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- | ====== 1989 Commencement Speech: William J. Wilson, Professor, University of Chicago ====== | ||
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- | Father Raynor, members of the Board of Trustees, members of the Faculty and Administration, | ||
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- | One of the things that I remembered about my pleasant visit to Marquette University for one week during the spring of 1986 was the concern expressed by many of the students with whom I spoke about the problems of inner-city poverty, the growing disparity between the rich and the poor In the United States, and the lack of a strong commitment in this country to alleviate the problems of economic deprivation. When I recently reflected on those conversations I thought that it would perhaps be appropriate to address in my brief remarks this morning the broader issue of American perceptions of poverty and welfare. These perceptions are in sharp contrast to the views expressed by the thoughtful and socially conscious students of Marquette University, and I believe that they make it difficult to generate a national program to effectively combat poverty in America. To be more specific, any effort to improve the lives of the poor will have to confront a strong belief system In the United States that denies the social origins and societal significance of poverty and welfare. For example, after analyzing findings from national survey data collected in 1969 and then again in 1980, one recent study concluded that “Most Americans believe that opportunity for economic advancement is widely available, that economic outcomes are determined by individuals' | ||
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- | The origins and stability of these beliefs are related to a complex set of factors involving the economic system, the class structure, and the political system of the United States. The interplay of these factors can be best understood in a comparative light, i.e., by exploring cross-national variations in the perceptions of poverty. In a 1977 study of the way poverty is perceived in nine Western European countries, only the United Kingdom evidenced attitudes similar to those expressed in the United States. Whereas nearly half of all the respondents to a national survey in the United Kingdom attributed poverty to " | ||
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- | In 1978 the French social scientist Robert Castel argued that the paradox of poverty in affluent American society has rested on the notion that "the poor are individuals who themselves bear the chief responsibility for their condition. As a result the politics of welfare centers around the management of individual deficiencies." | ||
- | The data from public opinion polls support this argument. They indicate that Americans tend to be far more concerned about the duties or social obligations of the poor, particularly the welfare poor, than about their social rights as American citizens to be free poverty and economic deprivation. | ||
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- | A recent survey suggests that underlying such public sentiment is the belief that it is the moral fabric of individuals, | ||
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- | The heavy emphasis on the individual traits of the poor and on the duties or social obligations of welfare recipients are not unique to the general public. This " | ||
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- | Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the expanding network of poverty researchers In the United States paid considerable attention to the question of individuals’ work attitudes and the association between income maintenance programs and the work ethic of the poor. They consistently ignored the effects of basic economic transformations and cyclical processes on the work experiences and prospects of the poor. In an examination of American approaches to the study of poverty from a European perspective, | ||
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- | Another irony is that despite this narrow focus, these very American researchers have consistently uncovered empirical findings that undermine, not support, assumptions about the negative effects of welfare receipt on Individual Initiative and motivation. Yet these assumptions persist among policymakers and "the paradox of continuing high //poverty// during a period of general prosperity has contributed to the recently emerging consensus that welfare must be reformed.” | ||
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- | Although it is reasonable to argue that policymakers are not aware of a good deal of the empirical research on the effects of welfare, the General Accounting Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress, released a study in early 1987 which reported that there was no conclusive evidence for the prevailing belief that welfare discourages individuals from working, breaks up two-parent families, or affects the child-bearing rates of unmarried women, even young unmarried women. | ||
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- | The GAO report reached these conclusions after reviewing the results of more than 100 empirical studies on the effects of welfare completed since 1975. Although these conclusions should come as no surprise to poverty researchers familiar with the empirical literature, they should have generated a stir among congressmen, | ||
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- | These two themes are based on the implicit assumption that a sort of mysterious " | ||
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- | Poverty, like other aspects of class inequality, is a consequence not only of the differential distribution of economic privileges and resources, but of the differential access to culture as well. In other words, in an industrial society, groups tend to be stratified in terms of the material assets or resources they control, the benefits and privileges they receive from these resources, the cultural experiences they have accumulated from historical and existing economic and political arrangements, | ||
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- | When this subtle point is made, it is important to remember that poor Americans, including inner-city ghetto residents overwhelmingly endorse mainstream values regarding work, family, and the law. What is so apparent to me - after reading pages and pages of field notes from our current research on poverty, joblessness, | ||
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- | This is the message that I have tried to communicate to members of the United States Congress in an effort to challenge them to move beyond the narrow vision that defines poverty in individualistic terms and to begin to recognize the problem of life-chances in the inner-city ghetto – that is, the powerful obstacles to social mobility as reflected in the structure of opportunities and constraints in urban America. But this message is difficult to communicate when you only have a limited amount of time and is not likely to offset the simplistic images many members of Congress have obtained from the media' | ||
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- | Clifford has been working for several years as a dishwasher for different employers. He now cooks, mops, and washes dishes for $4.85 an hour. He has held this job since February of 1985 without taking a single day of vacation. His supervisor has made it crystal clear to him that he Is expendable and that if he takes too much (that is, any) vacation, they will not keep him. On the day of the interview, he had had a molar pulled and was in great pain (partly due to the fact that, not having any money and having already borrowed cash to pay for the extraction, he could not buy the prescribed pain killers); yet he was extremely reluctant to call his boss and ask for an evening off. | ||
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- | When I asked if he expects to find a better job soon, he laughed: "I don’t know: this is up to the employers, If they wanta hire me." Should he find one, it would be " | ||
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- | He has not taken any steps to get further education or training, mainly because his work schedule and lack of resources make such planning quasi-impossible. Yet he clearly would like to get more so he
" | ||
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- | As a result, he frequently finds himself without any money. "Yeah, like today. I had to get my tooth pulled and I had to go out and rent money." | ||
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- | All of this was pretty depressing and the mere fact of interviewing him under these circumstances was almost obscene: I felt quite ill at ease in this situation, although I never showed It to Clifford (who was in too much pain to have noticed anyway). In fact I was so nauseated by the whole thing that I couldn' | ||
- | Once the interview was over, I explained I’d pay him with a money order because we don't carry cash with us. "I don’t blame you for not bringing any money around here, man. I don't blame you. I have been stuck up before. I don't blame you." // | ||
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- | This is the kind of message that my future congressional testimony will include, and I will point out that when I read pages and pages of our field notes on the endless struggle for survival In the inner-city ghetto, I think about the myopic perceptions of those who have been complaining about the declining norms of citizenship in the ghetto, about those who do not question the validity of the prevailing belief system on poverty and welfare, and about those who have helped to shift the current emphasis away from the social rights of the truly disadvantaged to be free of poverty and economic deprivation in our affluent society. | ||
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- | **__Footnotes__** | ||
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- | What Is and What Ought to Be__. New York; Aldine de Gruyter, 1986, p. 37. | ||
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- | Notes from a European Perspective.” in __Poverty and Public Policy: An Evaluation of Social Research__, (ed. by V. T. Covello), Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980, p. 305. | ||
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