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Workshop

Pathways to precarity: Modeling narrative accounts of poverty and despair in America, 2006-2016

  • Amy Weissenbach (Columbia University)
E1 05 (Leibniz-Saal)

Abstract

In June 2006, Warren Buffett announced he would give away the great majority of his wealth in his lifetime. Soon he began to receive letters, most of them appeals for assistance. Buffett gave the letters to his sister, Doris, who proceeded to read and respond to the writers, sometimes offering help in the form of small grants and in-kind gifts. The letters continued to pour in by the thousands over the following decade. In this article we examine 10,058 personal appeals received by the Buffetts between 2006 and 2016, from individuals and households across the United States. Most of them contain narrative accounts of who the writers are, how and why they fell into trouble, and how they think the Buffetts might help get them on track. The letters present a fresh opportunity to address questions of longstanding interest to sociologists, about how pathways to financial insecurity unfold in time, as understood and communicated by those who experience them. We develop methods to identify typical pathways associated with stories focused on different kinds of adversity. To do this, we extract narrative sequences from letters and represent them as network graphs. We then reduce these graphs to relationships among forms of adversity in the author’s story in order to identify ideal typical pathways associated with stories focused on different topic areas (e.g. housing insecurity, abuse, medical issues, educational challenges). In doing so we lay the groundwork for an examination of how pathways to precarity unfold.

Katharina Matschke

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Contact via Mail

Jürgen Jost

Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften

Eckehard Olbrich

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

Marjan Horvat

IRRIS Institute

Tom Willaert

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Armin Pournaki

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences