REVIEW: Overcoming Welfare
by Stanley W. Carlson-Thies
James L. Payne's new book, Overcoming Welfare: Expecting More from the Poor—and from Ourselves (Basic Books, 1998), is in fact two books in one. Both deserve serious attention and both need serious criticism.
The first book is an argument about how welfare ought to be done. Payne's message is that, for the sake of the poor, we should reject the ideal of unconditional help—"sympathetic giving"—that we have embraced in our desire to be warm-hearted, and return to the wisdom of the charity theorists of the nineteenth century. What they discovered (as Marvin Olasky has also emphasized) was that effective compassion is tough love; what really helps is "expectant giving" that requires from the needy a constructive response. Without this reciprocal character, assistance compensates for a family's needs rather than enabling it to overcome the causes of the needs; worse, such help can even encourage helplessness and life-choices that perpetuate poverty.
This is an argument that cannot be conclusively decided by piling up statistics or footnotes, and Payne doesn't attempt to do so. What he offers instead is an appeal to the reader's own understanding of human nature and how the world operates, and an invitation to rethink with him just how our welfare programs have actually worked, despite our hopes, and why and how private charities can have such a powerful impact when needs are desperate. Here is a plea to consider that, if the end result of so many decades of effort and change is a welfare system that virtually no one applauds, perhaps we have been "progressing" in the wrong direction.
This is not to say that the book should escape hard criticism. When Payne emphasizes the psychological and moral constraints that are created under conditions of "sympathetic giving" which treats the poor as victims, he downplays too much the actual external barriers that often confront the poor. His large point is correct: just as the coach of a losing team must spur the players on to renewed effort instead of helping them wallow in excuses, so people facing great challenges should be helped to mobilize all of their effort and ingenuity to overcome the crises that have overtaken (or been created by) them. But no coach stops with cheerleading. She will analyze her team's weaknesses and then provide specific help to overcome its problems. And she will insist on tending to any external causes of defeat, such as biased officiating and a travel schedule that precludes sufficient rest. Payne knows that moral uplift is not enough, but his argument does not sufficiently acknowledge such obstacles as inadequate schooling, mismatches between jobs and both the skills and locations of those who should be working, insufficient child care, and more.
Payne's second book within the same covers is an argument about why it is impossible for government to do welfare the way it should be done. Government, as he sees it, is necessarily "an engine of sympathetic giving" so that the only lasting welfare reform is to turn welfare over to private charities. He emphasizes, for instance, that government's inherent (and laudable) bias toward uniformity and universality militates against taking account of the specificity of each poor family's deeper needs and predisposes officials to help by just doling out checks, which is cheaper than requiring and enabling work.
There are problems, though, with the argument that government is the chief obstacle to effective help for the needy. By Payne's own account, a major culprit is rather a general cultural predisposition to give in response to the tugs of the heartstrings without sufficient inquiry about what will actually prove most helpful. According to one hard-hitting chapter, the social work profession over time shifted from helping the poor advance to supplying benefits that compensate for their lack of advancement—but if so, then the key problem is the bad ideology or philosophy of too many social workers, not the fact that most of them work for government. And for all of Payne's praise of private charitable efforts, his story makes it clear that private assistance can itself easily become misguided.
Even more: it appears that government welfare can adopt the principle of expectant giving without strings. Reciprocal obligations is one of the key principles of the 1996 federal welfare law, as well as of many of the state experiments that predated it. And as a June GAO report on welfare reform details, states are drastically changing their policies and practices. Eligibility determination and check writing are no longer the focus; now the emphasis is on preparation and services that support employment. Welfare payments now are intended to undergird families as they become employed or as a wage supplement; in many places government offers a lump-sum payment to families in financial crisis as an alternative to welfare.
Overcoming Welfare is not the book for people who despise what they call the "nanny state" since it is likely to confirm their anti-governmentalism. On the other hand, people who deep down believe that the more welfare there is the better off the poor will be ought to wrestle with Payne. They may be forced to think again about how government has tried to help the needy and why those attempts have not been very effective.
