Abstract
Family scientist Kevin Roy reviews the books So Rich, So Poor and Ain’t No Trust. The books examine the consequences of welfare reform policy for low-income families and the next steps in dealing with rising social inequality.
So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard To End Poverty in America by Peter Edelman The New Press, 2012 208 pages
Ain’t No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers by Judith Levine University of California Press, 2013 314 pages
The phrase “to end welfare as we know it” does not the have the ominous ring that it did 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton first spoke those words on the primary trail. The contentious debate over his 1996 welfare reform has largely died and while we may never agree on the successes or failures of reform, the end of the economic boom and the emergence of the greatest degree of income inequality since the 1920s has ushered in a new national discussion about poverty policy. Now is the time to ask: are there any lessons to be learned from the era of welfare reform?
Poverty policy has gained new relevance since the end of the boom and the re-emergence of vast income inequality.
Peter Edelman and Judith Levine clearly believe there is much to be learned. Their new books recall the welfare reform debates and gauge the impact of a wide range of policy changes. They also point to where we might go next as we rethink poverty, affluence, family life, and social policy in an era of slow growth and rising inequality.
Edelman heard the ominous ring of Clinton’s words and, in protest, famously resigned his position as an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. His vision of eradicating poverty traced back to his experiences with Robert Kennedy in the late 1960s. In 1997, Edelman wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly that detailed his opposition to welfare reform. Now, more than 15 years later, he has penned another extended corrective, So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard To End Poverty in America.
Part retelling of history, part prescription for presidential debate, and part in-depth exploration of select key issues, Edelman’s book deftly moves the discussion from poverty to inequality. He notes that there have been successes in combating poverty, including most of the programs in the War on Poverty, which reduced poverty rates throughout the 1960s. Food stamps (now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), for example, continue to be an effective tool in delivering relief to poor families. However, Edelman believes that now we are stuck. Trying to discern why we are in our current mess, he shows us that it is the nature of poverty that has changed, due in part to a low-wage economy, the growth of households headed by single mothers, and a small class of super rich Americans. His analysis is unabashedly partisan, holding Republican efforts to dismantle social programs accountable for our inability to reduce poverty since the mid-1970s.
Edelman’s discussion of low-paying jobs goes to the heart of the reason poverty persists. A 40-year overview of wage flattening, peppered with insightful statistics and policy tales from a Washington insider, offers, in a few short pages, a cogent narrative of the fate of working poor families. A sensible and coherent national macroeconomic policy, Edelman argues, would help offset falling wages. We could start by generating more public sector jobs—though this worked in the New Deal, it is now considered politically taboo—and focus mainly on improving the pay of private sector jobs. Edelman highlights what has worked—food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit —and what needs to be shored up or reestablished, such as increased minimum wages, and publicly subsidized housing, education, health care, and child care.
As an important player in Washington, D.C., for many decades, Edelman understands that there are many layers of poverty in the United States and that even immediate policy fixes for jobs will not address the longer-term challenges of adults and children who live in deep poverty. The collapse of welfare, he argues, resulted in the growth of the number of families in these circumstances. Edelman faults the 1996 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program for misunderstanding the roots of deep poverty and for assuming that all poor families need is “a swift kick in the behind” to get their lives back on track. At best, he argues, TANF is a temporary panacea for unemployment, and has done little to temper the long-term ravages of poverty that threaten children’s development. Since low-wage work is a permanent feature of the new economy, we may need to redesign our entire safety net from the ground up.
A new safety net, according to Edelman, should support abandoned families in urban communities. He paints a compelling historical portrait of Robert Kennedy’s plan to create a restoration corporation in Bedford-Stuyvesant, tying it to more recent efforts to address housing and education in disadvantaged communities, like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Empowerment Zone. This broader approach shifts the focus away from personal responsibility and individual families, toward livable communities, stronger school systems, gentrification, and regional economies.
Building on his previous writing on young, disconnected men, Edelman sketches out a vision for crafting new educational pathways for disadvantaged youth. At the end of the book he asks: how do we educate young people to attain better jobs and achieve stable lives? While debates about poverty policy rarely consider such questions, Edelman considers the long view as well as the quick fix. He draws on his many years of policy work to present a truly comprehensive plan for addressing poverty and inequality. On the question of how to build for future generations, he looks to career and technical education, the continuing promise of community colleges, and creative programs that offer a range of services to dropouts.
We may need to redesign our entire safety net from the ground up.
Judith Levine’s book, Ain’t No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers, descends from the 10,000-feet high view of poverty policy to provide close, ethnographic portraits of 95 low-income mothers in Chicago. Levine’s study was conducted in 1994-1995 (prior to welfare reform) and in 2004-2005, almost a decade after reform was implemented. The contrast (or, more precisely, the lack thereof) between these two moments is one of the surprising findings of the book. She works in the tradition of urban ethnographers such as Elliot Liebow, Kathryn Edin, Sharon Hays, and journalist Jason DeParle, who push back against claims that a culture of poverty pervades low-income communities.
Levine pays close attention to how “women’s actions [are] constrained by their social environment.” For example, in previous studies, poor women’s distrust of others has been framed as a problematic personality trait that they themselves need to change. Levine shows us how structural arrangements, not personal traits, produce distrust. Families are placed at great risk and uncertainty due to conditions of poverty; distrust emerges as a consequence of these conditions. Similar studies were undertaken by Linda Burton on the discourse and meaning of trust in the lives of low-income women and their intimate relationships. Levine extends these findings, indicating how distrust can be protective when mothers feel marginalized by employers, caseworkers, or even their own family members. Creating trustworthy structures—fair policies and supportive programs, stable family members and partners who can contribute regularly to their children’s lives—is the challenge we face. In effect, Levine takes much of the blame off of poor mothers who report that there “ain’t no trust,” envisioning environments in which these very women can engage with trustworthy others to make changes in their lives.
Clinton’s welfare reform, despite its trumpeted promise, did not change structures at the federal level, or alter poor women’s relationships with caseworkers and communities. After reform, poor mothers often became even more stigmatized and more distrustful of the new policies. In this context, their choices to disengage make sense. Levine describes how these new policies, which so transformed public perceptions of welfare, did not alter poor families’ lives very much. The distrust remained; mothers devised makeshift strategies to find resources to support themselves and their children.
The issues raised in this nuanced study are only first steps in understanding how women interact with those who can help to move them out of poverty. Trust plays out differently in each new relationship: welfare caseworkers, employers and co-workers, child caregivers, and family members. Levine points out paradoxes, such as how distrust toward poor fathers coincides with women’s empathy about men’s marginalization through economic instability, lack of good schools, and mass incarceration. Where else do trust and distrust coexist? Perhaps some relationships allow distrust to evolve into trust, and for women to learn to trust. And some settings feature people privileged with resources and power, while in other settings, nearly everyone is struggling with the same barriers faced by poor mothers.
Thankfully, Levine gets to these questions of powerlessness in the final pages of the book. We understand too little about how trust could evolve in relationships characterized by power imbalances. Interestingly, Levine gives us five different contexts to compare, speculating on what might change if these contexts fostered greater trust. Rare is the study that can link structural issues of power to micro-interactions among people. Levine has accomplished this, and it is a real contribution, one that moves us forward.
These books offer us important lessons from the past about where and how we have succeeded and failed to ameliorate poverty. They suggest that rather than focusing on poverty, we need to focus on broad patterns of inequality, and how they impact the everyday lives of poor people. Edelman and Levine push us past simple answers to a recognition of the depth of the political and personal changes that will be necessary to end inequality as we know it.