By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Noah Smith has offered a stale slab of conventional
wisdom under the hectoring headline: “Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their
Poverty.” The essay compounds sloppy thinking with tedious writing, but it
reflects a common line of thinking, the defects of which are worth taking the
time to understand.
Smith argues that conservatives err in taking a
moralistic view of poverty (he cites my writing on the subject) and offers as a
point of comparison the Japanese: “In Japan,” he writes, “people work hard, few
abuse drugs, crime is minimal and single mothers are rare. The country still
has lots of poverty.”
Almost none of that is exactly true, or true without
qualification.
To start at the end and work backward, a technical
matter: It is not obvious that Japan “has lots of poverty.” Real data about
poverty in Japan are notoriously difficult to find (it is almost as if the
government does not want to talk about it!), and Smith here relies on a useless
measure of “relative” poverty, the share of the population earning less than
half of the median income. You can see the limitations of that approach: A uniformly
poor society in which 99 percent of the people live on 50 cents a day and 1
percent live on 49 cents a day would have a poverty rate of 0.00; a rich
society with incomes that are rising across-the-board but are rising much more
quickly for the top two-thirds would have a rising poverty rate, and some
people who are not classified as being in poverty this year might be in poverty
next year even though their incomes are higher, etc. It would be far better to
consider poverty in absolute terms, but our progressive friends are strangely
resistant to that.
Secondly, it is not entirely clear that the Japanese are
as free from the pathologies that attend poverty in many other places as Smith
suggests. It is true that Japan as a whole has low rates of chronic
unemployment, drug use, single motherhood, etc., but the relevant question here
would be how Japanese who are poor
compare on these metrics with Japanese at large. To assume that the situation
with the poor can be approximately deduced from national averages is pretty
sloppy analysis, if it counts as analysis at all.
Third, it emphatically is not the case that Japan is a
society that is largely free from substance abuse. In Japan, as in the United
States, the most socially significant and destructive mode of substance abuse
is legal: alcohol abuse. Japan
has a big problem with alcohol, and alcohol abuse is related to joblessness
and poverty, although the question of causality (Are they unemployed because they drink, or do they drink because they
are unemployed?) gets complicated, and some studies suggest that in Japan some
kinds of destructive drinking increase with income.
Smith is correct that Japan has high work-force
participation, and that it has a universal(ish) national health-insurance
scheme. To which he adds: “Too many people fall through the cracks in the
capitalist system because of unemployment, sickness, injury or other forms of
bad luck.” This is an odd thing to write immediately after noting that Japan
has 1. low unemployment and 2. a national health-care system that helps people
through sickness and injury.
Perhaps those things are not sufficient?
“Capitalism” is a very broad term. The United States is a
capitalist country, and a rich capitalist country at that. So is Japan. So is
Singapore. So is Sweden. So is Switzerland. These countries have radically
different health-care systems, tax codes, family lives, cultural norms, etc.
Unsurprisingly, these produce different outcomes on a great many social fronts
— but all of them are comprehended by “capitalism.”
So, not obviously correct about Japan, and not obviously
correct about capitalism. Smith is batting about his average here, the usual
mishmash of tendentious platitudes and misunderstood truisms.
But what about conservatives and our judgmental, “moral”
approach to the question of poverty? I do not think Smith really quite
understands this either. And, since he uses my work as his example, I will do
my best to make it more clear.
The thing about moral truths is that they are truths. Take the example of a problem
drinker. We can be reasonably sure that his life will improve if he stops
drinking two liters of bourbon a day, or at least that it is much less likely
to improve if he does not stop drinking two liters of bourbon a day. Some
people see drunkenness and understand it as a character defect; others see
alcoholism and understand it as a disease — in either case, the diagnosis is
the same: Stop drinking two liters of bourbon a day. Perhaps it is the case
that the world has been cruel and unfair to him. What now? Stop drinking. Maybe his parents abused him, he was discriminated
against because of his race or sexual orientation, and wrongly convicted of a
crime. What now? Stop drinking. It is
not that those other factors do not matter — of course they do, especially if
they can help us to understand the source of the problem. But the remedy is
going to be the same.
To argue that the problem is “the capitalist system” is
to retreat into generality and to refuse to consider the facts of the case,
each on its own merits. To insist that the problem is capitalism also is to
assert that phenomena such as homelessness are fundamentally economic problems, which does not seem
to be the case. In New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities, it is common
for people to sleep on the streets even as beds in shelters go unoccupied.
There are many reasons for that, but the main one almost certainly is mental
illness (and substance abuse as a subset of that). That is the nearly universal
opinion of the professionals who work with the urban homeless.
There are better and worse ways to deal with mental
illness in a wealthy, complex society, and we in the United States have settled
on one of the worst: After the “deinstitutionalization” of the 1960s and 1970s,
in which left-wing liberationist thinking combined with right-wing
penny-pinching to gut the public mental hospitals, we punted the problem to the
police and to the jailers, who are ill-equipped to handle it. The United States
is not alone in this. Many (perhaps most) Western European countries have more
effective social-welfare systems than we do, but even in Sweden, with its
fairly comprehensive welfare state, mental illness is the leading cause of
“work force exclusion,” as they call it.
Smith insists that poverty is “related to the economy’s
structure.” I suppose that must be true in some trivial sense. “Structural” is
a favorite word in these kinds of arguments, but I am not convinced it actually
means anything other than, “This problem is complicated and has lots of
variables that I intend to replace with a single adjective.” But the big
changes that progressives generally propose for the United States — a national
health-care system like Japan’s, an enlarged welfare state more like Sweden’s —
do not seem to have been entirely effective in the places where they have been
tried. And there is good reason to believe that Swedish or Swiss practice
cannot simply be imported into Eastern Kentucky or Baltimore and replicated
locally. That does not mean that there is nothing to learn from Japanese or
European practice — perfection is not our criterion — but it does complicate
the conversation. We have, in fact, spent a tremendous amount of money on
anti-poverty and economic-development programs, and much of that has not
delivered anything like the promised return.
And that is where this “moral” stuff that bothers Smith
comes in, again.
The United States is a very, very rich country, one that
can well afford to be less than scrupulous about distinguishing between the
so-called deserving poor and the undeserving. (Whatever that means. A related
thought: Christians citizens, who believe themselves to be the recipients of
the greatest unmerited gift in the history of all things, could probably stand
to be a little less persnickety about who is deserving and who is undeserving
of considerably less precious benefices. We should act like we believe our own
dogma.) Given that, we should be less worried about some “undeserving” person
getting over on us than we are about doing active harm to individuals and
communities through well-intentioned programs. And, indeed, thoughtful
conservatives (and, once upon a time, thoughtful progressives) are very much
attuned to that. Social spending of all kinds creates incentives and
disincentives. Some of these can have big, unintended social consequences.
There is a moral question there, to be sure, but there also is a question of
program design. Economic treatments of fundamentally non-economic social
problems are not likely to produce good results.
In my own reporting on poverty in the United States, I
have tried to present the facts as unsparingly as I can. Perhaps Noah Smith
thinks that I do this in order to savor the exquisite delights of moral
condemnation. But the intended purpose is to scour away the crust of
sentimentality that poverty has acquired in order that we may deal with the
actual facts of the case in a way that is productive and that does not end up
deepening the very problems we hope to mitigate. There are people who are poor
because they have terrible disabilities and no family support; there are people
who are poor because they drink two liters of bourbon a day; there are people
who are poor because they simply will not work; there are people who are poor
who are willing to work but cannot or will not relocate to places where there
are opportunities; there are people who are poor because the education system
has failed them; there are people who are poor for all sorts of other reasons.
We have to sort those out, not because we want to elevate the “deserving” and
abandon the “undeserving” but because those are fundamentally different
problems that demand fundamentally different solutions.
We could try to do that. Or we could blame “the
capitalist system.”
A Little More Noah Smith
By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Having made an embarrassing error (as we all do, from
time to time), Noah Smith of Bloomberg Opinion has done the intellectually
dishonest and chickensh** thing of deleting the erroneous claim without
acknowledging it or correcting it. Given that he was making a false claim about
me and what I have written (see above), this is vexatious. But that’s how it
goes, now. Predictable,
and predicted.
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