The Poverty Trap's Assumed Explotation

Paul Krugman has a very nice series of blog posts attacking Paul Ryan's latest discussion of poverty, which continues in his usual theme of how anti-poverty programs are actually terrible for the poor. The series culminates in this post, pointing out that not only does Ryan's attempt to invoke scholarship fail miserably, but the logical argument he's trying to make with that scholarship is equally a failure. Ryan loves to focus on the issue of "social mobility," but he simply assumes that reducing the incentives of the poor to work hard will reduce their social mobility. There is in fact no evidence for this assumption: internationally, we observe that the American poor, having a less-generous welfare state upon which to depend than their European brethren, indeed work harder, as Ryan thinks they should, and also have worse social mobility. Oops.

What Paul Krugman did not say is what's behind this assumption of Ryan's. And what I think it is is the idea that people, or poor people in any case, should only and will only be permitted to live a non-destitute life if they work really hard. It's kind of the old "deserving poor" idea, that poor people deserve their poverty and do not deserve charity (private or public in nature) unless they have a good Protestant work ethic (and, particularly in the olden days, various other good moral qualities). So then for somebody like Paul Ryan, it becomes definitionally true that getting a poor person to work less hard will disadvantage them, because we're assuming that only working hard can permit a poor person to stop being destitute. And so public policies which in fact weaken or destroy the empirical connection between hard work and being allowed to live a marginally-comfortable life must be disadvantaging the poor, even if in fact they make them less poor. Because after all, the only way to get ahead is by working hard, even if that isn't true.

Now, obviously, that's ridiculous. So what's going on? One possibility is that Paul Ryan and his ilk believe their own hype somehow. Could be. More likely, though, is one of the following two options, or some admixture of the two. One would be an essentially theological belief: it doesn't matter how comfortable a life poor people are allowed to live here on earth. Living a life of dependency on the government will be bad for their souls, and will therefore condemn them to an eternity of torment in hell upon their deaths. We shouldn't be tempting people into laziness by making it possible for them to live somewhat more lazy lives without material punishment within the temporal realm. This is of course a somewhat-logically-consistent position (although Republican doctrine doesn't exactly avoid providing similar temptations for the rich and powerful, and there's probably nothing whatsoever in the Bible to support this view anyway, perhaps unique among all possible theological or moral views), but it rather blatantly violates the principle that public policy ought not be used as a tool to save others' souls according to one's own theology.

On a more crass level, Paul Ryan doesn't care about poor people at all. What he cares about is extracting work from them, because he is the representative of the capitalist classes. And it is of course perfectly true that if our social goal is extracting the most work from the poor, well yeah, things that reduce the incentive of the poor to work hard and which thereby have the effect of reducing working hours among the working poor are bad. But this is not exactly a social goal that Paul Ryan can be upfront about. So he needs to disguise his nakedly exploitative desire to extract the maximum work-hours from the peasantry by pretending to have a background assumption that working harder is unavoidably the only way for a poor person to move up in the world and to have a better life. That gives him an excuse to pursue policies dedicated precisely to making that the true state of the world, while pretending that he cares about poor people.

Now, I don't know which of these is actually motivating Paul Ryan. I suspect it's about 70%, maybe closer to 80% the class warfare reason, more like 20% to 30% the theological one. But I do know that underlying the faulty assumption deconstructed by Paul Krugman is a belief that hard work and ceasing to live in poverty are definitionally identified, that you cannot have the latter without the former. But since this is obviously false, either Paul Ryan is an idiot who believes his own hype or he has some ulterior motive he's trying to conceal, probably one of the two I describe. He is, in other words, laundering his own assumption that the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the capitalist class is an intrinsic good thing, or that exploitation of the poor is ultimately good for poor people because it's good for their souls. So whenever he says he cares about poor people, just flatly don't believe him. He doesn't, at least not in the ordinary way that public policy is supposed to.

Charity Is A Tax On Generosity

This has occurred to me as I've been asked several times by people on the streets of New Haven for money. If I have the right configuration of bills in my wallet to do so, I typically give a dollar or two, because I really am on board with Matt Yglesias' "just give money to poor people" program. But it strikes me that there's a big problem with relying on private charity, either on the individual level such as my recent encounters or through larger-scale organizations, as a mechanism for giving money to poor people, as opposed to having the government do it by taxing and spending, beyond just the simple fact that more transferring of wealth will happen in a public system. Compared to a public social safety net, a system of private charity that transferred the exact same amount of money to poor people would have a significant distributional impact on the class of people away from whom money was being redistributed. Specifically, in the private-charity world, the more generous you are the less well-off you'd be, financially speaking at least. Now, you'd be less well-off because you would have voluntarily given away some of your money, and maybe like Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of the play you'd discover some sort of spiritual benefit to all this giving. But the fact remains that your colleague with the same salary but more the attitude of early-play Scrooge will end up with a bigger bank account than you will. In effect, therefore, reliance on private charity as a remedy to the problems of poverty amounts to a tax on generosity, and an incentive toward selfishness. Generosity is typically considered a good thing, and while I think the world recognizes that the most virtuous people won't be the ones who do the best for themselves in terms of material standard of living, that doesn't mean it's a good thing to set up a system that actively discriminates against possessors of a certain kind of virtue. Adopting public policies that use progressive income taxes to fund aggressive anti-poverty and anti-homelessness efforts would not only help poor people (which is, of course, by far the primary reason to do them), they would also remove from those of us with an inclination toward generosity, perhaps even what some might consider excessive generosity, the burden of addressing those problems on a penny-ante private basis.

Of course, under the Republican doctrine that all poor people are bums and moochers who, having been judged worthless by The Market, deserve their fate of destitution, the generosity I'm describing as a virtue being unfairly taxed by inadequate anti-poverty policies is really the whole problem, the thing on which these evil "takers" prey, so this argument probably isn't really going to get very far, is it?