This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 25th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The problem of poverty in the United States seems as intractable as ever.

Whole regions, like Appalachia, appear to have been almost entirely left behind by

progress despite trillions of dollars in public sector spending.

J.D. Vance is author of the book Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of a family and culture in crisis.

It's his story of growing up along the Hillbilly Highway.

We spoke at the Cato Institute's Benefactor Summit in March about poverty, culture, and well-meaning public

attempts to help low-income people. I lived in Kentucky for about 16 years. I

wasn't born there, but I went to high school there, went to college there, I had a career there, and on my visits

to Eastern Kentucky with friends of mine who are from the area, it becomes difficult really to, one, fully appreciate, let alone explain the

nature of the problem, if you could even reduce it to one problem.

It's poverty, it's culture, it's economic opportunity, and well just give me just in a general sense from your observations what what is the

lynchman if there is one? Yeah that's that's really. I too would resist the idea of pinning it all on a single problem,

but the way that I would explain it is that you take an area that for many generations has struggled in a number of different ways.

It struggled economically.

The folks who have lived there have gotten used to a certain sense of struggle and

even desperation in certain cases.

And because of that, their children and their grandchildren

grow up in a circumstance where they really, I think,

expect not to do especially well.

And so this sense that life is very foreclosed,

...