Only Nixon could go to China. And only when a Democrat is in the Oval Office can we admit that culture can be a cause of poverty:
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.
“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.
October 20th, 2010 | 11:03 am
It’s important to realize that, for all but a very few mental cases, poverty in the USA is basically freely chosen.
Not always directly chosen, but freely chosen. If one takes the 12-13% of people officially below the “poverty line” (which often means a household which has only one TV and only a few phones among its well-fed members), you will see a mix of immigrants who chose poverty in the US rather than status quo in their home country; single mothers who chose poverty by way of single-parenthood; and divorced people who could have stayed out of poverty had they remained married.
Most of those who came here out of economic desperation (choosing poverty in the US in so doing) will be in a higher quintile of income in a decade, or at latest a generation. The rest made unfortunate (dare we say sinful?) moral choices which have poverty as their direct and predictable corollary. They and their children will not fare so well.
If the Church wishes to battle poverty, and it should, it would do well to redirect its energies away from political campaigns in favor of socialistic “solutions”, and toward things more directly associated with its basic mission–proper moral choices, strong marriages, and sound families.
October 20th, 2010 | 12:09 pm
I don’t know Prof. Sowell has been talking about this for years and years, see Black Rednecks and White Liberals for example.
This rejection of cultural explanations for economic outcomes isn’t exclusively liberal either. There are a great many conservatives, the I.Q. fetishists, who also deny the effect of culture and insist that success is genetically determined.
My issue with conservatives isn’t that culture, i.e. day to day mores and habits not culture in the other sense, lead to better or worse outcomes but what to do with that information.
Some conservatives seem to want to use it to excuse different outcomes and absolve themselves from any responsibility for working to change them. Others seem to want to use that information as a gatekeeper to keep the bad sorts of cultures out.
It seems to me the Christian approach should be to work to change people’s cultural habits to ones which are more conducive to successful living.
October 20th, 2010 | 12:17 pm
After having accumulated enough experience in life, including some very difficult economic times, and having listened to my wife, a teacher in an urban school, talk about her own experiences with her students, I have come to the conclusion that the vicissitudes of life can thrust anyone into poverty. But remaining in that state is, in effect, a choice (excepting of course those who through no fault of their own have no choice available). People may become poor through no fault of their own. Remaining poor is very often a result of a series of bad choices.
October 20th, 2010 | 1:25 pm
Hadn’t seen this when I first posted my comment but here’s Prof. Sowell today on this very subject: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/250338/change-don-t-celebrate-cultures-thomas-sowell
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