Lawrence Mead's The New Politics of Poverty: The Non-Working Poor in America
Katz, Michael
THE NEW POLITICS OF POVERTY: THE NONWORKING POOR IN AMERICA, by Lawrence Mead. Basic Books, 1992. 356 pp. $25.00. In 1986 Lawrence Mead catapulted to prominence with the publication of Beyond...
...It does not fit the origins of the Civil Rights movement in the rural South or its subsequent history...
...In his new book, The New Politics of Poverty: The Non-Working Poor in America, Mead blends these arguments into a provocative account of recent political history...
...Dismissing commonly asserted causes for "nonwork," Mead offers his own explanation, which is rooted in human nature and culture...
...Work, moreover, requires habits learned and practiced over time...
...Mead castigates poor blacks not only for "nonwork" but also for their inability to hold a job...
...In his current book, Mead has traded his moral defense of compulsion for a psychological one...
...Nor are low wages a real obstacle to work by single mothers...
...Mead's specific recommendations are surprisingly timid and conventional...
...Clients looked through telephone directories and other job listings, but they received very little job preparation or support, and, most seriously, these programs paid no attention to job creation...
...Mead also tries to dismiss the lack of available child care as a cause of nonwork among single mothers...
...Mead argues that the initial jobs young blacks get are as good as those of whites...
...By "competence" Mead means "all the qualities that allow a person to get ahead in economic terms—not only intelligence, but foresight, energy, discipline, and the ability to sacrifice for the future...
...Mead relies on Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) data, the principal evaluation of WIN experiments, which he interprets selectively...
...Two recent studies provide powerful evidence that contradicts this assessment...
...4. As a response to the new poverty, a new politics of dependency based on "social and personal" issues has emerged to replace the old, redistributive politics of class...
...Although single mothers themselves work no less often than they did in 1959, it should be noted that the number of them receiving welfare (AFDC) declined from 63 percent in 1972 to about 45 percent in 1988, an inconvenient statistic unreported by Mead...
...Competence is the quality essential for "normal functioning...
...According to his statistics, the percentage of single female heads who did not work at all in 1959 was 57.1 and in 1989, 58.4, virtually the same...
...In every state, single mothers, he claims, can support two children above the poverty line without welfare...
...Mead has highlighted a new form of poverty concentrated especially in America's inner cities...
...This, of course, is precisely where the problem is worst...
...He is right about the men...
...For Mead, the emergence of an underclass represents the replacement of a hard-working generation by one that doesn't want to work...
...Dependency politics asks, "how fully Americans should live up to values, including basic civilities, on which nearly everyone is agreed...
...In the end, Mead undercuts his case by admitting that spatial mismatch might be a problem in depressed Eastern and Midwestern cities...
...In a recent study, the Urban Institute sent carefully matched black and white men in Chicago and Washington, D.C., to apply for the same jobs...
...The jobless poor, especially young men and single mothers, do not respond to ordinary incentives...
...It defended the boundary between the individual and the state...
...His sole evidence for costs is from WIN (federal workfare) programs in which clients spent "only" 7 percent of their budgets on transportation, a figure that, on a minimum wage or other low income, does not strike me as insignificant...
...Contrary to Mead's version of political history, since early in the nation's history authoritarian efforts to regulate behavior have remained central to conservatism, which has confined its concern with freedom primarily to the marketplace...
...Rusty, maybe never learned, they become progressively harder to activate, and potential employers regard the long-term unemployed with heightened suspicion...
...When such programs don't work, in his view, it is the fault of clients who fail to follow good advice or to seize opportunities...
...Mead makes a five-part argument: 1. "Nonwork" is the major cause of a new form of poverty...
...On the world scene, his hero is the IMF, "which operates as a kind of international workfare...
...In practical terms, Mead advocates compulsory workfare...
...His explanation, which rests solely on character, ignores falling real wages, inflation, court decisions about retirement, and other factors that propel or permit people to work longer hours and more years, such as those referred to by Juliet Schor in The Overworked American...
...Among these, the most important is the contrasting experience of blacks and white immigrants, which refutes Mead's attempts to blame blacks for not following the path to upward mobility trod by Europeans who came to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century...
...Mead's case rests partly on curious omissions and slippery language...
...However, "Between 1973 and 1989," concludes the most authoritative report on the subject, "the earnings of young black males deteriorated relative to whites...
...Could that great private American institution, the southern plantation, have functioned without them...
...These are serious arguments, which Mead documents with abundant footnotes to social science and policy literature...
...He would prefer that immigrants and minorities not be allowed to vote unless they are both fully employed and fluent in English...
...Their "success" consists almost solely in saving money for the state by sanctioning clients and "churning" the welfare rolls...
...Concentrating on them, Mead discounts the Boston experience, except as evidence for his argument for the irrelevance of job supply to the "nonwork" problem...
...Most women, he assumes, "probably" find affordable and satisfactory child care because so many of them rely on their relatives...
...Between 1973 and 1984, the poverty rate for full-time adult male workers grew 45 percent...
...It's not that whites have failed to try to teach blacks independence...
...This is his challenge to the political left, which has retreated before the issue of race, advocated ineffectual public policies, and failed to develop a compelling explanation of the situation within inner cities...
...The old issues, he writes, were "economic and structural...
...So do the other items omitted from Mead's skewed history...
...If the able-bodied unemployed wanted jobs, Mead believes, they could find them quickly...
...In fact, the best available evidence, Why Black Men Are Doing Worse in the Labor Market: A Review of Supply-Side and Demand-Side Explanations, by Philip Moss and Chris Tilly (Social Science Research Council, 1991), documents the declining labor-market fortunes of black men...
...only liberal activists object...
...He attacks bilingual education and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, "as amended and interpreted by the courts, instituted a kind of electoral affirmative action...
...and community action's history and accomplishments do not fit Mead's distorted account of its failures or the forces that killed it...
...For Mead, government has permitted an excess of 552 • DISSENT freedom, and we have reaped the consequences in nonwork, dependence, illegitimacy, crime, drugs, and social disorder...
...Mead, however, will have none of this...
...As in the first Civil War, the GOP is leading the "new battle for integration...
...A more careful analysis of the same data shows these experiments to have been largely failures, which did not lift clients above the poverty line or put many into permanent jobs...
...The rise in involuntary part-time workers between 1989 and 1992, 1.5 million, rivals the number of workers, 2 million, who lost their jobs...
...The growth of income inequality, he contends, has no connection to poverty...
...Mead grounds his cultural explanations in historical distortions...
...the need is to create it...
...Mead supports his policy recommendations with a caricature of liberal programs and a celebration of contemporary workfare, especially the WIN program as it has been implemented in San Diego...
...Mead identifies "nonwork" with young black men and single mothers...
...Evidently, the worldview of blacks makes them uniquely prone to the attitudes contrary to work, and thus vulnerable to poverty and dependency...
...Does the location of jobs in suburbs create insurmountable difficulties for inner-city residents (the mismatch theory...
...He points out the rise in the number of hours worked between 1973 and 1988 and the increase in the number of people working during old age, which he interprets as evidence of a heightened work ethic that separates ordinary Americans from the nonworking poor...
...His whole discussion begs the question by not figuring out what women would have to earn to match the combination of medical benefits, food stamps, and other assistance available through welfare and then comparing it to the wages they could expect to earn...
...Because group memories of slavery and Jim Crow, he contends, induced lasting hopelessness and passivity, blacks responded to prejudice in a distinctive way...
...I fear it will be as influential as it is flawed...
...The withdrawal of many blacks from "mainstream institutions," asserts Mead, amounts to an "internal secession . . . no less threatening to the country than the more formal rupture in 1861...
...Black history since then [the end of slavery] can be seen as a high-pressure education in an economically achieving way of life...
...the 1970s hardly constituted the first time critics seriously asserted the incapacity of government to reach its goals...
...Welfare and labor-market policies remained, as always in American politics, dissociated...
...As a result of a court order, inner-city single mothers moved into housing in mainly white suburbs where jobs happened to be much more available...
...In Mead's explanation of "nonwork," psychology buttresses culture...
...2. Neither economic trends, racism, segregation, inadequate child care, nor other tangible obstacles explain the emergence of the new poverty...
...The list could go on...
...The situation emerges as even worse than Mead describes because wage differentials between black and white men have widened since the mid-1970s, and even controlling for education does not substantially reverse the relative earning decline of blacks, which was most severe among the college educated and high-school dropouts...
...Relatively high unemployment accompanied the prosperity and job creation of the 1980s because structural changes in the economy kept the labor market for unskilled workers slack...
...Little else can be as demoralizing as the inability to find a decent job...
...In 1986 Lawrence Mead catapulted to prominence with the publication of Beyond Entitlement, which argued for enforcing work obligations on welfare recipients...
...When blacks are not dependent, they are slow learners...
...Another is low wages...
...the right wanted to restrict it...
...He provides no source for this assertion, and his discussion of the spatial mismatch theory itself considers only bus routes, not the cost of transportation...
...What increased was the absolute number of single mothers...
...However, as Mead's own tables show, his contention about single mothers is incorrect...
...Passivity does not explain why AfricanAmericans' rates of school attendance remained so high in early twentieth-century cities...
...it reinforces stereotypes of black inferiority...
...He is right that conditions within them are unprecedented in American history...
...In the end, if his strategy succeeded, it would increase the supply of reliable, low-wage workers...
...One exception proves the rule: the tight labor market in Boston during the 1980s...
...This is why economists' rational models can't explain "nonwork" in America's ghettos, where residents live outside the market...
...Mead mires his arguments in contradictions...
...Nonetheless, he misleads about the evidence, misreads history, substitutes rhetorical tricks for reasoned analysis, slips into a language that reinforces class and racial stigma, mires himself in contradictions, seeks to exclude many Americans from citizenship, and proposes curtailing freedom and extending authority...
...He can't have it both ways...
...Although Mead admits that employers frequently do remain unwilling to hire black men, he contends their refusal reflects unfavorable prior experience, not racism...
...Mead finds the problem of dependency politics also gnawing away like a cancer in international affairs...
...It might be thought that the expense of car ownership, transportation, and the hostility blacks face in suburbs would provide common-sense answers to this question...
...For him, the search for material gain is the only rational behavior...
...rates of joblessness among them have risen to astonishing proportions...
...But the social scientists who have tried to find quantitative ways of measuring the relation between the location of home and jobs have given equivocal responses, although the best evidence provides some support for the mismatch theory...
...Indeed, Mead is no friend of diversity...
...Descriptions that apply to some young black men and single mothers denigrate a much larger group because Mead applies them to the "poor," which gives his argument a nasty racial edge...
...To reach them, social policy needs to rely on the stick rather than the carrot...
...He has identified an important new strand in national politics...
...After all, black male unemployment continued to rise during the prosperous 1980s...
...Incentives assume competence...
...Without qualifications, Mead's argument that "nonwork" has increased among poor household heads also misleads because many more single women now head poor households...
...federal planners of the 1960s did not try to defeat poverty through income transfers...
...Furthermore, he asserts, it is largely voluntary...
...This is not the view I hear from lawyers and welfare-rights advocates...
...5. At its most constructive, the new politics of dependency realizes that only public policy that utilizes the authority of the state to enforce acceptable behavior can alleviate the new poverty...
...Other significant historical omissions include legal restrictions on their mobility in the South, de jure segregation, state-sanctioned violence, lynching, and the racism that excluded them from unions and manufacturing jobs in the North...
...Mead's connection between "nonwork" and "competence" redraws the boundaries of political community to exclude large numbers of Americans from the ordinary entitlements of citizenship...
...Mead contrasts the new politics of dependency with an older progressive politics that lasted until the 1960s...
...Strictly speaking, blacks have made less money in the private sector, but failure to draw attention to the legal barriers, social customs, and violence that excluded them from the private economy is not only incomplete...
...But if employers, for whatever reason, refuse to hire black men, then "nonwork" is not nearly so voluntary as Mead implies...
...Where, then, did the hard-working generation come from...
...The longer one goes without a job, the harder it is to get and hold one...
...In Beyond Entitlement, Mead justified compulsion on moral grounds...
...Among the working-aged, it is the primary source of poverty...
...His source is a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation, and his calculations omit the cost and availability of medical insurance...
...As evidence for his position, Mead has only two 1979 studies that claim that increasing the availability of child care would produce at best a 10 percent rise in work effort by women...
...Mead distinguishes between the reasons for low wages and those for "nonwork...
...Later he discounts the importance of medical insurance in deterring women from taking jobs without medical benefits...
...Dependence does not capture the spirit of poor, former slaves who in the years after the Civil War matched from their own resources the money given by white philanthropy to build schools...
...Mead also argues that employment discrimination has dropped to negligible levels...
...Nonwork" appears voluntary because Mead calls it "withdrawal" from the labor force...
...Young African-American men and single mothers constitute the overwhelming number of the new poor...
...This argument assumes that the growth of concentrated, persistent poverty in America's cities bears no relation to the forces that, at the same time, restructured their labor markets and lowered wages...
...Government statistics show a long-term increase in both voluntary and involuntary part-time work...
...In interviews with employers in Chicago, Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman encountered open reluctance to hire young black men among firms of all types and sizes...
...The answer could drive domestic politics and shape social policy for the next generation...
...Poverty among the working-aged, Mead correctly observes, is "in the first instance" an "employment problem...
...Harvard economist Richard Freeman, drawing on the Boston experience, concludes that "employment of black FALL • 1992 • 549 youths is particularly sensitive to the state of the local labor market...
...Involuntary part-time workers, of course, are the most likely to lack health benefits and to live in poverty...
...only a strong federal government could reverse the slide into permanent dependence and social pathology in America's inner cities...
...The poor had an obligation to work for their support...
...Mead can offer no evidence for this assertion, which, in fact, is contradicted by his own data showing the underrepresentation of black male household heads among the jobless as well as by abundant historical evidence...
...This represents a relatively new situation, because throughout much of American history low wages and irregular work meant that employment alone did not lift most workers out of poverty...
...Part of "competence" is employment, which, he contends, "is essential to being a functional citizen...
...Rational explanations don't account for "nonwork," because the poor won't accept the jobs that would improve their situation...
...Progressive politics debated the tradeoffs between security, equality, and growth...
...In 1991, one in five were part-time and two-thirds voluntary...
...But Mead would dismiss them as partisan, claiming greater objectivity for himself and his conservative allies...
...Mead, a conservative, builds his case by asserting the passivity and incompetence of the poor...
...The principal issue for the politics of dependency "hinges on whether the needy can be responsible for themselves, and above all, on whether they have the competence to manage their lives...
...Researchers discovered that abundant jobs and reasonable wages drew many who had been thought unemployable into the labor force and dramatically reduced unemployment...
...Mead gives no good reasons for dismissing the evidence of economists, such as Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, who find a close association between the forces depleting good jobs and those driving wages down...
...Also contrary to Mead's claims, American writing about poverty always has stressed the personal responsibility of the poor for their plight...
...For Mead, "incompetence" distinguishes the dependent poor from other Americans and necessitates a different kind of social policy...
...Mead dismisses all structural arguments...
...For some mysterious reason, ghetto residents do not believe opportunity exists for them...
...One consequence was the rise in the number of working poor...
...Although Mead's metaphor of a second Civil War is preposterous, he is right that an unprecedented crisis exists within America's inner cities...
...there is little, if any, evidence that the "public loves to help poor people" through employment...
...Between 1979 and 1989, one-third of the increase in part-time work consisted of workers who wanted full-time work...
...The issue is how to interpret it...
...The question," Mead asks, "is how passive you can be and remain a citizen in full standing...
...I see them rather as dutiful but defeated...
...Also writing of Boston, MIT economist Paul Osterman observes, "Full employment does in fact deliver many of the benefits its advocates have promised...
...Here he neglects much careful, empirical work on the topic that contradicts his assertion by showing how the structure of welfare makes work disadvantageous for poor mothers and how unlikely they are to earn enough to escape poverty...
...it also creates entitlement to citizenship...
...He has argued correctly that policy has a moral as well as an economic dimension...
...He offers an intellectual foundation for conservatism in the nineties and beyond...
...Today, few full-time workers fall below the poverty line...
...Government, in his view, should assume more, rather than less, responsibility...
...Mead equates rationality with the desire to make money...
...One might read the evidence another way...
...Unlike Charles Murray, whose Losing Ground (1984) argued for reducing the scope and responsibilities of the state, Mead developed a conservative defense of big government...
...But are they correct...
...Good behavior is at issue, not the good society...
...Unlike white immigrant groups facing discrimination, they didn't start their own enterprises or even flee the South...
...Mead attacks black capacity relentlessly...
...The availability of jobs constitutes only one obstacle to "nonwork" that Mead dismisses...
...At the same time, he FALL • 1992 • 551 asserts, "Black demoralization is heavily due to the oppressions of slavery and Jim Crow...
...What Mead wants from government, in a word, is authority...
...548 • DISSENT 3. Instead, the new poverty's roots lie in psychology, culture, and human nature...
...Without compulsion, the dependent poor will not realize the importance of work...
...Elsewhere he contends, "Blacks work at much lower rates than whites no matter where they live," only, two pages later, to contradict himself by pointing to the underrepresentation of black male household heads among the long-term jobless and the propensity of black single mothers to "work their way off welfare" as often as whites...
...To dismiss the role of psychology in "nonwork" would be foolish, although I suspect it operates differently than Mead contends and that the issue is not irrationality or cultural memory but the duration of joblessness...
...Until recently, blacks have played a much smaller role in the institution where other groups find their economic base—the private economy...
...Mead has resurrected Sambo, Mammy, and Uncle Tom and held them responsible for "welfare queens" and Willie Horton...
...Pessimism about future prospects rests on a realistic assessment of the job market...
...In 1957, one out of every eight workers was part-time and 80 percent of these were voluntary...
...Certainly, a significant fraction still remained hard to reach and outside the labor market...
...Mead discounts mothers' statements that finding child care is difficult, which, he claims with no reasons, cannot be taken at "face value...
...The culture of black America is the most significant for an understanding of today's nonwork and poverty...
...Mead dismisses the growth of part-time work in the 1980s as evidence of job shortage because most part-time work, he asserts, is voluntary...
...Their work rate rose dramatically, far exceeding that of their counterparts who remained in the inner city...
...The left wanted to "expand" government's intervention in the marketplace on behalf of workers...
...yet he also contends that only conservatives believe in the competence of the poor and their ability to work regularly like everybody else...
...To argue for a dissociation between falling real wages and poverty is to live in a fantasy land...
...Here, too, the data fail to support his case...
...In fact, with virtually no evidence, he observes that welfare clients like compulsion...
...He denies that jobs are in short supply...
...Despite the improved rewards of work, what Mead calls "nonwork" has increased, especially among minorities...
...Instead, they "remained dependent on the white man, both economically and psychologically...
...This demographic shift accounts for most of the increased "nonwork" among single mothers since the 1950s...
...Since the 1970s, moreover, the rate of black college entry has declined...
...Nor does he 550 • DISSENT discuss the most interesting direct evidence on the question: the Gattreaux "experiment" in the Chicago area...
...Both "deindustrialization" and an assault on the "social wage" began in earnest after 1973 as employers confronted international competition and falling profits...
...Aside from compulsory workfare, he would allow fathers of AFDC families to work, and he would supplement low wages with public funds...
...neither wages, working conditions, nor prospects were relevant...
...He calls for better education and drug enforcement...
...Or is Mead correct that the location of jobs doesn't matter because anyone who really wants to work will find a way to get there...
...Out of this melange of misinterpreted statistics, slippery evidence, and contradiction emerges one fact that cannot be disputed: the extraordinary jobless rate among black young men...
...Used widely to support federal workfare, the book's lasting significance lay in the intellectual foundation it provided for contemporary conservatism...
...Either the history of blacks is one of demoralization and passivity since slavery days or nonwork and associated behaviors have emerged only recently...
...Although he argues that blacks—all blacks—are more likely than whites to quit their jobs, his footnote calls the evidence equivocal, and the study on which he relies refers only to black men...
...the new ones are social and personal...
...it reflects "a lesser view of competence than programs that make serious demands on the dependent...
...Mead tries to strike a "moderate" stance, rejecting "the position that nonwork is sensible behavior for the poor, and also the view that the poor are fundamentally flawed or opposed to work...
...Voluntarism, he believes, not only will not work...
...He does not consider the elasticity of the supply of relative-based care or the impact of the increasing proportion of working women on the availability of relatives to provide child care...
...Most researchers, however, draw the opposite conclusion...
...Although he wants to encourage the dependent poor to seize opportunity, he does not think government should do very much to set them on the road to real upward mobility, and he opposes allowing clients to leave their workfare jobs to pursue education...
...The whites received job offers much more often than the blacks...
...The mismatch theory, he contends, overlooks the fact that population has left cities faster than jobs, thereby creating plenty of opportunity for work...
...As a conservative advocate of big government, Mead rejects the views of other conservatives, notably Charles Murray, who believe that simply eliminating welfare will reduce dependence...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
