How We See the Poor

...Has social science become yet another aspect of our market-driven culture...

...Like Rank, who makes no effort to hide the effects of empathy on his character, they are compassionate as well as intelligent...

...Because Funiciello knows her own history and that of many people who were homeless or poor with her, she finds it comfortable to put her faith in them...

...None of them is content with the welfare system...

...No one believes that welfare solves problems...

...The most widely noted of the four, Christopher Jencks' The Homeless, was motivated, the author says, by the editor of the New York Review of Books...

...It has a price, he says, that has been exacted from the poor people he met...

...And adventurers seldom want to keep track of other people's money...

...That is how we book reviewers are...

...ft., not counting bathrooms...

...Rank breaks this venerable form, and it affects the nature of his book...

...Then Skid Row is not an attractive solution...

...After reading these four books it is impossible to separate the social scientists from their circumstances...

...Funiciello and Rank are concerned first about the reactions of the people whose names and stories appear in their pages...

...Ultimately, though, he urges us "to begin to analyze the game [of economic musical chairs] itself, rather than simply those who lose at it...

...Without such information, one was left with a half-finished sketch of the welfare picture...

...His analyses are clear, his demands for precise definitions refreshing...

...Goodness, for example, is evident...

...Perhaps the standard should be the rigors of the human critique...

...distortions will not be overlooked by those who find themselves reflected in the light of the work...

...like men who stand on the moon, we think that the distance gives us control of the world below...

...In truth, she is always outraged...

...266pp...

...To that end he offers six approaches: "They include establishing a coordinated employment policy, building individual assets, providing tax benefits to assist low-income workers, addressing the economic consequences of family change, providing universal health care, and developing and building community resources and opportunities...

...It began as a review of the recent literature, and although it grew into a slim volume, it remains a view of viewers and their views...

...Beyond this fiercely aware audience, Funiciello and Rank face their colleagues, in the academy and out, and lastly the policymakers in Washington and the state houses, the powerful people they want to influence...

...The market-driven aspect of each book comes through clearly...

...The definition of the homeless that drives his book defines its audience: "...what I am really writing about is what we might call the 'visible homeless'??people whose presence on the streets upsets the more prosperous classes...

...Her Archimedean point is here and now...

...Less than 10 per cent of poor children live in big city ghetto neighborhoods...

...Jencks' audience is apparent throughout...

...Bane and Ellwood claim that "Americans misunderstand the nature of poverty...

...We badly need more reliable information on where the homeless get their money and how they spend it," he writes...

...ft., including a 50 sq...

...I do not mean to cast one of our more notable social scientists in an unfair light...

...The conclusions reached by the writers further reveal how they have focused on the demands of their audiences...

...And if we were being picky, one of us??you or I??would notice its resemblance to the slogans of the Reagan Right...

...Moreover, all want to reduce the role of government, to make the poor less dependent...

...no one seems to feel the need to explain why dependence is bad or independence is good...

...Tyranny of Kindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America By Theresa Funiciello Atlantic...

...And, indeed, a book that closely engages its subjects must be a well-made mirror...

...The alternative is to establish some rule about the validity of markets...

...Bane and Ellwood seek to influence policymakers first, and then the academy...

...They don't like the welfare system, and believe no one else does either: "Liberals decry the very low benefits...

...340 pp...

...She is sick to death of the "helping professions...

...Conservatives argue that it breeds dependency and illegitimacy...

...In all of this they seem to follow the pattern set by Funiciello and Rank, yet in the end they sound a curiously moralistic note: "To turn things around, we will have to ensure that people who play by the rules do not lose the game...

...220 pp...

...Rank describes free-market capitalism as a game of musical chairs in which someone is always left out when the music stops...

...In brief, here is what they say: Nothing less than a guaranteed income policy will satisfy Funiciello...

...29.95...

...The point," he continues, "is to begin to temper and reduce this price...

...One thing is clear from this group, however: Archimedes was correct, distance affects the way we see the world...

...Closest to Jencks stand Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood...

...Metaethical discussions are absent from these books...

...Neither he nor any of the others, though, is able to escape the drive of the market...

...Jencks spoke originally to the readers of a magazine aimed at the academy, but surely he also has the policymakers in mind...

...They also share some views...

...Riis' smallest apartments had two rooms??274 sq...

...29.95...

...He offers some thoughts about what has caused it ("deinstitutionalization"??a word that dances to the music of bureaucracy??and so on), but he can't really put his finger on the cause either...

...bathroom...

...Yet what if Rank and Funiciello are right, and the poor have much the same aspirations as the rest of us, we of "the more prosperous classes...

...It is not money she bestows upon them so much as freedom, with all of its responsibilities...

...The relentless human critique has no purchase on their work, for their subjects are numbers and the experience of observers...

...The books that have inspired my curiosity??or perhaps more precisely, my doubts??are not of a piece...

...she and her subjects stand on common ground...

...Jencks' perfect antipode may be Theresa Funiciello, a woman who was on welfare, briefly homeless, and then became an advocate...

...Each has a different origin and was written from a different perspective...

...Is it guided by the interest of its intended audience, which may be as small as one person in Washington or a group of colleagues, or as large as all the poor and homeless in America...

...Funiciello has no distance from the people she is writing about...

...Mark Robert Rank stands beside Funiciello, but they do not occupy the same ground...

...Both are Assistant Secretaries in the U.S...

...The authors do share certain characteristics...

...and practical and affordable nonwelfare solutions do exist...

...Christopher Jencks functions at the next remove...

...He understands that his audience requires orderly, incremental solutions, but for him the human critique mandates consideration of the radical possibility...

...Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform By Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood Harvard...

...Department of Health and Human Services, on leave from the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School??and Bane has been the manager of a street-level social program in New York...

...Funiciello is outraged...

...Speaking of the apartment for homeless New Yorkers proposed by Andrew Cuomo, now Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Funiciello turns to a comparison with those designed by Jacob Riis a century earlier...

...Jencks, like the other authors of these books on poverty, brings the decency of present-day liberalism to what has become an endemic tragedy in America...

...In the journey from Funiciello to Bane and Ellwood the viewpoint has gone from the bottom up to the top down...

...in other words, these social scientists are not the sort who hold their noses while seeking to do or say what they consider just...

...This fact is too often missing from the policy and academic debate...

...The radicalism of Funiciello's plan permits clarity, and its attendant economies...

...As [Leslie] Dunbar states, social science 'treats the poor like a foreign nation or refashions them into objects unlike us...

...Nevertheless, he goes on to conclude: "Whatever their current budgets look like, we have to assume that a significant proportion of today's homeless will spend any additional cash they receive on drugs or alcohol...

...Reviewed by Earl Shorris Author, "Latinos," "Power Sits at Another Table" and, forthcoming from Norton, "A Nation of Salesmen" IT SEEMS a simple-minded question, an amateur's problem, but four recently published books about poverty in America make it virtually impossible to avoid asking: Why do people do social science...

...Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America By Mark Robert Rank Columbia...

...That is, while the statistical data were quite valuable, there was no information regarding welfare recipients' feelings, experiences, beliefs, and so on...

...Arranged in ideological order, from Left to Right, the lineup would be: Funiciello, Rank, Bane and Ellwood, Jencks...

...undeniably good men and women...

...How different from Rank, who questions the morality of the game rather than that of the players...

...The audience that sets the rules for Funiciello and Rank??the people they interviewed and came to know??does not truly exist for Bane and Ellwood or Jencks...

...What would she say to Jencks' finding a 60 sq...

...He faults both liberals and conservatives for the destruction of those units, and even though he deplores the quality of the housing and the life, he thinks the return of Skid Row is a solution of sorts to homelessness...

...It is] a discipline that speaks mainly for the approval of other social scientists and of legislators, and seldom consults the poor themselves.' Effective as well as humane policies will be based on the assumption of commonalities between the poor and the nonpoor...

...Contrary to the old "limousine liberal" theory, the closer the writers are to the poor the more Left their notions...

...To varying degrees, none is pleased with the role of government in the lives of the poor, including the homeless...

...What is the purpose...

...That is not to say any of them cross the political midpoint to conservatism, but Left to Center on social policy today describes a very large field...

...23.00...

...Funiciello portrays herself as a tough guy with street smarts, Jencks wants to be as relentless as justice or objectivity, Bane and Ellwood want to be as impersonal as a policy manual, but these attempts at deception fail...

...In thinking about such a work, I am reminded of what Archimedes said about distance: "Give me a point to stand on and I can move the earth...

...Jencks is surely a first-rate social scientist...

...At least twice that number live in two-parent families with a full-time worker...

...Finally, they want a national system of "insured child support enforcement,' ' which they term "a real welfare alternative...

...cage room acceptable, at least during what could turn out to be a very long interim period between homelessness and...

...But what is the best of all possible markets...

...Jencks attributes much of the problem of homelessness to the destruction of "cage hotels" and the Skid Row neighborhoods where they existed...

...If the group had a slogan, it might be "Get government off the backs of the people...

...he not only describes, he analyzes...

...Arguing that people who work should not be poor, Bane and Ellwood propose to "make work pay" through "a combination of wage and tax policies to ensure that a full-time worker earns enough to keep his or her family out of poverty," including the cost of day care, and advocate "medical protection [for] all low-income families, not just those on welfare...

...Rankis apractical man...

...Since markets are interchangeable (that is, one may choose to do social science on the same subject for any market), the reader is left to choose the market that comes closest to the comforts of home...

...Nor can the "where you sit is where you stand" theory be applied to them, for they are not poor...

...But the only way to collect better information is to spend endless hours with the homeless, observing what they do instead of just asking them about such matters on surveys...

...She wants the government to supply the difference between an income of $0 and $28,000 for a family of three...

...And what...

...Living with the homeless is both disagreeable and dangerous, so only the adventurous want to do it...

...During his 10 years of field work, Rank reports, he found "only half the story of welfare recipiency was being told...

...Cuomo's plan calls for one-room apartments of 271 sq...

...But he has no solution to the problem of homelessness...

...The recipients often hate it most of all, claiming that it leaves them isolated, frustrated, and humiliated...

...Proximity to the subject determines the audience and the audience determines the work...

...Rank, whose book is the result of a decade of research, and who is more sophisticated than I am about the practice of social science, grapples with the very issue I raised at the outset when he writes: "For policies to effectively temper the extent of poverty, they should be based on the assumption that the poor and welfare recipients hold much in common with the attitudes and values of mainstream America...