This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_poverty. The second was published at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/opinion/the-poverty-of-an-idea. The third http://www.newsweek.com/todays-culture-poverty-84449, with the title above.
The culture of poverty is a social theory that expands on the cycle of poverty. It attracted academic and policy attention in the 1960s, survived harsh academic criticism, and made a comeback at the beginning of the 21st century. It offers one way to explain why poverty exists despite anti-poverty programs. Critics of this subculture arguments insist that explanations of poverty must analyze how structural factors interact with individual characteristics. Early proponents of this theory argued that the poor are not simply lacking resources, but also acquire a poverty-perpetuating value system. The concept created a backlash, pushing scholars to look to structures rather than the poor. Since the late 1990s, this culture has witnessed a resurgence in the social science, although most scholars now reject the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis gave characteristics that indicated the presence of this subculture, which he argued was not shared among all of the lower class. He wrote, " People with a culture of poverty only know their own conditions. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of other like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are sensitive indeed to status distinctions.
Published 50 years ago, the book, "The other America: Poverty in the United States," by Harrington was a surprise best seller that influenced the direction of social welfare policy, particularly by Lyndon Johnson, as well as the backlash that followed it. The book had a simple thesis: poverty was more extensive and tenacious than America had assumed. "That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them," he wrote. He had picked up the idea of a "culture of poverty" from the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, whose 1959 study of Mexican slum dwellers identified a subculture of lowered aspirations and short-term gratifications. Harrington`s culture of poverty thesis was at best an ambiguous impediment to understanding, in later books, he made no use of the term. But in its moral clarity, the book, "The Other America" was ultimately optimistic, it was less an indictment and more an appeal to Americans to live up to their better instincts.
For decades, social scientists and politicians have studied and debated what`s come to be known as the culture of poverty. The consensus: a class is set apart from the mainstream by geography, class and income. Its members adhere to norms that do not apply to the rest of society, and engage in self-destructive behavior that imposes significants costs on the nation at large. The culture of poverty has made for potent politics and spawned best-selling polemics. We do not hear as much about the culture of poverty these days. Perhaps it is because the crisis is making us all feel a little poorer. Or perhaps it is because a highly visible group is now exhibiting all the outward appearances of the underclass: the overclass. Wall Street types do not live in guettos, but they inhabit environments that are sealed off socially from the rest of the world. Because they rarely interact with people of middle-class, they have become woefully out of touch with the solid bourgeois values that made America great. In the underclass, unmarried young fathers do not take responsibility for their children. In the overclass, twice-married, middle-aged daddies do not own up to the consequences of their insane financial miscues. In his book, "The Age of Abundance," author Brink Lindsey boils down the difference between the desperately poor and the rich to an ability to focus on the long term. "Members of the underclass operate within such narrow time horizons and circle of trust that their lives are plagued by chronic chaos and dysfunction." By contrast, elites are long-term thinkers. Right. "Modern Wall Street is a system," says Charles Morris, author of "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, " that rewards crazy risk taking in the short term without regard for the long term consequences." Critics point to a pervasive sense of victimhood in the underclass. But listen to CEO Alan Schwartz told after his firm succumbed to wounds that were almost entirely self-inflicted. Conservatives critics constantly carp that the culture of poverty has encouraged a sense of dependency on government. Yet, it vaulted into action to save the bankers from their own disastrous bets. in 1993, the late senator Daniel Patrick coined the term "defining deviancy down." The prevalence of bad behavior in the underclass, he argued, caused institutions to lower standards and expectations, which effectively socialized the costs of dysfunction. In recent weeks, the FED has responded to Wall Street`s crisis by lowering the standards of what it would accept as collateral for loans. It agreed to lend $30billion against assets of dubious provenance. And guess who bears the risk if that $30 billion can not be paid back? You and me.
