During our poverty debate, David Balan mentioned that a colleague of his was troubled by the very phrase “How Deserving Are the Poor?” And she’s hardly alone. Poverty analysts are far more likely to morally condemn the middle class for being judgmental than the lower class for being irresponsible. Indeed, the more irresponsible behavior the analyst sees, the more sternly they rebuke judgmental outsiders. Walter Miller’s 1959 article “Implications of Urban Lower-Class Culture for Social Work” (Social Service Review) is a fine example.
Emotional acceptance of culturally-derived behavior. — The principle, “Start where the client is,” implies, among other things, an initial emotional acceptance of certain attitudes and behaviors of clients which may appear distasteful to the worker because of values derived from his own social background. Any trained worker knows that such emotional acceptance is extremely hard to attain, that it frequently takes great effort to conceal personal reactions to conditions which may arouse shock or disgust, but that, despite this difficulty, effective practice depends on continued effort to handle these reactions. It should be apparent that such outward acceptance is especially important when dealing with lower-class clients, who are frequently hypersensitive to actions or attitudes which might indicate “snobbery” or feelings of disdain for those of “lower” status.
[…]
Those who wish to work effectively with cultural groups outside their own society must learn to deal with their emotional reactions to cultural practices such as polygamy, bride-price, or polytheism. This is not easy. But it is considerably easier to manifest “tolerance” for the ways of the Zulu, Navaho, or Burmese than to achieve emotional acceptance of features of lower-class culture in our own society; in the former case it is relatively easy to recognize that disapproved or exotic behavior is a direct product of the group’s culture and to accept such behavior on the grounds that it is “their way” of doing things, a way which is different from ours. In the case of lower-class culture, however, there is an almost automatic tendency to view certain customary behaviors in terms of right and wrong and to explain them as blameworthy deviations from accepted moral standards rather than as products of a deep-rooted cultural tradition. It is not too difficult to view the device of polygamous marriage and the mother-centered household among the Zulus as one alternative arrangement for meeting the problem of marriage and child-rearing; it is much harder to see the practice of serial mating and the female-based household in our own society as social forms which may constitute a practical or effective adaptation to the milieu in which they are found.
There is no attempt here to advocate a completely morality-free approach to such features; this is evidently neither possible nor desirable. What is suggested is a much more directed and conscientious effort to view the features of lower-class culture as interrelated aspects of an essentially adaptive way of life, deeply rooted in a persisting tradition. The corner boy does not persist in “delinquency” nor the mother in serial marriage out of stubborness or a wilful desire to violate known moral standards, but because the individual’s whole inner system of personal security is dependent on the maintenance of the life-pattern of which these features form an integral part. In dealing with behavioral areas which involve these cultural patterns, the worker must maintain an intelligent respect for their positive function for the individual and the extent to which they mutually support one another.
I’ll happily admit that “Start where the client is” can be strategically useful advice. However, it’s most strategically useful precisely when your clients are “stubborn” and “willful”! If your clients are mature adults, you can forthrightly describe the prudent course of action. E.g., “Don’t have unprotected sex until you are in a stable, long-term relationship with a responsible adult.” If your clients are stubborn and willful, in contrast, you might be more persuasive if you humor them. E.g., “Have you talked to your boyfriend about using birth control? Here’s a free three-month supply… if you feel like trying it.”
Why call this “humoring”? Well, a social worker who sincerely “maintained an intelligent respect” for the “positive function of cultural patterns,” would keep his opinions – and his free contraceptives – to himself. If you really believed that e.g. unprotected casual sex is “an essentially adaptive way of life” or “an integral part” of “the individual’s whole inner system of personal security,” why discourage it?
Miller continues:
Many terms commonly used to refer to prevalent features of lower-class culture contain a “built-in” cultural bias, which causes an observed feature or behavior pattern automatically to appear “deviant” or pathological as soon as it is described. For example, the female-based household is generally called a “broken home”; the serial monogamy marriage pattern is termed “desertion”; certain social arrangements of lower-class communities are called “community disorganization”; the widespread and highly functional adolescent street-corner group is termed the “delinquent gang”; aggressive and other forms of behavior in active conformity with standards of the individual’s most immediate and significant reference groups are called “antisocial.” In evaluating or diagnosing a given set of attitudes or behavior patterns, the question should first be asked, “To what extent does this pattern of behavior represent customary or expected behavior in the client’s home community?”
A bizarre claim. The main goal of social work, you’d think, is to help fix dysfunctional communities. And what is a dysfunctional community, but a community where “customary or expected behavior” is bad? Again, I can see why you might not want to tell juvenile delinquents that they’re vicious predators. But if you really see gangs as “highly functional adolescent street-corner groups,” why try to reform them?
What should Miller have said? As long as he’s only addressing fellow reformers, he should have just bluntly endorsed the judgmental attitudes he condescendingly dismisses. Then, he could have added, “Of course, since we need the poor’s cooperation, we should strive to be sympathetic.” It’s bitter, but at least it’s honest.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Mar 18 2019 at 4:26pm
Starting where the target of the policy is seems like perfectly good marginal, economic thinking. Does an extra Km of Wall dissuade enough “negative benefit” immigrants to be worth the investment or not, is exactly the kind of question to ask, not whether people “should” be crossing the border. Same for EITC, not “should” people be skilled enough to earn incomes at a level not to need EITC, but what at the benefits and costs of such transfers?
Phil H
Mar 19 2019 at 1:11am
Wow, this is startlingly simplistic. It seems to presuppose that we (a) know what the objective of social work is; (b) know which behaviors are good and which are bad; (c) have the political, social, and moral authority to work actively to change those behaviors.
But all of those things are contested. Is the goal of social work to hit certain specific targets (e.g. reduced crime, reduced poverty, prevention of addiction/disease); or to improve the lives of those in need; or to correct dysfunction; or… Do we know what is bad? We don’t have much standing to say that sex is bad; or that drinking/smoking/drug taking are morally bad. So the argument must be that these poor lives are instrumentally bad; but that assumes that the goals of the poor are same as the goals that we(? who?) have defined… Do social workers have the authority? Often they refer to the people they work with as clients – implying that their authority to act comes from them. But they are paid by the government. And they work with different agencies to achieve different ends.
So if we had clear, easy definitions of social work, then yes, what social workers “should” do would be obvious. But we don’t, and until we do, this kind of moralising just sounds silly and Victorian.
Mark Z
Mar 19 2019 at 10:08am
We’re already quite Victorian regarding taxation and redistribution: poverty, disease, and single motherhood are tragic states in need of vast amounts of money to be shared with those suffering them. Why should we abandon the morals we impose on the taxpayers when dealing with those on the recieving end of the checks? Paternalism ought to be a two way street, don’t you think?
Personally, I’d be fine with regarding smoking, promiscuous unprotected sex, etc. as morally neutral lifestyle choices, like BASE jumping or any other hobby with risks. But that comes with the stipulation that the general public not be required to insure the hobbyist against the consequences. “My body, my choice, someone else’s bank account” is not an internally coherent political philosophy.
Phil H
Mar 20 2019 at 2:33am
There is a confusion in what you’re saying here. You’re claiming simultaneously that (1) people who engage in base jumping etc. are basically insured by the state; and the (2) their base jumping makes them poor.
I don’t think both these things can be true, can they?
Mark Z
Mar 21 2019 at 6:35am
No, what I’m saying is: BASE jumping has costs. People who do it are more likely to die prematurely. If we are going to permit people to choose to BASE jump if they really enjoy it, then that cost should be borne by them: society shouldn’t be paying for their life insurance policies.
Drug use, unprotected sex, etc. have costs too. If we accept that people should be allowed to choose to do them if they really want to, that’s great. I’m no paternalist. But then the costs of those decisions should, again, be borne by them, not by society.
What I’m objecting to is: we’re already moralists when it comes to taxation and redistribution. We treat the results of the choices as bad, and make taxpayers pay for the remediation. Why shouldn’t we judge the people who make the bad choices? We acknowledge the choice is bad because we insist its consequences are bad and need remediation. Is it that we ought to regard people as purely victims of their own choices, that their choices are beyond their control? If so, why let them have choices at all? If people genuinely can’t help themselves from having children out of wedlock or becoming addicted to hard drugs, because ‘history’ or ‘culture’ or ‘society’ has imposed these situations on them, then why not outlaw these activities and prevent people from doing them? After all, if their choices aren’t really free to begin with, then paternalistic laws regulating reproduction, drug use, imbibing, etc. aren’t really restricting anyone’s freedom – because they don’t really have freedom to begin with.
Phil H
Mar 21 2019 at 9:28pm
“Drug use, unprotected sex, etc. have costs too…the costs of those decisions should, again, be borne by them, not by society.”
This is the confusion. According to you, at least, the costs of those decisions *are* being borne by the people who use drugs and have unprotected sex. They are the poor. They pay the cost by remaining poor. That’s the argument that Caplan and you seem to be making. So you’re loudly proclaiming that something which already happen really ought to happen!
I think you’re wrong about two things. (1) Poor people don’t currently suffer the consequences of their “poor behaviour”. – It seems to me plain that they do. (2) These “poor behaviours” have inevitable consequences. – Here I have to go anecdotal: We had an unplanned pregnancy, got married, and now have a fairly comfortable middle class life, because we had lots and lots of support from families and other institutions. Accidents in life happen to everyone. Being well-off is about the ability to recover from accidents, not about preventing anything unexpected from ever happening.
Khodge
Mar 20 2019 at 12:10am
Simultaneously agree and disagree strongly with Phil H. Economics is supposed to recognize people’s preferences but all too often addresses how to change them (PSA’s). Meanwhile society (not just sociologists) are encouraging behaviors that do not move people into socio-economic mainstream.
Matthias Goergens
Mar 19 2019 at 1:20am
The street corner group could be ‘functional’ in a rather technical sense of fulfilling some function.
David Friedman’s work on Legal System Very Different From Ours describes how eg prison gangs are an adaption to (ironically?) lack of law enforcement in prison. Countries with better run prisons where convincts have reasonable recourse in case they were wronged, tend to have fewer gangs in prison. (Not implying that the street corner group provides for law enforcement. It’s just an example of how a seemingly disfunctional group can provide some functions.)
Adopting middle class attitudes does indeed enhance your chances to get out of poverty. But you also have to see that the bar is higher for poor people: I can indulge in a spontaneous night out and still stay virtuously on budget. My margin of errors are much bigger, and there’s less temptation.
Human ability to optimise for the longer run is not limitless, and uses lots of mental energy. Poor people often have the double whammy of having less mental energy and needing more. (And people with enough discipline often do make it out of poverty.)
Eg Germany has a pretty generous welfare system by international standards. But for a poor person to use it properly, they need a certain willingness and aptitude to negotiate bureaucracy. (And if you have that, you are actually not too far off from being able to hold down a job.) So Germany still has homeless people.
Enough waffling. I mostly agree with what you say.
E. Harding
Mar 19 2019 at 6:33am
“Is the goal of social work to hit certain specific targets (e.g. reduced crime, reduced poverty, prevention of addiction/disease); or to improve the lives of those in need; or to correct dysfunction; or… ”
Yes.
“Do we know what is bad? ”
Uh, absolutely.
“Do social workers have the authority?”
It depends.
“But we don’t, and until we do, this kind of moralising just sounds silly and Victorian.”
I don’t think you understand just the sheer extent of the depravity of many of the poor.
“But you also have to see that the bar is higher for poor people”
It’s best to provide some evidence for that.
Phil H
Mar 19 2019 at 8:12am
Haha, thank you. Way to prove my point. You even busted out a nice Victorian word to do it! “Depravity,” indeed.
To you, and I guess to Caplan as well, I would say: the narrative of the undeserving poor died 100 years ago. I know it’s tempting, but progress means learning what we’ve learned, and not forgetting it. We can’t go backwards on this stuff.
Mark Z
Mar 19 2019 at 9:57am
Does progress dictate that, while we purport to know that lung cancer is a disease (bad), we should treat behavior conducive to it (smoking), hugely disproportionate in poor communities, nonjudgmentally, as just a cultural practice to be met with understanding rather than criticism?
You can’t insist that a phenomenon – be it lung cancer or poverty – is bad (and handwringing on the left over income inequality surely suggests they think it’s objectively bad) while insisting we treat behavior conducive to the phenomenon with strict cultural relativism.
Even if you embrace – as many of those who putatively empathize with the poor do – a fully deterministic outlook toward the poor, where their conditions and even behavior are to no moral fault of their own due to being entirely beyond their control, if you really have their interests at heart, you should still accept the need to reproach harmful behavior in order to discourage it.
I really don’t understand how one can think it reasonable to regard the behavior from the perspective of unlimited ‘understanding’ while treating the result as an unalloyed evil in need of urgent remediation… at a third party’s expense, of course.
Mark Z
Mar 19 2019 at 10:00am
Also, I must’ve missed this evidence from 100 years ago showed definitively that behavior is unrelated to poverty. Do you have citations?
Phil H
Mar 20 2019 at 2:25am
Hi, Mark Z.
Citations – yeah, all of 20th century history. People used to be dirt poor. The fundamental nature of people didn’t change much between 1900 and 2000. But for a significant part of the world’s population, lifestyles were utterly transformed over that period. This did not happen because feckless Victorian ragamuffins suddenly grew a work ethic. It happened because of two reasons: (1) technological shocks, and (2) we remade the state so that it started serving citizens rather than the desire for conquest of a corrupt ruling class.
The problem with the story that Caplan is advancing is that it seems to situate the ultimate cause for poverty in the behaviour of poor people. I just don’t think that’s true. The lesson I draw from history is that when you stop abusing people, they do fine. We gave everyone the vote, and schools, and hey presto, even the working classes turn out to be literate and capable members of a polity. We remove restrictions from women, and all those jobs that they used to think women could never do – they now do them with no problem. Once you stop telling homosexuals they’re sick and sinful, it turns out their lifestyle doesn’t actually make them commit suicide any more than anyone else. Etcetera, etcetera.
The way our economy is set up at the moment, someone has to be “poor”. We’re just not set up for everyone to be equal (that was tried elsewhere, and we all know it doesn’t work). So someone is always going to be poor. If you then approach those someones and say, “You’re poor because you X,” you’re not actually giving them a solution. Let’s say everyone in the working class suddenly stopped having children out of wedlock. Would the working class disappear? Would *everyone* be middle class then? No! Because the economies we have are literally designed to have a working class. At that point, what does Caplan say?
Or drug-taking… what a coincidence it is that just as the crack epidemic of the 80s and 90s died down, a “legal crack” epidemic began. Was that the fault of the feckless poor? Are they the doctors who overprescribed Oxy?
The point is not that taking drugs is great; it’s that telling people that drugs/single parenthood/whatever is *the problem* is false, and damaging. No, the poor as a class can’t pull themselves up through economic action (even though some individuals can). But certain groups of the poor, who have been particularly badly discriminated against, can improve their lot through political action to end the discrimination. Race is the obvious example.
Mark Z
Mar 21 2019 at 6:22am
“People used to be dirt poor. The fundamental nature of people didn’t change much between 1900 and 2000…”
This is a logical fallacy. ‘Because Y is influenced by X, it cannot be influenced by Z.” I think it was also clear from the context that I’m referring to relative poverty among contemporaneous people. One might just as well respond to the (correct) assertion that intelligence correlates with income by saying, “then why do average IQ people today make so much more money than Pythagoras did?”
“The problem with the story that Caplan is advancing is that it seems to situate the ultimate cause for poverty in the behaviour of poor people.”
There is no ‘ultimate cause.’ Everyone’s behavior is influenced by their culture and how they were raised by their parents, who were in turn influenced by the culture they grew up in and their parents, and so on. The ‘ultimate cause’ isn’t particularly useful in the allocation of responsibility.
“The way our economy is set up at the moment, someone has to be “poor”. ”
Not really. Someone has to be relatively poor. Half of everyone has to be poorer than average. That can’t be fixed though. As you yourself refer to above, essentially everyone today is well off by the standards of history. So what are we talking about if not relative poverty, which is a statistical – not societal – inevitability?
“The point is not that taking drugs is great; it’s that telling people that drugs/single parenthood/whatever is *the problem* is false, and damaging. No, the poor as a class can’t pull themselves up through economic action (even though some individuals can). But certain groups of the poor, who have been particularly badly discriminated against, can improve their lot through political action to end the discrimination. Race is the obvious example.”
But taking drugs and single parent clearly are problems, and telling people not to do those things, and having negative consequences for doing those things can reduce people’s tendency to do so. Why do people punish children who run out into the street to chase a ball? Because of our theories of moral responsibility? No, they have no reason to know better. Because we have to instill in them a negative association with harmful behavior, and it’s better we do it as parents than let the world (such as in the form of oncoming traffic) do it instead.
The poor “as a class” can’t pull themselves up because they’re not poor as a class. They’re poor as individuals. And to the extent that they’re beholden to the culture of their class, the best thing one can do for individuals of that class is encourage them not to follow the herd.
And race is actually a perfect example of the opposite: political action is largely useless. Blacks’ economic performance has been relatively stagnant in recent decades compared to prior decades, even as their political representation has skyrocketed. If you look at some of the most economically successful ethnic groups in American history, such as Jews and East Asians, they became disproportionately wealthy before they became disproportionately represented in government (I don’t think Asians ever became disproportionately represented). You’re also begging the question here. Inasmuch as the proximal cause of poverty is behavioral, there are no political solutions (short of heavy-handed paternalism, of course). Politics can redistribute wealth toward putative marginalized groups, but it won’t be enough to make up for the relative dearth of education, training, and productive habits, and will actually disincentivize the accretioon of them. Finally, the attribution of disproportionate drug use, out of wedlock pregnancy, etc. in black communities to discrimination suffers from the problem that these problems skyrocketed well after discrimination against black people had begun to rapidly subside.
Ultimately, I think it’s actually quite harmful to black communities to continue to tell them all of their communities’ problems are ultimately the fault of discrimination by white people, past or present, and only perpetuates poverty. Exonerating people of proximal responsibility for their actions does not encourage responsible behavior. If you want someone to stop doing drugs, what’s the truly compassionate thing to say to them? “It’s not your fault, you only use because your parents abused you; it’s all their fault really.” Or: “stop doing drugs and take responsibility for your choices.” If the latter is more successful – and I think it generally is – then that seems like the truly compassionate approach. The former approach wreaks of determinism, and telling people that they’re fated by circumstance to make impulsive decisions only exacerbates impulsive decision-making.
Phil H
Mar 21 2019 at 9:40pm
There is a bit of a rhetorical divide that we’re struggling to leap here. First, I think you’re infantilizing poor/black people in a way that is deeply unhelpful. The comparison to a child running into the street is one part. The exhortation to “take responsibility” is another – in what way are black/poor people not in charge of their own lives? No one is looking after them like a parent. They are the ones suffering the consequences. The idea that successful/white people have “taken responsibility” and unsuccessful/black people have not is, I believe, completely backwards.
My own experience, as a middle class white person, is that I have had the freedom to make many, many bad choices, and have been relatively insulated from any terrible consequences. And it is *precisely that insulation and support* that enabled me to recover, do more training, and ultimately earn a high income and support a family.
Insurance is about protecting us from consequences. Exposing people directly to consequences doesn’t toughen them up. It just kills them. Wealth, infrastructure, social support – these are all forms of insurance. And they are what make success possible.
John Alcorn
Mar 19 2019 at 10:56am
Re: “The main goal of social work, you’d think, is to help fix dysfunctional communities.” Isn’t that too much to ask of social workers? A more reasonable goal for social workers might be to make a difference at the margin, by helping specific needy individuals to get resources, to disentangle themselves from dysfunctional situations, and to improve themselves.
Re: ‘Start where the client is’ vs. ‘Humor the client.’ Skilled social workers might help a client (a) to leverage constructive values, which most individuals have, and (b) to grasp key means-ends relationships. Is helping a client to get clarity about values and instrumental rationality equivalent to humoring a client?
Chris Wegener
Mar 19 2019 at 2:13pm
I think that suggesting that poor people are poor because of poor choices is an oversimplification.
I would refer you to the following study that shows many of the issues poor people and the effects of poverty on children: https://www.gao.gov/assets/120/115212.pdf
Further I would suggest that on of the overarching problems with modern life is its complexity. For a large part of the population of America cause and effect has ceased to have any meaning. The results of choices made does not lead to any obvious outcome. As an example I would suggest smoking.
Yes smoking is bad for you. However the negative effects are distant and uncertain while the momentary pleasure are immediate and the stifling of the nicotine craving is rewarding.
Many choices facing people are comparable and blaming the person for not making the right choices does not mitigate the actual problems that they are suffering, Nor does blaming the victim help them escape poverty.
Thomas Sewell
Mar 20 2019 at 11:37pm
People must be responsible for the natural consequences of their actions.
In most communities where “customary or expected behavior” is bad, there is some level of coercion and encouragement helping to create the environment where that bad behavior turns into more adaptive behavior.
For example, you get a lot less “female-based households” before the War on Poverty. That’s because incentives changed.
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