The eCrozier

One of my intellectual mentors died last week at age 95. Nathan Glazer was a sociologist who studied how government social and economic programs designed to alleviate poverty affected those they served. When I was working on my Ph.D. (which turned into an AB.D. – “All But Dissertation”) in the 1980s, Glazer was the most important scholar to which one needed to pay attention. He started out as a left-leaning socialist, became a member of the “neoconservative right,” and then ended up somewhere in-between angering in the process both extremes, which seemed to me just about right.

Dr. Glazer insisted that government programs, begun in the 1960s during the “War on Poverty,” worked to lessen poverty. After those programs were enacted, we saw a steady decline in poverty. Only after those programs were rolled back in the 1980s did we see poverty begin to increase again. So, the data showed such intervention lessened poverty. But Dr. Glazer also saw the limits of what government could do, since some of those interventions, while reducing poverty, also gave rise in Dr. Glazer’s words “to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.” He contributed wisdom to the complexity of poverty. We need to remember his insight, because we still tend to divide into two tribes when it comes to the governmental role in addressing poverty.

One tribe says government is the problem; that the more the government tries to help the worse things become; and, that the government should just end all poverty-alleviation programs because they’re counter-productive and discourage self-sufficiency, hard work, and personal responsibility. Of course, this tribe wants to ignore the data on how, for example, SNAP (formerly called “food stamps”) has greatly reduced hunger. There’s also, however, solid data that supports this tribe’s contention that familial and personal choices matter greatly in getting out of poverty.

The other tribe argues we need more, not less government intervention to alleviate poverty (e.g., in education, health care, food supplements, tax policy, income support, etc.). They believe if there were a big enough safety net then we could eliminate poverty all together. They put little weight on the role of familial and personal choices as being determinative or important. Like with the other tribe, they tend to discount data that don’t support their already-arrived-at conclusions.

Both tribes have it both right and wrong. Government can and must have an active, involved role in poverty alleviation. To suggest, as one tribe does, that the government just needs to get out of the way and allow individuals and the magic of the free market to work, ignores both the data and what we know about the messiness of human choice. We all do stupid stuff and if we’re financially well-off, then we can get still keep doing stupid stuff. But if we’re poor, there’s no margin of error. The other tribe has its own magical thinking believing we can always protect people from their poor choices. Sinners that we are, we all sometimes engage in self-destructive behavior. There are limits to what any government can do about that. If we could just learn the wisdom from both of these tribes, then we’d be on to something, now wouldn’t we?