The Undeserving Poor:

...Even worse, economists took over the War on Poverty because of federal funding mechanisms...

...Several key themes emerge from Katz's historical treatment...

...Ironically the same official was a primary spokesman three years later during a major increase in U.S...

...But the category is misleading and poorly drawn, an oversimplification of the complexities of the lives of the poor...

...Perhaps A. K. Sen's reconceptu-alization of poverty as an issue of capacities and freedoms would break the confines of the debate...

...Michael B. Katz provides a careful and convincing social history of contemporary U.S...

...This effort is essential...

...Their own influence, however, was fleeting because their analysis, according to Katz, was not well-based empirically and was inadequately presented in the literature...

...Perhaps further development of an ethically based understanding of macroeconomics, as proposed by Charles Wilber and me in our new book, Beyond Reaganomics: A Further Inquiry into the Poverty of Economics, could provide the structural understanding necessary for creating better policy...

...For without mutuality, obligation becomes coercion...

...attitudes and social policy toward poverty are ambivalent, if not schizophrenic...

...The book concludes with an attempt to move the debate beyond liberal and conservative conceptions of poverty, in the process showing the difficulties involved...

...Katz proposes a structural analysis of poverty and suggests that policy modeled on the European experience might be more successful in stopping the pendulum swing between the liberal and conservative extremes...

...The book is quite favorable about the American bishops' Economic Justice for All, but never draws upon its insights in formulating a new position...

...however, I am not convinced that Katz's approach can stop the pendulum swing in the understanding and treatment of poverty...

...Kenneth P. Jameson In early 1981 a newly appointed Reagan administration official complained to the press about the homeless men living on the avenues around his agency and suggested they should be removed to save Washingtonians such an unpleasant spectacle...

...U.S...

...Drawing on the work of William J. Wilson, he shows that the existence of the so-called underclass can be better understood by examining structural problems in the job market...

...The latter was doomed to failure because it lacked resources and was based on a naive perspective on poverty, one motivated by noblesse oblige, the obligation of the elite to help the poor...

...The framework Katz employs is a chronology of the debates over poverty and policy, starting with the 1960s and Oscar Lewis's sympathetic depiction of the culture of poverty...

...The book reinforces the late Michael Harrington's view that our ability to deal with poverty measures progress in the "pilgrimage toward our humanity...

...The condition of poverty involves its genesis, manifestations, and characteristics, and the response of the poor to policy steps...

...As such it is a euphemism...

...He weaves together threads of political, moral, and social philosophy, social science analysis, and empirical investigation into a tapestry which is a worthy complement to the larger historical perspective provided in Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Idea of Poverty...

...The simplistic-and misleading-image of family disruption, wanton sexuality (teenage pregnancy), and irresponsibility in work and housing decisions has clearly marked the underclass as undeserving and without claim on society...

...It says as much about the categorizers as about the poor...

...Secondly, Katz shows that "poverty" is both a condition and a category, and that the policy debate depends on how both aspects are dealt with and applied...

...races condemned to one hundred years of solitude [do] not have a second opportunity on earth...

...attitudes, debates, and policy toward poverty...

...Or perhaps a return to community organization, mobilization of the poor, and direct attack on the structures of society would be more successful than in the 1960s...

...The "culture of poverty," now amalgamated with Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1960s' observation on the of the black family, has reappeared...

...However, we let the Furies be loosed in vengeance on those whose poverty we believe is of their own making or who dare take advantage of our good will...

...The categorization of the poor as those who are deserving or undeserving is even more important and sometimes sinister for its policy ramifications...

...a more plausible explanation is that their analysis was a threat to the system...

...What other alternatives are available...

...Whichever direction is taken in this post-conservative era, the late Michael Harrington's words continue to ring true: "When we join, in solidarity and not in noblesse oblige, with the poor, we will rediscover our own best selves...

...However, the failure of liberal policies based on noblesse oblige and the role of enlightened leadership leave the field open to conservatives who assume minimal social responsibility for dealing with poverty and who sugar-coat it with calls for "a thousand points of light...

...Despite real accomplishments (Head Start, the depau-perization of the elderly), too much was promised...

...In one of the best parts of the book, Katz critiques the currently popular category for the undeserving poor, "the underclass...

...Lewis was rejected by radical champions of the poor and of civil rights...

...The poverty field was left to liberal policy makers and the War on Poverty...

...and the expansion of benefits reinforced the distinction between social insurance and public assistance, creating the incorrect perception that public assistance to the "undeserving poor" was growing unjustifiably and dramatically...

...Katz writes of this latest phase, embodied in the recently enacted workfare legislation: "The harder one pushes, the more Mead's concept of social obligation collapses into a new strategy for preserving a pool of cheap, docile labor...

...If we fail in this, we will suffer the fate of the Buendias in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude...

...This provided an opening for a conservative reaction which initially attacked the War on Poverty (Martin Anderson), then blamed social policy for poverty while at the same time extolling inequality (George Gilder and Charles Murray), and finally emphasized the social obligations of the poor-the poor must be induced to contribute to society (Lawrence Mead...

...we will regain the vision of America...

...These are curious reasons...

...Perhaps the consistent moral and prophetic stance of the bishops can inoculate against the self-delusion that is often present in dealing with poverty...

...We have a generosity of spirit, a willingness to share society's and our own resources with those the Fates scorn, the "deserving poor for whom we accept a social obligation...

...Liberals take poverty seriously and have a better grasp of its complexities than conservatives, who deal in stereotypes and show a cavalier disregard for empirical evidence...

...famine relief for Ethiopia...