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1 Introduction

Ordinary Poverty

The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

—J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

African American woman, 38 years old. She has lost her

benefits and explains what she now does to get housing:

My friend helps me. I live some of the time with him. I eat here

[at St. John’s Bread and Life soup kitchen] whenever I can.

[Is it getting harder to make ends meet?] Yes it is. I can’t

survive; I need medical assistance and I’ll do anything. I have to

ask people to stay at their house. I have to do favors. I provide

sexual favors [she points at her friend]. He only lets me stay with

him for sex.

White man, 40 years old, a warehouse manager with 20 years of

experience. He hasn’t worked in a year:

You should see the people I have to compete with. I am waiting

for a job interview with a moving company. Beautiful operation.

They liked me but they said they didn’t want to train me. It’s not

because I’m obese. At least not this time. It’s a computerized

operation, and I would have to be trained on the computer. But

I’m sitting waiting for the interview, the other guy sitting to be

interviewed is an MBA, also my age. Knows how to use com-

puter. Laid off from Wall Street, $80,000-a-year job. He’s

competing with me. I told him I just applied for a warehouse

job at Busch Terminal. He asks me for the information and if I

mind that he’ll apply for the job. I give him the address. He’s

1

more desperate than I am. How am I going to get a job? I have all

on-the-job experience and only a two-year college degree. How

can I compete for warehouse jobs with MBAs? And it happens

all the time.

African American man, 49 years old. He doesn’t have any benefits:

I live between a rock and a hard place. I’m homeless, but I have a

basement that they let me sleep in for taking care of it. I don’t

have my own home. . . . It’s truly a shame that I can’t get a

job. . . . I have an associate’s degree in accounting. I was working

in a beverage place that reclaims bottles and cans. It took me less

than a minute to fill the boxes. I pride myself at my speed at

work. They’re paying me three dollars an hour. Working 10

hours a day, how can I live? Then they laid me off because they

weren’t busy. Its pitiful out there.

White man, January 20, 1989. President George H. W. Bush’s in-

augural address:

It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of

the world. My friends, we have work to do. There are homeless,

lost and roaming. There are children who have nothing, no love,

no normalcy. There are those who cannot free themselves of

enslavement to whatever addiction—drugs, welfare, the de-

moralization that rules the slums. There is crime to be con-

quered, the rough crime of the streets. There are young women

to be helped who are to become mothers of children they can’t

care for and might not love. They need our care and guidance,

though we bless them for choosing life. . . . I have spoken of

a Thousand Points of Light, of all the community organizations

that are spread like stars throughout the nation, doing good. We

will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading,

sometimes led, rewarding. We will work on this in the White

House, in the Cabinet agencies. I will go to the people and the

programs that are the brighter points of light, and I’ll ask every

member of my government to become involved. The old ideas

are new again because they are not old, they are timeless: duty,

2 Chapter 1

sacrifice, commitment and a patriotism that finds its expression

in taking part and pitching in.1

White man, February 17, 1993. President Bill Clinton’s economic

address to a joint session of Congress:

Later this year we will offer a plan to end welfare as we know

it. I have worked on this issue for the better part of a decade

and I know from personal conversations with many people,

that no one—no one wants to change the welfare system as

badly as those who are trapped in it. I want to offer the people

on welfare the education, training, the child care, the health

care they need to get back on their feet, but say after two years

they must get back to work, in private business if possible, in

public service if necessary. We have to end welfare as a way of

life and make it a path of independence and dignity.2

Latino man from the Bronx. He is in the Work Experience Program

(WEP):

I don’t understand, I work 35 hours per week and I get $68.50

every two weeks. I’m a single man so I get less for working the

same jobs as someone who has kids. That’s not fair; I’m doing the

same work. I sweep the park at my site on Arthur Avenue. It’s not

enough toliveon.Withmyfoodstamps I get four dollars a day for

food, so I use the three dollars a day that I get to go to work every

day for my food too. My rent is $270 but welfare only gives me

$215, so I have to get the other $55 from my grants. So I walk

everywhere. I walk an hourback and forth towork. I walk all over

the Bronx and Manhattan, more than two hours each way. I’m in

good shape. I like orange juice, but a container costs three dollars,

soifyoubuy a container,I havealmostnothing leftforfoodfor the

day. I don’t know what to do. Still I don’t understand why I get so

little for working, sweeping leaves in the park.

African American man, begging on the G train in Queens:

You look at me and you say I should get a job. That I’m a bum.

Why am I bothering you? But I just want some change so I can

Introduction 3

get something to eat, a room for the night. You know that

there’s people doing drugs, killing each other, raping children,

doing all kinds of terrible things. I’m just asking you for some

money. And you say I should get a job. Well, let me tell you,

there aren’t any jobs out there. If there were jobs in Brooklyn

and Queens, there wouldn’t be people on this train going to

Manhattan to work. And every time they advertise a job, there

wouldn’t be 150 people waiting for that job. There aren’t any

jobs out there. It’s a lie that there are jobs for everyone. And

that’s why people are robbing, stealing, doing drugs, murder-

ing. There aren’t any jobs out there. So please give me some

change. God bless you.

These are dramatic accounts but poverty is not dramatic—it is

ordinary. Two of the accounts are by presidents of the United States

who do not necessarily understand the daily lives of the poor but

who have the power to change their lives. They will, in fact, change

the lives of poor people dramatically. When President Clinton signs

the welfare reform bill in 1996, he cuts their benefits on the prem-

ise that welfare recipients will get jobs. But most of the jobs pay

poverty-level wages, and he succeeds only in increasing their misery.

The man on the G train, who understands too well the lives of the

poor, also wants some change. Sure, he wants a little money to

purchase what he needs, but if his misery is going to end, he needs

some social change as well.

Social change for the poor was rare in the 1990s and is still rare at

the start of the twenty-first century. Welfare rolls are down, but

poverty has not been reduced. In our free market system there are

always a few winners, but most lose, and poverty just increases.

Unemployment is low, under 5 percent, but jobs that pay well are

declining, wages have not increased, and the poor face a choice be-

tween workfare and reduced benefits. Public funding for the poor

has been cut (27.9% in aid for single mothers with children from 1979

to 1989).3 The poor keep losing ground, and neither President Bush’s

‘‘Thousand Points of Light’’ nor President Clinton’s ‘‘welfare reform’’

4 Chapter 1

has reduced their daily misery. Democrats and Republicans have

agreed that workfare is the full-employment program for the United

States: ‘‘Jobs for All,’’ but at a rate that means indentured servitude for

the poor. The politicians all speak the same language—jobs will re-

duce poverty—but there aren’t enough jobs. New technologies are

destroying the older job sectors without producing enough good new

jobs, and most of the new jobs that have been created pay low, even

poverty-level wages. To end poverty, jobs would have to pay above

poverty level wages. They don’t; instead, we have the end of welfare

replaced by workfare, as the poor are forced to work for limited

public assistance that just guarantees their continued poverty.4 Pov-

erty grows throughout the United States. It seems unchangeable. As a

young homeless man in a soup kitchen says about his life, it’s ‘‘a little

food and cold storage.’’ The hopelessness of the poor has become

ordinary.

A Vocabulary Shift

The vocabulary of social policy has shifted over the decades, and the

metaphors of the conservatives have become dominant.5 In the mid-

1970s, with the continuous increase in poverty, the recession, the oil

crisis, and the fiscal crisis, the language of ‘‘community control’’ and

‘‘black power’’ and activism to ‘‘end poverty’’ gave way to the lan-

guage of ‘‘benign neglect,’’ ‘‘culture of poverty,’’ and the ‘‘failure of

social programs.’’ The poor became ‘‘pathetic victims,’’ ‘‘junkies,’’

‘‘the homeless.’’ Such changes reflect the political shifts of the 1970s

and 1980s. First, the language of social change mutated into the lib-

eral language of advocacy. The poor could no longer speak for them-

selves; they were no longer part of dynamic social movements, and

experts would speak for them. By the eighties, liberal social policy

had been reduced to a holding action, and the only question was how

much of the safety net could be saved. Next, as the practical, liberal

language of advocacy gave way to the new conservative hegemony,

the goal was to ‘‘end welfare.’’ The language of possibility faded,

and the conservative language of ‘‘individual achievement’’ and

Introduction 5

‘‘personal responsibility’’ came to center stage. This shift excluded the

poor.

Though the Reagan administration guaranteed that the ‘‘truly

needy’’ would be provided for by the ‘‘social safety net,’’ social wel-

fare programs were slashed in the 1980s and 1990s. Poverty, hunger,

and homelessness reached a level unknown in the United States since

the Great Depression. The first President Bush reacted to this new

poverty, not by redirecting federal money to the poor, but by prom-

ising that the private sector would make up the difference through the

mobilization of volunteers, the ‘‘Thousand Points of Light.’’

William Jefferson Clinton started his presidency in 1992 with a

pledge to ‘‘end welfare as we know it.’’ Some hoped that this was

merely a campaign promise, and that his administration would turn

around the Reagan-Bush assault on welfare. Ultimately, however,

Clinton spoke the same conservative language, even if he seemed to

have more compassion for children. In 1996 the Democrats, originally

reluctant, joined the Republicans in passing welfare reform, ending

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replacing it

with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).6 On January

25, 1999, during his impeachment, Clinton boasted that because of

his welfare reform program, there were fewer than 8 million Amer-

icans on welfare, down 44 percent from 14.3 million in 1994.7 He left

out some significant data. First, there were still 35.5 million people

living below the poverty level in 1997, down only 0.5 percent since

1995.8 Second, typical welfare recipients who found jobs through

welfare-to-work programs across the United States earn between 65

and 70 percent of the federal poverty level.9

The language of possibility has become a one-dimensional lan-

guage of the free market—a ‘‘final vocabulary,’’ to use Richard Rorty’s

term: ‘‘It is final in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these

words, their user has no non-circular argumentative recourse. Those

words are as far as he can go with language: beyond them there is

only helpless passivity or a resort to force.’’10 In this sense the final

vocabulary of conservative social policy ends debate. Its key terms are

‘‘work,’’ ‘‘productivity,’’ ‘‘moral,’’ ‘‘duty,’’ ‘‘responsibility,’’ ‘‘achieve-

ment,’’ ‘‘free market,’’ ‘‘competition,’’ and ‘‘patriotism.’’

6 Chapter 1

Both conservative and liberal politicians and social scientists have

been affected by the conservative vocabulary shift. The victory of

conservative policy makers means not just that their views have be-

come dominant but that liberal social scientists and policy makers now

speak the language of limitations of the free market. Plans for eco-

nomic redistribution through a higher minimum wage, taxation, and

government intervention against homelessness and hunger have been

severely restricted by the forced austerity of budget cuts. Thus, the

‘‘economic boom’’ of the Clinton years did not mean a new era of

possibility in the fight to end poverty but a continuation of the con-

servative vocabulary, with some new words added: ‘‘workfare,’’ ‘‘time

limits,’’ ‘‘block grants,’’ ‘‘sanctioning,’’ and the ‘‘ending of entitlements.’’

With the policy shift to the right, the programs for the poor are

determined not by their needs but by market forces. The new poverty

advocates speak the language of accommodation, survival, and main-

tenance. Two government policies concerning poor children in the

early 1990s demonstrate the conservative hegemony over poverty

policy. First, the America 2000 Excellence in Education Act proposed

to reform education in the United States by creating ‘‘New American

School Communities’’ in which federal money would be allocated to

public schools based on standards of excellence.11 Schools in poor

districts, already underfunded, would have to compete with well-

funded schools in middle-class and wealthy districts. ‘‘The Bush

administration argued that the competition would make the poor

schools shape up or shut down.’’12

Second, a study entitled Beyond Rhetoric: A New American Agenda

for Children and Families, by the National Commission on Children,

reported on the condition of poor, battered, unhealthy, homeless, and

hungry children in the United States. ‘‘The National Commission on

Children calls on all Americans to work together to change the con-

ditions that jeopardize the health and well being of so many of our

youngest citizens and threaten our future as an economic power, a

democratic nation and a caring society. Our failure to act today will

only defer to the next generation the rising social, moral and financial

costs of our neglect. Investment in children is no longer a luxury, but a

national imperative.’’13

Introduction 7

The commission proposed ‘‘52 billion to 56 billion in new federal

funds in the first year.’’14 This expenditure is not feasible in the cur-

rent austere fiscal condition. It is not cost-effective. It will increase

taxes. It will hinder American competitiveness in the global market.

The language of possibility is quickly muted. Liberals must accom-

modate or become silent. The poor do not have a voice; without a social

movement, they are spoken for. Advocates, though well meaning, are

isolated and impotent. They cannot speak the vocabulary of social

change. They ‘‘settle for’’; they ‘‘do the best they can.’’ Without power,

they engage in piecemeal struggles. They do not struggle for new

housing but for the right of the homeless to have a shantytown in

Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Instead of

struggling for a guaranteed middle-class income for all, they put all

their energy into saving an inadequate safety net. These struggles yield

some victories, but over the 13 years that this book deals with, failure

was more common and the conditions of poor people have gotten

worse. The vocabulary of advocacy is never a transformative vocabu-

lary. In the name of practicality, advocates rule out social movement,

change, and possibility. Ultimately, they support the status quo, and for

the poor this means that their poverty is permanent.

Policy and Daily Life in Bedford-Stuyvesant

September13,1991.IamwalkingdownStuyvesantAvenueinBedford-

Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, surrounded by crumbling buildings and

crumbling people. A man is collecting bottles, pushing a shopping cart

draped with a green lawn-and-leaf bag. The bag is full of bottles and

cans, which he can redeem at the supermarket for a nickel apiece. This

is another example of the Protestant work ethic and free enterprise in

Bedford-Stuyvesant. In my own Brooklyn neighborhood, Greenpoint,

the bottle redemption center is next to a Key Food supermarket. Men

and women line up daily with trash bags full of bottles and cans.

Nickels for bottles: the fair exchange for their hard work. Many of the

men in line at the Greenpoint Men’s Shelter earn their living in this

way. They keep the streets clean. They are underpaid.

8 Chapter 1

The director of Catholic Charities says to me, ‘‘It’s very depressing—

the age of these people. They’re young. They’re not old and disabled—

these are physically able people. It’s very depressing.’’

Today at St. John’s Bread and Life soup kitchen in Bedford-

Stuyvesant, I am serving cookies. I take a handful, wrap them in a

napkin, and give them out. I talk to Jerry, who works in the kitchen.

He’s living at the Glenwood Hotel on Broadway and Havermeyer

Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, down the hall from John, who also

works in the kitchen. John was forced to leave the Greenpoint shelter

because of budget cuts about a year ago. ‘‘The hotel is a fleabag,’’ he

says. ‘‘It’s shit, but it’s better than the shelter. It’s $6.50 a night, and

welfare pays.’’

‘‘The hotel is hell,’’ Jerry says, ‘‘but I couldn’t live on the streets.

I’ve been worried about living on the street since my sister-in-law

don’t want me staying in the basement at their house. She says she

wants to rent it and she can get more than I pay. I’m too old to be in

the streets. It would kill me.’’

John interrupts, ‘‘We did it. We spent a whole winter in the streets,

and then a long time at the shelter.’’

Jerry: ‘‘It would really kill me now. I could never do it again.’’ He

laughs: ‘‘Do you remember, you spent the whole winter without a

coat? That was our project, to get you a warm coat.’’

John: ‘‘I don’t know how I survived that whole winter without a

coat.’’

Jerry: ‘‘We finally got him a coat, but it was February.’’

John: ‘‘It’s great having Jerry down the hall.’’

All of these poor people are trying to cope with an unbearable

situation. Politicians and policy makers make decisions about them,

mostly without much knowledge of their daily lives. Here conser-

vatives and liberals are the same, congratulating themselves even

though their policies decrease funding and make the lives of poor

people harder. It is important to analyze these policies and try to

understand how they have failed to help poor people who are ‘‘liv-

ing the experience’’ of poverty, increasing immiseration amidst

prosperity.

Introduction 9

On this same day, Professor E tells me that they are always ‘‘be-

tween a rock and a hard place.’’ Professor E is a West Indian who

took it upon himself to educate me on the realities of ‘‘Bed-Stuy.’’ I

remember what Professor E said to me about the shortcomings of the

first President Bush’s solution to poverty: ‘‘If President Bush was

serious, he would know that a thousand points of light ain’t enough.

At least a million is necessary.’’

Two Exemplars of Free Market Social Policy

The Conservatives

Charles Murray’s Losing Ground is the basic statement of the con-

servative position on poverty and social welfare.15 Murray’s study

was the bible of the Reagan and Bush administrations’ poverty pol-

icy16 and an influential text even during the Clinton era. His discourse

on poverty, framed in the language of the free market, launched the

essential vocabulary shift and the new dogma that government social

welfare programs are the problem. (Later, in the nineties, Michael

Tanner, would echo Murray’s account of the poor being enticed into

welfare by a failed liberal welfare state.)17 According to this narrative,

the behavior of the disadvantaged is independent of social and

psychological factors and determined by economically motivated

rational choices. Social welfare programs create a context in which

the rational choices of the disadvantaged are ‘‘not to enter the la-

bor force,’’ ‘‘not to get an education,’’ and ‘‘not to get married.’’ In

short, the social welfare programs of the 1960s and 1970s failed be-

cause ‘‘we made it profitable to be poor.’’18

Murray claimed that poverty increased in spite of the federally

funded social programs of the 1960s and 1970s because those pro-

grams decreased incentives for disadvantaged young blacks to enter

the labor force, take available jobs (even at low wages), and continue

working. Thus, these programs increased black unemployment. They

also increased the proportion of black female-headed families be-

cause benefits provided disincentives for marriage. Though his data

was unconvincing, and he had many critics, his argument became

10 Chapter 1

dominant.19 That was because his argument was based not on his

data but on thought experiments, the most important of which was

the case of Harold and Phyllis.

Harold and Phyllis have low-income parents, are not well edu-

cated, and have no special vocational skills. Phyllis is pregnant.20

Harold and Phyllis are the children of AFDC, the most extensive

public assistance package in the United States until it was ended in

1996. In Murray’s view, it destroyed the motivation of Harold and

Phyllis to form a family and to struggle at low-wage jobs. AFDC

made it more advantageous for Phyllis to live off her welfare package

and for Harold to work only enough to collect unemployment ben-

efits. They cohabit out of wedlock because they would lose benefits if

they got married. For Murray, social welfare programs have made

this strategy the norm of economic advantage. It is not economically

rational to work hard at a low-paid job and get married. Social

welfare programs have made the personal dignity of both partners an

economic disadvantage.

When economic incentives are buttressed by social norms, the effects

on behavior are multiplied. But the main point is that social factors are

not necessary to explain behavior. There is no ‘‘breakdown of the work

ethic’’ in this account of rational choices among alternatives. There is

no shiftless irresponsibility. It makes no difference whether Harold is

white or black. There is no need to invoke the spectres of cultural

pathologies or inferior upbringing. The choices may be seen more

simply, much more naturally, as the behavior of people responding to

the reality of the world around them and making the decisions—legal,

approved, and even encouraged decisions—that maximize the quality

of life.21

Murray assumes that both Harold and Phyllis could work at low-

wage jobs if they wanted to, that they could get married if they

wanted to, but that social welfare programs have made it easier for

them to live off the tolerable misery of public assistance. This is es-

pecially true because from 1965 through the early 1970s subsidies

increased, altering the structure of incentives for the poor:

It was easier to get along without a job. It was easier for a man to have a

baby without being responsible for it, for a woman to have a baby

Introduction 11

without having a husband. It was easier to get away with crime, it was

easier to obtain drugs. Because it was easier to get away with crime, it

was easier to support a drug habit. Because it was easier to get along

without a job, it was easier to ignore education. Because it was easier to

get along without a job, it was easier to walk away from a job and

thereby accumulate a record as an unreliable employee.22

All of this was, for Murray, the result of increasingly generous

social welfare programs: AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, housing

subsidies. These programs degrade the poor. If it were not for these

programs, Harold and Phyllis would have chosen an alternative

path. They would have married. Harold would have worked at a

low-wage job, which, after years of hard work, would have provided

them with a decent life. Independent of welfare, they would have

personal dignity. ‘‘Work hard, stick to the job no matter how bad it is,

and you will probably climb out of poverty, but not very far out.’’23

Murray’s underlying assumption is that low-wage jobs are avail-

able if you are willing to work. Cut social programs severely, and the

poor will become motivated to take these jobs. It is the logic not only

of Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey’s Contract With America,24 but of

President Clinton’s policies as well. Murray’s work was powerfully

influential because he successfully combined the concept of the ‘‘cul-

ture of poverty,’’ with its emphasis on the family structure of the

black underclass, with free market capitalism. The Clinton economic

boom of the nineties merely reinforced Murray’s position. Capitalism

is no longer the problem, nor are the inequities of class, because the

problem is the behavior of poor people who refuse to work because

they can successfully live off welfare.

The liberal Mickey Kaus exemplifies the range of Murray’s influ-

ence. In The End of Equality, Kaus argues that an underclass—built on

the dependency programs of ‘‘money liberalism’’—has undermined

the public sphere that makes civil society possible in the United

States. The two key money liberal programs, AFDC and food stamps,

‘‘throw money’’ at poverty and have had the unintended conse-

quence of supporting welfare over work. This must be corrected if a

more egalitarian society is to be built. Kaus’s answer is civic liber-

alism and the expansion of the public sphere as a means of creating

12 Chapter 1

more equality in American capitalist society. For Kaus, money lib-

eralism fails to recognize the practical limitations of the redistribution

of wealth through tinkering with capitalism. ‘‘Civic liberalism,’’ on

the other hand, ‘‘pursues social equality directly through government

action, rather than by manipulating the unequal distribution of in-

come generated in the capitalist marketplace.’’25

If the civic liberal program is followed, we can have the peaceful,

civil society of the 1950s—‘‘a society in which the various classes use

the same subways and drop off their kids at the same daycare centers

and run into each other at the post office. We don’t have to repeal

capitalism or abandon meritocracy to do these things. We don’t have

to equalize incomes or make incomes more equal or even stop in-

comes from getting more unequal to do these things. We just have to

do them.’’26 A more powerful public sphere will increase the possi-

bility of egalitarianism by creating a society in which money counts

for less and in which class mixing can occur.

Ultimately, Kaus’s solution is the same as Murray’s in that he puts

the emphasis on the values of work and family. Here, political and

economic change isn’t necessary, only cultural change. The solution

to the problem of poverty isn’t eliminating structural inequality in

American society but abolishing the culture of poverty and the be-

havior of the nonworking poor.

The extremely poor—the poorest 2.5 million of the 32 to 39 million

who were estimated to be officially poor by the Bureau of the Census

in the 1990s—are, for these thinkers, the ghetto underclass that has

sabotaged the civility of the public sphere in the United States. They

have degraded the country because they do not share the universal

American values of work and family. Everyone should share these

values even if they are stuck in low-wage, subsistence-wage, poverty-

maintaining-wage jobs. The urban underclass isn’t like Marx’s prole-

tariat; it ‘‘is the villain rather than the hero. It is a class whose values are

so inimical to America’s universal culture that its negation, and trans-

formation, will allow those universal values to flower.’’27

This underclass stays poor for a long time. It consists of women

who have out-of-wedlock births and receive AFDC, of men who

won’t work and are prone to criminal behavior and drug abuse. They

Introduction 13

are mostly black. Kaus tells us, ‘‘I am saying what every urban res-

ident knows to be true, and what statistics know to be true, which is

that underclass areas are awful environments that produce a large

subculture of criminality, often violent criminality.’’28 Kaus, like

Murray, bases his arguments on very selective evidence and, for

the most part, on what everyone ‘‘knows to be true.’’ Thus he can state

that a black underclass who won’t work and who are part of a large

criminal subculture are the villains who are destroying American

cities. This is ridiculous or worse, and yet his work is taken seriously.

Consider criminality. In actuality the costs of corporate crime are

much greater than that of the urban underclass. In 1992 white-collar

crime was estimated at $250 billion, whereas ‘‘the monetary costs to

all victims of personal crimes (e.g., robbery, assault, larceny) and

household crimes (e.g., burglary, motor vehicle theft) totaled $17.6

billion in that year.’’29 The Savings and Loan scandal cost taxpayers

$500 billion, compared with the $35 million stolen in all the bank

robberies in 1992. Clearly the outrage over street crime is out of

proportion to its costs.30

The claim that teenage AFDC mothers have more out-of-wedlock

births is crucial because, if true, it attests to the degradation of the

black underclass family. Kristin Luker in Dubious Conceptions: The

Politics of Teenage Pregnancies finds that teens are less likely than older

women to have unwed births and abortions.31 Mark Robert Rank has

shown that birth rates in the general population are higher than those

for welfare mothers.32 But data isn’t crucial to either Murray or Kaus

because their argument isn’t scientific but ethical. It is an ethics based

on the shared charge that the underclass lacks the values of work and

family. Work is so important that Kaus has no difficulty in calling for

only ‘‘work-tested’’ programs and a new Works Progress Adminis-

tration (WPA) offering subminimum-wage jobs to the extremely

poor.33 This WPA-style workfare would only maintain poverty, but

these would be a more moral poor. Work and family values will

reduce the evils of welfare dependency. The success of this argument

is based neither on facts nor on results but on its broad acceptance

throughout the political realm. It is not a contradiction that the

conservative Murray and the liberal Kaus share the same closed

14 Chapter 1

discourse, or that workfare has become commonsense policy for

people of all political persuasions, translated directly into state and

local politics throughout the United States. In New York City, Mayor

Giuliani made it difficult for the poor to apply for food stamps,

forcing them to spend two days being screened before applications

are even given to them. (This is in violation of federal law, and the

Department of Agriculture filed a suit against New York City, stating

that ‘‘city officials routinely violate the law by denying poor people

the right to apply promptly for food stamps.’’) But for Mayor Giu-

liani, making food stamps harder to get is good for poor people,

whereas under the Department of Agriculture’s ‘‘user friendly’’

program, ‘‘foodstamps have sometimes been used to buy drugs.’’34

In the same vein, New York City’s Human Resources Adminis-

tration (HRA) Commissioner Jason Turner bemoaned the fact that

people who have been sanctioned off welfare can still find shelter

from providers and still receive food from soup kitchens and food

pantries. He said, ‘‘We need to create, if you will, a personal crisis in

individual lives.’’35 This is consistent with the final vocabulary of

conservatives. Both Giuliani and Turner believe, as does Charles

Murray, that harsh policies against public assistance will make the

poor self-reliant, and that a ‘‘personal crisis’’ will force the poor to

change their lives and become willing to work at low-wage jobs. The

proof that conservatives are right about ending entitlements is ‘‘the

43 percent drop in welfare rolls’’ since the Personal Responsibility

and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was passed.36

The success and power of the conservative vocabulary shift in pov-

erty policy has been operationalized in welfare reform and has be-

come the common sense behind the continued discourse on how to

deal with the poor. For if a black underclass is subversive to the

central American values of work and family, it is in the interest

of national survival to end entitlements and incarcerate the large

underclass criminal element.37 Ending welfare is ultimately in the

interest of the poor: ‘‘hard love.’’ Abolishing AFDC, cutting food

stamps, and imposing work requirements motivate the nonwork-

ing poor to take low-wage jobs. The conservative solution is a job

solution.

Introduction 15

The Liberals

William Julius Wilson embodies the liberal response to Murray,

asking ‘‘why the behavior patterns in the inner city today differ so

markedly from those of three decades ago.’’38

For Wilson, the social welfare programs of the 1960s and the race-

specific programs of the 1970s succeeded in enlarging the black mid-

dle class. As this class became more affluent, it moved out of the

inner-city ghetto, increasing the concentration of underclass blacks

there: ‘‘150,000 blacks departed these communities during this ten

year period (1970–1980) leaving behind a much more concentrated

poverty population.’’39

Wilson is concerned about the increasing proportion of underclass

blacks in the inner city. For many, his use of underclass is problematic

and controversial: Bob Blauner proposes that social scientists stop

using the term because ‘‘it suggests a group of people who are per-

manently outside of the class structure’’ and ‘‘calls up images of black

people who whites find both frightening and morally irredeem-

able.’’40 Wilson understands the problems with the term but uses it

because he wants to move away from ‘‘race’’ as the dominant concept

for explaining the continuation and overrepresentation of blacks

among the poor. He doesn’t deny that blacks are a highly stigmatized

group, but he believes that underclass is a better term for describing

the profound economic and social dislocations of the inner-city

ghetto.41

Crucial for understanding these dislocations is the deindustrial-

ization of the American economy and the loss of union jobs. Blacks

have been disproportionately hurt by these changes. It is with an

analysis framed by these economic transformations that Wilson con-

fronts Murray’s major contentions that black unemployment and the

breakup of poor people’s families (as indicated by an increase in

female-headed households) are the result of social welfare programs.

For Wilson, the problem is joblessness.

Responding first to Murray’s contention that the increase in wel-

fare benefits has led Harold and Phyllis to choose welfare over full

employment, Wilson argues:

16 Chapter 1

Real benefits in fact have fallen dramatically since the early 1970’s. . . .

[B]y 1980 the real value of the AFDC plus food stamps has been

reduced by 16 percent from their 1972 levels. By 1984 the combined

payments were only 4 percent higher than their 1960 levels and 22

percent less than 1972. In the words of Greenstein, no other group in

American society experienced such a sharp decline in real income since

1970 as did AFDC mothers and their children.42

Second, black joblessness is not a result of young black men

making a rational choice not to work. Rather, deindustrialization had

a greater impact on black workers because they were concentrated in

inner-city areas.

Between 1947 and 1972, the central cities of the thirty three most

populous metropolitan areas . . . lost 880,000 manufacturing jobs,

while manufacturing employment in their suburbs grew by 2.5 million.

The same cities lost 867,000 jobs in retail and wholesale trade at the

same time that their suburbs gained millions of such positions, while

the black population of these central cities lost more than 9 million

whites and added 5 million blacks.43

Third, the geographic deindustrialization of urban and suburban

areas became national from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. These

employment changes had a major impact on family life that Wilson

conceptualizes in terms of what he calls the ‘‘male marriageable pool

index’’: the men who are available to marry and support a family.

Because of increased black joblessness caused by urban deindustri-

alization, ‘‘combined with high black mortality and incarceration

rates, . . . there has been a decrease in black men who are able to sup-

port families. This has resulted in the increase in black female-

headed families.’’ Again, it is not welfare that has caused this situation.44

His solution to these problems is to remedy black joblessness.

His ‘‘hidden agenda’’ is that race-specific programs increase the stig-

matization of the target group. He prefers universal programs for

increasing employment, operating on the key assumption that ‘‘im-

proving the job prospects of men will strengthen low-income black

families.’’45

Central to Wilson’s solution is a mixture of public and private

programs to increase economic opportunity. The truly disadvantaged

Introduction 17

‘‘would also benefit disproportionately from a program of balanced

economic growth and tight labor market policies because of their

great vulnerability to swings in the business cycle and changes in

economic organization, including the relocation of plants and use of

labor-saving technology.’’46

Though Wilson disagrees with Murray’s contention that work is

available to all who are morally willing to work, though he contends

that deindustrialization has greatly reduced the number of jobs avail-

able to inner-city blacks, he shares with the conservative Murray a job

solution to the problems of American poverty.

This job solution is further developed in When Work Disappears.

‘‘The jobless ghetto’’47 is the result of the social and economic dislo-

cations caused by the global economy. All the problems of dein-

dustrialization have been exacerbated by the new global competition.

Globalization has increased the educational and training require-

ments for workers; along with new technological labor processes that

eliminate jobs and displace workers and the tendency of new com-

panies to locate in the suburbs, it has taken an immense toll on the

inner city. ‘‘As the disappearance of work has become characteristic

of the inner-city ghetto,’’ Wilson continues, ‘‘so has the disappearance

of the traditional married-couple family. Only one-quarter of the black

families whose children live with them in inner-city neighborhoods

in Chicago are husband-wife families, today.’’48

For Wilson, the impact of deindustrialization on the opportunity

structure and changing societal norms on marriage must be viewed

together: both ‘‘negative outlooks towards marriage’’ and ‘‘an en-

vironment plagued by persistent joblessness. This combination of

factors has increased out-of-wedlock births, weakened the family

structure, expanded the welfare rolls and as a result caused poor

inner-city blacks to be even more disconnected from the job market

and discouraged about their role in the labor force.’’49

Wilson is aware that myths about welfare are widespread: he

knows that blacks were not the majority of AFDC recipients, nor

were most recipients long-term. He also disparages the belief that

government intervention and welfare itself are the greatest problems

for the poor. Yet he seems to have reversed the causal nexus, and now

18 Chapter 1

the behavior of the black male in relation to marriage and the family

has become crucial. The social and economic structure, still impor-

tant, is no longer central, and Wilson has come closer to Murray’s

position. This is not surprising, since Murray’s position on poverty

has become common sense for American society. Thus, Wilson in-

creasingly stresses the socialization process of the black inner-city

family, warning that ‘‘weak families do not prepare youngsters for

the labor market.’’50 Though he understands the limits of Murray’s

arguments, he still emphasizes the same points: first, the need to

rear black children to ‘‘avoid street culture,’’51 and, second, the need

to get inner-city black men jobs at all costs. The belief that the ex-

tremely poor have a degraded culture of poverty is complicitous

with Murray, as is the idea that hard work will automatically remedy

the culture of the underclass. Wilson’s analysis of the second point

deserves closer examination.

The global economy has increased wage and skill inequality and

strained the welfare state.52 The diminished welfare state has taken a

toll on the inner city, and homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and

abandoned buildings attest to this decline. Wilson’s solution—jobs at

all costs—is an attempt to remedy the increasing immiseration of the

poor. He first tries to develop a policy to meet the skill demands of

the new global economy. In a society that has decreased its com-

mitment to the inner-city public school, Wilson backs a conservative

education policy. Instead of advocating better modes of curriculum,

he comes out in favor of national performance standards, better

teachers, and vouchers (public monies for private schools).53 The

problem of the jobless ghetto can be solved through the panacea of

education and training. He provides scant evidence for this position,

which, put simply, states that if you train the inner-city poor, the jobs

will come. But education and training isn’t Wilson’s real solution; in

fact, his solution is antithetical to the call for education and training.

His real remedy is ‘‘WPA-style jobs of the kind created during the

Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.’’54

These jobs would be provided by the government at minimum

and subminimum wages, with the addition of wage supplements

through an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). ‘‘By 1996,

Introduction 19

the expanded EITC will increase the earnings from a minimum wage

job to $7 an hour.’’55 But $280 per week only sustains misery and

poverty. Wilson is influenced here by the work of Sheldon Danziger

and Peter Gottschalk,56 whose ‘‘proposal offers a subminimum-wage

public service job to any applicant. They would set compensation at

10 to 15 percent below the minimum wage to encourage movement

into private sector jobs as they become available. . . . These wages

would be supplemented with the earned income tax credit and other

wage supplements.’’57

Wilson prefers Mickey Kaus’s WPA-like plan, however. Kaus’s

program would be universal, not just for those on welfare. (Older

workers would be excluded because retraining would be too costly.)

These jobs would also be at minimum and subminimum wages. As

Wilson states, ‘‘None of my immediate solutions offers a remedy for

the growing inequality in the United States. . . . The jobs created

would not be high wage jobs, but with universal health insurance, a

child care program, and earned income tax credits attached, they

would enable workers and their families to live at least decently and

avoid joblessness and the problems associated with it.’’58

Would these poor families live ‘‘decently’’? Wilson’s scenario ad-

dresses education and health care but leaves out food, clothing, and

housing. In America in the 1990s and 2000s, a family cannot afford a

decent life at minimum or subminimum wages. Wilson’s uncritical

embrace of Kaus’s WPA proposals is a key link to the conservative

analysis that Kaus himself has embraced. Murray, Kaus, and Wilson

all agree that the solution to poverty is hard work and low wages.

None of them interrogate the nature of the available jobs or the like-

lihood that the global economy will create the jobs needed to end the

problem of the jobless ghetto.

To put it simply, only above-poverty-wage jobs can end poverty.

There isn’t any evidence that those jobs are being produced. Low

unemployment and a tight labor market have not resolved the prob-

lems of the inner city. The current boom has barely raised middle-

class wages and has completely missed the urban poor. The job

solutions of the conservatives and liberals have failed. The misery of

the poor endures.

20 Chapter 1