‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeb ack

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html

‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback
By PATRICIA COHEN

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of
poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord
Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the
Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty”
to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t
coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar
Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an
inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare
dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral
deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own
misfortune.

Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers,
whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton
signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the
overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology
the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes
and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.

Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly
about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are
enmeshed.

“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being
politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at
Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.

The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the
Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried
parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the
Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American
Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of
scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social
scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and
poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science.

“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction
declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of
the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural
roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose
to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of
California, noted at the briefing.

This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of
Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44
million.

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture,
but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects:
Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and
unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive
attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to
sustained racism and isolation.

To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best
understood as “shared understandings.”

“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of
poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns
into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the
way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and
garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they
respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,”
believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson
walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped,
addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently
lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of
the community’s culture.

In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious
Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes
were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the
letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the
difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s
cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or
stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than
the actual level of poverty, he said.

William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto
life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty,
defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an
understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that
understanding.”

For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist,
said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough
demeanor, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get
them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”

Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have
ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of
residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like
the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value
marriage.

In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was
profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners
were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers
and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage
without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.

Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an
editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New
York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of
support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book,
“Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or
ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers
that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and
had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for
parents to connect.

Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in
cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the
baggage of that debate.”

Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much
longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and
analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at
culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard
Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which
attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.

The authors claimed to have taken family background into account,
Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative
effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”

He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the
environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”

He mentioned a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing
up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and
where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering
I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more
than a year in school.

Changes outside campuses have made conversation about the cultural
roots of poverty easier than it was in the ’60s. Divorce, living
together without marrying, and single motherhood are now commonplace.
At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out
on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he
criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school.
President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly
talked about “responsible fatherhood.”

Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at
the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on
family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were
disparaged.

Still, worries about blaming the victim persist. Policy makers and the
public still tend to view poverty through one of two competing lenses,
Michèle Lamont, another editor of the special issue of The Annals,
said: “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor
because they are a victim of the markets?”

So even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals”
or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is
more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms.
Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological
pablum.”

“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea
concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each
other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of
anthropology — and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend
to their will.”

Fuzzy definitions or not, culture is back. This prompted mock surprise
from Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a
concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way
people meet the challenges of poverty.”

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