Jane Galt on Poverty

Jane Galt talks about poverty, poverty alleviation programs, and the long-term damage to individuals of living in poverty:

My own thoughts on welfare reform: it's clear to me from the research I've done to write about poverty, and from reading books like DeParle's, that the poor suffer from three main problems: their own poor impulse control or decision making; a culture that encourages poor decision making; and limited means, which give them no buffer against the results of their poor decision making.

Liberals want to change the third variable, but this is somewhat recursive. As long as our society offers housing to everyone who needs it, the poor will be stuck living with people whose bad behaviour makes them impossible neighbours . . . so that even if the housing stock is physically perfect, crime and various other sorts of antisocial behavior that flourish in a world without evictions make the housing for the poor actually unbearable. Also, if people have very bad problems, such as mental illness or drug addiction, no reasonable amount of cash will improve their lot without adding things like forced institutionalisation. The people with those problems, unsurprisingly, are the overwhelming majority of the truly immiserated poor, who have rotting housing, insufficient caloric intake, and so forth.

Conservatives, by and large, want to change the first two variables, and there's a lot to this. There's simply no question that welfare enables women to make short term choices that are all right in the short term (dropping out of school, having a baby out of wedlock), but disastrous in the long term. Enabling women to make awful short term choices means enabling some proportion of them to ruin their lives.

But it's not enough to say to these women "Get married" or "Ignore your friends and pay attention to school". Some extraordinary people do, of course, but we all tend to overestimate how easy it is to be that extraordinary. Most of us reading this blog, after all, went to college and/or got nice steady jobs because we had enormous social and familial pressure on us to do so. How many of us were strong enough to overcome our environment, drop out of high school, and sell drugs?

Another issue with the current set-up is that the benefits to bad behaviour are immediately apparent, while the benefits to more responsible behaviour take a while to show up. Most people, rich or poor, are more easily persuaded of visible short-term benefits than invisible long-term ones.

Similarly, the more things that are "taken care of" for you, the less able you are to cope with the rest of life's choices: intellectual infantilism is the worst possible way to encourage someone to grow up. If you don't have to pay your own rent, or food, or utility bills, then how are you to be expected to take these on for yourself at some future point?

Most of us, as children, had few responsibilities and therefore also few choices in life; our parents took the decisions for us. As we got older, most of us started to take on more responsibilities and to have the options made available to us. We learned by making mistakes, but the consequences of those mistakes were kept within reasonable bounds by the scope of the decisions we were allowed to take. Most of us would consider this a "normal" way of growing up.

If, however, you never had this steady growth in personal responsibility, instead of minor mistakes that had minor repercussions you'd have a sudden transition from no responsibility to full responsibility. Perhaps I'm being over-pessimistic, but I don't think many of us would cope that well. Some exceptional individuals could, but most of us could not.

To a large degree, this is what our society has done to many of the people currently on welfare: we have undermined their ability to survive in the long term by making it possible to just get by without planning for any long term at all.