Yes, anti-poverty programs do keep some people poorer than they should be
Kudos to the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof for not only daring to question whether anti-poverty programs might actually harm some people more than they help them, but for doing some on-the-ground reporting about how that happens in specific individuals’ lives. His entire piece from Sunday is well worth reading, but here’s the crux of it:
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.
Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.
Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.
Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.
Charles Murray, about whose book “Coming Apart” I wrote earlier this year (I’ve also previously noted the importance of marriage to ending child poverty, as Kristof did), argues the problems Kristof identifies are due to three laws of social programs, which he describes as:
1. The Law of Imperfect Selection. Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons [leading them to expand constantly]. …
2. The Law of Unintended Rewards. Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer. …
3. The Law of Net Harm. The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm [by encouraging more people to engage in the bad behavior in the first place, so that they can profit from making the desired change]. …
Read Murray’s entire comment for a fuller explanation of these three laws. And, yes, the proper emphasis here should be on some people being worse off sometimes — the argument made by most conservatives is not that government should provide no safety net, but that it should not catch and even ensnare people who can and should be responsible for their own well-being. Even marginal increases in dependency have long-term consequences because they accumulate over time — most often as generation after generation within particular families grow up seeing nothing but dependency. Kristof is right to focus on the effects of dependency on children.
Taken together, Murray’s post and Kristof’s column give us an important understanding about the fallibility of even well-intentioned government programs for the poor, and some ways that we ought to think about these programs as we try to end unnecessary dependency and get our nation’s finances under control.
– By Kyle Wingfield
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217 comments Add your comment
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
4:04 pm
@@:
“Did ‘ya see something I didn’t?”
“On second thought……..take your a$$-ump-shuns and stick ‘em!!!!”
Clearly.
@@
December 11th, 2012
4:07 pm
Real Athens:
Clearly.
If you saw something….BRING IT….otherwise, KMA!
Clear enough for ‘ya?
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
4:10 pm
Ibid.
@@
December 11th, 2012
4:17 pm
Real Athens:
I presented the link with this precursor:
An interesting site…objective within a variety of topics.
Not right, not left…grounded?
Ibid?
Admit it….you are more interested in the attack than you are in acknowledging your mistake….not that I need you to. Following so much resistance on your part, it would prove to be worthless.
Now begone or be stoopid. Matters not to me.
@@
December 11th, 2012
4:25 pm
Real Athens may as well have signed off with “IbiDEM”
schnirt
New threads!
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
4:26 pm
Sigh:
“After identifying passages in all the texts that made reference to rural people or places, we then summarized our best conjectures of what the authors were trying to convey in each of them. Twelve themes, in our view, captured the underlying messages of these diverse rural references.
• Rural is an Idyll
• Science ,Technology, and Business Improve, but Ultimately Change Agriculture
• Rural People are Political
• The United States Depends on Human Triumph Over Nature
• Rural People and Rural Life are Deficient
• Agriculture is Built on a Legacy of Slavery and Indenture
• Farmers Have Mixed Responses to Central Government
• America Dominates the World
• Geographical Features Influence Settlement Patterns, Land Use, and Ultimately Culture
• The Development of Infrastructure Provided Crucial Links Between Places
• Agriculture Feeds an Industrial Nation
• Rural and Urban Places Diverge”
And what about these themes is unabashedly liberal? I see two that might stick out and be argued by some. Not going there. Greater minds than mine have for 110 years.
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
4:29 pm
“Not surprisingly, given decreases in the proportion of the North American population living in rural areas between 1950 and 2009, the extent to which rurality figured as an important marker of national identity in these high school textbooks decreased substantially over time. The high school texts revealed diminishing concerns about an agrarian way of life and increasing concerns about the inevitable transformation of the sacred rural past into a more secular cosmopolitan present. The following quotes illustrate this change in focus.”
Is this true? Is the first half of the paragraph causation of the second?
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
4:32 pm
@@:
“schnirt”
Ostentatious chest thumping like the primate he’s not descended from.
md
December 11th, 2012
5:00 pm
“When Reagan took office the debt was 1 trillion.
In 8 years he quadrupled it to 4 Trillion.
Obama wont come close to quadrupling our debt.”
Cheesy, I have to give you the twisted logic play on numbers award for that one……..
@@
December 11th, 2012
5:10 pm
So what, Real Athens….because rural America decreased in numbers (became a minority) they’re no longer relevant? Subject to ridicule?
I disagree! There’s alot to be learned from their history. Text books depicting them as ignorant and backwards serves no useful purpose. At a time when our text books were championing the civil rights movement (rightfully so), they were disparaging rural Americans.
Class warfare perpetuated by democrats and public education….’tis a grand plan.
NOT!
Ostentatious chest thumping like the primate he’s not descended from.
I’m a she, not a he. A believer in ID and evolution. A former liberal who grew to dislike what they’ve become.
surpiiiiiiiiiiise…surpriiiiiiiiise
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
6:22 pm
“So what, Real Athens….because rural America decreased in numbers (became a minority) they’re no longer relevant? Subject to ridicule?.”
Where, ever, did I propose that?
A Republican mantra is “to the victor, go the spoils”. As a more people became urbanized the role of rural America became marginalized — by this same “Republican” thinking. It’s not “liberal”. It harkens back to the anti-communist rantings of those that would say/do anything to demean anything agrarian — because of the association to Marx and Engels.
The push to embrace a rural, more agrarian, stewards of sustainable farming, fishing, etc., farm-to-table lifestyle is not being advanced today by modern “conservatives” but by the the folks you revile as liberals.
Funny. We’re not that different. I’m a he, not she. A fellow believer in evolution. Raised a conservative in the mold of Eisenhower, one who listened and heeded to his farewell address to the American people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY
I abhor the transformation of conservatism by the likes of Reagan, William Kristol and their media driven offspring.
@@
December 11th, 2012
6:34 pm
Real Athens:
The push to embrace a rural, more agrarian, stewards of sustainable farming, fishing, etc., farm-to-table lifestyle is not being advanced today by modern “conservatives” but by the the folks you revile as liberals.
Sho ’nuff? Read some of the comments offered up by liberals here as they relate to rural America.
Backwards, ignorant, bible-thumping talibaptists, toothless redneck, incestuous hillbillies…the list goes on and on.
Talk to them, not me.
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
6:43 pm
Really? I’m not familiar with any comments of that sort of this blog. You certainly haven’t heard it from me. So I’ll just quote you.
“Backwards, ignorant, bible-thumping talibaptists, toothless redneck, incestuous hillbillies…”
My father was born in 1935, the last of 19 children to one man and two different wives (the first wife died of “consumption”). My family farmed in Southern Appalachia until the early 70’s — until they could no longer compete with the “corporate farming” movement. Most of the land was sold. A few of my relatives still farm as a second job, ’cause it’s in their blood.
@@
December 11th, 2012
8:06 pm
Really? I’m not familiar with any comments of that sort of this blog.
BS!!!!!
A different day…a different thread…a different name. You’re not to be trusted.
I’m outta here.
Real Athens
December 11th, 2012
8:16 pm
My name has never changed on this blog, nor do I have any alter egos.
Can you write the same? What do you know about trust?
And really, no need to announce your departure. Just go.
@@
December 11th, 2012
8:57 pm
Can you write the same?
On this blog? I can.
I’ve had to use another name at Bookman’s, but only because of his enthusiasm for censorship. I’ve admitted as much and make every attempt to let others know it’s me.
My @@ is verboten over there….from the looks of it, other bloggers can’t mention my name. My “schnirt” has been banned there as well.
Haven’t been there (under any name) in weeks.
No need for alter egos when the one you have is so very HUGE.
independent thinker
December 13th, 2012
8:59 am
SSI disability is a joke . I used to work for Social Security Appeals. We had one guy who claimed his disability was talking dirty and acting hostile to women . His attorney argued his condition got worse – he got arrested for physically accosting a woman. I can’t tell you haow many laborers are out there who say they only want to get paid cash because they are getting disability payments