What do the Poor Need?

...It is based on the notion that the poor are not so very different from the rest of us: they only have less money...

...A single example: in 1968 the New York Communities Aid Association published a report entitled "The Multiple Problem Dilemma" in which it gave an account of a two-and-ahalfyear special-service program for multipleproblem families...

...They are assumed to be able to take care of themselves...

...There has been a reduction of the flow of income going to the top 5 percent of the American population, but this drop, while profiting the middle ranks, has had no discernible effect on the poor...

...Even when the help is given from the most benevolent of motives, the very fact of being helped becomes a token of degradation...

...Yet the fact is that they often lead lives just as helpless as those on public assistance...

...By providing services to the poor, the social worker contributes in effect to putting them into a special category of second-class citizens and thereby helps to stamp upon them a stigmatized status...

...A man dependent on casual work of an unskilled sort is not likely to have the inclination, time or energy to train himself for new kinds of employment...

...To receive assistance means to be removed from the ordinary run of men...

...I will leave to economists a detailed discussion of the relative merits of a variety of redistribution schemes that have been brought forward in recent years...

...It is only among certain romantic primitivists that life styles from which the lower classes suffer are transmuted into admirable and admired characteristics...

...Service vs...

...It is deeply offensive to liken, say, Italian subcultural preferences for pasta to alleged lower-class "preferences" for femaledominated households or serial marriage...

...If the poor have indeed cultural characteristics fundamentally at variance with those of the rest of society, then it is of little avail to attempt to eradicate poverty by an income or any other strategy...

...It has helped many of the poor, it may even have enabled many to escape pov erty altogether, but it has perpetuated the condition of poverty...

...But there is a major difference between such adaptations to conditions not of one's own choosing and a culture that is a way of life...

...the Income Strategy" in Fred R. Harris, ed., Social Science and National Policy, Chicago: Aldine, 1970...

...The sociologist Everett C. Hughes has remarked that, "A man's work is as good a clue as any to the course of his life, and to his social being and identity...

...Glenn M. Anderson, D.-Calif., said in a House speech that Wayne, long "a vocal critic of the welfare program," had "turned to the federal treasury to supplement his income...

...The well-to-do and the poor still live as two different nations...

...What is needed is a structural approach counteracting the tendency for unemployment to be much higher among the unskilled than among the skilled occupations...

...Yet this right is denied to the poor...

...Services, though they may have other beneficial consequences, can do little to reduce the overall extent of poverty...

...Hence assistance and the service strategy perpetuate the conditions they are designed to alleviate...

...Possessing limited skills, cooped up in areas where the labor market provides no opportunities, they desperately try to hang on to an aura of respectability while knowing only too well that the jobs they perform seldom allow them to gain status and respect...

...In the very process, then, of being helped and assisted, the poor are assigned to a special career that impairs their relations with others...

...2 In the following I have drawn on two of my previously published papers: "The Sociology of WHAT DO THE POOR NEED...

...Rep...

...We therefore need a provision of adequate income for those unable to work and an income maintenance program for those who, because of conditions in the labor market, cannot gain an adequate income...

...Ultimately it should be a means to the wider end of creating valued occupational and social positions for those who were formerly casual unskilled laborers or passive recipients of assistance...

...More generally, when men know that unskilled work to which they are assigned could as well be performed by machines, they often feel such work to be degrading...

...The notion of culture implies a desired and valued way of life...

...invasion of home territory is necessarily ex perienced as humiliating...

...The Working Poor SO FAR I HAVE DEALT only with the assisted poor, but these are in fact only a minority of the total poor population...

...Because it prevents the usual stage management for visits by outsiders, such an Poverty," Social Problems, XIII, 2 (Fall 1965), and "Unanticipated Conservative Consequences of Liberal Theorizing," Social Problems, XVI, 3 (Winter 1969...

...The woman on welfare with three or four children who has been given such a going-over recently for `getting something for nothing' must be shaking her head quizzically when she reads about these wealthy dirt farmers who receive such high payments from the federal treasury," Anderson said...

...The poor must approach as supplicants those who have it in LEWIS COSER their power to relieve some of their misery...

...Welfare personnel, on the other hand, by supplying services to the poor, establish power over them...

...that one is likely to conceive of oneself as a pawn, an object, of social and political developments rather than a selfconscious political subject...

...The underlying assumption of the service strategy is that the poor need assistance because, unlike the rest of the population, they are unable to make the relevant choices by themselves...

...It would be preferable if they were to limit their search to nonliterate tribes...

...They are in fact the mark of their oppression...

...This is dangerous nonsense...

...but the percentage of total money income that flows to the bottom 20 percent of American families has hovered at around 5 percent ever since the end of World War II...

...In an earlier period when the aim of social policy was simply to assist paupers, the service strategy made some sense...

...Beyond the primary issue of income distribution, poverty raises the question of full citizenship for the poor...

...Patterns of equality in social affairs are established when men deal with others under conditions of reciprocity, that is, when services supplied can be reciprocated...

...It is possible, I think, to "save" many of their children so that their condition does not become hereditary...

...And that is the real scandal...

...Lest I be misunderstood, let me stress that I am not in favor of make-work programs that provide socially unnecessary jobs for the unskilled in order to take them off the streets...

...Visiting the slums of Naples and North Africa or traveling through the Sicilian or Greek countryside, one realizes that their misery, their utter deprivation, their stark horrors are qualitatively different from the poverty one encounters in the United States...

...Autonomy and independence is assured to the extent to which benefits received do not exceed services rendered...

...Washing dishes by hand in the restaurants of the past was a perfectly normal job...

...They render needed services that cannot be had elsewhere so that the recipients become obligated to them...

...The underlying assumption of the income strategy is, on the contrary, that what the poor really want is to make their own choices as they see fit...

...The "Culture of Poverty" THOUGH OFTEN advanced by writers whose motivations are impeccable, it still seems to me that the notion of a "culture of poverty," bandied about so much in recent years, is a fundamentally mischievous idea...

...They have been forced into them by desertion, by divorce, or by the persistent pressures of male unemployment, the vagaries of the job market for the unskilled, and the inhuman stipulations of current welfare policies...

...that one feels excluded and alienated from the political proc ess...

...But the principle should be clear: whatever the scheme, the task is to develop a set of economic programs insuring poor families and individuals a basic floor of income not too far removed from the median income of American families as a whole...

...We suffer from a highly unequal distribution of incomes, with the result that a fairly large proportion of the population is daily reminded of the fact that, compared to the rest, it is severely disadvantaged...

...When money is allocated to members of any other status groups, they have the freedom to dispose of it in almost any way they see fit...

...Except among religious ascetics, poverty is not a positive virtue...

...By definition they are receivers of benefits who are in no position to reciprocate...

...Assisted poverty, no matter how well-intentioned the persons who provide assistance may be, involves a status degradation through which, in Harold Garfinkel's words, "the public identity of an actor is transformed into something looked on as lower in the local scheme of social types...

...A very large proportion of all families earns a moderate income (the second, middle, and fourth fifths earn roughly 55 percent of all family incomes...

...While there are about 8 million assisted poor in contemporary America, between 40 and 50 million fell below the poverty or near-poverty level in the late sixties...

...The notion of a "culture of poverty" creates the impression that, no matter what strategy is adopted, the poor will continue to live in a world of their own, as unassimilated and unassimilable pariahs...

...It is rooted in the idea that men belonging to a culture are devoted to it because it embodies for them prized qualities and virtues...

...washing dishes by hand when mechanical dishwashers are readily available is something else again...

...As such they deserve sympathy, understanding, and, above all, tolerance from the ranks of those who have succeeded in carving a more secure niche for themselves...

...They are likely to remain permanent victims of modern society, a vivid reminder of the high price at which modern urban society has made its ambiguous progress...

...An income strategy should therefore aim at more than simply redistributing income...

...In an instrumentally oriented society, those who cannot give but only receive are naturally assigned the lowest status...

...But the service strategy, by its very nature, fosters not reciprocity but unilateral dependence based on asymmetry of power...

...But how can a culture of poverty be valued and desired...

...but poverty as such creates no culture...

...Yet both groups showed almost identical developments...

...Nothing seems to me as degrad LEWIS COSER ing for people as to be employed in work that they know is useless...

...It would entail the creation of a vast number of paraprofessional jobs in schools and hospitals...

...The study director concluded with rare candor: "You cannot casework poor people out of poverty...

...At least in principle, facets of behavior ordinarily not public are in their case under public control and are open to examination by social workers or other investigators...

...In a culture such as ours, which still basically judges a man according to his occupational status, it stands to reason that simple transfers of income to those among the poor who are able to work is not a permanent answer...

...Once a person is assigned to the status of the assisted poor his role in life is changed, just as the career of the mental patient is changed by the very fact that he is designated a mental patient...

...Romantic admiration for the natives of Upper Dahomey is not likely to have many social repercussions in the life of these people, but the glorification of an alleged "culture of poverty" in our own midst could act as a self-fulfilling prediction...

...Subjective intentions and institutional consequences sharply diverge...

...It is, of course, true that the poor have been forced to make a number of serious adjustments in their life styles in order to subsist at all...

...To be sure, deprived persons may present a variety of characteristics that distinguish them from the more fortunate, but they do not choose these characteristics and are not themselves likely to consider them desirable...

...They are denied free disposition of the money granted them...

...The mark of degradation is too deeply ingrained in their psychic structure...

...When such writers claim that, far from participating in WHAT DO THE POOR NEED...

...But as to most of them, the best that can probably be done is to see to it that they live their dismal lives as free from harassment and direct need as possible...

...They must account to the donors for their expenses, and the donors decide whether the money is spent "wisely" or "foolishly...

...society recognizes a right to privacy, that is, to conceal parts of one's behavior from public scrutiny...

...The status quo can only be bolstered by attributing some kind of glamour to a way of life, if poverty can be called that, which requires nothing less than radical abolition...

...These people, often under the influence of drugs of vari ous sorts, have become so apathetic and withdrawn from the public scene that they are not likely to be reached by any of these measures...

...John Wayne on Welfare A California Congressman has suggested that actor John Wayne was a "welfare recipient" of sorts in getting a $218,000 farm subsidy from the government...

...That the service strategy in effect bypasses these huge numbers of men altogether is a further mark of its inadequacy and irrelevance...

...You can, of course, see in the Mississippi delta cases of deprivation similar to those in Mediterranean slums, yet poverty in America is by and large no longer a problem of sheer physical survival, of utter immiseration and pauperism...

...The only radical strategy worthy of the name must be designed to change income distribution in such a way that it assumes the shape of a pyramid— through moving the bottom fifth into one of the middle categories...

...They are typically being investigated at home and hence have much less chance to conceal their private affairs from welfare observers...

...Here again the treatment of the poor differs sharply...

...When a man's job does not insure him a decent income and is looked upon with contempt by his fellows, it can only provide him with a negative identity...

...But I am also convinced that a man with an adequate income will be much less likely to abandon his family than one whose sense of self-esteem is continually undermined by casual work or by unilateral dependence on public assistance...

...This would involve large-scale federal programs insuring not only very low unemployment rates (reducing unemployment by 1 percentage point would reduce the number of persons in poverty by 1.25 million), but guarantees of entry into the labor force for the unskilled as well as guarantees of on-the-job-training so as to enable the unskilled gradually to move up into skilled categories...

...If policy-makers listen to such vicious advice and refrain from action to eradicate poverty and redistribute income, then indeed the poor will continue to be with us...

...dominant up till now, means viewing the poor as a group of people in need of special aids and services financed by the rest of the population and provided and administered by a welfare bureaucracy...

...These large numbers of families and individuals are, of course, not reached at all by the service strategy...

...A way of life may be adhered to despite poverty, as in the case of the Jews in the shtetl...

...And not only are the poor seen by others as belonging to a special stigmatized category, they also tend to see themselves as others see them...

...The elimination of poverty in America will not be attained even when almost all of its citizens have moved above one of the statistical poverty lines...

...Job training and the development of technical competence can be pursued only when the economic insecurity and anxiety that now mark the poor have at least in part been removed...

...In any case, an overemphasis on the alleged adaptive functions of the "culture of poverty" can only deter us from taking the needed radical measures to change the opportunity structure and the income distribution of contemporary America...

...To be poor in contemporary America means not only that one disposes of less income but also that one is aware of having little or no access to the levers of political power...

...An equal number of families with comparable problems were given only routine service...

...When it comes to this class of men, the limits of public policy may have been reached...

...I am aware of the very special problems that arise in many lower-class families from the lack of authority or the complete absence of fathers and the ensuing pathological matrifocality...

...Emphasis on the unskilled and the necessary upgrading of skills need not make us lose sight of the fact that in contemporary American society there exists a large, and growing, category of people who have been so demoralized and pathologized by their social conditions that they cannot, in fact, avail themselves of job opportunities...

...Hence relations of unilateral dependence come into existence, which are at fundamental variance with the rights deriving from equal participation and citizenship in the society at large...

...No measure of repression can eliminate them from the social scene, and no appeals to "law and order" offer any effective way of dealing with them...

...The current income distribution has the shape of a diamond...

...Millions of people are poor by any standard, despite the fact that they work full-time throughout the year...

...25 percent of all poor families (including 8 million persons) are headed by men gainfully occupied for the full working year...

...The number of Americans below the U.S...

...UAW Washington Report, July 12,1971 What I have in mind here are not so much the physically handicapped—their case is largely unproblematic—but rather those who suffer from overpowering psychic handicaps...

...Fifty of these families received special and extensive care by highly trained social workers...

...At the risk of being taxed with sociological WHAT DO THE POOR NEED...

...they are also politically deprived of the rights and privileges that come with citizenship in a democratic society...

...That is why, for those among the poor who are able to work, a secure job is as important as an adequate income...

...I know of no evidence to indicate that women who are the heads of matrifocal families in the lower classes desire such positions of their own free choice...

...The first, which has been 1 Cf., among other works of these authors, S. M. Miller and Pamela Roby, The Future of Inequality, New York: Basic Books, 1970, and Lee Rainwater, "The Service Strategy vs...

...Even when a man is no longer stigmatized by his dependence on public assistance, even when he has a right to income maintenance as well-established as socialsecurity benefits, he will still not escape social blame as well as self-blame if he lacks a rewarding and productive job...

...A major reason, and perhaps the major reason, why such programs fail or even become counterproductive is that the service approach reinforces and perpetuates the dependent status of the poor...

...The protective veil that other members of society can put between themselves and the outer world is then explicitly denied him...

...That is, insofar as they are treated much like children who have to account to parents for the use of pocket money, the poor are infantilized...

...The lowest fifth, on the other hand, earns very little (around 5 percent...

...Census Bureau poverty level—$3,743 in annual income for a nonfarm family of four, in 1969—dropped from 39 million in 1959 to 24.3 million in 1969...

...It would be foolish to deny that, compared to the days of laissez faire, this approach has been a tremendous step forward...

...This will not bring income equality, but at least it will insure that the 20 percent or so of our population now effectively denied full citizenship will have a secure basis from which to lay the foundations for social and political participation...

...It is one thing to defend the right to diversity in life styles where such divergent and nonconformist patterns have been freely chosen—as among contemporary youth— but it is quite another to defend a situation where such divergencies have in fact been imposed by those who occupy a superior position in society...

...It will occur only when the present distribution of income is changed so that the bottom portion of the income distribution is shifted into the middle category...

...You only have to watch the demeanor of the many persons in the Eastern bloc countries who are employed in raking leaves or sweeping sidewalks to realize that this way of disguising unemployment is deeply humiliating...

...Where other recipients of social services may occasionally be visited at home by investigators, most of their contact with the agency is likely to be in its offices...

...Not only are the poor relatively deprived when it comes to goods and services...

...The Need for Income Redistribution WHATEVER THE MERITS of the various elaborate standards by which the number of poor is currently estimated and poverty lines are drawn, most uses of these statistics obscure the major fact that, though the number of people falling below statistical poverty lines has dropped considerably in recent years, there has been no redistribution of national income as between the poor and the rest of the population...

...Poverty in America concerns, in the main, not absolute but relative deprivation...

...It institutionalized the idea that the total community as well as the government must carry a responsibility for the well-being of all citizens, a well-being that cannot be left to the vagaries of the market...

...naivete by social scientific brethren, I would still maintain that what the poor lack above all is money...

...In the wilderness of every modem city tens of thousands of persons, perhaps many more, have become a kind of permanent un derclass or lumpen proletariat that is likely to remain with us no matter what antipov erty strategies are adopted...

...As the dean of British sociology T. H. Marshall once put it, "The common purpose of statutory and voluntary effort was to abate the nuisance of poverty without disturbing the pattern of inequality of which poverty was the most obvious unpleasant consequence...

...a common culture, the poor have developed a culture of their own that sets them fundamentally apart from the majority of the population, then, whether they intend it or not, they create the impression that the members of that culture are somehow alien beings who cannot be assimilated and hence must remain beyond the pale...

...Think only, as S. M. Miller suggests, how many jobs could be created in the sanitation departments of major cities if lower-class neighborhoods were given services equal to those of higher-class areas...

...In this respect the working poor find themselves in a situation not too dissimilar from that of the assisted poor, even though they try desperately to distinguish themselves from them...

...Income Sfrafegies LEE RAINWATER, on whose work, as well as that of S. M. Miller, I have largely relied in this paper,' argues persuasively that basically there are only two strategies for dealing with poverty: the service strategy and the income strategy...

...but it is not in tune with the requirements of our age...

...This is not the place to spell out the measures that would seem necessary in order to assure that an adequate number of positions is available so as to provide opportunities for all who need them...

...Certain intellectuals seem to have a perennial tendency to hunt for noble savages that can be contrasted to the alleged vices of modern civilization...

...Generally, in modern society, the exercise of authority— except within the family—is separated from the home...

...At present a small proportion of the total population earns a great deal of money (the highest fifth earns around 40 percent of all family income...

...Let me give a few illustrations: Nearly all groups in society can use a variety of legitimate mechanisms to shield their behavior from observation by others...

...In absolute terms they are indeed better off, but in relative terms they are almost exactly where they stood 25 years ago...

...Far from aiming to equalize life chances and citizenship rights between the well-to-do and the poor, the service strategy perpetuates inequality...

...It would entail the creation of many new jobs in the general area of public employment to counteract the present tendency of neglecting public expenditures so as to enhance the private consumption of middle-class voters...

...These are conditions from which the poor suffer precisely because in their essential cultural makeup they do not differ fundamentally from the rest of the American population...

...The fact is, however, that rewarding jobs are likely to come into reach only after immediate worries about current income are relieved...

...When immediate worries about income have been removed, when elementary needs have been gratified, it becomes psychologically much easier to prepare for more skillful and hence more rewarding employment...

...Today large-scale income redistribution is on the agenda...

...Income maintenance programs may alleviate some of their immediate plights, but it is unlikely that they will lead them to abandon their way of life...

...The need is not make-work for the unskilled, or to slow technical progress in order to provide jobs...

...The much touted Income Revolution has not meant an increase in the share of income for the poor...

...Hence radicals, even while supporting this or that measure which promises to alleviate LEWIS COSER the ailments from which the poor suffer, need most of all to focus on redistribution of the flow of national income...

...It would involve high minimum wages, and federal incentives to employers to retain or even enlarge their labor force rather than replacing expensive manpower by labor-saving devices before the work force has been trained in higher skills...

...WRITING THESE PAGES in Europe allows me to look at the problem of American poverty in a way I might not have chosen had I written in America...

...There is no doubt in my mind that a great deal of the social pathology now proliferating among the poor would be resolved through an adequate provision of income...

...Whether a negative income tax or another form of income maintenance and support program is adopted does not concern us here...

...With regard to the poor on relief, however, this is not the case...

...Unless that is done, the poor will always be with us...

...For even to be socially recognized as "poor," a person is obliged to make his private life available to public inspection...

...Social workers, welfare investigators, welfare administrators, and local volunteer workers seek out the poor in order to help them, yet, paradoxically, are the very agents of their degradation...

...It is, rather, to allow the unskilled to upgrade their skills so that they can work with machines that produce results about which they can feel some satisfaction...

...Yet it is by now evident that the service approach has failed to bring about structural changes in the distribution of income...