Recently, (October 18, 2010) a New York Times article covered the resurgence of scholarly interest in the “culture of poverty”. The reporter focused on academic meetings and a congressional briefing linked to a special issue of The Annals, the Journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
The article probably overstates the academic withdrawal resulting from association between “culture of poverty” and “blame the victim” established by the early 1970s. Research of the 1980s and 1990s focused on the new term “urban underclass” but continued to provide a rationale for ignoring pleas for anti-poverty efforts from the federal government. Nevertheless, the recent interests does seem to represent a heightened participation by researchers and their funders.
Studies by Daniel Patrick Moynihan before he became a senator from New York and the anthropologist Oscar Lewis among others, described the urban black family as trapped in a “tangle of pathology” and moral deficiencies resulting in a community of welfare-dependent unmarried mothers. The underlying racial theme repelled many for decades, so the renewed interest in this subject is noteworthy. There is a careful avoidance of terms like pathology, and language that sounds like blame.
We know that this is not a purely academic exercise if for no other reason than the congressional briefing. The Times article highlights this connection directly:
“The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty ‘play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,’ Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.”
But this current research is not so focused on distinguishing which cultural attributes cause or sustain poverty rather than being caused by poverty. Separating cause and effect is important. Marriage promotion has been advocated as an anti-poverty strategy because marriage appeared to be one of the striking differences between the poor and the non-poor. But is marriage a cause or the result of higher income?
Why is the focus on the behavior of the “losers” in the economic competition as opposed to all players? Pathologies of the rich would seem to be at least as interesting, but draw much less attention at universities where the research is conducted or the government
agencies and charitable foundations that hand out the research grants. Wouldn’t it be constructive to learn how and why middle class families are convinced to vote pathologically against their economic interests; or how the truly rich are able to separate their weekend religious beliefs from their profit generating weekday activities when in comes to interactions with other economic classes?
One of the arguments against aid to the poor is that it encourages a “culture of dependency”. Policy analysts don’t identify the same flaw in tax benefits and subsidized mortgage rates for middle class homeowners. Or at least it doesn’t seem to be of “cultural” interest.
When the sub prime mortgage collapse expanded into a banking crisis, some argued that not only was government intervention on behalf of low income homeownership bad for the poor, but that it could destroy capitalism for everyone. The diseases from the culture of poverty could escape quarantine even if poor people couldn’t. The pathology of the poor had transformed into a contagion infecting the rest of us.
Advocates for homeownership claim a list of benefits for society: increased satisfaction with their homes and neighborhoods; increased likelihood to participate in voluntary and political activities; and prolonged stays in their homes, contributing to neighborhood stability. But housing subsidies to the poor are devoid of any analogous self-empowerment – in other words, no means to accumulate wealth in the form of equity, or effective participation in the operation of the public housing project. As a result, many of the elements that contribute to the advantages of homeownership are “designed out” of low income housing subsidies.
Instead of focusing on culture, this blog advocates a focus on the federal and state government spending policies that unfortunately contribute to differences in economic opportunity.
This structural approach suggests a different set of questions than those emphasized by a focus on culture. What is it about the rules of the economic game that produces so many losers and could the game be made fairer? Why isn’t the poverty level a higher priority
target of economic performance along with growth in gross national product and the unemployment rate? In other words, isn’t a persistent, and now climbing, poverty level a sign of failure for fiscal/tax policy?
What about the Culture of Poverty Studies?
Unlike engineers or others involved in technology, social scientists are not expected to solve the problems they study. Although they as individuals may care about the fate of the poor, these researchers have a perverse incentive to keep poverty around.
If the focus on the poor is driven by a desire to solve the poverty problem, then I would expect more emphasis on solutions-oriented research. I would expect more emphasis on the structural obstacles to escape from the poverty trap. Instead, there is at least as much
interest in developing new theoretical frameworks, and applying novel experimental designs to examine poverty in fresh ways. In fact there doesn’t seem to be a high expectation of eliminating poverty through social science research.
It’s not as if solutions-oriented experts don’t exist: but they are not really asked to deliver them.
Besides the PhD. policy analysts at D.C. partisan and nonpartisan think tanks, there are government economists, statisticians and attorneys at the Federal Reserve, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Commerce, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and other agencies representing a staggering amount of intellectual and computational firepower who are never directly asked the question they have spent most of their careers fantasizing about: "How would you fix this poverty mess?”
In many cases, government policy analysts, e.g. CBO, are prohibited from giving recommendations, presumably to assure “objective, impartial analysis” of the policy under consideration. Instead they get to make diplomatic comments, analyses and forecasts about what congress is about to consider, and they are occasionally asked to comment on some tangential details in a congressional hearing. But wouldn’t we all like to know what they are muttering to themselves when they are asked everything else but “How would you fix this mess?”
At its simplistic core, solutions to poverty don’t require that much intellectual fire power. Once you set aside those who are physically or mentally incapable of holding a productive job and those who avoid working, the missing element is self-evident. There are not enough jobs at the appropriate skill level paying enough to keep job seekers above the poverty level. Aren’t there rich countries that have much lower levels of poverty? How do they do it?
Instead of studying the “culture of poverty”, maybe we could disrupt the culture of poverty studies and give some “experts” a serious chance to solve problems using the proper incentives. It’s not an accident that the most successful advocates in Washington are the ones that are paid for winning – lobbyists and vendor/contractors.
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