Welcome to Litsy!

Work hard to get ahead; the poor are mostly minorities in inner cities living lazily off of welfare fraud; the government spends more on welfare than anywhere else in the world; America is a land of equal opportunity with easy social mobility for all. These are but a handful of the many myths about poverty in America, some of which have persisted for decades, with significant and harmful consequences on our social policy, our social compacts, and ourselves.Poorly Understood seeks to challenge and debunk these myths, along the way asking tough questions about how and why they have persisted and what it would take to replace them with true stories.