The new politics of poverty

Thirty years ago, the great national issue was how to help ordinary, workaday Americans achieve the good things in life. Today, we are preoccupied with--and increasingly divided over--how to cope with the problems of poor and dependent Americans, most of whom do not work. The growth in the number of nonworking poor people--and the failure of traditional social reforms to bring them back into the mainstream--has transformed American politics beyond recognition. According to Lawrence Mead, one of this country's leading poverty experts, whose writings have helped shift national welfare policy toward work requirements, we are faced today with a new dependency politics, where the issue is no longer whether there are enough jobs for the poor but why so many poor either cannot or will not work at the jobs available. Throughout the West a politics of morals and personal conduct is driving out older disputes over workers and the organization of society. Mead provides overwhelming and disturbing evidence that passive poverty--the failure of most of the poor to work at all--reflects defeatism more than lack of opportunity. This demoralization of the poor has alienated them from the working majority, with tragic consequences both for them and for America.