ON "THE CULTURE OF SHIFTLESSNESS"

...He drank too much, and was a skirt-chaser and gambler...

...and that right beneath them, nipping at their heels, are the ambitious middle classes who are equally ensnared in the toils of the Protestant ethic, fully deserving of every tax loophole, emolument, or "perq" that comes their way...

...I shall call her Willie Mae Smith, although that is a pseudonym...

...5Chandler Davidson and Charles M. Gaitz, "Are the Poor Different...

...But aside from having altered her name and those of the other principals, I have taken no liberties, in the above "case history," with any of the known facts or published rumors about the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...

...The earlier question is now reformulated: Is the culture of shiftlessness more likely to be found among the poor than the nonpoor...

...In its strongest version, the culture-ofpoverty hypothesis states that a value system, or culture, which denigrates hard work, discipline, ambition, and the sacrifice of immediate gratification to future satisfaction, results in laziness...

...And, as is true with all 353 genuine ideologies—deeply held world views that serve a group's interest—it influences the perception of the facts upon which the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis depends...

...When he went broke during the Depression, his fatherinlaw had to bail him out, paying Buck's rent on condition that he straighten up...

...I propose a term that not only does justice to the essence of the concept but is more pleasantly colloquial...

...to be primarily in the amount of compensation those who work receive for their efforts, and in the amount of subsidies those who do not work—the disabled, the lazy, the very young and old and, of course, those who cannot find work—receive from society...

...The evidence is skimpy...

...Rockefeller simply seized upon the occasion of addressing a group of blacks to lecture them on the virtues of the industrious life, as any apostle of selfimprovement would have done...

...A married brother had been implicated in the drowning death of a girl friend, but the police were never able to pin anything on him...

...The families tend to be large, and internal tensions often lead to deviance...

...2. Marked by lack of ambition, energy, or purpose...

...She has an aversion to work, even though she could get a job...

...Like the notion of the culture of poverty, however, the notion of work is loaded with class ideology...

...But unemployment rates are calculated as a percentage of the labor force—those working or looking for work—and labor-force participation may vary by class...

...The term "culture of poverty" is inherently biased, for it presumes to answer, more or less by definition, the empirical question I am posing...

...In the words of a Business Week reporter: Glanville and MacGregor flew out in Amax's plane...

...Yet the assumption that the poor work less is so ingrained in the sociology of poverty that it had not Hyman Rodman, "The Lower-class Value Stretch," Social Forces, 17 (Dec...

...Consider the following case...

...Even so, the number of hours worked is the 'Fred Harris, The New Populism (Berkeley: Thorp Springs Press, 1973), pp...

...Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future...

...Ball—who was in Vancouver—came down, and on the night of Memorial Day, over a six-hour dinner with Haynes and Bell in a private room of the Carnelian Room restaurant, on the 52nd floor of the Bank of America building, they put the deal together...

...Brown wears wooden pallets under his shoes and a rubber mask for protection...

...Both of her husbands were even wealthier than her own family...

...His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for "action" take precedence over everything else—and certainly over any work routine...

...It taught me not to expect too much and not to take things for granted...

...in which case there is the very real question of whether an hour spent in the boardroom or on the company jet entertaining clients is equal to an hour spent pouring concrete or roughnecking on a drilling rig...

...one who is rich and a member of 349 `the 400' may be lower-class...

...His speech might have been entitled, "Lecturing the Colored and the Poor—or Their Ostensible Leaders—on the Virtues of Work, or How 355 to Imply, without Actually Saying so, that They Wouldn't Take a Job if It Were Handed Them on a Silver Platter...

...He has headaches...

...Was it work...

...I am unaware of other studies with similar controls that compare the poor and nonpoor in this manner...

...This can be illustrated in no better fashion than to recount a brief history of a woman whose life is enmeshed in the culture of shiftlessness...

...An examination of these two assumptions is my subject...

...352 best single measure of work we have...

...Among students of poverty the answer would likely be yes...

...The problem is how to classify the activities of these busy executives, culminating in a sixhour repast in the Carnelian Room...

...He drank heavily...

...One does not lecture on virtue unless vice is suspected...

...Like Lewis, Banfield is able at times to see that lower-class culture is distinct from the lower class...

...Today the rich are treated more gently...

...Sometimes with Jimmy, sometimes without, she stayed up till dawn "painting the town...

...The difference is that it wears its bias on its sleeve instead of hiding it behind jargon...

...It was a decade punctuated by family crises...

...Her kin networks are remarkable for their pathology—the involvement of their members in violence, drugs, divorce, illicit sex...

...They were largely reared by others...

...Our findings therefore raise questions, not only about the allegedly unequal distribution of the culture of shiftlessness, but about the poor's tendency to work less...

...The first one had been fun," she said much later, "but toward the end I got tired...

...Among MexicanAmerican men, 86 percent of the poor v. 91 percent of the nonpoor were employed: no statistically significant difference...

...The marriage lasted ten years—much longer than one might have expected, given Roosevelt's sexual adventures, Willie Mae's compulsive spending on clothes and baubles for herself, and the fights that resulted...

...Willie Mae comes from a highly disorganized family milieu...

...As Jimmy's wife, Willie Mae continued her life as a "party girl...

...It sounds odd, in other words, to ask if the poor are more likely to belong to the culture of poverty than the rich...

...Brown has worked at the mill for 18 years, seven on this same job...

...He works only as he must to stay alive, and drifts from one unskilled job to another, taking no interest in his work...

...The couple separated, and then began to compete for the affections of their children, Willie Mae and her younger sister, Laura...

...Nor was there an appreciable difference, among employed men of all three groups, in the number of hours worked by the poor and the nonpoor...

...And he is ten times more likely to die of lung cancer than the average steelworker.' The point is that work performed by the manual occupations—the "working class," after all—comes closer to the intuitive notion of work as a strenuous, exhausting, burdensome task than that performed by their social betters...

...On the basis of this information, we can tentatively conclude that the poor have been unfairly singled out as the shiftless class...

...Linking a cultural syndrome and poverty in a single descriptive term invites this confusion...

...149-54...

...q 356...

...To sum up, Willie Mae's life-style exemplifies many of the characteristics of the "culture of poverty...

...Mills correctly criticized Veblen for dismissing the business activity of the rich as nonwork because it was not socially productive labor...

...Her life has a random quality to it, as Willie Mae has no 354 disciplined commitment to a life goal...

...they do not subscribe to it wholeheartedly.° But few social 4 Elliot Liebow, Tally's Corner: A Study of Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967...

...205-15...

...The originally extroverted Buck became "tuned out...

...Mills presented data on the `very rich" in The Power Elite, published in 1956...

...She hates housework and child care...

...Subjects were asked questions about intrinsic work motivation, commitment to "work and achievement" rewards, and "time orientation...

...But the comparison is shaky, not only because of the small sample size but because 70 percent of Mills's 1950 sample of the very rich were women...

...Veblen's theory," wrote Mills in 1953, "is not `The Theory of the Leisure Class.' It is a theory of a particular element of the upper classes in one period of the history of one nation...

...surrounded by thick acrid smoke...

...Nelson Rockefeller arrived propitiously on a day that enabled him to address the 26th annual dinner of the Houston Business and Professional Men's Club, an organization of black businessmen...

...Moreover, most poverty scholars would probably accept the contention of Hyman Rodman or Elliot Liebow that shiftlessness is a value system that some of the poor adopt ,faute de mieux...

...is often unaware of it...

...Jimmy's daughter by a previous marriage was said to hate Willie Mae, and this seemed to be dampening Jimmy's ardor for his wife...

...Our Houston sample did not contain any rich people, as distinguished from middle-class respondents...

...But when they find out the joys and satisfaction that comes through work," he said, "they do so and that's what built this country...

...Nor will the rich open up their lives as graciously or gullibly as the poor have done...

...It sounds rather like asking if French culture is more likely to be found among the French than the Chinese...

...8That is, I have taken no liberties except the one most commonly taken in sociological accounts of the poor: I have selected the facts to suit a predetermined interpretation of an individual, and I have used some loaded words to describe them...

...But of course, there is and there has been a working upper class—in fact, a class of prodigiously active people.6 At the time this assertion was first made, 6C...

...And it virtually precludes asking whether the DuPont family in Delaware shares some of its values with the Martinez family in a San Juan slum...

...He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless...

...Passed from parent to child, this culture is perpetuated from generation to generation...

...3Oscar Lewis, "A Puerto Rican Boy," in Joseph C. Finney, ed., Culture Change, Mental Health, and Poverty (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969...

...Even Banfield, who sees the shiftless poor as a major source of America's urban problems, estimates that only 10 to 20 percent of families with incomes below the government-established poverty line are shiftless...

...It does not sound odd (just impertinent) to inquire if the rich are shiftless...

...Instead of measuring work in terms of social usefulness one might measure it in terms of energy expenditure...

...Our evidence, in other words, casts doubt on the view that the cultural values of shiftlessness are more common among poor people...

...To the extent that Veblen's view still applies, Mills believed, it is to "the nouveau riche of the new corporate privileges...

...previously occurred to me to ask if there were any evidence to support it...

...In Banfield's words: The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment...

...Shiftlessness, of course, has a derogatory connotation, just like the term it is meant to supplant...

...It is possible that Mr...

...It is an "energy intensive" activity...

...True, hardly anyone now argues that all the poor belong to it...

...But this is just as true for those at the foot of the social ladder...

...I understand what it means to try to seek to achieve and produce through hard work and that's what builds America," Mr...

...Willie Mae conceived five children by Roosevelt, only two of whom are alive today...

...Lacking in ability or resourcefulness...

...Her father, a pathetic drunk, finally died...

...He was right, I believe, but we have yet to see very many social scientists act on his suggestion and begin to make forays into the ghettos of affluence...

...Three siblings died violently, one was divorced, one was mentally retarded, and another's wife had psychiatric problems...

...229-45...

...In the work of Thorstein Veblen, for example, it was the rich who stood indicted as nonproducers...

...Add to this a penchant for high living, the "dog" which is exhibited in the men, the pursuit of sex and alcohol and latenight adventure, and you have precisely that admixture of impulsiveness and irresponsibility that epitomizes a "lower-class culture...

...More than 20 years passed before Willie Mae got another job...

...Mary Ann's remarriage was a blow to him...

...When the evidence is in, I suspect that the poor will come off better than either the popular stereotype or the academic "poverty literature" has portrayed them...

...Our findings were that among men, the black and Anglo poor were less likely to be employed than the nonpoor (68 percent v. 86 percent for blacks...

...Curiously, a terminological fact has discouraged the issue from being raised...

...The same objection applies to Edward Banfield's "lower-class culture," which refers to some of the same values...

...Nor did he tell us how many were of retirement age...

...The government and the private foundations are not about to fund academic probes into the bedrooms of Park Avenue, the boardrooms of Wall Street, or the cloakrooms of Congress, when the intent of the research is to study time orientation, ability to defer gratification, or machismo among the upper classes...

...We are badly in need of a fresh, imaginative, and objective look at the patterns of work and leisure among the nonpoor, and especially the rich...

...second, that the poor do indeed work less than the nonpoor...

...Her second husband was Jimmy, a divorced man whose scrapes with the law seemed to contribute to his sex appeal...

...The supposed shamefulness of labor (Mills wrote) on which many of Veblen's conceptions rest, does not square very well with the Puritan work ethic so characteristic of much of American life, including many upper-class elements...

...For others, it is merely an obfuscation that diverts us from the true causes of economic deprivation...

...For "culture of poverty" and "lower-class culture" I shall substitute "the culture of shiftlessness...

...It is a marriage of two distinct concepts: culture, referring to a set of values, and poverty, referring to a lack of monetary or material means...

...While there is merit in these arguments, they tacitly concede two crucial assumptions: first, that the values of this culture are more likely to be found among the poor...

...Although Mills interpreted his findings as supporting his earlier contention that "the very rich in America are not an idle rich and never have been," it turns out that 26 percent of his 1950 group were, in his words, "rentiers and not much else...

...More likely, his message was not really addressed to the black business leaders, but to the largely white middle-class readers of the next day's newspapers...

...Most important is the fact that Willie Mae is not poor...

...The answer is that it serves the ideological function of rationalizing the inequitable distribution of income in America...

...I am not denying that shiftlessness exists in some small but significant measure among the poor...

...The subject is a female, age 47, who has been intensively studied over a period of years...

...Yet the thumbnail sketch I have presented is relatively abstract, and if various other details are filled in, problems of interpretation arise...

...Willie Mae, in the words of one observer, "was emotionally scarred by the events in her family situation...

...The reasons are obvious...

...First, however, Lewis's definition of the culture must be narrowed sufficiently to render it plausible as an explanation of poverty...

...As a young woman she held a job briefly, and then married Roosevelt, a man much like her father, with a reputation for sexual promiscuity...

...Historically, the idea of the shiftless poor has vied in the popular mind with that of the shiftless rich...

...It would hardly be surprising, therefore, if denizens of this culture were likely to be poor and to contribute more than their share to the social and economic problems that plague urban America...

...It was only in the course of our analysis of values, however, that the even more interesting question arose: Do the poor actually work less than the nonpoor, quite apart from their attitudes toward work...

...The Vice-President admitted that there were many, including himself, who did not have to work...

...30-31...

...350 scientists have seen fit to ask whether the culture actually is concentrated among the poor...

...53 percent v. 83 percent for Anglos), a matter of 18 and 30 points difference, respectively...

...But now that the pendulum of blame has swung in the opposite direction, the bias operates against the poor: their labor is dismissed as nonwork on the same grounds, i.e., that it is less socially useful or less "functionally important...

...Government employment statistics indicate that the poor are more likely to be unemployed...

...Steel Corporation...

...Walls of flame from surrounding ovens shoot over his head...

...Projecting the trend to 32 percent in 1975, we discover that the percentage of idle rich is the same as that of the idle black impoverished men in the Houston sample, and greater than the idle Mexican American impoverished men...

...As The Wall Street Journal has reported, his job "is hot, filthy, monotonous and dangerous...

...Lewis exacerbated the problem by confusing poverty with cultural traits he believed were associated with it—although he sometimes distinguished between them, as when he estimated that no more than onethird of the American poor belonged to the culture of poverty...

...Her sister, Laura, divorced and remarried, after having had a relationship with Jimmy, an older man whom Willie Mae was later to marry herself...

...To clinch the deal, executives from all three firms flew to San Francisco...

...In a recent secondary analysis of sample survey data collected by the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences with the assistance of the National Opinion Research Center, Charles Gaitz and I tried to discover whether the attitudes toward work expressed by the poor, as classified by government standards, varied from those expressed by the nonpoor.5 The data were drawn from a Houston sample...

...Webster's Third New International defines shiftlessness as follows: 1.a...

...Ignoring the obvious fact that no one who was this "present-time oriented" could live more than a few days, one can agree with Banfield that impulsiveness, or radical improvidence, is a more plausible explanation of 2Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 48...

...Jimmy had seen Willie Mae soon after Roosevelt was killed, and their relationship continued until their marriage, which was said to have infuriated Jimmy's favorite long-time girl friend, as well as a number of his more casual ones...

...But whether he is aware or not, his description serves the interest of the affluent, by justifying the present inequitable distribution of wealth and income...

...Rumor had it that her sister, Laura, had slept with Jimmy before Laura's first marriage broke up, and then again after she remarried...

...A new term is required that leaves open the question whether the cultural values under consideration are more wide-spread among the poor...

...Once these two concepts are joined together in unholy matrimony, it is difficult to appreciate that the culture and the economic reality of poverty can vary independently of each other...

...Basically," he went on, "those who really care, really want to do it, are going to do it through hard work...

...The same problem is posed in the New York Times obituary of Charles Revson of Revlon: "Despite his interest in the social whirl, and the amount of time he spent aboard the Ultima II, the 257-foot, 1,200-ton yacht he bought from Daniel K. Ludwig, the multimillionaire shipbuilder, Mr...

...Social Problems, 22 (December, 1974), pp...

...Among women, there was no significant difference by poverty status in hours of housework performed by either Mexican Americans or Anglos...

...The phenomenon we were trying to explain by calling it the culture of shiftlessness, namely, the work differential between the poor and nonpoor, was itself suddenly in doubt...

...and if one measures work by the energy spent, then the laborer may outwork his boss even when putting in fewer hours...

...By this criterion, who works more...

...The most influential academic version of the busy rich was advanced by C. Wright Mills, who was as stern a critic of the American upper class as Veblen, although for different reasons...

...In turn, laziness causes poverty...

...reprinted in paper, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp...

...Rockefeller told the black audience...

...She was born into a family of established wealth...

...The ethnic minorities, on the average, expressed more support for work-oriented values than the Anglo majority...

...Moreover, when various kinds of activities besides employment in the narrow sense of full-time paid labor were lumped together—such as looking for work, and going to school—there was no significant difference between the poor and the nonpoor in any ethnic or sex category...

...He inhales tar, methane, benzine, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, coal dust, coke dust, and particles of pure carbon...

...If the hypothesis is correct, one would expect to find that the culture of poverty is more widespread among the poor than the nonpoor, and that it accounts for the smaller amount of work performed by the poor relative to other classes...

...Or was it something else...

...The Theory of the Leisure Class was an academic reflection of the widespread turn-of-the-century outrage at the socially subsidized shiftlessness of the wealthy of that day, symbolized by the extravagant potlatches of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Harrimans...

...b. Lacking in ambition or incentive: IDLE, LAZY...

...Buck initially won out...

...One person described her as "attracting men like honey does bees...

...Willie Mae had known him before Roosevelt's death...

...meaning that a rich person may belong to the lowerclass culture...

...We are told that they are not leisured—that ours is a generation of the "busy rich," the hard-driving Nelson Rockefeller rich...

...Lehman Brothers, the investment banking house, was instrumental last year in persuading Standard Oil of California to buy up some $300 million worth of new shares offered by Amax, Inc., to raise equity capital...

...2 But his unhappy choice of terms, just like Lewis's, makes it sound absurd to ask what proportion of the rich belong to the lower class...

...But if this is true, what accounts for the continuing influence of the culture-of-poverty hypothesis...

...Povertystatus black women put in more hours of housework than other black women—and more hours than nonpoor Anglo women...

...Is the culture of poverty peculiar to the poor...

...His famous list of 62 traits, which comprise the culture,' has rightly been criticized for its everything-including-thekitchensink comprehensiveness—one that brings together a welter of disparate qualities having no inherent relations to one another...

...In either case the implication of his message was the same...

...Since its formulation almost 20 years ago by Oscar Lewis, the concept of "the culture of poverty" has been at the vortex of controversy.' For some writers, it provides a key to the mystery of poverty...

...It is not whether they do or don't, but what percentage of the various classes work, and how much—questions requiring comparisons of the work habits of the classes...

...This is so because time units are easy to apply to any activity, and are more "objective" than, say, energy expenditure or productivity...

...351 Mills offered no evidence, nor, in a sense, was there a need for it...

...At one point in his book, The Unheavenly City, he writes...

...and of course among recent crops of `Texas millionaires...

...She is the paradigm of the "present-time oriented" individual, sometimes justifying this by the pain and suffering she has endured...

...Revson never lost contact with his office...

...One can hope, however, that at least a few intrepid researchers will not be deterred by the funding problem...

...Banfield's concept is an improvement, in that it salvages from Lewis's cultural smorgasbord those elements that hang together and plausibly explain why people who belong to the lower-class culture are in fact poor...

...The ideology of poverty influences the way sociologists see and describe the poor, even though the researcher $I relied primarily upon Freda Kramer's Jackie: A Truly Intimate Biography (New York: Award Books, 1975...

...Surely one can bully his wife, flaunt the law, confuse Andrew with Henry Jackson, have sexual intercourse before the age of ten, and still possess the virtues that enable one to become wealthy, if not healthy, respectable, or wise...

...He visited his daughters often, spoiled them shamelessly, and taught them his philosophy of playing "hard to get" to attract men...

...Comparisons between the rich and the nonrich are also sparse...

...Hylan Lewis, an anthropologist and longtime student of poverty (not to be confused with the late Oscar Lewis), early on recognized the significance of social science's concentration on the so-called culture of poverty...

...For a sizable number of the affluent, the rather nebulous activity of "keeping in contact with the office" seems to be all that distinguishes their daily routine from leisure...

...He works all day on top of a battery of hot brick ovens, pulling off the heavy steel oven lids with a long iron bar and dumping in coal...

...Students of poverty, going a step further, have built a one-sided case against an entire social class—the poor...

...Unable to do so, Buck began fighting with Mary Ann, Willie Mae's mother...

...Willie Mae is the fictitious name of a wellknown person...

...A comparison of work behavior and attitudes among the urban poor and nonpoor...

...If the poor can be saddled with the responsibility for their poverty, and the public convinced that the poor are the sole carriers of the "disease" of shiftlessness, the goals of a full-employment economy and a guaranteed decent standard of living become pointless...

...poverty than such of Lewis's traits as machismo, early initiation into sex, an impoverished sense of history, or hatred of the police...

...Such an argument is no more plausible than Veblen's...

...She compulsively spends money on clothes and adornments...

...My suggestion is simply that shiftlessness is fairly equally distributed among social classes, and hence cannot be used to explain income differences...

...Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959...

...The political use that is made of the image of the shiftless poor is illustrated in an incident that occurred during a vicepresidential visit to Houston in December of 1975...

...If the poor differ from the nonpoor, it would seem...

...when it rains or snows, it rains or snows on Walter Brown...

...Obviously many of the rich and near rich do work hard...

...Critics have usually tried to show either that the behavior of poor people is not a manifestation of a genuine culture or that their tendency to work less is a function of some aspect of the larger socioeconomic structure: racial discrimination, for example, or job scarcity...

...She remained single for a while, but because of her looks and her image as a "man's woman," she had no lack of male attention...

...Her father, Buck, was pathologically unstable...

...There is no roof...

...They fought often...

...His sample consisted of three generations of the 90 or so reputedly richest people in the country in 1900, 1925, and 1950...

...My own view," he wrote, "is that the most important research in this area now should focus not on the culture of poverty but on the culture of affluence—this is the culture that matters more and that is far more dangerous than the culture of poverty...

...As this case history was being written in early 1974, there were signs that their marriage was on the rocks...

...No statistically significant differences were observed between the poor and nonpoor in any ethnic category...

...Compare the activities of the executive and professional classes with those of Walter Brown: Walter Brown, aged 40, is a coke oven worker at the Clairton, Pennsylvania, plant of the U.S...

...Moreover, the percentage of idle rich had increased from 14 percent in 19.0 t0o 17 percent in 1925 and to 26 percent in 1950...

...Willie Mae's marriage ended abruptly when Roosevelt was shot to death on the street by a man who was thought to be deranged...

...Wright Mills, "Introduction," in Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New American Library, 1953), pp...

...We limited our analysis to the 20- to 64-year-old age group, and controlled for the effects of both sex and ethnicity (black, Anglo, and Mexican American...

...xiv-xv...

...Even more important, it leaves open the question whether the attitudes it describes are peculiar to the poor...

...1963), pp...

...He, too, came from a family prone to violence and tragedy...

...The bricks he walks range in temperature up to 180 degrees, and the steel lids up to 480 degrees...

...Fortunately, our abovementioned Houston survey data contained information about the respondents' work habits, and enabled us to compare the poor and nonpoor irrespective of labor-force participation...

...The theme of his address that night was the virtue of hard work...