Problem Solving and the Poor

...Levine's recommendations for a continuing attack on poverty show the influence both of his evaluations of past approaches and his predilection as a problem-solver for the politically feasible...

...Accordingly, it makes excellent sense to attach a "very high priority...

...One is the Uncle Tom type, quickly captured by the local power structure and tamed before it showed any signs of independence...

...Although Levine rests his hopes for community action on the responsible militants, will they accept his deemphasis on housing and education...

...Who defines the problems and who selects the means to resolve them...

...It is surely among the most engaging social science chronicles a glum period has evoked...

...on rigorously controlled experimentation," but it would be bad judgment to assign "major monies" to "anti-poverty education programs now...

...There are, he declares, three major varieties of community action agencies...

...Give corporations enough in the way of financial rewards and they will hire, train and promote the hard-core unemployed, or at least more of them than any alternative major institution is likely to...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Of the modest fraction I have read of the vast poverty literature, Robert A. Levine's evaluation of the triumphs, disasters and prospects of Lyndon Johnson's "unconditional" war on poverty may well be the best...

...His version of the agency's bureaucratic history is therefore intimate and, as his chapter title "A Biased History of the War on Poverty" candidly concedes, a touch partial...

...At the other extreme are wildly militant groups, whose major tactic is violent confrontation and whose apparent goal is institutional destruction...

...practical social reformers should enlist business' energies and refrain from courting its enmity...

...Head Start may have made a few children briefly happier, but on the evidence, it has achieved none of its educational goals...

...He is refreshingly honest about the data limitations, the confusing influence of other events and other programs, the brevity of the period examined, and the vagaries of cost-benefit analysis (which nevertheless is his favorite conceptual tool...

...a casualty is Levine's preferred solution to black unemployment, a problem he, but not the President, regards as important...

...At its most creative, oeo legal services (given high marks by Le-vine) has through successful litigation simply extended the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment to the poor...

...nor does it waste huge sums in surveillance and administrative overhead...

...Worse, they imply that those so recently hired with such fanfare will be ejected back into the poverty and hopelessness from which they had so recently emerged...

...How much of the improvement was the result of cyclical expansion and how much the fruit of oeo policy remains obscure...

...And Vice President Agnew, at least, appears to believe that the politics of provocation are extremely useful in winning the electoral affections of good middle Americans...

...Because such strategies arouse massive hostile reactions from city officials and working class groups, the politics of provocation is likewise fated to failure...

...The negative income tax is also preferable to family allowances, for it can be designed to hit its appropriate target, the low income population...

...Levine is thus compelled in a great many instances to grant that it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the war on poverty's impact on its two major objectives, diminishing poverty and widening equality of opportunity????especially because the two goals frequently conflicted...

...Finally, Levine advocates "Community Action????or Reasonable Facsimile...

...I share Levine's hope that ours is an age of problem-solving, as long as he and I can define the problems and design the solutions...

...Unlike welfare, it does not impair the work incentive, infringe the civil liberties, and damage the dignity of its beneficiaries...

...While disturbed by some of the compulsions built into the President's welfare proposals and by the tenor of his rhetoric, Levine approves Nixon's scheme as a major breakthrough to a true negative income tax...

...We know almost nothing about the education of the poor...

...Quite common in smaller cities and towns, community action directed by this model is literally worthless...

...The problem-solving style leaves incompletely answered a crucial question...

...The bulk of family allowances, to the contrary, would flow to middle- and upper-income parents...

...During the years of the author's service, the number of people living in officially defined poverty declined but, as Levine carefully observes, this was a time of high and rising employment...

...Nevertheless, the demands of the moderately militant are usually nonutopian, less than totally subversive of present arrangements and, in the eyes of Establishment politicians, it is easier to grant them, at least in part, than to bear the brunt of the escalation of political hostilities...

...Levine's second initiative is in the area of income maintenance...

...Integration obviously is not an important solution to any issue seriously considered by this Administration...

...National unemployment of 5 per cent????And a rate of black unemployment double that?spell failure for all manpower development efforts...

...Take manpower, the third leg of his policy tripod, jobs and every other attempt to induct the hard-core unemployed into the world of conventional employment requires tight labor markets and low rates of general unemployment...

...The rhetoric of Southern courtship, generational conflict and officially encouraged repression does not stimulate confidence in this Administration's commitment to rational solutions of the sort of problems that have occupied Levine's professional talents...

...Productive politics are coalition politics...

...And the best kind of community action, it turns out, is sponsored by the moderately militant...

...A negative income tax seems to him the most efficient of the income maintenance possibilities...

...Minority groups require allies, not additional enemies...

...This reservation aside, the chapter is an excellent compressed version of some chaotic events...

...The South is another problem to the President, who copes with it by nominating Carswells and Hayns-worths and dragging his feet on school desegregation...

...On this topic he makes some interesting judgments and defines a range of activity...

...The Nixon Administration has chosen to cure inflation by increasing unemployment...

...Here Levine rummages thoughtfully through a long catalogue of oeo ventures in manpower training and development, individual and community betterment, housing improvement, black capitalism, and income maintenance...

...The difficulty with massive educational outlay is the present state of our knowledge...

...An economist who favors what he praises as the "problem-solving style" (and opposes what he deprecates as "the politics of provocation"), Levine spent his time between 1966-69 as Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo) Assistant Director for Research, Plans, Programs, and Evaluations...

...Unhappily, much evidence persuades me that the present era is one of provocation, with a dangerous quantity of it emanating not from the political crazies and the militant blacks but from the President of the United States and his Executive family...

...Much of the time, responsible militants clamor for no more than their legal rights vis-a-vis welfare departments and housing authorities...

...The patchwork of present programs, he notes, alleviates the poverty of only half those suffering from the condition...

...He believes community action has scored irreversible successes in the construction of ghetto institutions????At last blacks have the support of a modern equivalent to the Workmen's Circles and other fraternal organizations that earlier in this century solaced Jewish and Italian immigrants...

...The trouble with spending very much on housing, Levine says, is the intractability of racial prejudice, which will block the dispersion of low income families from the ghettos in the foreseeable future...

...I fear that by his own criteria Levine's concluding pages on the Nixon Administration should be a good deal less encouraging...

...Levine concludes that oeo accomplished a good deal and is cheerful about the period ahead...

...He opts for three major programs, the first being an extension of jobs (Job Opportunities in the Business Sector), jobs has been comparatively successful?and the majority of the other oeo manpower programs relatively unsuccessful????because the incentive structure of business organizations, unlike most others, is powerful and well-understood...

...Oddly enough, Levine is quite gentle to personalities, even to that inveterate enemy of community action, Daniel Moynihan...

...Their objectives may be and quite probably are a source of discomfort to the present holders of political power and institutional privilege...

...The core of the book, however, is the succeeding chapter, "An Equally Biased Evaluation of the War on Poverty...