Poverty & Dependence
Opting Out of the Burdens of Freedom
By Lawrence M. Mead
America’s greatest strength is its civil society. And central to this civil society is family and the capacity to provide for one’s own through work. Traditionally, Americans have worked hard to advance themselves and their families — an effort that, in turn, produces this country’s extraordinary wealth. But an important part of America seems to be opting out of this strenuous, yet rewarding, life.
For the most part, serious poverty occurs in America when employment and family break down. Most of the poor are of working age, yet barely a third of the adult poor reported any earnings in 2012, compared to nearly two-thirds for the population as a whole. Female-headed families, where the parents fail to marry or to stay married, are at high risk of poverty — 40.9 percent of such families with children were poor in 2012, compared to only 8.9 percent for two-parent families.[1] Government supplies these families with various benefits, but nothing can fully compensate for the lack of parents who are committed to each other and to working.
The proportion of non-working and single-mother households has increased considerably in recent decades. In 1959, 68 percent of the heads of poor families worked; in 2012 only 45 percent worked. In the 1960s, less than 10 percent of American children were born outside marriage, but by 2012, 41 percent were, with especially high rates for Hispanics (54 percent) and blacks (72 percent). Government and private charities struggle to forestall poverty, but they face a constant undertow from a weakening of the culture of work and family life.
America used to have unusually high labor force participation, with two-thirds of adults working or seeking work. But since 2000, that figure has plummeted and is now below that of several European countries.[2] Legions of low-skilled men are giving up on work, either by retiring or claiming support from our swollen disability programs.
Non-work and non-marriage are also connected. Failure to work regularly is a central reason why many low-skilled men today become absent fathers; their spouses often evict them from the home because they do not provide. So non-work promotes the breakup or non-formation of families. The converse is also true: when children grow up in fatherless families, they are less well prepared to work and marry than children from two-parent families. So non-marriage contributes to non-work, crime, and other problems that persist in the next generation.
Trends are much worse at the bottom of society than the top. Upper-income Americans typically work many more hours than the poor, the reverse of a century ago. The college-educated also tend to marry and stay married, even as marriage is failing at the other end of society. The contrast in lifestyle between the affluent and the poor is now as stark as their difference in income. Marriage, not money, now marks the chief dividing line between classes in America.
Together, irregular employment and family relations complicate the lives of lower-income Americans. These adults typically work erratically, moving in and out of jobs and the labor force. Spouses often change partners, forcing children to adjust to a succession of fathers or other caregivers. The turmoil detracts from the energy and productivity of the society.[3]
Liberal analysts stress structural causes. In the short term, they say, the financial crisis threw millions out of work, and these individuals are only now finding new jobs. The advent of Obamacare, which allows many more people to obtain health coverage outside employment, will cause another 2.5 million to leave the labor force.[4] Liberals also blame the long-term trends on globalization, especially the loss of well-paid factory jobs when manufacturing moved overseas. Supposedly, low-skilled men cannot find work or, if they can, the jobs are too low-paying to motivate employment. This, in turn, explains why fewer and fewer men are now taking on the burdens of steady work and marriage.
But plenty of low-paid jobs still exist. Most of the jobless poor say they can find work, and the continuing presence of 11 million illegal aliens in the country demonstrates as much. Low wages are not an impediment to work, since wage subsidies and other benefits can make those jobs livable. And if low wages prevent marriage, why are poor adults still having children outside marriage? By doing so, they incur most of the burdens of marriage, such as child support obligations, without its benefits. Unwed pregnancy is not sensible for either parents or children, and it never has been. With or without good jobs, the best solution to family is the traditional one — for parents to avoid pregnancy until marriage, and for marriages to last.
Some suggest that poverty is related to rising inequality in earnings, with the rich making relatively more and the low-income less, than they used to do. If most poor adults were working and struggling to survive on declining wages, such a scenario might be plausible. But earnings inequality has little to do with either poverty or welfare.
In the past, conservatives have blamed these trends on an indulgent government. Social programs like welfare that support the non-working and fatherless families can appear to produce more of them. But these effects are insufficient to explain the gulf in work and family behavior that now divides the classes. A better theory is that welfare, until recently, was permissive — giving aid without demanding good behavior in return. In the 1990s, welfare reform stiffened requirements that welfare mothers work in return for aid. This reform, combined with a good economy, drove most of these mothers off the rolls, mostly into jobs. The earnings gains halted the rise of inequality, but it resumed when some of the work gains were lost in the 2000s.
Most likely, the decay of work and family is due primarily to the decline of America’s bracing culture of individual responsibility — not the opportunity structure. Ordinary people, even if low-skilled, once seized their chances to get ahead more consistently than many appear to do today. A hard-working lifestyle is strenuous. The burdens of freedom can be heavy. But living such a challenging life enables ordinary people to achieve their own goals, rather than be governed by their environment.
In light of welfare reform, the best hope to reaffirm a culture of achievement is to combine “help and hassle”: Assist the needy but also demand that they do more to help themselves. Recent education and training programs are increasingly telling their clients that they must meet accepted standards and go to work in available jobs. The criminal justice system has begun developing mandatory work programs to which parolees can be assigned if they do not work. And the child support system also has work programs for men who fail to pay their child support.
As a result of these innovative new approaches, there is new hope that the decline in employment of low-skilled Americans can be reversed. By promoting work where possible, we can promote the self-reliant qualities needed to make marriage and family possible. Stronger workers can be stronger parents, able to prepare the next generation to flourish in a free society.
— Lawrence M. Mead is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at New York University. He is the author of several books about poverty and welfare reform.
Highlights
From 2003 to 2013, the labor force participation rate for adults ages 25 to 54 fell by 2 percentage points. “U.S. labor force participation began falling gradually in 2000 — a decline that accelerated sharply after the onset of the Great Recession,” writes James Sherk.
The unwed birth rate rose 6.7 percentage points between 2002 and 2012. As Ron Haskins explains, “Nonmarital childbearing is one of the preeminent reasons this nation, despite spending about $1 trillion a year on programs for disadvantaged families, is struggling to reduce poverty and increase economic mobility”.
From 2002 to 2012, self-sufficiency — the ability of a family to sustain an income above the poverty threshold without welfare assistance — declined as the percentage of individuals living in poverty increased by 2.9 percentage points.
The work participation rate for recipients of cash welfare declined by 5 percentage points from 2000 to 2010. As Robert Doar points out, it has not risen above 30 percent since 2006: “Restoring the original purpose of welfare reform requires reinvigorating the work participation rate”
Next Up in the Index:
2014 Index of Culture and Opportunity
Culture | Poverty & Dependence | Opportunity
Preface | Introducing the Index of Culture and Opportunity | Overview of 2014 Index | The Blessings of Liberty
Endnotes
- Poverty and employment statistics come from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, various years.
- Data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
- Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012).
- Annie Lowrey and Jonathan Weisman, “Health Care Law Projected to Cut the Labor Force,” The New York Times, February 5, 2014 (accessed May 7, 2014).
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