Poverty may be our age’s most over-discussed social phenomenon. There is only one justification for barreling on: it is also one of the least well apprehended and most often misportrayed of all public issues.
Fortunately, our misunderstandings of poverty fall into several fairly simple clusters. The first concerns composition. Most discussions tend to treat the poor as a great, uniform mass. The elderly poor, alcoholic poor, working poor, voluntarily poor, widowed poor, sick poor, criminal poor, poor graduate school students — these and many other variations are brutally compressed into one meaningless category.
An even more fundamental question concerns what exactly it is we are measuring when we define poverty. The official count of the poor is made on the basis of cash income only, yet $150 billion of federal government assistance directed toward the needy takes the form of food stamps, subsidized housing, medical care and so forth, instead of cash. It makes no sense to ignore that non-cash income when estimating the number of people who lack the means to live comfortably.
Also, the official poverty test takes no account of where or how the person in question is living. An income that would stifle in Manhattan, Washington or San Francisco could provide an ample existence in Buffalo, Chesapeake, or Bakersfield. Likewise, someone who has inherited his grandmother’s house, has a garden, and access to public transportation might live well on funds that would mean misery to a renting, car-owning, grocery-dependent shopper with unusually high medical bills.
Our official poverty rate is an extraordinarily crude measure. It is not much better at telling us whether people have what they need than, say, adding up the total weight of what people eat would be at gauging whether they are adequately nourished.
A much better way of assessing economic status than totting up income is to look at spending —that is, what families actually consume. (Lots of people spend more than they officially earn in any given year by drawing down savings, by taking out loans, by getting payments from family members, by spending unreported income, by consuming the surplus of a previous good year, and so forth.) Professors Lowell Gallaway and Richard Vedder have taken such a look, comparing spending by the poorest 20 percent of all consumers to the middle 20 percent and the top 20 percent. Their findings are quite striking.
In 1986, the average poor person in the bottom 20 percent spent $3,761 on the four basic categories of food, shelter, apparel, and health care. The typical middle class person (in the middle 20 percent) spent $4,288 on those same items, or just 14 percent more. People in the richest fifth averaged $6,847 on the basics, or $1.82 for every dollar spent by the poor. The gap between the poor and the rest of society, in basic living standards, then, is less than 2:1 —not nearly so great as looking at income would lead you to believe.
Moreover, a single year’s income is just a snapshot in time. It provides no information on where a person has been or where he is heading. For example: There have been several years in my life where, if a Census Bureau interviewer had knocked on my door and asked for particulars, I would have been entered in the national register as an official poor person. But it would have been a waste of time to feel sorry for me, and a waste of money to shovel federal funds at me.
This happened most recently a few years ago, when I left my last traditional job at a research institute and made my start as a self-employed writer. As I established myself that first year, and even beyond, my wife and children and I had a family income easily in the official poverty range. How did we survive? Simple: we took out loans, we borrowed from our families, we deferred major purchases and cut living expenses way down. We made a choice, we changed our way of life, we did not suffer.
Writing being the occupation it is —book advances one year, full-time writing and no income at all the next, and so forth —it is quite possible our family will again be officially poor in some future year. And lots of other occupations, in self-employment and elsewhere, have a similar income dynamic. The fact is, most of the “poverty population” is made up of persons just cycling through for a brief period in response to short- term changes in family or work status. Such people may be experiencing difficulties, but they have not lost the basic tools of independence and achievement: their education, their health, their productive worth. Low annual income is not irrelevant. But, as in my own case, it is often much less significant than might appear. Persons of limited means are not necessarily the helpless victims that most reports so anxiously portray.
Who’s To Blame?
A related misunderstanding of poverty is reflected in the ancient question (usually posed with wonder in one’s voice) “How can this happen?” The implication is that when people are poor, some agent, some person, must be to blame. The reality, as author Robert Sheaffer has written, is that “poverty is not caused or created: it is the default condition of the human race . . . Â It is wealth that must be caused.” In other words: you will be poor, unless you do something about it.
What most of us do about it is several things. First, we resist our natural human impulses toward self- seeking, disorder, and sloth. We learn to be reliable and honest, to work in concert with our fellows. Wealth, it has been said, is nothing more than the consequence of a lifetime of commitments honored. Alarm clocks must be obeyed, homework must be done, instructions must be followed, goods must be delivered.
Without mutual trust, mutual aid, and fulfillment of our social responsibilities, advanced society — which relies on economic specialization and complex trades between citizens — would not be possible. We would revert to man’s primeval state, where each person or family had to supply all of its own needs: grow its own food, make its own clothes, heal its own sick. Life would be short and harsh, with no economic surplus to further art, science, religion and other hallmarks of civilization.
So first we must reject instinct, and do other than what comes naturally (a uniquely human capability). Then we take more specific measures. We get jobs. We educate ourselves. We form families so we can share labor and lean on each other in times of sickness or trouble. Over the centuries, these have become culturally expected behaviors. Marriage is the norm. When you meet an adult, you naturally assume he has an occupation. If children fail to appear in school, a truant officer hunts them up. Indeed, it takes some effort to avoid following these traditional paths to success.
Which brings us to another misunderstood aspect of contemporary American poverty: True poverty is not just a lack of economic means. It is a complex set of behaviors, of which absence of income is typically the effect, not the cause. Physical disability and old age are two conditions which can make economic security elusive without assistance from family or welfare payments. Other times, mental illness or addiction to alcohol or drugs can so interfere with individual functioning that poverty results. A very large fraction of the homeless fall into this category, and monetary payments are not the answer for such persons. The problematic nature of psychological treatment and detoxification, particularly if the individual is resistant, make lasting progress here heartbreakingly difficult.
Another behavioral root of poverty, one increasingly prevalent among the urban “underclass,” is an active resistance to the disciplines of achievement. There is evidence that a disturbing anti-success ethic may now be taking root among some inner-city youths. A year-long investigation by the Washington Post at a D.C. high school deemed “typical” reported recently that “Doing Well Is Not Cool at Inner-City School.” An earlier study by University of California and University of the District of Columbia professors found that many black students in urban areas do poorly in school and avoid success because their peers view use of standard English, studying, and pursuing academic interests as “acting white.” One of the taunts applied to ambitious black students at such schools is “Oreo” — referring to the cookie that is black on the outside but has lots of white on the inside.
Bearing a child out of wedlock is another self-damaging behavior that is sharply on the increase. Nearly one-quarter of all American births will be illegitimate this year. In inner city areas more like three-quarters of all women who have children will do so without benefit of marriage. Most unmarried fathers live apart from their children and do not contribute to their upbringing. Most unwed mothers go on welfare (55 percent of the children born out of wedlock in 1980 were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1981), and their average period of dependency is more than nine years.
Dropping out of school is a behavior closely associated with poverty, while more than 95 percent of persons who do finish high school are above the poverty line. Failure to accept an entry level job is also closely linked to poverty. Nearly three-quarters of unemployed, out-of-school black inner-city males age 16 to 24 report they could get a minimum-wage job “very easily or somewhat easily.” Yet most don’t. The lowest wage such individuals say they are willing to work for is more than a third higher than the minimum wage, on average. This increasingly selective engagement with the job market is reflected in national statistics: only 57 percent of black men are employed today, compared to 70 percent in 1968.
It is the confluence of these kinds of behavioral problems with low income that constitutes what most of us mean when we refer to the poverty dilemma. In virtually all of our great cities, the veneer of civility has grown frighteningly thin. In many areas, any time there is an electrical blackout, a hurricane, or other opportune disruption, one may expect an outbreak of looting and anarchy. It is not the sight of career criminals that disheartens so much as that of mothers filling shopping carts with what they can grab through broken windows, of grown men dragging away mattresses, of children loading their arms for circuits between home and looting site.
These things were not always so. In earlier times, when the poor were much more isolated and had far fewer public resources to draw upon—when the black poor in particular faced bigotry, miserable educational opportunities, even state segregation —nonetheless there was often a far stronger social fabric, a much larger reservoir of personal and communal resources. In Harlem in 1925, despite the economic and social pressures on black families, 85 percent of black families were “intact.” That gave them a deep, private strength. The World of Patience Gnomes, a lovely little recent book about a small black town on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, illustrates how black Americans in thousands of similar places once relied on tight families, strong values, and close-knit communities to succeed against the odds. What, then, do the poor really need more of: material help or social and spiritual resources?
In poor neighborhoods today, the trials of low income are grossly magnified, not ameliorated, by the oppressions of anti-social behavior. As recently as 25 years ago it was possible for low-income residents of major American cities to leave their doors unlocked, or even sleep outdoors on steamy summer evenings. Today, no amount of income could make that safely possible. The mutual trust and mutual aid that characterize fruitful civilizations have vanished. Indeed, we live now amidst their opposites.
A Moral Problem
For most of us, it is psychologically desirable to believe that the poor are just people experiencing hard luck. And there is such a group. But among today’s chronically poor, it is no longer possible to conclude other than that a significant fraction are simply living life in accordance with their principles. Twenty years of treating poverty as an engineering problem, a problem of finances and physical conditions requiring technical solutions, have led to bitter defeat and disappointment. It is essential that we now recognize poverty for what it really is: a problem of attitudes, actions and choices. In short, a moral problem.
In some ways, this is a discouraging, even depressing, conclusion. Moral problems root deeply, they are resistant to collective solutions, and most Americans are rightly skeptical of moral propagandizing. Moral reform is always a difficult, uncertain undertaking.
On the other hand, there is an excitingly hopeful aspect to this finding. Specifically: Moral problems are self-solvable. We don’t have to put our miseries on hold until some elusive social consensus evolves. Budget deficits needn’t paralyze. One doesn’t have to await the convoluted findings of learned social scientists. We aren’t hostage to a benefactor’s purse. Because each of us has the power to change ourselves, and if we do, the world will move. Success is within reach of most poor. That is profoundly good news.
And we now know exactly where the reform effort must begin: with family integrity. The poor desperately need better public schools, and sorely deserve a crackdown on the crime raging around them. They continue to need economic growth, and better delivery of services from all levels of government. But if we are really intent upon reducing want, the evidence shows clearly, our primary focus must be on strengthening the ties between husbands and wives, and fathers, mothers, and children. Intact families have a poverty level of 3.9 percent. But 19.5 percent of female-headed families are poor. The former are getting rarer. The latter are soaring in number. That is the primary source of our present problem.
To begin, let us acknowledge that no compassionate response to poverty can make apologies for exploded families. Any policy which begins by assuring the poor that sexual license, casual divorce, abandonment of children by their fathers and mothers, and illegitimate birth are just alternative lifestyles, morally indistinguishable from traditional family forms, thereby projects contempt for the poor and condemns them to a lifetime of pain and avoidable misery. Tragically, conventional liberal wisdom does just so, insistently. Our leading actresses and avant-garde intellectuals may have little use for marriage, and the haut bourgeois may have the financial resources to indulge sexual libertinism for awhile, but the poor and near-poor have no cushion for anything other than strict family solidarity and sexual probity. Indeed, neither do the rest of us in the long run. There is no substitute for the existential security provided by a stable marriage and a close-knit family.
This is more than just rhetorical argument. We have already spelled out above the financial damage done by birth out of wedlock. Sociologist Lenore Weitzman and others have shown there are also extremely harsh effects on women and children associated with casual divorce. The last two decades of research allow but one conclusion. Family decay has been the driving force behind poverty for a generation now, and directly accounts for most contemporary poverty cases.
Worryingly, there is a self-fueling aspect to this. In a very recent study of 8,000 individuals, two researchers form the University of Wisconsin found that children who grow up in one-parent families are very likely to repeat the experiences of their parents, creating a new cycle of family disruption. Women from broken families were more than twice as likely to bear illegitimate children, and far more likely to divorce as well, compared to persons who had grown up in traditional families. Strikingly, however, the researchers note that growing up in poverty does not affect a woman’s chances of successfully starting and maintaining an intact family. The message comes through again: what matters is not really income, but behavior.
Other evidence corroborates the importance of family structure over secondary environmental factors. Teenage girls from traditional intact families, for instance, are less than half as likely to be sexually active as their counterparts from non-traditional single-parent families. If we are really interested in personal well-being and social health, traditional family structures must command our attention.
The anti-poverty strategy of the last generation— income maintenance —can now be recognized as bankrupt. Simply writing checks to the poor amounts to mere pacification, a humiliating and corrosive custodialism that one observer has likened to a policy of keeping Indians in the quiet hopelessness of reservations. To treat just the symptoms in our ghettoes —to plaster the fractures with currency, without attempting to deflect the bone-twisting forces that injure —is to practice a cruel quackery. That path offers nothing but sadness.
Instead we must try dramatic new strategies to improve education and foster self-respect. We must suppress criminal terror and provide secure schools and streets. We must continue to expand work opportunities, we must encourage ownership of homes, we must demand self-reliance. The poor must be given choices, and they should be held accountable, as all equal and independent citizens are.
Most of all, those of us who feel concern for the poor must accept that our real work is not to transfer income but to heal families: to help restore love and respect, to enforce the obligations of blood, to defend the innocent and suppress domestic violence, to bind men to women, and women to men, and both to their children. Our deepest efforts must be frankly to encourage the formation of families, and we must prefer the intact to the single-parent, the married to the unmarried, the traditional to the untraditional. If we are to do this in a gentle and respectful way, we will want to do it mostly through agencies other than government.
That is a difficult program, but not beyond the reach of a free and self-regulating people.