How can we reduce poverty? There are two main answers with strong moral foundations. The liberal one is, more or less: the government should provide aid to the poor. The conservative one is: communities should provide encourage the poor to take responsibility for themselves. For liberals, the conservative approach is cruel and heartless in the short run and completely ignores the power of systemic and structural forces that keep people in poverty despite their best efforts. For conservatives, the liberal approach encourages dependence and undermines self-respect.
What do the facts say? Well, it’s complicated. According to the official poverty statistics in the US, poverty fell from 22% to about 14% between 1964 and 1967 – that is, before Johnson’s ambitious Great Society legislation. As of 2014, it was still 14%. That doesn’t indicate success for the government programs. However, liberals point out that if you include the government subsidies that are not counted in the poverty rate – tax credits and noncash benefits – then the poverty rate has indeed dropped a lot since 1967, to below 5%. But, the Republicans reply, that just proves our point: a massive redistribution via government aid has only made people dependent on government – it hasn’t increased their own earned income.
Something is definitely wrong. We all know that there are large sections of the country that are desperately poor in both material and cultural terms – whether it’s the ghettos of Philadelphia or the mountains of Appalachia, both riddled with drug use and violence. There are even wider areas that have quietly lost hope. While it’s hard to prove, it seems to me that there are far more people now than fifty years ago who feel they will never make it, that the paths to financial comfort and self-respect are closed to them. Whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t worked.
The liberals would say: that’s because Republicans have been undermining our programs since the start; if we could really do what Denmark and Sweden have done, we wouldn’t have those problems. But Denmark and Sweden and Europe in general do have those problems, and they don’t know how to deal with them either.
In general, poverty and inequality are lower in Europe than in the US (though there are intense debates about how to measure these, the US comes off badly in most approaches.) But the trends are similar to ours: both poverty and inequality are rising everywhere. Europeans are concerned about ethnic and immigrant ghettos and pockets of severe poverty. So in 2010 the EU adopted the “Europe 2020” strategy, aiming lift 20 million people out of the risk of poverty and social exclusion within ten years. But it hasn’t worked: since 2010 poverty in the EU has increased.
While the New Deal model has lost ground here, the European welfare model has lost ground throughout Europe. Whatever is causing the rise in poverty, they haven’t got the answer.
Of course, there is no good evidence that the conservative answer works, either. Conservatives, in my experience, are often more active in local food banks and church charities than liberals: in that way they may do more visible good. But that doesn’t dent the larger problem. Relying on local communities and family networks, or on personal morality, can work occasionally, when the stars are aligned, but I have not seen a conservative model that shows it works for systemic change.
Liberals believe we have a moral obligation to reduce poverty. We feel morally superior when we embrace programs that we believe will work on a large scale. But we should be a little more humble. Actually, we should be a lot more humble. We do not know what works. The method that worked pretty well in the postwar period seems not to be working effectively now. We should be trying to figure that out.
Conservatives may have some good ideas for that. It seems very likely that building community will have to be part of the solution. Indeed, most liberals would agree: we have supported programs of community engagement and participation. It seems probable that the government-centered approach is too clumsy and bureaucratic for the complexity of current societies: there are just too many examples of programs that wrap people in red tape rather than helping them. As an administrator of an Obama-era program to help teachers in poor districts admits, “"We get focused on, you know, budgets and legislative requirements and things like this, and frankly, I think sometimes we forget who we ultimately work for."
So as a matter of fact, there is a great deal of overlap and agreement across the political spectrum. Everyone wants to develop local communities. No one wants to give all the power to a a central government bureaucracy. Everyone believes the goal should be to help people achieve independence and self-respect, not dependence on a dole. So the intense battles around this issue represent another case where ideological framings have unnecessarily blocked the search for solutions.
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