Noahpinion, Tyler Cowen and others have recently posted about the deserving poor.
Bernard Shaw played with the idea of the deserving and undeserving poor in Pygmalion, written over 100 years ago.
Pygmalion, more familiar as My Fair Lady, tells the story of a young flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, who is transformed by the linguist, Henry Higgins, into a "lady."
Her no-good wastrel father, Mr. Doolittle, objects to Henry Higgins' adoption of his daughter, and demands appropriate compensation. Higgins, and his friend Pickering, are shocked, "Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you would sell your daughter for 50 pounds?…Have you no morals, man?" "Can't afford them, Governor," Doolittle replies, "Neither could you if you was as poor as me."
Doolittle then goes on to lament the plight of the undeserving poor:
What am I…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 agen 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. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that's the truth. Will you take advantage of a man's nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he's brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she's growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.
Incentives versus needs – there are no easy answers.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
“All I want is a room(?) somewhere
far away from the cold night air
ah wou.., ah wou.. ah wou..
Ah wouldn’t it be luvverly.”
I can almost sing the whole album, from childhood memory.
The problem with refusing to tell people that they have responsibilities (because: that would be mean and judgemental) is that they end up acting as if they really don’t have any responsibilities. With what results, etc, etc.
Unfortunately, this is generally regarded as no big deal by our political class, so long as the undeserving poor continue to vote for the undeserving elites, and the undeserving elites don’t have to live anywhere near ’em.
LOL! Nice quotation.
Technically, though, Noah’s post was as much about the undeserving as the deserving. After all, his point was that we may wish to aid the undeserving – he’s on Mr. Doolittle’s side! And anyway, isn’t there something a little bit irritating Mr. Domuch?
Nick: “I can almost sing the whole album” – I can almost sing it, too, (“warm ‘ead warm ‘ands warm feet…”) but my nearest and dearest tend to object to “almost singing”, preferring the real thing.
vimothy – “The problem with refusing to tell people that they have responsibilities…”
The undeserving poor don’t have any monopoly on the shirking of responsibilities. One of my favourite political ironies is that the poor happily vote for candidates promising “workfare” because what they want, more than anything else, is a decent job; the middle class are opposed because creating jobs is more expensive than writing cheques, and paying people on social assistance a token amount to clean parks (say) takes away jobs from municipal or other employees. (lump of labour, etc. but still).
Phil “Noah’s post was as much about the undeserving as the deserving.”
Yes, absolutely, this post started out as a comment on his blog “Noah, you really should read this, I think you’d enjoy it” but got too long.
Frances,
Agreed, to some extent, hence my reference to undeserving elites. On the other hand, if the phrase is to have any meaning, then there must be some relationship between the undeserving poor and the property of “undeservingness”. Moreover, if other classes are also undeserving (and IMO British society has been in continuous moral decline for the last century), then it does beg the question “undeserving of what”.
Yup. Is the drug dealer a vicious criminal, or a resourceful entrepreneur? Undeserving is in the eye of the beholder.
Sorting out the deserving from the undeserving seems a hopeless business. Poverty sucks for the poor and it sucks for the rich, who have to live with the mess. Worst case you’re giving money to the underserving as a bribe to not do e.g. a home invasion on you, break your skull, and steal your PS3 (something that happened 2 weeks ago to a friend of mine). Compared to alternative of stolen property, assault, psychological trauma, legions of cops, lawyers, judges, jailers, etc … it might just be easier and cheaper to bribe the undeserving with unearned money and legal dope so they leave us alone.
Yeah, but Patrick, who says that even if the “undeserving poor” are given unearned money and legal dope they’re going to leave you alone? It seems to me that that might just make them hassle you more–assuming that they like free money and dope.
In the UK, we spent the last century liberalising every institution in sight, created an extensive welfare state, and experienced a concomitant 5000% rise in the crime rate. I mean, how much free dope and money is it going to take before it starts to have an effect?
vimothy “British society has been in continuous moral decline for the last century”
Though I suspect it was never as morally upright as portrayed in the “do the right thing” school of children’s literature, nor is it that bad now, overall I agree with you – but suspect that it would take a lifetime of study to figure it all out. As an outside observer and frequent visitor, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the country. Every time I go there I find the amount that people drink staggering – I hate it – but then I end up going down to the pub because, basically, there’s not much else to do. And Britain has such amazingly fantastic pubs. So I fall in love all over again.
Patrick
“Compared to alternative of stolen property, assault, psychological trauma, legions of cops, lawyers, judges, jailers, etc … it might just be easier and cheaper to bribe the undeserving with unearned money and legal dope so they leave us alone.”
I believe David Simon and Ed Burns had a good line to that effect in “The Corner”, i.e., that welfare was a cheap way to get the inner-city poor to head back to their ghetto and mainline themselves to oblivion while leaving the rest of “us” alone. And that it was a bargain at that. (Of course they also suggested (facitiously) that if the US government was really serious about eaging the “war” on drugs, it might consider napalm strikes on inner-city drug corners. Short of that, it wasn’t going to win.)
That being said, you can see why your argument isn’t likely to be all that compelling to Joe Q. Public (and why no politician frames the case for welfare that way). No one likes to be shaken down. Presented like that, the answer is likely to be “send in the army”.
Patrick: “Is the drug dears a vicious criminal or a resourceful entrepreneur”
Can’t he be both? I suppose if we stopped calling them criminals and started calling them entrepreneurs, the right would start lobbying to dereguate them and the left would look to put them all in jail and tax them out of existence.
vimothy: “I mean, how much free dope and money is it going to take before it starts to have an effect?
I don’t know about money, but at some point the drugs will have a sedative effect.
Frances,
I think that there’s a danger that if you follow that argument along you can be lead to think that it’s all semantic and there’s really no difference between the Britain of today and the Britain of 100 years ago. In fact, the Britain of today doesn’t really bear any resemblance to the Britain of 100 years ago. The Britain of 100 years ago has long since ceased to exist.
Now, if you think that there was nothing particularly moral about the Britain of 100 years ago, or that there’s nothing particularly immoral about today’s culture of unrestrained hedonism and social alienation, then that’s a judgement call and this is probably of no real interest. Just because my grandparents found the country to be weird, foreign and hostile before they passed away doesn’t mean that anyone should factor this into their calculus when trying to think about policy.
On the other hand, we all have to live here, and there might be a connection between quote-unquote “morality” and quality of life. Assuming that people in the past weren’t totally misguided, then maybe their morals and mores had some kind of adaptive function. Personally, because I am quite poor, I tend to live in pretty horrible places in the North of England. Many of these places have always been poor, but they haven’t always been horrible. The problems I see relate more to people not knowing how to live than people having unmet material wants. (By the strict monotonicity of preferences, people will always have unmet material wants).
Commonly held standards of behaviour (like taking a position on what constitutes “undeserving”) would serve to both ameliorate this blight in our sink estates and re-establish currently non-existent social solidarity. All without increasing the deficit. Sadly, I don’t think anything can alter our trajectory. And there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, as someone once said…
Did my comment just get eaten…?
It’s pretty generous to assume that the welfare state really would have this palliative effect on the poor. The same machine that gives us welfare programs also gives us drug criminalization, (sometime) criminalization of the sex trade, and poverty-perpetuating policies like minimum wages, occupational licensing, and rent controls.
Let’s remember too that when we talk about the social pathology associated with poverty, we are talking about (1) the permanent multi-generational underclass, and not the working poor who move in and out of poverty but often have a strong work ethic, and (2) criminal organizations that use the underclass. Most of that criminal activity would not exist if drugs and the sex trade were legal. We would have drug addicts and prostitutes, but far less violence and related crime encircling them.
vimothy: Look, I’m a clumsy communicator but I think I’m really just trying to say that ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ is all in the framing. Ruthless behaviour exhibited by the local pusher is criminal. Ruthless behaviour exhibited by a CEO is business acumen. Economic rents extracted by the poor are a shakedown. Economic rents extracted by a CEO is innovation.
BTW, A good example of bribing people to behave is the Canadian banking system. They get a monopoly to shakedown the public and in return promise to do what Finance and OSFI tell them to so as not to blow-up the economy and ultimately cost us all a lot more.
Bob: Yeah, of course it isn’t going to fly as a campaign slogan. But it would be hilarious to hear Stephen Harper defending the rights of drug dealers on the grounds of natural freedom while the left argued to fill the (newly constructed) jails with the population of the Lower East side.
vimothy: “In fact, the Britain of today doesn’t really bear any resemblance to the Britain of 100 years ago.” -It’s complicated. There’s a cultural continuity, e.g. listen to Franz Ferdinand and you can hear echoes of a distinctively British musical tradition. Britain has always been, I think, a pretty violent society – that’s the edge behind the humour. I don’t travel in the north of England much – I’ll be doing so this summer, though. I’m struck by your comment about people not knowing how to live, but don’t have time to reply (duty calls and all that).
@ Nick Rowe:
“With one enormous chair.” 🙂
Frances,
Edwardian Britain was certainly not a violent place. We really did experience something like a 5000% increase in the crime rate over the course of the 20th century. No, that’s not a typo–that’s a five and three zeroes. I’m going off the govt’s own figures here (using the rate of indictable offences, to be precise). I can dig up the source if you don’t believe me.
In addition to the quantitative change in the amount of crime, there was also a qualitative change in the nature of the crime being committed and how that crime is prosecuted (which is sorta my point–there is a relationship between how society treats anti-social behaviour and the quantity and quality of anti-social behaviour that results). Today, it’s possible to beat people to death in the street and be out of jail in only a few years. Where I live, there are signs plastered everywhere warning mothers that child snatchers and slavers are operating in the area. No one bats an eyelid! A century ago, people were being arrested for things that would be regarded as egregiously trivial today.
As one commenter (I forget who, perhaps Peter Hitchens) wrote, if we used the standards of our past today, practically the whole country would be in prison; if we used the standards of today in our past, practically no one would have been in prison.
To allow this problem to be framed as undeserving vs. deserving is to loose the game. You must shut this crap down immediately. It’s just more Regan talking about someone using the change from buying an orange on food stamps to buy vodka. You didn’t get change with food stamps, you got a paper receipt with 27 cents written on it below the store stamp, and you had to keep track of that piece of paper until you went back to the store. Even not knowing that, why nobody asked him where they sell bottles of vodka for under 75 cents is beyond me.
Find jobs for everyone who wants one. Set a decent minimum wage, and hold people to it by eliminating all the ‘private contractor’ crap. Once you’ve done that, talk to me about the undeserving. Until then you’re wasting everyone’s time on some mythical crack head while some poor mother is trying to support herself on 27 hours a week at the local corner market.
You plan on eating cheeseburgers, buying new socks, going to the movies, having someone else take care of batty old Aunt Helen and changing your oil. Let them earn enough to eat, heat their home and buy their kids shoes.
vimothy: “Edwardian Britain was certainly not a violent place” – One thing that’s remarkable when you read some of the less celebrated British children’s literature from the last century is how often people slap or hit each other. You still see that in Britain – people hitting their children. If someone in Canada hits a child in a public space, the least they can expect is a gentle intervention from a well-meaning bystander – a citizens arrest and reporting to child services is as likely. Think of schools and corporal punishment – caning, the strap, etc. Corporal punishment of students in schools was routine in the Britain of 100 years ago. Is it still legal in Britain? It was banned here years ago.
This in many ways validates your point, however, that there has been a qualitative change in the nature of crime, and what we regard as crime.
Now I really must go or I’ll be late for class and my students will be able to see from the time of the post why.
“Ruthless behaviour exhibited by the local pusher is criminal. Ruthless behaviour exhibited by a CEO is business acumen.”
I don’t think that sort of moral equivalence works. I suspect most people aren’t all too fussed by the fact that drug dealers typically don’t pay their employees minimum wage or don’t comply with Canada’s product labelling or drug testing legislation (conduct that we would consider “ruthless” in the business context, when some CEO outsources his supplier to China). And I suspect that if the CEO of a large bank started collecting from defaulting homeowners by kneecapping the debtors (behaviour that we consider criminal in the drug dealer context), we’d all consider that to be criminal . The typical behaviour of the former is considered criminal because it’s typically criminal, the typical behaviour of the latter isn’t because it typically isn’t.
Frances,
Ah, I see what you mean. Thanks for clarifying.
@Nick & Frances: Do you know the Peter Sellers version of “Wouldn’t it be Loverly”?? Hilarious.
Found it…I grew up listening to this from my anglophile Chinese grandfather:
http://grooveshark.com/s/Wouldn+t+It+Be+Loverly+1999+Digital+Remaster+/2x3Ojr?src=5
Has anyone ever been to a poor neighborhood with a high crime rate…? I doubt it (though it is popular to pretend you have); because if anyone has, they would know that even in high crime neighborhoods the rate is understated by a large amount. When you give poor people in these neighborhoods money they begin to learn how to use the social infrastructure to their advantage, i.e. calling the police with the expectation that their property rights will be protected. Suprise the crime rates rise, because people are now following through with the reporting process. So increased crime is expected, not justification for calling people in these areas undeserving.
Most jobless ghettos have been around a while, and are going to need a generation of fiscal subsidy to beging to redevelop. For a caricature watch the wire season 4, there is a great dilemma illustrated by a conversation between police officers after they give amnesty to drug dealing within a green zone: it goes along the lines of “What do we do, arrest the guy who robbed the drug dealer?. Do I have to file a report?”
These areas have their own parllel political and economic structures; and they enforce a degenerate type of order. You can’t criticize it just because it exists… and they don’t develop on accident either, they develop out of necessity. I don’t know any 5 year olds who aspire to sneak on to the subway at 11, drug run at 13, sell by 15, and start robbing and hustling as an adult, they are left with little choice in their development.
There is a great book called “When Work Disappear” by William Julius Wilson that outlines the criteria for this sort of thing. Should be required reading for all policy makers.
The deserving poor are school age children who need some help to access opportunity, and thus everyone is deserving at some point…
It’s time to drag that old Anatole France chestnut out once again! “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Callin the army? You meanhiring half the poors to beat up the other half?
Anyway. What we call “criminality” ( as distinguished from “high finance”) is essentially restricted in area and population. The isolation is both physical and mental-socioogical but mostly the latter. To a boy in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve or the Bronx, the skyscrapers skyscrapers are farther away than the Rockies. To get to the Rockies, you can steal $ 1000 and buy a plane ticket. To get to the skyscraper, you steal an MBA? What’s an MBA? Who has an MBA? No uncle or cousin of mine has that MBA thing.
As Peter Cook said:
“I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin’. I never had it, so I’d had it, as far as being a judge was concerned…”
still as hilariously sad as it was in 1961.
“Most jobless ghettos have been around a while, and are going to need a generation of fiscal subsidy to beging to redevelop.”
Which is true, but I think the point that David Simon and Ed Burns were making in “The Corner” (those names will be familiar because they were the producers/writers of “The Wire”, which was based to a large degree on the real-life experiences they recorded in “The Corner”. That’s why it was so good.), is that the conventional notion of welfare does nothing to promote the redevelopment of poor neighbourhoods, it just keeps the residents of those neighbourhoods from bothering the rest of us.
Another way of thinking about the “deserving poor”/”undeserving poor” distinction, is between those who cannot help themselves under any realistic set of circumstances (the elderly, children, the severely disabled – I suspect no one would dispute that those are the traditional catagories of the “deserving poor”), i.e., those who have no agency over their lives, versus those who may be able to help themselves with the proper assistance, incentives, guidance, etc. (young, able-bodies, working-age people – the tradidional “undeserving poor”), who have some agency over their own lives. Note, phrased like this, there’s no suggestion that the “undeserving poor” should be tossed to the wolves, but there is a suggestion that the public programs designed to help them should be very different from those structured for the “deserving poor”.
So, for example, traditional “welfare” programs make a lot of sense for the “deserving poor”, i.e., those people who cannot otherwise help themselves. They make a lot less sense for the “undeserving poor”. Quite the contrary, they’re likely to have disastrous implications. A person might quite reasonably prefer collecting the dole to working a 30 hour week at 7/11. Such a person is, quite reasonably, exercising their agency in so doing (and truthfully, would any of us make a different decision?). But of course, the long-run implications of that choice are disastrous, both for the individual, and for society at large. In the case of the individual, the basic skills of being a productive adult (i.e., civility, showing up on time, etc.) are eroded or lost, increasing their dependence on the state. Moreover, in that circumstance, earning illegal money is a lot more palatable than earning legal money (since the latter causes you to lose benefits, while the former doesn’t – again, given the choice of collecting the dole, and making a few bucks on the side slinging dope, versus making a few bucks slinging burgers, hey who are we kidding, we’d do the same thing). From a broader perspective, children grow up in communities with norms that are fundamentally at odd with being a productive member of the broader community (in “The Corner”, Simon and Burns recount the experience of one of their protagonists, a moderately successful young drug dealer, who can handle the complex business aspects of the drug trade, but who lacks the basic social skills to keep a job at McDonalds. I think they used that incident as the basis for a scene in one of the earlier seasons of “The Wire”).
Of course, you could design better social assistance programs to avoid this fate – provide wage subsidies to make work more palatable (think the earned income tax credit that was part of the US Workfare reforms), require training as a condition of collecting welfare, so that recipients might have an alternative beyond the 7-11. But, those are the sorts of programs that critically depend on making a distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor” (there’s no point making the elderly or the severely disabled attend training programs as a condition of collecting welfare). Ironically, by attacking the distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”, we don’t do the “undeserving poor” any favours. Not only does that deny them their fundamental human agency (quite literally, treating them like children), but it ends up trapping them in public welfare schemes which neither addresses their needs nor develops their potential.
Bob Smith,
That’s a smart analysis–well written.
“And I suspect that if the CEO of a large bank started collecting from defaulting homeowners by kneecapping the debtors (behaviour that we consider criminal in the drug dealer context), we’d all consider that to be criminal . The typical behaviour of the former is considered criminal because it’s typically criminal, the typical behaviour of the latter isn’t because it typically isn’t.”
The drug dealer should go to small claims court to induce delinquent customers to pay? This is a bizarre point, as Mandos noted.
The undeserving poor shirk their responsibilities, as opposed to the undeserving rich, who merely pay others to fulfill them. This is how America got its last Republican administration, the ‘Tom and Daisy Buchanan” administration.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9
Bob: Ah, but it does work. The CEO resorts to a system of violence sponsored by the state. He has parliament, the courts, bailiffs, and police to go do his kneecapping for him. What if we lived in a world were trafficking in houses was illegal, but selling processed plants like cannabis, coca, and poppy was perfectly legal? If the drug dealer could enforce his contracts in the same way that a CEO can, there would be no need for kneecapping.
Great comments and links, thanks – love the quotes from Antole France and the Great Gatsby.
Bob, thank you for those thoughtful comments.
In a sense the vision that you are articulating is a description of the status quo in Canada, where, for example, we’ve decided that over 65s deserve a basic income guarantee, and under 65s are perceived to be able to support themselves.
But we’ve decided, as a matter of policy, to reject that distinction – to let someone go because they’re over 65 is age discrimination. If people over 65 are perfectly capable of working, just like anyone else, on what grounds are they deserving of OAS, GIS or any other special supports?
Even the idea of disability is becoming increasingly problematic. In an economy based on manual labour, it’s pretty easy to figure out who is capable of working and who isn’t. In an economy based on intellectual labour, who is disabled and thus deserving?
Our society’s affluence also makes it hard to draw a line between needs and wants. Does someone need a cell phone? Sure, you don’t starve without one. Lots of respectable middle class people manage perfectly fine with only a land line. But these days it’s almost impossible to get a job if you don’t have a phone number where you can be reached, and as a practical matter that generally means a cell phone.
Sure, we can agree on kids, moms and apple pie, but I don’t know if that’s going to help us make hard policy decisions.
“I don’t know if that’s going to help us make hard policy decisions”
The thing about charity is that it’s as much about the donor as the recipient. The act of giving rewards us with a good feeling; but that works best when we believe the recipient is “deserving.” Unfortunately, that means that assistance doesn’t have to be helpful to the recipient to be helpful to the donor, as this Onion squib puts it neatly: http://www.theonion.com/articles/kid-with-cancer-hopes-to-realize-dream-of-meeting,6899/.
So the first hard policy decision to sort out is, who are we trying to help? The poor? Or ourselves?
Phil, great link.
For astute economic analysis of problems relating to poverty, also for the latest in behavioural economics and addiction research, I turn to John Cheese of cracked.com. These ones are particularly relevant to the undeserving/deserving poor debate:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-money-can-buy-happiness/
also:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/
First, on a 5000% crime increase in Britain: false. First, the ‘lower classes’ frequently did not call the police, they expected and were expected to deal with it themselves. In some cases the only thing that would get the police into a low income area (as we say now) is murder. Pickpockets were common. Gentlemen of the era did not carry canes as an aid to mobility, they were a weapon intended to be used in self-defence.
Second, at the end of the Edwardian era Britain was just about rid of the “Bloody Code” which at its height in the 1780’s would see a death sentence imposed for theft over five pounds.
Yet only 20% of death sentences passed in this era of ‘severe justice’ were actually carried out. Pardons and clemency were very common, far more common than today. For an offence such as theft the local lord/squire/MP/gentry would approach the Home Secretary and ask for a pardon which was duly granted. The severity of the law was curtailed and the mercy of the ruling class displayed. The existing social order was reinforced.
As for deserving/undeserving poor: watch it. Everyone likes to value their own talents and thinks that the job market will mysteriously ‘provide’ and quickly at that. Further they expect that the person on the other side of the table will be fair, transparent and quick. Experience has shown me that all these expectations are wrong.
First, an employer can see you as a bad fit. Too educated? Might bolt at the first opportunity.
Fair? I’ve had racism directed at me, been invited and re-invited to an an interview a year apart and still no job and currently have one job get denied over a test whose marking stinks. It took me six months to get that far and now it’s under appeal with the Public Service Commission. Later I found out that the whole Department is on probation for its lax merit practices (stage I had problems with).
People like to deny the existence of Job Search Purgatory but it surely exists.
Sorry Bob, your last post is way off-target.
“If people over 65 are perfectly capable of working, just like anyone else, on what grounds are they deserving of OAS, GIS or any other special supports?”
Good point, yet another point in favour of pushing back the retirement age (i.e., what is the moral basis for providing 66 years old with free money when many of them are wealthier, and have greater incomes, than people younger and more disadvantaged than them? Answer: none – which makes the NDPs position somewhat curious).
Mind you, past a certain point people’s health will deteriorate to the point where they can’t (or shouldn’t) work, so it may make practical sense to draw the line somewhere, ideally based on some reasonable estimate of how long people can be epected to be capable of working(because it’s less costly that having to assess everyone on a case-by-case basis). Whether that point should still be 65 in an era where life expectancies (and health adjusted life expectancies) have increased by a good 10-15 years from when the OAS/GIS was introduced, is a wholly different question. Any line will be somewhat arbitrary, but it would be nice if the arbitrary line had some reasonable basis (other than having been chosen by a 19th century Prussian autocrat).
Moreover, while drawing that line may be a hard policy decision, the key point is recognizing that we have to make that hard policy decision. The old way of doing things didn’t involve making hard decisions, you just cut a check once a month (or build “affordable” housing that no one who can afford better will live near, or pass minimum wage laws which price the poor out of the labour market, the list is long). It may have been ineffective (or, indeed, destructive), but it certainly wasn’t hard. That links to Phil’s point, much social welfare policy was “easy” precisely because it was intended to make “us” feel better, without regard to the needs or incentives for the poor. Sure, it may immiserate the poor, but hey, we tried, if they’re still immiserated, that’s their fault. But of course, that’s not right. If we set up a system that helps immiserate the poor because it’s easy and it makes us feel better, that says more about us than it does about them. Good social policy is hard precisely because it isn’t enough for us to spend money, you have to spend money in such a way that actually empowers the poor – and to do that you have to believe that the poor can be empowered, that they have agency, that they can be the “undeserving” poor.
I had a great post get eaten by the spam filter. I am not spam!
Determinant: “Sorry Bob, your last post is way off-target.”
I suppose that settles it then…
Determinant – in the spirit of earlier posts by Shangwen and Jacques Rene, the only response to “I am not spam!” can be…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE
Bob: great comments, all of them. Yes, we should distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving, most of the time.
One of the problems with programs for “the poor” is that efficient allocation of those resources (money and professional services that the individual then makes decent use of) is a whole lot of last-mile problems that programs cannot address not just because they are top-down and bureaucratic, but because a truly individualized system ultimately has to come up against the reality of people not just making crap decisions but also having incomprehensible preferences. I worked part-time in an occupational medicine clinic for years and we had hundreds of patients come through with all kinds of voc-rehab support–some of it quite lavish–and yet the percentage of people who failed to take advantage of benefits or even start them was huge–over a third, I think. Then I was talking to a colleague one day and he said, “A lot of them just say they want it because that’s the socially correct thing to say to professionals. But what they have now is what they want.”
I sometimes think of this as a Chinese Menu Problem. When I was growing up I noticed that when we went to Chinese restaurants, the non-Chinese customers got the English menu (lemon chicken, egg rolls, fried rice), while the Chinese parents also got the Chinese menu which of course was much, much better (braised duck with chestnuts, fried pork belly, steamed baby vegetables). When the real deal is not only so much better, authentic, and healthier (no egg rolls) than the fake stuff, why wouldn’t every one want it? But not everyone wants to learn Chinese just to read a menu, and even if you translate it then it is another complex process to learn about what to order and how to enjoy it.
You can look pitifully on the English Menu class and lament their monotony and benightedness. You can look scornfully at them and say they are slobs just rolling up to the buffet to suck back more chicken balls. You can look at them with alarm and say they are destroying Chinese cuisine and ruining public health. You can pick any stereotype you want, but the problem is how do you find that fraction of the crowd that sees the transition as worth pursuing, to have access to the Chinese menu of comfy retirement, no mortgage, educated children, and status. They are there, but few policies allow them to come forward distinctively while leaving the rest to voluntarily exercise their own preferences. If policies want to hand out cash and human capital upgrades, they can do that: just write checks and send people to trade school. But if they want to distribute status and affiliation while lumping everyone into the same bourgeois fantasy, because the opposite belief is distasteful, they will fail.
It seems I too am Spam…
Shangwan@February 01, 2012 at 09:58 AM: ‘Most of that criminal activity would not exist if drugs and the sex trade were legal. We would have drug addicts and prostitutes, but far less violence and related crime encircling them.’
Apologies in advance for this off-topic comment, but I feel I have to disagree with the above comment. I live in Victoria, Australia where prostitution is regulated by the ‘Sex Work Act 1994’ with one of the original aims of regulation being to eliminate criminal activity associated with the operation of brothels. Despite that by some estimate there are four times as many illegal brothels as there are legal ones. In fact criminal elements have been using legal prostitution as a cover for their illegal activities including bringing in sex slave from overseas to operate in their legal brothels.
From my understanding of it the legal trade is complementary to the illegal one. What we’ve seen in Victoria with legalisation is the expansion of the legal ‘industry’ over time with a corresponding disproportionate increase (from estimates) of the illegal trade. Legalisation has increased demand, with corresponding increase in supply, both legal and illegal. Not all illegal brothels employ sex slaves (it may even be a minority), but in my mind at least, legalisation has helped spur human trafficking.
Putting my amateur sociologist hat on, the attributes of prostitution industry include workers being overwhelmingly young, from low socio-economic backgrounds, and women, while consumers are overwhelmingly male which isn’t relevant per se except for power relationships between these two groups. Incidence of violence against sex workers are higher than other forms of employment (and it is probably an underestimate due to underreporting as reporting from street prostitution which is illegal and illegal brothels is low for obvious reasons). The labour movement in the prostitution industry isn’t particularly strong so while workers in other ‘low-skilled’ employment benefit from legally enforceable collective benefits (minimum wages and conditions), prostitutes don’t even though it’s legal. Employer-employee relationship is overwhelmingly in favour of the employer (as prostitution is only allowed in brothels and to operate a brothel you need to get local council planning approval which is almost impossible unless you got a bit of financial heft which the average sex worker isn’t going to be). So employers typically get 50-60% of each act (and in the case of slavery, 100%). Human trafficking and sex slavery is of course illegal and so is violence (sexual and otherwise) except in practice enforcement is difficult if not impossible (because of legal issues that I won’t go into).
If I was anymore cynical I would say this system was deliberately designed to exploit a economically and politically weaker group by a coalition of politicians, businessman, and criminal elements (not mutually exclusive) most likely disproportionately made up of men.
This outcome of legalisation may be specific to us, I haven’t look into the issue deep enough to conclude whether the failure to reduce associated criminal activities is due to poor regulation or otherwise, but I have my doubts about the merits of legalisation with regulation or not because of the complementary relationship between the illegal and legal trade + the fact it seems the political economy and sociology of prostitution seem to point to an overwhelming exploitation (of economic and social rent) from a politically/economically stronger group over another.
This is a general comment, not responding to anyone in particular. The problem with the focus on whether the poor are ‘deserving’ distracts the focus away from possible structural reasons for inequality.
I wouldn’t be worried about inequality per se if in fact the world was truly meritocratic in the sense that we are all endowed with the same opportunities and our rewards in life was for the most part determined by our efforts and not by our postcode (country, skin colour, gender etc. etc.).
However if in fact our social-political-economic institutions are set up to favour one particular group over another leading to multiple equilibria (‘good’ and ‘bad’) then inequality becomes a structural/macro problem and not one down to effort or physiological attributes (which is a micro issue).
To be more specific, a person born in a poor country over the lifetime is probably going to be poorer than the same person born in a rich country no matter how much more effort they exert because they have different levels of access to education and health infrastructure, security (e.g. military conflicts, civil unrest), capital (physical and/or monetary), peer effect (think social norms/culture/peer pressure), and political institutions (e.g. exploitive vs representative) etc., and assuming the status quo is maintained their children are likely to be poor/rich, and their children’s children … leading to diverging good/bad equilibria.
Now replace ‘country’ with ‘parents’ then you have an example of inequality in opportunities within a country. Other examples, think segregation, apartheid, or medieval society which are more blatant and extreme forms of inequality induced by certain arrangement of institutions.
Going back to the ‘poor/rich parents’ case, assuming the status quo is maintained, it can be seen the initial conditions, in this case birth to poor/rich parent, matter in the long run. Hence, you hear stories about multiple generations of unemployed or at the other extreme dynasties of affluent families.
My second point, which is implicit in the first, is effort/hard work/motivation is a function of many things including but not limited to culture/social norms/peer effect. If you are born to a poor family which you have no choice over, unfortunately you may not learn/inherit the ‘high effort’ attribute leading to better economic/social outcomes over your lifetime. In effect your lifetime utility comes down to luck. This might not matter in a world of low inequality, but if you live in a world of high inequality induced by the arrangement of certain social/political/economic institutions then trying to figure out whether the poor are ‘deserving’ becomes irrelevant as by ‘birth’ they are ‘low effort’ due to institutional arrangements outside their control.
There are of course variances in outcome between individuals because of variances in effort spent but if you accept the premise that institutions cause inequality then taking the position that the poor can only blame themselves for their predicament is contradictory.
$586/month (Ontario Works)
$10.25 x 30 x 4.3 = $1332.50/month (7/11)Which is *essentially tax free
This is for an individual… kind of makes the “I’d rather sit at home than earn minimum wage” argument a bit silly; although, it still is a popular one amongst people who know a guy who knows a guy who has a big screen tv, audi, and still collects welfare.
I’ve actually heard MP’s talk about the kid at a high school in North York they know who sells drugs because its more profitable and easier than getting a job at Subway… He is undeserving. Except
Middle man purchase of weed get can negotiate a price between $180 – $220 ounce (~28 grams) @ $7 – $10/g retail = $16 – $100 profit/ounce. And remember this is being sold to other kids in low volumes with high risk. These middle man purchases are usually financed and the retailer is on the hook if the product is stolen or confiscated. They might make $125 – $200/week if they have a “legit” business model with lookouts, contact men and muscle (all on payroll). The ones who don’t often take losses and all of them have been robbed or beaten up on more than one occasion. So actually that kid doesn’t exist.
And when presented with information its always… well I didn’t talk to him, someone I know did…
But, what about parents on welfare who only have babies to game the system? They are undeserving. These kids always have Nike shoes and Ipods and lead indulgent lives on tax payers dollars…. Except that these same kids eat chips and koolaid for breakfast and lunch, and literally live on the streets until its time to sleep unless there are funded community programs that give them a place to interact socially, do homework etc. These people don’t exist either.
But, what about the guy who talked to the guy who met a homeless man who gets assistance and wastes it on alcohol and crack.
But what about the guy who …
These conversations always end up about fictitious poor people a representative population. Sad.
Unfortunately that’s popular opinion.
DavidN,
I suspect we don’t disagree in substance. Perhaps when thinking about “deserving” vs. “undeserving” the question is: “deserving of what?”. Because you’re right, there’s no moral distinction between being born, say, with a severe disability or being born to a poor family. Both may be, in their own ways, severe barriers to participation in the broader society.
On the other hand, once we ask ourselves “deserving of what”, the distinction re-emerges. A person who cannot work (or otherwise effectively participate in society) under any circumstances is deserving of unconditional assistance from the broader community – they have no agency over their lives. On the other hand, while the person born to the poor family certainly has a claim to be deserving of assistance from the broader community, because they have some agency over their lives, the claim to assistance will be different from the person who cannot work, and will likely not be unconditional. They will be “undeserving” of the unconditional assistance offered to the person who cannot work, but that doesn’t mean that they will not be “deserving” of any assistance.
“There are of course variances in outcome between individuals because of variances in effort spent but if you accept the premise that institutions cause inequality then taking the position that the poor can only blame themselves for their predicament is contradictory.”
I don’t think that those positions are contradictory. First, we have to be careful about conflating “poverty” with “inequality”, since unless you define poverty solely as a relative concept, they aren’t the same. Moreover, “poverty” can mean different things. One of the sad things about the “war on poverty” that’s been fought by western countries since the end of WWII is that while in material ways they have been quite successful at eradicating, or at least reducing, poverty as understood by our parents or grandparents, in other ways the poor are worse off than they were 50 years ago. As a result, while the Western poor are often materially as well, or better, off than the third-world poor, in other respects their lives are more deprived (if not depraved).
Second, there’s no contradiction there, because poverty, on its own, is not an insurmountable barrier to achievement, particularly in the presence of effective social institutions. The contrast between the native born poor in countries like the UK, the US or Canada and the immigrant poor is telling in this regard. As you correctly point out, there’s no inherent distinction between beeing born into a poor country and being born into a poor family. And yet, its almost a universal experience that the native born poor do worse than their foreign born neighbours. The distinction is not one of poverty, but of culture, incentives, and expectations. One can be poor, in a material sense, and still share the values and expectations of the broader community. The question is, how do you develop social programs to assist the poor without creating a culture of dependence and helplessness, without establishing perverse incentives, and without denying them their agency as human beings (and the responsibility and expectations that come with that, which responsibilities and expecations we have of ourselves).
Think of it this way, if you design social programs on the premise that poverty is an immutable barrier to achievement, that’s likely to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you design social programs on the premise that poverty is a barrier, yes, but one that can be overcome, and further, that the poor are the people who have to overcome it and who have an incentive to overcome it (which should be self-evident propositions), the social programs you design are likely to look very different and are far more likely achieve that objective. Moreover, if you treat the poor like human beings, and hold them up to the expectations we have for ourselves, rather treat them like hamsters (i.e., give them food, water, a place to sleep (ideally where they aren’t going to keep us awake at night), and clean up their shit – sound familiar?), such policies are less likely to have the corrosive effects that we’ve witnessed in the Western poor over the last half century.
“In its general influence on educated public opinion, orthodox [economics] teaching has not been merely feeble and confused but positively pernicious. It gives support to the view that expenditure by a government that is beneficial to the inhabitants of its territory is ‘socialism’ and must be prevented at all costs. This reconciles an otherwise more or less sane and benevolent public opinion to the arms race which seems to be dragging us all to destruction. …
It seems to me that the whole complex of theories and models … is in need of a thorough spring cleaning.”
Joan Robinson
Bob: “If you design social programs on the premise that poverty is a barrier, yes, but one that can be overcome, and further, that the poor are the people who have to overcome it and who have an incentive to overcome it (which should be self-evident propositions), the social programs you design are likely to look very different and are far more likely achieve that objective.”
Agree, also on the issue of “deserving of what”. If you focus on the poor because of their unequal share, then everyone’s inequality is up for grabs. My kids will be OK, but they aren’t likely to go to Harvard and don’t currently mingle with the elite of the Eastern Seaboard; should someone else fix that for me? It would sure boost my kids. But policies that go beyond relieving deficiencies in basic necessities are based on the idea that private social affiliation is somehow a public good. I agree with antipoverty types who are concerned about hunger and malnutrition–that is lifelong medical harm that is tough to correct. But you do not have to have a cell phone or internet access, even though the lack of those makes life dull and difficult.
Again, I think it is really important to distinguish not just on deserving/undeserving lines, but between those poor who move in and out of that rubric because of changes in the economy, personal health and fortune, and those who are the latest in a multi-generational pattern of dependency. The single mom working as a warehouse clerk is not the same as the person who has never known anything but the welfare office.
Awesome comments, keep them coming!
There are a couple of other un-cool but highly successful anti-poverty interventions that deserve mention: hypergamy, and joining the military. The US military is the most lavish welfare state in the world: it absorbs hundreds of thousands of people who come from low-income backgrounds and gives them a job, lifelong benefits, healthcare, child-care, and free education. It also confers tremendous status and affiliation benefits, some of which would be hard to get through other means. The Canadian military does likewise (with better health care than civilians get). Of course, people still have to take advantage of it, and there are many who leave the military with little additional human capital. But it is a fascinating natural experiment. My point is not to plug a military career, but to note that there is a huge number of people annually in both countries who are offered lavish anti-poverty treatments, yet you still see very unequal results including those human capital is unaffected.
Now, I understand that marrying up is much less common or available than it used to be, but it hasn’t been banned either.
Shangwen – don’t know if I’d agree with you about hypergamy, but strong family ties are a great anti-poverty strategy. Canada’s income support policies don’t have huge marriage disincentives compared to some other countries’, but if a single parent allows someone earning, say, $20,000 a year to move in, the loss of child tax and other benefits can be substantial relative to the additional financial support available. I think this is one reason why we won’t see the CTB enriched at all over the next few years – because this government is concerned with marriage taxes, and knows where all of the little ones lurk in the income tax and benefit system.
The US military is a really interesting one – and there have been quite a few studies of the economic impacts of joining the military.
What happens as a long-term consequence of the Iraq war will be worth watching, too, because of the relatively huge number of non-fatal yet cripplingly awful injuries that have left family at home with major long-term care giving responsibilities and vets with no possibility of supporting themselves.