MIDDLE-CLASSMORALITY
Abhijit at the age of twelve, like many of his friends, was in love with Audrey Hepburn. He discovered her as Eliza Doolittle in the movie version of the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady, based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (a radical left-winger in his time).
In the play her father, Alfred, makes this truly wonderful little philosophical speech (before more or less offering to sell his daughter for five pounds even):I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up against middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.12
It was hard being poor in Victorian England where the play is set. To be deserving of charity one had to be abstemious, thrifty, churchgoing, and above all hard working. If not, it was off to the poorhouse where work was enforced and husbands and wives were kept apart, unless you happened to be in debt, in which case it was to debtor’s prison or an enforced trip Down Under. An 1898 “map descriptive of London Poverty” classified some areas as “lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal.”13
We are not very far from this today. Mention welfare in a well-heeled crowd in the United States, India, or Europe and there will always be a few shaking heads, worried that welfare turns the poor into “good for nothings,” to use a Victorian expression still popular among a certain class of Indians.
Give them cash and they will stop working or drink it up. Somewhere behind this is the suspicion the poor are poor because they lack the will to achieve; give them any excuse and they will check out.In the United States, the economic catastrophe of the Depression during the 1930s temporarily gave poverty a more benign face because it was so ubiquitous. Everyone knew someone who suffered from sudden poverty. John Steinbeck’s brave Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl are a staple of high school classes. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal marked the beginning of an era where poverty was seen as something society could fight, and beat, with government intervention. This continued until the 1960s, culminating in Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” But when growth slowed and resources were tight, the war on poverty turned into war on the poor. Ronald Reagan would return time and again to the image of the so-called welfare queen, who was black, lazy, female, and fraudulent. The model for this was Linda Taylor, a woman from Chicago who had four aliases and was convicted of $8,000 in fraud, for which she spent several years in prison. This was one and a half years longer than onetime billionaire capitalist hero Charles Keating, the central figure in the most famous corruption scandal of the Reagan era (the Keating Five scandal), and the related savings and loans crisis that was to cost taxpayers over $500 billion in bailout money.
In a new twist, the moral turpitude of the poor was now presented as the consequence of welfare itself. In 1986, Reagan famously declared the war on poverty lost. It was welfare that made us lose the war, by discouraging work and encouraging dependency, which led to the “crisis of family breakdowns, especially among the welfare poor, both black and white.”14 In a radio address to the nation on February 15, 1986, Reagan declared:
We’re in danger of creating a permanent culture of poverty as inescapable as any chain or bond; a second and separate America, an America of lost dreams and stunted lives.
The irony is that misguided welfare programs instituted in the name of compassion have actually helped turn a shrinking problem into a national tragedy. From the 1950’s on, poverty in America was declining. American society, an opportunity society, was doing its wonders. Economic growth was providing a ladder for millions to climb up out of poverty and into prosperity. In 1964 the famous War on Poverty was declared and a funny thing happened. Poverty, as measured by dependency, stopped shrinking and then actually began to grow worse. I guess you could say, poverty won the war. Poverty won in part because instead of helping the poor, government programs ruptured the bonds holding poor families together.Perhaps the most insidious effect of welfare is its usurpation of the role of provider. In States where payments are highest, for instance, public assistance for a single mother can amount to much more than the usable income of a minimum wage job. In other words, it can pay for her to quit work. Many families are eligible for substantially higher benefits when the father is not present. What must it do to a man to know that his own children will be better off if he is never legally recognized as their father? Under existing welfare rules, a teenage girl who becomes pregnant can make herself eligible for welfare benefits that will set her up in an apartment of her own, provide medical care, and feed and clothe her. She only has to fulfill one condition—not marry or identify the father… The welfare tragedy has gone on too long. It’s time to reshape our welfare system so that it can be judged by how many Americans it makes independent of welfare.15
These ominous claims do not withstand scrutiny. One could line many long bookshelves with studies on the impact of welfare on fertility and family structure. The overwhelming conclusion of this literature is that those effects, if they are there at all, are very small.16 Reagan’s fears were unfounded.
But despite this overwhelming evidence, the idea that welfare causes poverty, and the tropes of “dependency,” “welfare cultures,” “crisis of family values,” and the implicit association with race or ethnicity, is pervasive across different times and places. In June 2018, French president Emmanuel Macron taped himself preparing for a speech on his proposed reforms of the anti-poverty programs. The tape was made public by the administration as a candid “behind the curtains” view of the president, a window into his real style and unvarnished opinions. We see him, despite all the differences between the two, adopting very much a Reagan-like tone, repeating over and over that the current system is failing, and managing to talk about the need to make the poor more responsible six times in the space of a few minutes.17
In the United States, this spirit turned into action in 1996 when President Clinton passed, with bipartisan support, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which imposed new work requirements on the beneficiaries. Clinton also expanded the earned income tax credit (EITC), which supplements earnings for poor workers (making government assistance conditional on already having some work). In 2018, President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers issued a report advocating a work requirement as a condition of eligibility for the three major noncash assistance programs: Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), and rental assistance.18 In June of 2018, Arkansas became the first state to implement a work requirement for Medicaid adults. Interestingly, the Council of Economic Advisers’ main argument was no longer that the war on poverty had failed but, on the contrary, that “our war on poverty is largely over and a success.” The report argued that “the safety net—including government tax and [both cash and non-cash] transfer policies—has contributed to a dramatic reduction in poverty [correctly measured] in the United States. However, the policies have been accompanied by a decline in self-sufficiency [in terms of receipt of welfare benefits] among non-disabled working-age adults. Expanding work requirements in these non-cash welfare programs would improve self-sufficiency, with little risk of substantially reversing progress in addressing material hardship.” In other words, people had to be made to work for their supper, so they were not cheated of “the American work ethic, the motivation that drives Americans to work longer hours each week and more weeks each year than any of our economic peers [which] is a long-standing contributor to America’s success.” Sure, it might cause some pain, but it was worth it to prevent a large number of poor people from succumbing to sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. The Puritans would have applauded.