The New York Times recently faced criticism after publishing a factually incorrect op-ed about how much money people receiving SNAP benefits (food stamps) spend on soda and other sweetened beverages. In a piece challenging the findings, Professor of Public Policy Joe Soss revisits the numbers and finds no substantial difference in spending between people who receive these benefits and people who don’t. Non-SNAP households spend about four cents on soft drinks for every dollar on groceries, and SNAP households spend about five cents per dollar. Soss points out that this error perpetuates stereotypical moral judgments about the poor. Research finds time and time again that these moral judgments often miss the facts, but they nevertheless have a big impact on our social safety net policies.
Historical work finds that aid to the poor in the United States developed to be highly conditional — political leaders often justified policies by focusing on certain “deserving” categories of people like soldiers and mothers. As a result, moral narratives about who deserves aid became central to the policymaking process and continue to shape attitudes about helping the poor.
- Theda Skocpol. 1996. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
- Brian Steensland. 2006. “Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State: The Case of Guaranteed Income Policy.” American Journal of Sociology 111(5):1273–1326.
- Linda J. Skitka and Philip E. Tetlock. 1993. “Providing Public Assistance: Cognitive and Motivational Processes Underlying Liberal and Conservative Policy Preferences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65(6):1205–23.
These moral narratives bias our thinking about people who are poor and hide the fact that they are often no different from people who aren’t. For example, despite efforts to drug test welfare recipients, substance use rates are not much higher among the poor. And single motherhood in poor communities does not come from different sexual behavior — it happens because poor mothers value family just as much as everyone else. By treating poor people as morally deviant, our public policy can do more harm than good.
- Bridget F. Grant and Deborah A. Dawson. 1996 “Alcohol and drug use, abuse, and dependence among welfare recipients.” American Journal of Public Health 86(10): 1450-1454.
- Kathyrn Edin and Maria Kefalas. 2005. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford Schram. 2011. Disciplining the Poor Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comments 2
Daniel — February 3, 2017
You see this perpetuated across time and states (US and otherwise). In the Philippines we find the poor internalizing the myth that beneficiaries of public benefits - if not scrutinized and tested off program eligibility - will descend into a spiral of gambling and alcohol consumption; regardless of facts to the contrary. Often this travels with, and is likely driven by, visual observations and imaginations of creativity that it is the poor who chaotically escape into alcohol induced poverty.
The narrative created, like the assumption that if she burns she's a witch, fails to recognize the logic which simple interviews with the affected will clearly point out - the escapism provided by "vices" is the symptom not the disease. This is clearly apparent in the near perfect correlations of increased income inequality and prison rates - the latter capturing, though rather crudely, the multitude of socially constructed layers of control adapted and augmented over time with the effect of obscuring the very simple fact that America, as with so many other societies, doesn't have a crime problem, it has a poverty problem.
As Oscar Wilde once quipped - " They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.".
Sarah Price — September 4, 2017
I loved this article because it was short but hit at some of the most misunderstood aspects of poverty. We make assumptions every day about the people around us but especially those that might have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. Shame on us if we assume that every family in poverty is dealing with drugs or other unhealthy habits. Policy should reflect the truths of poverty, not the myths we believe to make us feel better about poor people and their struggles. From someone who has lived in poverty before, I greatly appreciate the post and the perspective.