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The NYT's Ross Douthat just published an article titled "Two Premises on Poverty and Culture":
The last time I followed certain of my colleagues into an argument about poverty, economics and culture, it took several thousand words to find my way back out. This time I’m going to try a briefer intervention, stressing again that I think conversations about policing are a more productive response to what’s happened in Baltimore than leaping up a level to the persistent right-left argument about the welfare state. But since that debate is happening no matter what, it might be helpful to describe a framework in which I think these arguments should take place, because quite often the two sides can’t even decide on where the argument should start. So here, for your consideration, are two premises about the last fifty years of American history.
1.) The modern welfare state has succeeded in substantially cutting our country’s poverty rate. This is a point that both right and left sometimes obscure, the right because it complicates a simple “we fought poverty, and poverty won” narrative about the Great Society, the left because it complicates claims that Reagan or Gingrich gutted welfare spending and crushed the fortunes of the poor. But the basic evidence seems very convincing: Whether it’s Scott Winship analyzing the numbers from the center-right or Harvard’s Christopher Jencks doing the same from the center-left, you can see dramatic reductions in the poverty rate since the 1960s, with various public programs, means-tested and otherwise, pretty clearly playing a substantial role. Per Jencks’ calculation, accounting for benefits and inflation correctly yields an estimated poverty rate of 19 percent in ’64 and just 5 percent in 2013; other adjusted calculations yield higher specific numbers, but pretty similar percentage declines. The details of how this decline happened and which programs mattered most obviously matter a great deal for policy. (Winship, for instance, argues pretty convincingly that the decline was more significant after the mid-’90s welfare reform). But overall the evidence that spending money on the poor can reduce poverty seems strong.
2.) The modern welfare state has not succeeded in producing clear improvements in opportunity, mobility and human flourishing. Recall that the hope for the Great Society’s social programs, from the vantage point of 1964, was not merely to raise the incomes of poorer Americans. Their architects also aspired (to quote the chief of them) to make America “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents … where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness … where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” And if you try to translate these soaring hopes to quantifiable indicators, the impact of public spending has not been at all what was hoped. The poor have more money, but their chances at upward mobility are persistently weak and basically unchanged relative to several generations ago. Schools have more money, but academic performance looks stagnant and big racial gaps endure. Cities have more money, but crime rates are only now returning to the levels of the early 1960s, and today’s peace has been purchased by incarceration on a scale that would have seemed horrific (because it is) a half-century ago. Low-income families are more likely to have health insurance, work supports, food stamps, housing assistance, and so on, but the families themselves are far more fragmented and the children are more likely to grow up fatherless than they were before the 1960s. And along other indicators of human flourishing suggested by L.B.J.’s soaring vision — community bonds, religious involvement, social trust, workforce participation, more — you can find a considerable amount of plausible evidence that everyday life in the lower classes is less “great” than it was when the poverty rate was higher.
These two realities, taken together, do not necessarily point toward either a left-wing or a right-wing diagnosis of our situation. You can acknowledge both realities and believe that the key issues are all economic, that the welfare state just needed to be even stronger still (and various other economic policies more worker-friendly) to make up for the devastating impact of global capitalism on wages and job security and the devastating social impact of rising inequality. Or you can acknowledge both and believe that the programs themselves are often part of the problem, that they raise incomes but also increase dependency, encourage idleness, crowd out the basic institutions of civil society, and so on through the libertarian critique. Or you can acknowledge both and argue (as I have, occasionally) that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s go a long way toward explaining how the poor in our era can have more money but less access to other basic human goods. (And therefore, because those goods are connected to economic advancement, less money than they might have had absent those revolutions.) Or you can talk, reasonably and non-ideologically, about the multiplicity of causes behind all broad-based social trends.
But I think just getting to the point where we could all agree that 1) public spending can make people less poor and 2) public spending hasn’t delivered on the Great Society’s social promises would be a big win for reasonable debate. Because that combination of realities, and the various questions that it raises, is why this argument exists, why it’s genuinely interesting, and why it isn’t going away anytime soon.
