IN the last two chapters I suggested that the kinds of help we want to provide are more limited than we commonly suppose and that, even when we want to help, the conditions under which a national program can do so without causing more harm than good are more tightly constrained than we suppose. My arguments might seem tailor-made to relieve us of responsibility for persons in need. But I believe just the contrary: that the moral imperative to do something to correct the situation of poor people and especially the minority poor is at least as powerful now as when Lyndon Johnson took office. I have for the most part used the data to make a case that the reforms flowing from the new wisdom of the 1960s were a blunder on purely pragmatic grounds. But another theme of the discussion has been that what we did was wrong on moral grounds, however admirable our intentions may have been.
It was wrong to take from the most industrious, most responsible poor —take safety, education, justice, status—so that we could cater to the least industrious, least responsible poor. It was wrong to impose rules that made it rational for adolescents to behave in ways that destroyed their futures. The changes we made were not just policy errors, not just inexpedient, but unjust. The injustice of the policies was compounded by the almost complete immunity of the elite from the price they demanded of the poor.
Before responding with a new wave of federally engineered solutions, however, we would do well to remember that, historically, such mistakes tend to correct themselves, given time. One may predict with some confidence, for example, that education in the United States is going to improve for middle-class children in the years ahead. It is apparent that a national consensus now holds that we burdened the schools with too many social responsibilities and neglected basic educational tasks, and that the time has come to focus again on academic achievement. Congress will tack some new programs onto this national agenda. The Supreme Court may countenance forms of meritocratic discrimination in the schools that it would have forbidden in the sixties. But such federal activity will be following rather than creating a momentum that is rooted in a broad public perception of what needs to be done. The real work will take place in the local schools. Our resources are sufficient to make improvements; implementing the new consensus depends on choices about priorities for those resources. We are now making choices that we could have made ten years ago but did not, because the winds were different then.
Conceivably such corrective forces will reverse trends among the poor as well. It is now intellectually respectable, as until recently it was not, to argue that welfare children should be indoctrinated with middle-class values. One may, without being considered an ethnocentric Anglo, urge that poor Hispanic children be denied bilingual education. One may more freely argue that certain family living arrangements and ways of treating children are not only “different” from middle-class norms, but inferior. In short, some improvements may devolve from nothing more complicated than yet another change, already well under way, in the elite wisdom.
But if the behaviors of members of the underclass are founded on a rational appreciation of the rules of the game, and as long as the rules encourage dysfunctional values and behaviors, the future cannot look bright. Behaviors that work will tend to persist until they stop working. The rules will have to be changed.
How might they be changed? I present three proposals: one for education, one for public welfare, and one for civil rights. The proposals of greatest theoretical interest involve education and public welfare. I will approach them as I did the “thought experiment,” using the discussion as a device for thinking about policy, not as a blueprint for policy. I begin, however, with the proposal for civil rights. It is simple, would cost no money to implement, and is urgently needed.
Real reform of American social policy is out of the question until we settle the race issue. We have been dancing around it since 1964, wishing it would go away and at the same time letting it dominate, sub rosa, the formation of social policy.
The source of our difficulties has been the collision, with enormous attendant national anxiety and indecision, of two principles so much a part of the American ethos that hardly anyone, whatever his political position, can wholly embrace one and reject the other. The principles are equal treatment and a fair shake.
The principle of equal treatment demands that we all play by the same rules—which would seem to rule out any policy that gives preferential treatment to anyone. A fair shake demands that everyone have a reasonably equal chance at the brass ring—or at least a reasonably equal chance to get on the merry-go-round.
Thus hardly anyone, no matter how strictly noninterventionist, can watch with complete equanimity when a black child is deprived of a chance to develop his full potential for reasons that may be directly traced to a heritage of exploitation by whites. Neither can anyone, no matter how devoted to Affirmative Action, watch with complete equanimity when a white job applicant is turned down for a job in favor of a black who is less qualified. Something about it is fundamentally unfair—un-American—no matter how admirable the ultimate goal.
Until 1965, the principles of equal treatment and a fair shake did not compete. They created no tension. Their application to racial policy was simple: Make the nation color-blind. People were to be judged on their merits. But then the elite wisdom changed. Blacks were to be helped to catch up.
I spent many chapters tracing the results. In summarizing these results as they pertain to the poorest blacks, this harsh judgment is warranted: If an impartial observer from another country were shown the data on the black lower class from 1950 to 1980 but given no information about contemporaneous changes in society or public policy, that observer would infer that racial discrimination against the black poor increased drastically during the late 1960s and 1970s. No explanation except a surge in outright, virulent discrimination would as easily explain to a “blind” observer why things went so wrong.
Such an explanation is for practical purposes correct. Beginning in the last half of the 1960s, the black poor were subjected to new forms of racism with effects that outweighed the waning of the old forms of racism. Before the 1960s, we had a black underclass that was held down because blacks were systematically treated differently from whites, by whites. Now, we have a black underclass that is held down for the same generic reason— because blacks are systematically treated differently from whites, by whites.
The problem consists of a change in the nature of white condescension toward blacks. Historically, virtually all whites condescended toward virtually all blacks; there is nothing new in that. The condescension could be vicious in intent, in the form of “keeping niggers in their place,” It could be benign, as in the excessive solicitousness with which whites who considered themselves enlightened tended to treat blacks.
These forms of condescension came under withering attack during the civil rights movement, to such an extent that certain manifestations of the condescension disappeared altogether in some circles. A variety of factors —among them, simply greater representation of blacks in the white professional world of work—made it easier for whites to develop relationships of authentic equality and respect with black colleagues. But from a policy standpoint, it became clear only shortly after the War on Poverty began that henceforth the black lower class was to be the object of a new condescension that would become intertwined with every aspect of social policy. Race is central to the problem of reforming social policy, not because it is intrinsically so but because the debate about what to do has been perverted by the underlying consciousness among whites that “they”—the people to be helped by social policy—are predominantly black, and blacks are owed a debt.
The result was that the intelligentsia and the policymakers, coincident with the revolution in social policy, began treating the black poor in ways that they would never consider treating people they respected. Is the black crime rate skyrocketing? Look at the black criminal’s many grievances against society. Are black illegitimate birth rates five times those of whites? We must remember that blacks have a much broader view of the family than we do—aunts and grandmothers fill in. Did black labor force participation among the young plummet? We can hardly blame someone for having too much pride to work at a job sweeping floors. Are black high-school graduates illiterate? The educational system is insensitive. Are their test scores a hundred points lower than others? The tests are biased. Do black youngsters lose jobs to white youngsters because their mannerisms and language make them incomprehensible to their prospective employers? The culture of the ghetto has its own validity.
That the condescension should be so deep and pervasive is monumentally ironic, for the injunction to respect the poor (after all, they are not to blame) was hammered home in the tracts of OEO and radical intellectuals. But condescension is the correct descriptor. Whites began to tolerate and make excuses for behavior among blacks that whites would disdain in themselves or their children.
The expression of this attitude in policy has been a few obvious steps —Affirmative Action, minority set-asides in government contracts, and the like—but the real effect was the one that I discussed in the history of the period. The white elite could not at one time cope with two reactions. They could not simultaneously feel compelled to make restitution for past wrongs to blacks and blame blacks for not taking advantage of their new opportunities. The system had to be blamed, and any deficiencies demonstrated by blacks had to be overlooked or covered up—by whites.
A central theme of this book has been that the consequences were disastrous for poor people of all races, but for poor blacks especially, and most emphatically for poor blacks in all-black communities—precisely that population that was the object of the most unremitting sympathy.
My proposal for dealing with the racial issue in social welfare is to repeal every bit of legislation and reverse every court decision that in any way requires, recommends, or awards differential treatment according to race, and thereby put us back onto the track that we left in 1965. We may argue about the appropriate limits of government intervention in trying to enforce the ideal, but at least it should be possible to identify the ideal: Race is not a morally admissible reason for treating one person differently from another. Period.
There is no such thing as an undeserving five-year-old. Society, in the form of government intervention, is quite limited in what it can do to make up for many of the deficiencies of life that an unlucky five-year-old experiences; it can, however, provide a good education and thereby give the child a chance at a different future.
The objective is a system that provides more effective education of the poor and disadvantaged without running afoul of the three laws of social programs. The objective is also to construct what is, in my view, a just system—one that does not sacrifice one student’s interests to another’s, and one that removes barriers in the way of those who want most badly to succeed and are prepared to make the greatest effort to do so. So once again let us put ourselves in the position of bureaucrats of sweeping authority and large budgets. How shall we make things better?
We begin by installing a completely free educational system that goes from preschool to the loftiest graduate degrees, removing economic barriers entirely. Having done so, however, we find little change from the system that prevailed in 1980. Even then, kindergarten through high school were free to the student, and federal grants and loans worth $4.4 billion plus a very extensive system of private scholarships and loans were available for needy students who wanted to continue their education. By making the system entirely free, we are not making more education newly accessible to large numbers of people, nor have we done anything about the quality of education.
We then make a second and much more powerful change. For many years, the notion of a voucher system for education has enjoyed a periodic vogue. In its pure form, it would give each parent of a child of school age a voucher that the parent could use to pay for schooling at any institution to which the child could gain admittance. The school would redeem the voucher for cash from the government. The proposals for voucher systems have generally foundered on accusations that they are a tool for the middle class and would leave the disadvantaged in the lurch. My proposition is rather different: A voucher system is the single most powerful method available to us to improve the education of the poor and disadvantaged. Vouchers thus become the second component of our educational reforms.
For one large segment of the population of poor and disadvantaged, the results are immediate, unequivocal, and dramatic. I refer to children whose parents take an active role in overseeing and encouraging their children’s education. Such parents have been fighting one of the saddest of the battles of the poor—doing everything they can within the home environment, only to see their influence systematically undermined as soon as their children get out the door. When we give such parents vouchers, we find that they behave very much as their affluent counterparts behave when they are deciding upon a private school. They visit prospective schools, interview teachers, and place their children in schools that are demanding of the students and accountable to the parents for results. I suggest that when we give such parents vouchers, we will observe substantial convergence of black and white test scores in a single generation. All that such parents have ever needed is an educational system that operates on the same principles they do.
This is a sufficient improvement to justify the system, for we are in a no-lose situation with regard to the children whose parents do not play their part effectively. These children are sent to bad schools or no schools at all—just as they were in the past. How much worse can it be under the new system?
This defect in the voucher system leaves us, however, with a substantial number of students who are still getting no education through no fault of their own. Nor can we count on getting results if we round them up and dispatch them willy-nilly to the nearest accredited school. A school that can motivate and teach a child when there is backup from home cannot necessarily teach the children we are now discussing. Many of them are poor not only in money. Many have been developmentally impoverished as well, receiving very little of the early verbal and conceptual stimulation that happens as a matter of course when parents expect their children to be smart. Some arrive at the school door already believing themselves to be stupid, expecting to fail. We can be as angry as we wish at their parents, but we are still left with the job of devising a school that works for these children. What do we do—not in terms of a particular pedagogical program or curriculum, but in broad strokes?
First, whatever else, we decide to create a world that makes sense in the context of the society we want them to succeed in. The school is not an extension of the neighborhood. Within the confines of the school building and school day, we create a world that may seem as strange and irrelevant as Oz.
We do not do so with uniforms or elaborate rules or inspirational readings—the embellishments are left up to the school. Rather, we install one simple, inflexible procedure. Each course has an entrance test. Tenth-grade geometry has an entrance test; so does first-grade reading. Entrance tests for simple courses are simple; entrance tests for hard courses are hard. Their purpose is not to identify the best students, but to make sure that any student who gets in can, with an honest effort, complete the course work.
Our system does not carry with it any special teaching technique. It does, however, give the teacher full discretion over enforcing an orderly working environment. The teacher’s only obligation is to teach those who want to learn.
The system is also infinitely forgiving. A student who has just flunked algebra three times running can enroll in that or any other math class for which he can pass the entrance test. He can enroll even if he has just been kicked out of three other classes for misbehavior. The question is never “What have you been in the past?” but always “What are you being as of now?”
The evolving outcomes of the system are complex. Some students begin by picking the easiest, least taxing courses, and approach them with as little motivation as their counterparts under the current system. Perhaps among this set of students are some who cannot or will not complete even the simplest courses. They drop by the wayside, failures of the system.
Among those who do complete courses, any courses, five things happen, all of them positive. First, the system is so constructed that to get into a course is in itself a small success (“I passed!”). Second, the students go into the course with a legitimate reason for believing that they can do the work; they passed a valid test that says they can. Third, they experience a success when they complete the course. Fourth, they experience—directly—a cause-effect relationship between their success in one course and their ability to get into the next course, no matter how small a step upward that next course may be. Fifth, all the while this is going on, they are likely to be observing other students no different from them—no richer, no smarter— who are moving upward faster than they are but using the same mechanism.
What of those who are disappointed, who try to get into a class and fail? Some will withdraw into themselves and be forever fearful of taking a chance on failure—as almost all do under the current system anyway. But there is a gradation to risk, and a peculiar sort of guarantee of success in our zero-transfer system. Whatever class a student finally takes, the student will have succeeded in gaining entrance to it. He will go into the classroom with official certification—based on reality—that he will be able to learn the material if he gives it an honest effort. The success-failure, cause-effect features of the system are indispensable for teaching some critical lessons:
None of these lessons is taught as well or as directly under the system prevailing in our current education of the disadvantaged. The central failing of the educational system for the poor and disadvantaged, and most especially poor and disadvantaged blacks, is not that it fails to provide meaningful ways for a student to succeed, though that is part of it. The central failing is not that ersatz success—fake curricula, fake grades, fake diplomas—sets the students up for failure when they leave the school, though that too is part of it. The central failing is that the system does not teach disadvantaged students, who see permanent failure all around them, how to fail. For students who are growing up expecting (whatever their dreams may be) ultimately to be a failure, with failure writ large, the first essential contravening lesson is that failure can come in small, digestible packages. Failure can be dealt with. It can be absorbed, analyzed, and converted to an asset.
We are now discussing a population of students—the children of what has become known as “the underclass"—that comes to the classroom with an array of disadvantages beyond simple economic poverty. I am not suggesting that, under our hypothetical system, all children of the underclass will become motivated students forthwith. Rather, some will. Perhaps it will be a small proportion; perhaps a large one. Certainly the effect interacts with the inherent abilities of the children involved. But some effect will be observed. Some children who are at the very bottom of the pile in the disadvantages they bear will act on the change in the reality of their environment. It will be an improvement over the situation in the system we have replaced, in which virtually none of them gets an education in anything except the futility of hoping.
I begin with the proposition that it is within our resources to do enormous good for some people quickly. We have available to us a program that would convert a large proportion of the younger generation of hardcore unemployed into steady workers making a living wage. The same program would drastically reduce births to single teenage girls. It would reverse the trendline in the breakup of poor families. It would measurably increase the upward socioeconomic mobility of poor families. These improvements would affect some millions of persons.
All these are results that have eluded the efforts of the social programs installed since 1965, yet, from everything we know, there is no real question about whether they would occur under the program I propose. A wide variety of persuasive evidence from our own culture and around the world, from experimental data and longitudinal studies, from theory and practice, suggests that the program would achieve such results.
The proposed program, our final and most ambitious thought experiment, consists of scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-aged persons, including AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Worker’s Compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance, and the rest. It would leave the working-aged person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded services. It is the Alexandrian solution: cut the knot, for there is no way to untie it.
It is difficult to examine such a proposal dispassionately. Those who dislike paying for welfare are for it without thinking. Others reflexively imagine bread lines and people starving in the streets. But as a means of gaining fresh perspective on the problem of effective reform, let us consider what this hypothetical society might look like.
A large majority of the population is unaffected. A surprising number of the huge American middle and working classes go from birth to grave without using any social welfare benefits until they receive their first Social Security check. Another portion of the population is technically affected, but the change in income is so small or so sporadic that it makes no difference in quality of life. A third group comprises persons who have to make new arrangements and behave in different ways. Sons and daughters who fail to find work continue to live with their parents or relatives or friends. Teenaged mothers have to rely on support from their parents or the father of the child and perhaps work as well. People laid off from work have to use their own savings or borrow from others to make do until the next job is found. All these changes involve great disruption in expectations and accustomed roles.
Along with the disruptions go other changes in behavior. Some parents do not want their young adult children continuing to live off their income, and become quite insistent about their children learning skills and getting jobs. This attitude is most prevalent among single mothers who have to depend most critically on the earning power of their offspring.
Parents tend to become upset at the prospect of a daughter’s bringing home a baby that must be entirely supported on an already inadequate income. Some become so upset that they spend considerable parental energy avoiding such an eventuality. Potential fathers of such babies find themselves under more pressure not to cause such a problem, or to help with its solution if it occurs.
Adolescents who were not job-ready find they are job-ready after all. It turns out that they can work for low wages and accept the discipline of the workplace if the alternative is grim enough. After a few years, many —not all, but many—find that they have acquired salable skills, or that they are at the right place at the right time, or otherwise find that the original entry-level job has gradually been transformed into a secure job paying a decent wage. A few—not a lot, but a few—find that the process leads to affluence.
Perhaps the most rightful, deserved benefit goes to the much larger population of low-income families who have been doing things right all along and have been punished for it: the young man who has taken responsibility for his wife and child even though his friends with the same choice have called him a fool; the single mother who has worked full time and forfeited her right to welfare for very little extra money; the parents who have set an example for their children even as the rules of the game have taught their children that the example is outmoded. For these millions of people, the instantaneous result is that no one makes fun of them any longer. The longer-term result will be that they regain the status that is properly theirs. They will not only be the bedrock upon which the community is founded (which they always have been), they will be recognized as such. The process whereby they regain their position is not magical, but a matter of logic. When it becomes highly dysfunctional for a person to be dependent, status will accrue to being independent, and in fairly short order. Noneconomic rewards will once again reinforce the economic rewards of being a good parent and provider.
The prospective advantages are real and extremely plausible. In fact, if a government program of the traditional sort (one that would “do” something rather than simply get out of the way) could as plausibly promise these advantages, its passage would be a foregone conclusion. Congress, yearning for programs that are not retreads of failures, would be prepared to spend billions. Negative side-effects (as long as they were the traditionally acceptable negative side-effects) would be brushed aside as trivial in return for the benefits. For let me be quite clear: I am not suggesting that we dismantle income support for the working-aged to balance the budget or punish welfare cheats. I am hypothesizing, with the advantage of powerful collateral evidence, that the lives of large numbers of poor people would be radically changed for the better.
There is, however, a fourth segment of the population yet to be considered, those who are pauperized by the withdrawal of government supports and unable to make alternate arrangements: the teenaged mother who has no one to turn to; the incapacitated or the inept who are thrown out of the house; those to whom economic conditions have brought long periods in which there is no work to be had; those with illnesses not covered by insurance. What of these situations?
The first resort is the network of local services. Poor communities in our hypothetical society are still dotted with storefront health clinics, emergency relief agencies, employment services, legal services. They depend for support on local taxes or local philanthropy, and the local taxpayers and philanthropists tend to scrutinize them rather closely. But, by the same token, they also receive considerably more resources than they formerly did. The dismantling of the federal services has poured tens of billions of dollars back into the private economy. Some of that money no doubt has been spent on Mercedes and summer homes on the Cape. But some has been spent on capital investments that generate new jobs. And some has been spent on increased local services to the poor, voluntarily or as decreed by the municipality. In many cities, the coverage provided by this network of agencies is more generous, more humane, more wisely distributed, and more effective in its results than the services formerly subsidized by the federal government.
But we must expect that a large number of people will fall between the cracks. How might we go about trying to retain the advantages of a zero-level welfare system and still address the residual needs?
As we think about the nature of the population still in need, it becomes apparent that their basic problem in the vast majority of the cases is the lack of a job, and this problem is temporary. What they need is something to tide them over while finding a new place in the economy. So our first step is to re-install the Unemployment Insurance program in more or less its previous form. Properly administered, unemployment insurance makes sense. Even if it is restored with all the defects of current practice, the negative effects of Unemployment Insurance alone are relatively minor. Our objective is not to wipe out chicanery or to construct a theoretically unblemished system, but to meet legitimate human needs without doing more harm than good. Unemployment Insurance is one of the least harmful ways of contributing to such ends. Thus the system has been amended to take care of the victims of short-term swings in the economy.
Who is left? We are now down to the hardest of the hard core of the welfare-dependent. They have no jobs. They have been unable to find jobs (or have not tried to find jobs) for a longer period of time than the unemployment benefits cover. They have no families who will help. They have no friends who will help. For some reason, they cannot get help from local services or private charities except for the soup kitchen and a bed in the Salvation Army hall.
What will be the size of this population? We have never tried a zero-level federal welfare system under conditions of late-twentieth-century national wealth, so we cannot do more than speculate. But we may speculate. Let us ask of whom the population might consist and how they might fare.
For any category of “needy” we may name, we find ourselves driven to one of two lines of thought. Either the person is in a category that is going to be at the top of the list of services that localities vote for themselves, and at the top of the list of private services, or the person is in a category where help really is not all that essential or desirable. The burden of the conclusion is not that every single person will be taken care of, but that the extent of resources to deal with needs is likely to be very great—not based on wishful thinking, but on extrapolations from reality.
To illustrate, let us consider the plight of the stereotypical welfare mother—never married, no skills, small children, no steady help from a man. It is safe to say that, now as in the 1950s, there is no one who has less sympathy from the white middle class, which is to be the source of most of the money for the private and local services we envision. Yet this same white middle class is a soft touch for people trying to make it on their own, and a soft touch for “deserving” needy mothers—AFDC was one of the most widely popular of the New Deal welfare measures, intended as it was for widows with small children. Thus we may envision two quite different scenarios.
In one scenario, the woman is presenting the local or private service with this proposition: “Help me find a job and day-care for my children, and I will take care of the rest.” In effect, she puts herself into the same category as the widow and the deserted wife—identifies herself as one of the most obviously deserving of the deserving poor. Welfare mothers who want to get into the labor force are likely to find a wide range of help. In the other scenario, she asks for an outright and indefinite cash grant—in effect, a private or local version of AFDC—so that she can stay with the children and not hold a job. In the latter case, it is very easy to imagine situations in which she will not be able to find a local service or a private philanthropy to provide the help she seeks. The question we must now ask is: What’s so bad about that? If children were always better off being with their mother all day and if, by the act of giving birth, a mother acquired the inalienable right to be with the child, then her situation would be unjust to her and injurious to her children. Neither assertion can be defended, however—especially not in the 1980s, when more mothers of all classes work away from the home than ever before, and even more especially not in view of the empirical record for the children growing up under the current welfare system. Why should the mother be exempted by the system from the pressures that must affect everyone else’s decision to work?
As we survey these prospects, important questions remain unresolved. The first of these is why, if federal social transfers are treacherous, should locally mandated transfers be less so? Why should a municipality be permitted to legislate its own AFDC or Food Stamp program if their results are so inherently bad?
Part of the answer lies in conceptions of freedom. I have deliberately avoided raising them—the discussion is about how to help the disadvantaged, not about how to help the advantaged cut their taxes, to which arguments for personal freedom somehow always get diverted. Nonetheless, the point is valid: Local or even state systems leave much more room than a federal system for everyone, donors and recipients alike, to exercise freedom of choice about the kind of system they live under. Laws are more easily made and changed, and people who find them unacceptable have much more latitude in going somewhere more to their liking.
But the freedom of choice argument, while legitimate, is not necessary. We may put the advantages of local systems in terms of the Law of Imperfect Selection. A federal system must inherently employ very crude, inaccurate rules for deciding who gets what kind of help, and the results are as I outlined them in chapter 16. At the opposite extreme—a neighbor helping a neighbor, a family member helping another family member—the law loses its validity nearly altogether. Very fine-grained judgments based on personal knowledge are being made about specific people and changing situations. In neighborhoods and small cities, the procedures can still bring much individualized information to bear on decisions. Even systems in large cities and states can do much better than a national system; a decaying industrial city in the Northeast and a booming sunbelt city of the same size can and probably should adopt much different rules about who gets what and how much,
A final and equally powerful argument for not impeding local systems is diversity. We know much more in the 1980s than we knew in the 1960s about what does not work. We have a lot to learn about what does work. Localities have been a rich source of experiments. Marva Collins in Chicago gives us an example of how a school can bring inner-city students up to national norms. Sister Falaka Fattah in Philadelphia shows us how homeless youths can be rescued from the streets. There are numberless such lessons waiting to be learned from the diversity of local efforts. By all means, let a hundred flowers bloom, and if the federal government can play a useful role in lending a hand and spreading the word of successes, so much the better.
The ultimate unresolved question about our proposal to abolish income maintenance for the working-aged is how many people will fall through the cracks. In whatever detail we try to foresee the consequences, the objection may always be raised: We cannot be sure that everyone will be taken care of in the degree to which we would wish. But this observation by no means settles the question. If one may point in objection to the child now fed by Food Stamps who would go hungry, one may also point with satisfaction to the child who would have an entirely different and better future. Hungry children should be fed; there is no argument about that. It is no less urgent that children be allowed to grow up in a system free of the forces that encourage them to remain poor and dependent. If a strategy reasonably promises to remove those forces, after so many attempts to “help the poor” have failed, it is worth thinking about.
But that rationale is too vague. Let me step outside the persona I have employed and put the issue in terms of one last intensely personal hypothetical example. Let us suppose that you, a parent, could know that tomorrow your own child would be made an orphan. You have a choice. You may put your child with an extremely poor family, so poor that your child will be badly clothed and will indeed sometimes be hungry. But you also know that the parents have worked hard all their lives, will make sure your child goes to school and studies, and will teach your child that independence is a primary value. Or you may put your child with a family with parents who have never worked, who will be incapable of overseeing your child’s education—but who have plenty of food and good clothes, provided by others. If the choice about where one would put one’s own child is as clear to you as it is to me, on what grounds does one justify support of a system that, indirectly but without doubt, makes the other choice for other children? The answer that “What we really want is a world where that choice is not forced upon us” is no answer. We have tried to have it that way. We failed. Everything we know about why we failed tells us that more of the same will not make the dilemma go away.
Billions for equal opportunity, not one cent for equal outcome—such is the slogan to inscribe on the banner of whatever cause my proposals constitute. Their common theme is to make it possible to get as far as one can go on one’s merit, hardly a new ideal in American thought.
The ideal itself has never lapsed. What did lapse was the recognition that practical merit exists. Some people are better than others. They deserve more of society’s rewards, of which money is only one small part. A principal function of social policy is to make sure they have the opportunity to reap those rewards. Government cannot identify the worthy, but it can protect a society in which the worthy can identify themselves.
I am proposing triage of a sort, triage by self-selection. In triage on the battlefield, the doctor makes the decision—this one gets treatment, that one waits, the other one is made comfortable while waiting to die. In our social triage, the decision is left up to the patient. The patient always has the right to say “I can do X” and get a chance to prove it. Society always has the right to hold him to that pledge. The patient always has the right to fail. Society always has the right to let him.
There is in this stance no lack of compassion but a presumption of respect. People—all people, black or white, rich or poor—may be unequally responsible for what has happened to them in the past, but all are equally responsible for what they do next. Just as in our idealized educational system a student can come back a third, fourth, or fifth time to a course, in our idealized society a person can fail repeatedly and always be qualified for another chance—to try again, to try something easier, to try something different. The options are always open. Opportunity is endless. There is no punishment for failure, only a total absence of rewards. Society —or our idealized society—should be preoccupied with making sure that achievement is rewarded.
There is no shortage of people to be rewarded. Go into any inner-city school and you will find students of extraordinary talent, kept from knowing how good they are by rules we imposed in the name of fairness. Go into any poor community, and you will find people of extraordinary imagination and perseverance, energy and pride, making tortured accommodations to the strange world we created in the name of generosity. The success stories of past generations of poor in this country are waiting to be repeated.
There is no shortage of institutions to provide the rewards. Our schools know how to educate students who want to be educated. Our industries know how to find productive people and reward them. Our police know how to protect people who are ready to cooperate in their own protection. Our system of justice knows how to protect the rights of individuals who know what their rights are. Our philanthropic institutions know how to multiply the effectiveness of people who are already trying to help themselves. In short, American society is very good at reinforcing the investment of an individual in himself. For the affluent and for the middle class, these mechanisms continue to work about as well as they ever have, and we enjoy their benefits. Not so for the poor. American government, in its recent social policy, has been ineffectual in trying to stage-manage their decision to invest, and it has been unintentionally punitive toward those who would make the decision on their own. It is time to get out of their way.
It is entertaining to indulge in speculations about solutions, but they remain only speculations. Congress will not abolish income-maintenance for the working-aged. The public school system is not in jeopardy of replacement by vouchers. The federal government will not abandon legalized racial discrimination when it is thought to help the underdog. More generally, it is hard to imagine any significant reform of social policy in the near future. When one thinks of abolishing income maintenance, for example, one must recall that ours is a system that, faced with the bankruptcy of Social Security in the early 1980s, went into paroxysms of anxiety at the prospect of delaying the cost-of-living increase for six months.
But the cautiousness of the system is not in itself worrisome. Reforms should be undertaken carefully and slowly, and often not at all. What should worry us instead is a peculiar escapism that has gripped the consideration of social policy. It seems that those who legislate and administer and write about social policy can tolerate any increase in actual suffering as long as the system in place does not explicitly permit it. It is better, by the logic we have been living with, that we try to take care of 100 percent of the problem and make matters worse than that we solve 75 percent of the problem with a solution that does not try to do anything about the rest.
Escapism is a natural response. Most of us want to help. It makes us feel bad to think of neglected children and rat-infested slums, and we are happy to pay for the thought that people who are good at taking care of such things are out there. If the numbers of neglected children and numbers of rats seem to be going up instead of down, it is understandable that we choose to focus on how much we put into the effort instead of what comes out. The tax checks we write buy us, for relatively little money and no effort at all, a quieted conscience. The more we pay, the more certain we can be that we have done our part, and it is essential that we feel that way regardless of what we accomplish. A solution that would have us pay less and acknowledge that some would go unhelped is unacceptable.
To this extent, the barrier to radical reform of social policy is not the pain it would cause the intended beneficiaries of the present system, but the pain it would cause the donors. The real contest about the direction of social policy is not between people who want to cut budgets and people who want to help. When reforms finally do occur, they will happen not because stingy people have won, but because generous people have stopped kidding themselves.