hope and you have a sense of how things can be put together again, no matter where you start.
So, I think that that kind of spirit and that kind of courage is going to be required of a lot of people in the next couple of years as the economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic really, really sets in. I’d invite all of your members to watch the film for free during the time that they’re on this coronavirus shut in the house. We’re offering everyone to watch the film for free at AmericaLostFilm.com/premiere. And I think it will give people a sense of what’s to come, unfortunately, for many places around the country, but also a sense of how to persevere and how to thrive despite whatever obstacles may come our way.
Beverly:
And I even think giving us a roadmap on trying to understand what people face and maybe how we can help someone, even if we’re in a more fortunate situation, because as you point out in this film, so much of this is about neighbor helping neighbor, people helping people, not being paid to do it, but doing it because you care. So appreciate not only this film. Once again, it’s called America Lost, but we appreciate you coming on the show and talking more about it. So thank you so much, Chris.
Chris:
All right. Thank you.
Beverly:
And thank you for joining us. Before you go, we wanted to thank you. Independent Women’s Forum relies on the generosity of supporters like you and investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity and wellbeing for all Americans. So do please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review on iTunes. It does help, and we’d love it if you shared this episode so that your friends know where they can find more She Thinks episodes. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for listening.