Robert Rector: Liberals Reexamining the Culture of Poverty? Guess Again
[Robert Rector is senior research fellow in domestic-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation.]
An article in the October 17 New York Times lauds liberal academics who are reexamining the “culture of poverty,” noting a recent symposium on the topic in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Beware, though: Those looking for bold departures from liberal orthodoxy should search elsewhere....
...[E]ditors of The Annals firmly declare that the main cause of poverty is “material deprivation itself.” In other words, the cause of poverty is poverty: The cure for poverty is to artificially boost the incomes of the poor through welfare payments, free food, housing, medical care, and so on.
This is nothing new. Liberals always have insisted that poverty causes dysfunctional behaviors rather than vice versa. But, if having a low income caused problem behaviors (such as illegitimate births and eroded work ethic), then most Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries (whose incomes were far lower than those of today’s poor) should have been drowning in dysfunctional behaviors. Of course, they were not....
Read entire article at National Review
An article in the October 17 New York Times lauds liberal academics who are reexamining the “culture of poverty,” noting a recent symposium on the topic in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Beware, though: Those looking for bold departures from liberal orthodoxy should search elsewhere....
...[E]ditors of The Annals firmly declare that the main cause of poverty is “material deprivation itself.” In other words, the cause of poverty is poverty: The cure for poverty is to artificially boost the incomes of the poor through welfare payments, free food, housing, medical care, and so on.
This is nothing new. Liberals always have insisted that poverty causes dysfunctional behaviors rather than vice versa. But, if having a low income caused problem behaviors (such as illegitimate births and eroded work ethic), then most Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries (whose incomes were far lower than those of today’s poor) should have been drowning in dysfunctional behaviors. Of course, they were not....