This week’s NY Times magazine has an interesting article about the “culture of poverty” and innovative attempts to end generational poverty. Author Tina Rosenberg describes the evolution of this phrase and profiles two conditional cash transfer programs: Oportunidades in Mexico and Opportunity NYC. These types of programs give people cash — rather than food subsidies, for example — but attach requirements intended to “break the culture of poverty.” Rosenberg notes that, in the Mexico, 25 percent of households — “including virtually every Mexican family at risk for hunger” — are enrolled in the program. Each month, enrolled families receive cash payments from local banks IF children maintain good attendance at school and attend regular preventitative health screenings. The author points to several indicators of success, including a drop in the rate of extreme poverty from 37.4 percent in 1996 to 13.8 percent in 2006 (during a period of only 3% economic growth).
A version of the program is being implemented in New York City under the name Opportunity NYC. According to the program’s Web site, “Opportunity NYC Family Rewards is an exciting new program that can help you make ends meet by adding up to $4,000 or more per year to your family’s income for taking certain steps that help your family.”
Rosenberg frames these programs as “postideological”:
Conditional-cash-transfer programs, part of the new paternalism, defy the traditional poverty wisdom on both left and right. But intriguingly, they are postideological in another sense too. Do the poor fall into the culture of poverty for structural reasons, as Lewis contended, or behavioral ones, as Banfield [author "The Unheavenly City"] argued? Oportunidades and Opportunity NYC have a novel answer to that question: maybe it doesn’t matter.
Critics, such as Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, argue against the philosophy behind Opportunity NYC:
If Opportunity NYC goes large scale it will further break down the moral obligation to care for one’s child and adopt the repertoire of parenting behaviors the middle class takes for granted. It will replace that with the expectation that I’m only going to do it if you pay me…What government cannot do is create personal responsibility and drive in individuals.
If programs like Oportunidades and Opportunity NYC work, does it matter why?
Opportunity NYC will not be able to help those parents too apathetic to pick up their coupon books. But those parents are just a small handful. As for the rest, one of the most tantalizing lessons of the program is that the answer to why Mom skips the parent-teacher conferences may not matter. Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, agreed. “We know that education and health as children are key to getting out of poverty as adults,” she said. “You can have an endless, circular debate about why people don’t do things. This program is less focused on the why and more focused on whether a different approach can have an impact in a way traditional approaches have not.”
Shouldn’t we still want to know why programs work, even if we take a pragmatic, innovative approach?
