Prometheus 6

I'm probably going to cross post this at The American Street...it'll be like my annual post...

Bit repetitious for some of you, but why rewrite boilerplate explanations when you can cut and paste?

And Now, 'Welfare Reform' for Men
By Lawrence Mead
Tuesday, March 20, 2007; A19

Reforms in the 1990s shifted more than 60 percent of mothers off the welfare rolls, mostly into jobs. The changes used both "help and hassle" -- new subsidies for wages and child care coupled with stiffer demands to work as a condition of aid. So, how could we do the same for low-income men?

Mead was one of the primary architects of welfare reform, and a proponent of Francis Fukuyama's “End of History” frame (which assumes there are no significant policy differences left in Western society). I believe he's on New York City's payroll as well. Welfare reform is pretty universally seen as a success. Me, I notice that wage subsidies helped businesses and that the majority of successes have not really improved their financial condition. I also note most of them wanted to work anyway. I just think whatever benefit gained could have been gotten without demonizing them.

The idea of him taking another shot at it bothers me because I know he's already written off the poor as lazy slackers...that we've done all that is possible to alleviate the effects of racism and that “after welfare reform it is impossible to have a social democratic politic.” I know whatever he suggests will net out to a wealth transfer to Corporate America again. But, like Al Sharpton, we have to listen to him because he has impact in decision making circles. And I have to be concerned as last time

Low-income men, often the absent fathers of welfare families, got little attention from the reforms because they are seldom on welfare themselves. Like mothers on welfare, they seldom work regularly, and this helps to keep families poor. In 2005, there were more than 7 million poor men ages 16 to 50 in the United States, and only half of them worked at all. Among black men in poverty, nearly two-thirds were idle, and their employment has fallen steadily in recent decades.

because Black men are in his baleful eye.

His standard rhetorical technique is

1. Build an abstract model of a situation

2. Ask a question about the model

3. Suggest a weak answer

4. Debunk the weak answer

5. Suggest his preferred solution

6. Proceed as though the falsity of the first statement establishes the truth of the second.

Case in point:

Why are low-skilled men withdrawing from work just when unskilled jobs appear plentiful and immigrants are flooding into the country to take them? One reason might be that the wages these men could earn have fallen, so, the thinking goes, why work for chump change? Yet these men failed to work more even in the 1990s, when wages for low-skilled jobs rose. It's more likely that male work discipline has deteriorated. Poor men want to work and succeed, yet many cannot endure the slights and disappointments that work involves. That's why poor men usually can obtain jobs yet seldom keep them.

This is the thing I look for in a reasonable-sounding article that comes to a wholly wrong conclusion. The Möbius point.

You know what a Möbius strip is?

The Möbius strip or Möbius band (pronouncedsurface with only one side and only one boundary component. It has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It was co-discovered independently by the German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing in 1858. /ˈmøbiʊs/) is a

A model can easily be created by taking a paper strip and giving it a half-twist, and then merging the ends of the strip together to form a single strip. In Euclidean space there are in fact two types of Möbius strips depending on the direction of the half-twist: clockwise and counterclockwise. The Möbius strip is therefore chiral, which is to say that it is "handed".

Because of that half-twist, if you run your finger along the top surface of the Möbius strip you wind up on the bottom. Somewhere in an article like this you will find the point at which some meaning is inverted in a way that, if you "translate your words into the facts they represent," is obviously absurd. In this case, the Möbius point is

poor men usually can obtain jobs yet seldom keep them.

At least in the case of Black men in New York City, they cannot get jobs at all.

Many of you may be familiar with the work of Devah Pager, whose work focuses on this very area.

The Mark of Race. Among the findings from Pager’s field experiment, one of the most troubling relates to the impact of race on employment outcomes. Employers for entry-level jobs were just as willing—if not more—to consider a white applicant with a felony conviction than a black applicant with no criminal history. This result clearly illustrates to the continuing significance of race in shaping opportunities. Though politicians and the general public are increasingly likely to believe that direct discrimination is a thing of the past, these results suggest that such a conclusion is premature. Pager is currently conducting a replication and expansion of her first project (with Bruce Western) in a study that examines discrimination by race, ethnicity, criminal background, and educational attainment.

Race at Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the New York City Job Market is a good popularization of her work. Shockingly, racism (conscious or not) and poor education (which is a national problem) are the major causes of a 50% Black unemployment rate in New York City. Mead's assumption being wrong, his plan is too. That's a problem if, as I think is the case, he's an advisor to New York's Mayor Bloomberg.

Oh, but I haven't told you what his plan is. It may sound familiar.

It's to re-institute slavery...watch the rhetorical technique at work.

Employing larger numbers of low-income men isn't going to be easy. Congress is likely to raise the minimum wage, and wage subsidies for low-skilled men could also be increased. But if low wages are not the main cause of male nonwork, these steps will change little. In welfare reform, improving work incentives by itself had little effect. Coupling new benefits to definite demands to work is what drove welfare mothers to work and then rewarded them. The same is probably true here: Nonworking men deserve to earn more, but they also must be required to work, as they seldom are today. Formerly, they could have entered the Army, where they could be ordered to work, and military service does help some men get their lives together. Unfortunately, today's volunteer military is too selective to accept most disadvantaged applicants.

A better idea is to use the child support system, which requires absent fathers to support their families, and the criminal justice system, which is supposed to supervise many ex-offenders on parole after they leave prison. Right now these institutions depress male work levels by locking men up, and by garnishing their wages if they do work. But they could be used to promote work. For example, men in arrears on their child support could be assigned to work programs, as could parolees with employment problems. These men -- about 1.5 million each year -- would have to show up and work regularly -- on penalty of going to jail. Both groups might also receive wage subsidies. The combination might instill more regular work habits.

Practically speaking, what are you going to have all those unemployed-by-no-fault-of-their-own Black folks do? Are you going to pay businesses to hire them like last time? Have them do municipal jobs, displacing current employees and increasing the supply of conscripts? Give them make-work jobs?

Will you relocate them?

How about all the middle Americans that live in dying company towns? Or mining towns where the young folks just don't want to do that hazardous work?

How about you? Because though he set up the argument using Black men and deadbeat dads, make no mistake...there are no restrictions on what he suggests other than that you be broke. If the job market was an investment account you'd call what you see now churn. Is YOUR job so secure, your debts so slight, that you'll never be subject to such a program?

And when a new competitor staffs up their entry level jobs with conscripts from an expanded prison industrial system and get a tax credit for it, are you going to buy into this system?

Consider it now because if Mead and his AEI clients have their way, it's coming.

He just told you so himself.