Beyond Entitlement

Lawrence M. Mead

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780743224956
• eBook ISBN: 9781439119570
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

Mead's timely and closely reasoned analysis makes a strong intellectual and moral case for a more authoritative welfare policy.

1 The Problem of Obligation in Social Policy

THIS is a book about social policy, but also about American politics. My question is why federal programs since 1960 have coped so poorly with the various social problems that have come to afflict American society. These twenty-five years have seen a succession of new programs for the needy, disadvantaged, and unemployed pour forth from Washington. But during the same period welfare dependency and unemployment have grown, standards have fallen in the schools, and rising crime has made some areas of American cities almost uninhabitable. In all these respects there has been a sharp decline in the habits of competence and restraint that are essential to a humane society. The public never wished for this state of affairs, but government has seemed powerless to affect it.

Part of the explanation, I propose, is that the federal programs that support the disadvantaged and unemployed have been permissive in character, not authoritative. That is, they have given benefits to their recipients but have set few requirements for how they ought to function in return. In particular, the programs have as yet no serious requirements that employable recipients work in return for support. There is good reason to think that recipients subject to such requirements would function better.

Policy is permissive, in turn, for reasons rooted in the libertarian nature of American politics, especially at the federal level. Because of the way social policy is approached in Washington, as well as for electoral and constitutional reasons, federal politicians tend to use social programs simply to give deserving people good things, seldom to set standards for how they ought to behave. Thus dependent groups are shielded from the pressures to function well that impinge on other Americans. A more authoritative social policy has begun to emerge, but it faces stiff resistance from the benefit-oriented habits of federal politics.¹

The term “social policy” is less abstract than it sounds. Federal social policy is summed up in the specific programs Washington has developed over the years for meeting the needs of vulnerable Americans. They include programs like Social Security and Medicare that serve the general public without regard to need, but in this book the focus is mainly on programs for the needy and disadvantaged, particularly welfare and employment programs. In essence federal social policy amounts to the specific things these programs do for, and expect from, their recipients.

The “welfare state” is more than a metaphor. By what they do and do not expect, social programs directly govern their recipients. The fatal weakness of federal programs is that they award their benefits essentially as entitlements, expecting next to nothing from the beneficiaries in return. The world the recipients live in is economically depressed yet privileged in one sense, that it emphasizes their claims and needs almost to the exclusion of obligations.

The approach to social policy taken here emphasizes the balance of rights and duties that programs imply for recipients. Such an approach has not been usual. The programs have been planned and studied mainly by economists, who seldom address their legal and administrative aspects. Lawyers, who do, have usually been interested in defining the claims of the recipients against government even more clearly, not in strengthening government’s claims on them. Political scientists tend to see programs as occasions for political dispute between the parties, politicians, Executive and Congress. Very little attention has been paid to the potential the programs have to set norms for the public functioning of citizens.

This history reflects the fact that American politics has largely been about the extent and not the nature of government. The main questions have been where to divide public authority from individual rights, and government regulation from the unfettered free market. Those are the issues that chiefly divide Republicans and Democrats, and have done so since the New Deal. Firmly in that tradition, most prescriptions for American social policy say that Washington is doing either too much or too little for the poor.

There is substantial agreement about the nature of the social problem. A class of Americans, heavily poor and non white, exists apart from the social mainstream. That is, it has very little contact with other Americans in the public aspects of American life, especially in schools, the workplace, and politics. This social separation is more worrisome to most Americans than the material deprivations that go along with disadvantage. Secondarily, problems of nonwork and low productivity have recently surfaced even among better-integrated members of the workforce, helping to account for the country’s declining economic competitiveness. While performance difficulties are greatest among the underclass, they are not at all confined to it. There is also substantial agreement that the solution for the disadvantaged must mean integration, that is, an end to the separation so that the disadvantaged can publicly interact with others and be accepted by them as equals. I shall use “social problem” to mean this separation and “integration” to mean overcoming it.

The disagreement is over the role of government in that solution, and specifically over the scale of government. Conservatives, for example George Gilder or Charles Murray, say that an overblown welfare state has undermined the vitality of the private economy and deterred the needy from getting ahead on their own.² Liberals say that the “war on poverty” achieved much, and would have achieved more if spending had not been cut by the Republican Administrations since 1969.³ Those further left, for example Michael Harrington, deny that the “war” ever amounted to much at all.⁴

These criticisms have weight, but mainly in ways their makers do not intend. Washington does give too much to the poor—in the sense of benefits given as entitlements. It also gives too little—in the sense of meaningful obligations to go along with the benefits. What undermines the economy is not so much the burden on the private sector as the message government programs have given that hard work in available jobs is no longer required of Americans. The main problem with the welfare state is not its size but its permissiveness, a characteristic that both liberals and conservatives seem to take for granted. The challenge to welfare statesmanship is not so much to change the extent of benefits as to couple them with serious work and other obligations that would encourage functioning and thus promote the integration of recipients. The goal must be to create for recipients inside the welfare state the same balance of support and expectation that other Americans face outside it, as they work to support themselves and meet the other demands of society.

The liberal and conservative critiques both assume that greater freedom is what recipients need to progress in American society. Some impediment, it is said, must be holding them back. Liberals say it is the oppressive, unfair, sometimes racist demands of the private economy. Employers refuse to hire the poor or to pay them enough to escape poverty. Only government action can overcome these “barriers.” Conservatives say the obstacle is government itself, whose programs keep recipients dependent and unable to get ahead on their own. The answer is to cut back the programs. For one persuasion freedom for the disadvantaged means to extend government’s reach into society; for the other, to pull it back.

Neither prescription, however, would fundamentally change the welfare state we have. Experience shows that big-government programs in the liberal or Harrington mode, which increase benefits without expecting any return, would not make the poor any less dependent. However, simply to cut back welfare as Gilder and Murray advise, while it would force independence on the recipients, lacks the political support to be carried very far, as the Reagan Administration has discovered. Most Americans, and their leaders, want to continue a humanitarian social policy. Also, many dependent people could not immediately cope on their own. They need support and guidance, even if the goal is overcoming dependency.

Once we face these realities, the welfare problem emerges as one of authority rather than freedom. The best hope for solving it is, not mainly to shift the boundary between society and government, but to require recipients to function where they already are, as dependents. Even more than income and opportunity, they need to face the requirements, such as work, that true acceptance in American society requires. To create those obligations, they must be made less free in certain senses rather than more.

Even to speak of obligation as a goal of social policy, however, is novel in the American context. The idea that government might act to enforce social order may sound like a truism, but it has not been prominent in American politics. For most commentators and academics, American politics has been about freedom rather than order. Its essence is to be found in our freewheeling elections and in the jockeying for power among the various institutions and interests in Washington. It is a game played out among lobbies, parties, and politicians to decide, in Harold Lasswell’s phrase, “who gets what, when, how”⁵ The game is played by rules designed, by James Madison and the other Founders, to disperse and divide power rather than concentrate it. The political system offers access to all interests. Each meets limitation from the force of competing interests rather than government itself. There is no state separate from society, but only a political process through which social forces compete for power. Government does not make demands on the people; they make demands on it.

The Madisonian view of government, however, centers too much on the high politics of Washington. The average American actually has little interest in politics in this participatory sense. Public opinion studies show that his knowledge of government is usually quite limited, and his desire to participate in it even more so.⁶ His concerns are usually closer at hand, rooted in his daily life of job, home, and family. He gets interested in government to the extent public policies make leading that life more or less difficult. His immediate attention is on law enforcement, the quality of the neighborhood schools and other public services, and employment prospects for himself, his family, and friends. In assuring these conditions the face of government as public authority, not as political arena, is most salient. As Hobbes said, government’s essential, if not only, purpose is to maintain public order.

“Order” here means more than just “law and order” in the narrow, police sense. It encompasses all of the social and economic conditions people depend on for satisfying lives, but which are government’s responsibility rather than their own. It includes, in other words, all of the public conditions for the private assurance of what Jefferson called “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Which conditions are a public responsibility is, of course, for politics to decide. In modern conditions the public agenda is broad. Even conservatives believe that government must manage overall economic conditions and assure equal opportunity to all, alongside basic public services.

Even the most liberal government, however, could never assure the conditions for order by itself. Policymakers in Washington sometimes forget that order is not a service that they can provide just by spending money. It depends on the concurrence of people with government, and with each other. The frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan shows that the sovereign is literally made up of “his” citizens. Government is really a mechanism by which people force themselves to serve and obey each other in necessary ways.

“Compliance,” further, is too passive a term for what order requires, particularly in complex modern societies. People must not only refrain from offenses against others but fulfill the expectations others have of them in public roles, as workers on the job, as neighbors, or simply as passers-by in the streets of our cities. Order requires not only self-discipline but activity and competence. It is achieved when a population displays those habits of mutual forebear and and reliability which we call civility.

American political culture gives pride of place to the value of freedom. But a “free” society is possible only when the conditions for order have substantially been realized. People are not interested in “freedom” from government if they are victimized by crime, cannot support themselves, or are in any fundamental way insecure. They will want more government rather than less. Nor are they likely to vote or otherwise participate politically unless they are employed and have their personal lives in order. A “free” political culture is the characteristic, not of a society still close to the state of nature, as some American philosophers have imagined, but of one already far removed from it by dense, reliable networks of mutual expectations.

The conditions for order also extend across the border between the public and private sectors in the usual meanings of those words. Obligation usually connotes governmental duties such as paying taxes, obeying the law, or serving in the military (if there is a draft). But order also requires that people function well in areas of life that are not directly regulated. They must be educated in minimal ways, able to maintain themselves, able also to cooperate with others for common ends, whether political or economic—what Samuel Huntington has called the “art of associating together.”⁷ The capacities to learn, work, support one’s family, and respect the rights of others amount to a set of social obligations alongside the political ones. A civic society might almost be defined as one in which people are competent in all these senses, as citizens and as workers. For people to fulfill these expectations or not is what I shall mean by their functioning or not functioning well.

Social policy should be seen as one of government’s means of achieving order. Social programs define much of what society expects of people in the social realm, just as other laws and the Constitution do in the political realm. By the benefits they give to and withhold from different groups, the programs declare which needs government will help people manage, and which they must manage for themselves. The structure of benefits and requirements in the programs, then, constitutes an operational definition of citizenship. One of the things a government must do to improve social order is to use these programs to require better functioning of recipients who have difficulty coping. The tragedy of federal social programs is that they have only begun to do this. Federal political culture has such difficulty setting requirements for recipients that the programs have undermined social order rather than upheld it.

Functioning in American society has declined since 1960. Each column of Table 1 shows a fall in one kind of competence that American society has traditionally expected of its members. The rise in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the main federal welfare program, reflects the inability of increasing numbers of low-income families to stay together and support themselves, since eligibility is usually limited to one-parent families in need. Most recipient families are headed by mothers separated from their spouses. The rise in unemployment means that increasing proportions of the labor force are unable to find jobs—or to accept the jobs available to them. The rise in crime reflects mainly the explosion of violence against persons and property in the large cities. The steady decline in SAT scores indicates a fall in the academic skills of students seeking to go to college.

TABLE 1 Trends in Social Functioning, 1960-83

Year	Recipients of AFDC (1,000s)a	Unemployment rate (percent)b	Serious crimes (1,000’s)c	SAT scoresd
a Average monthly number of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the main federal welfare program. Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, Social Security Bulletin, Annual Statistical Supplement, 1983 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), p. 248. Figure for 1983 from Office of Family Assistance, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
b Percentage of the civilian labor force unemployed. Source: U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, 31, no. 12 (December 1984):6.
c Serious crimes include murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, theft, and motor vehicle theft. Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1976 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1976), p. 153, and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1984 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1983), p. 176; U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 1983 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1984), p. 41.
d Sum of average math and average verbal scores of all students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the school years beginning in the indicated years. Figures differ somewhat from published averages for college-bound seniors. Source: College Entrance Examination Board.
1960	3,005	5.4	3,384	969
1965	4,329	4.4	4,739	967
1970	8,466	4.8	8,098	941
1975	11,346	8.3	11,257	899
1980	10,774	7.0	13,295	893
1981	11,079	7.5	13,290	892
1982	10,358	9.5	12,857	890
1983	10,761	9.5	12,070	894

Each trend appears a little less worrisome on examination. Welfare has risen mainly because more broken families in need have decided to seek assistance, not because there are more such families, though both trends are involved. While joblessness is greater, especially among the unskilled, the proportion of the adult population working or seeking work has actually risen. Higher crime is partly due to the huge “baby boom” generation passing through its youth, since greater numbers of young people always produce more crime. Declining SAT scores partly reflect the fact that relatively more test-takers in recent years have been disadvantaged or nonwhite, groups that on average were less well prepared for college than the middle-class whites who dominated earlier cohorts.⁸ Some of the rise in crime and dependency is due simply to population growth. The trends in crime and SAT scores had reversed by 1983, but dependency rebounded.

The magnitude of the changes, nevertheless, is so great that nothing can fully explain them away. Many Americans evidently are less able to take care of themselves and respect the rights of others than in earlier deca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Problem of Obligation in Social Policy
• 2 Functioning The New Shape of the Social Problem
• 3 Functioning Ignored Permissive Programs
• 4 Why Work Must Be Enforced
• 5 The Work Issue Defeats Welfare Reform
• 6 Federal Work Tests Weakness and Potential
• 7 Welfare Work A Closer Look
• 8 Why Washington Has Not Set Standards
• 9 Attitudes Against Obligation
• 10 The Civic Conception
• 11 The Common Obligations
• Congressional Materials and Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index