For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
Personal culture matters a lot. American studies (by the IRS, no less) have show that over half the people to be found in the bottom quintile of income at any given point will have moved OUT of that quintile within ten years.
It is roughly exponential. Half of those moving up are in the fourth quintile, a quarter in the middle, an eighth in the second, and a sixteenth — over 6% — in the top quintile. People also move [i]down[/i] profile regularly.
Herein lies the monstrous problem of heavily progressive income tax rates. Many people in the third and fourth quintiles are small business owners, farmers, fishers, plumbers and the the like. We have debts, some of which have been accumulated in a really bad year or two. Ask me about what the weather has done to this farmer this year; definitely gonna move down profile.
If, in contrast, we have a really [i]good[/i] year a dreadful lot of what we might otherwise have been used to recover the years the locusts have eaten … gets taxed away. No help in a tough year, but punitive taxation in a good one. All in the name of “fairness.”
I’ll be blunt: [b]the self-appointed elite do not want ordinary Americans to rise[/b], and they structure the tax and regulatory environment to make such self-improvement as difficult as possible.
In such a world, those without a really good set of values –attitude and effort are the only things we can control– can get absolutely nowhere. The elite like it that way, regardless of what they say.
[blockquote] “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor because they are a victim of the markets?†[/blockquote]
As usual, the Times still doesn’t get it.
The Irish were poor. the Polish were poor. the Italians were poor. They all adapted. The “Great Society” ossified the adaptation process by funding single motherhood through AFDC, thus providing a feedback loop enforcing the circle of poverty.
Incentives to provide stable families (stable marriages ) rather than Single motherhood would at least try to break that cycle. Unfortunately Traditional Marriage is anathema to the progressive world view, empowering as it does ogre-ish males over defenseless women and sensitive homosexuals.
We could do what the Irish Catholics did: Build a network of parochial schools and go into the city and preach the gospel. That worked. the “Great Society” has failed.
Bart,
Banks are allowed a deduction from their income for “allowance for bad debts.” It only seems fair that farmers should be able to get a deduction for “allowance for bad harvests!” 🙂
Daniel, what do you deduct [i]FROM[/i] when you don’t have any income?
Income averaging is always a potential pathway, but those options are quite limited here in the States (compared, say, to Canada), and in any case the current administration is moving aggressively to reduce even in income-averaging options we do have.