How We Cured “The Culture of Poverty,” Not Poverty Itself
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out.
Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty -- inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.
At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”
Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious -- qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.
According to him, what distinguished the poor was their unique “culture of poverty,” a concept he borrowed from anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who had derived it from his study of Mexican slum-dwellers. The culture of poverty gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also gave the book a conflicted double message: “We” -- the always presumptively affluent readers -- needed to find some way to help the poor, but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them, something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution of wealth. Think of the earnest liberal who encounters a panhandler, is moved to pity by the man’s obvious destitution, but refrains from offering a quarter -- since the hobo might, after all, spend the money on booze.
In his defense, Harrington did not mean that poverty was caused by what he called the “twisted” proclivities of the poor. But he certainly opened the floodgates to that interpretation. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- a sometime-liberal and one of Harrington’s drinking companions at the famed White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village -- blamed inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the “Negro family,” clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years after The Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C. Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:
“The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment... Impulse governs his behavior... He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless… [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.”
In the "hardest cases," Banfield opined, the poor might need to be cared for in “semi-institutions... and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman.”
By the Reagan era, the “culture of poverty” had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued in his 1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.
So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the “culture of poverty.” In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the “One Strike” rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed “workfare.”
In a further nod to “culture of poverty” theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250 million over five years for “chastity training” for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)
Even today, more than a decade later and four years into a severe economic downturn, as people continue to slide into poverty from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you’re needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes, so TANF recipients are routinely instructed in how to improve their attitudes and applicants for a growing number of safety-net programs are subjected to drug-testing. Lawmakers in 23 states are considering testing people who apply for such programs as job training, food stamps, public housing, welfare, and home heating assistance. And on the theory that the poor are likely to harbor criminal tendencies, applicants for safety net programs are increasingly subjected to finger-printing and computerized searches for outstanding warrants.
Unemployment, with its ample opportunities for slacking off, is another obviously suspect condition, and last year 12 states considered requiring pee tests as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits. Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have suggested drug testing as a condition for all government benefits, presumably including Social Security. If granny insists on handling her arthritis with marijuana, she may have to starve.
What would Michael Harrington make of the current uses of the “culture of poverty” theory he did so much to popularize? I worked with him in the 1980s, when we were co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and I suspect he’d have the decency to be chagrined, if not mortified. In all the discussions and debates I had with him, he never said a disparaging word about the down-and-out or, for that matter, uttered the phrase “the culture of poverty.” Maurice Isserman, Harrington’s biographer, told me that he’d probably latched onto it in the first place only because “he didn't want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties.”
The ruse -- if you could call it that -- worked. Michael Harrington wasn’t red-baited into obscurity. In fact, his book became a bestseller and an inspiration for President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But he had fatally botched the “discovery” of poverty. What affluent Americans found in his book, and in all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves -- disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.
Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we’ll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America’s ever-growing army of the “working poor.” And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.
Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword).
This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print at the Nation magazine.
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First, the right has used issues like teenage pregnancy, drug use, violence, financial irresponsibility, and welfare fraud to attack anti-poverty programs. I have spoken to some good-hearted, intelligent people who worked hard to survive the Depression who, because of such problems, have little sympathy for today’s long-term poor. Stopping one’s ears to discussion of counter-productive behavior among the poor is going to win no victories for the welfare state. Second, if some of these problems are actually keeping people in poverty, then it is in interests of the poor to address these problems.
Alexander Harrington
Alexander Harrington
The first problem to address if we want to reduce poverty is that the very wealthy (the top 1%) have seen their share of all income - not the income itself, but their SHARE of all income in the U.S. - rise to 270% of what it was 32 years ago. That is a direct result of very preferential tax treatment for the top 1%, on the theory that the increased money they take out of the business enterprise, as a result of the incentive to do so provided by lower tax rates, will somehow translate into money 'trickling down' on the heads of those without jobs.
'Trickle down' is an absurdist idea, absolute pie-in-the-sky foolishness of an extreme nature, which does not work, and has never worked, because it cannot work in any real world. ALL wealth comes from the bottom up, not the top down. The rich do not make their money by doing hard work. They make their money by telling others to do it. Without those 'others', or absent their incentive to perform, the rich would be poor. Anyone who believes that if the rich would only become richer we would all have more may as well be braindead, since all that is produced by increasing their share of income is far more people without jobs.
However, we have other poor people - the largest percentage of very poor people - who would work if PAYING jobs were available for them...jobs which paid enough for them to live safely and independently. In our society, however, we prefer to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top; a trickle UP economic plan which has been very well served by Harrington's characterization.
The reason why the richest among us have been sucking up, year by year, an ever larger share of income over the last 32 years is that we've made what some would say are minor but necessary reforms to the tax code. Others, of course, would take a more sane view and refer to those reforms as the ongoing daily rape of both the middle class and the poor.
The capitalist game is about power and sadism, about being able to degrade and humiliate other human beings without having to feel directly responsible for their misery. Capitalism is a sneaky, elaborated way that allows a lot of people to be cruel without getting a bad reputation or having to develop a bad conscience.
Fact is, in rich countries noone needed to be poor, if wealthy societies really wanted, they could make poverty disappear by moderate wealth redistribution, which means, that somehow society or at least certain fractions of it want to keep a portion of the population poor, they may not say so, but they do. In the first world, there is enough money infrastructure, wealth to guarantee everyone a decent life. It's not done. Ask yourself why!
In short, your idea has been tried and proven a failure.
It's easier to save money on food if you have a good fridge and freezer. If your cheap apartment has a dinky old fridge, you will waste food and be unable to buy foods in larger sizes. Poorer people may have homes -- but they are often poorly insulated, drafty and cost more to heat and maintain. Poor people pay more to get their laundry done at coin laundries. And furniture -- man, if you can afford good furniture, it will last for generations. If you can only afford discount stuff, you'll be lucky if it lasts 10 years. Credit is much cheaper if you don't really need it. One unlucky expense -- like replacing a pair of broken glasses or lost bus pass -- will throw out your budget. Trying to put off an expense you just can't afford now, like having a water heater repaired or replaced, can result in more costly damage later.
So it's even tougher trying to save up anything for education or training or starting a small business.
Furthermore, never really having money to save or invest means not having experience in money management. Most poor people blow any windfall that comes their way because they've never had any experience in investing. Others will put it away and
One thing that I beleive is that the education given to most poor people is subpar, and on of the main reason for the subpar education is the huge amount of time lost to distractions by maybe 10 to 20 percent of the students who attend schools in poor neighborhoods.
These children are generally simultaneous victims of their own screwed up parents and victimizers of their peers, minimally to the extent of severely hampering their classmates..
It is a terrible dilemna, but the answer is surely not to allow these few to diminish the prospects of their classmates by their disruptive behavior as is the status quo.
There are schools with mold in the walls, schools without enough desks, schools without enough teachers or books or classrooms, even, in the poorer neighbourhoods. Those are also distractions. In more affluent schools, the main distractions might be the archery range or swimming pool or latest fashions.
But the most important factors in education are the education level of the parents and whether there are books and a place to study in the home. And that's where poorer neighbourhoods with crowded apartments really handicap the kids.
It also frustrates me when the nitwits say "But these so-called poor people have cell phones!" They must be absolutely ancient if they have no idea what kind of hoops you have to jump through these days to get a land line. A cell phone isn't much more expensive, and you absolutely need a phone these days when so much employment is changing shifts and casual hours.
With a smart phone, you can look for and apply for jobs online. And when you get a call, you can check out the company, locate the address for the job interview and look up the bus schedule for how to get there.
It's the 31 year old man who just had a massive stroke, with no insurance because he works two jobs, but they are both minimum wage, so no insurance.
It's the child who goes to the special room at school on Fridays to take home the "backpack" with food in it for the family for the weekend when there is no school lunch.
It's the mother who has to have surgery and needs to take her children to her mother an hour away, but her car doesn't run, so we beg repairs so her children doesn't go into state custody.
I could go on and on and on. Most people have no idea how the poor have to live.
The young woman is white and lives in a Chicago suburb. This is the expanded face of the new poverty and not the 2 to 4 percent who fraud the food stamp program.
Our present culture of meanness and hate most times drops to the level of racism with images of black food stamp recipients when the majority of recipients is white. It’s always been that way Ms. Ehrenreich, as you write in your book, and it's always been the haters.
There is a spirit of sharing and helping that this country was built upon, not contriving to steal hard-earned money from poor homeowners who believed in a dream. Obama won because of that spirit and will win again, trimming those who would be selfish and the haters to their knees.
As for the the obligatory (and smug) reference to "Appalachian whites," we need to fill in the gaps a bit:
According to the Appalachian Regional Commission, there are approx. 3.8 million people in the "Appalachian Region," spread out over 13 states, defined as "living below poverty level."
The Appalachian areas of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia could be subtracted from that total (about 1 million people), because the percentage of those living "in poverty" in the three sections is actually lower than the national average.
The 'trap' about poverty isn't that, with social services, *the bottom* doesn't drop out: the problem is that there isn't enough in one place at a time for people to have any *other* direction to go very far. We should be opening doors, if not lifting roofs. In a capitalistic system, if a lot people can't earn a living wage even if everything goes right, you can hardly say they'll do better if starved out and made homeless and sick. Saying 'They deserve it cause they aren't 'incentivized' is just rich people thinking.
Here was his message, in his own words: "Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them."
By the most conservative estimates I could find, we spent some $9 Trillion on poverty since 1964 and the Great Society program initiated by LBJ and a progressive Congress,. Some make the number as high as $16 Trillion.
To what end? Did it eliminate poverty? Will it?
No.
For the last 50 years, our poverty level has remained in the mid-teens. I call spending $9 to 16 Trillion and not being able to move the needle any appreciable amount a colossal failure, wouldn't you?
This same government that understands that feeding the bears in our national parks only makes them dependent on handouts from tourists rather than foraging on their own can't see the same problem with handing out benefits. It compounds the problem by promoting broken homes with single mothers to the point that it has become a generational phenomenon.
We can talk about personal responsibility all day, but when your government rewards the exact opposite, you get a poverty that stays the same.
Anecdotally, I did work for a man that owned a Section 8 qualified apartment complex. He hated reloading the soda machines so often in the Summer that he doubled the price of an individual can so it would push his residents to go down the street to the corner store and buy it cheaper in six-packs or cases. The level of consumption never went down.
...Is exactly what got us in this economic mess. There's no more to squeeze, part out, or dismantle, so now the ultra-rich want to claim people aren't poor enough to take jobs that aren't even there.
Well, first of all, you totally ignored the trillions spent on poverty with no effect.
The problem with your analysis it that relies on a static model of what people make. People ordinarily DON'T stay in the same income level over time. I started out @ $6.00 an hour, working 72 hours a week, with NO overtime pay, and NO benefits, working my way through school. As people improve their circumstances through individual initiative and hard work, they move up the income ladder.
This is the same marxisocialist class warfare rhetoric with a 21st Century OWS twist. There is no other economic system in the world that has provided more wealth and prosperity to more people ACROSS THE GLOBE than capitalism. Is it any wonder people will do anything to get to America versus any other country on this planet?
Have you ever given thought to carrying this punishment of the poor idea to its extreme would do? If everyone is too poor to buy anything, who will pay for the goods and services that make rich people...rich?
It makes no sense to purposely drive people OUT of the market where they can't afford buy anything.
Just walking away with all the houses and everything we spent on them , *and* still holding all that debt on things not even as valuable as their inflated prices (but still vacant deteriorating homes) was a *massive* transfer of wealth away from the common people and up to Wall Street. Not to mention a hideous waste of *real stuff.*
There is not even a scintilla of a relationship between the two.
Secondly, we were PROMISED we could eliminate poverty if we just spent enough money.
Nine trillion dollars later, we still need HOW MUCH more to eliminate it?