50 Years Later, The American Dream is Still in Crisis

By Marianne Lombardo

Recent publications stir debate about the relationship between poverty, race, family structure, and social mobility.

Not much has changed over the past 50 years in how our country talks about poverty.

In 1965, Black civil rights leaders were put off by liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,“ that stated that the breakdown of the nuclear family compromised equal opportunity for black Americans. Phrases like “the tangle of the pathology” and a national call to arms to “enhance the stability and resources of the Negro American family” made them feel like President Lyndon B. Johnson’s assistant secretary “blamed the victim” and ignored racism and structural social barriers. At the time, James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality, denounced the report as a “massive cop-out for the white conscience.”

In 2015, word choice continues to reveal the connotation that poverty is caused by irresponsible choices and cultural deficiencies.

For example, Education Next – a quarterly journal of opinion and research on education reform – recently revisited the “Moynihan Report” in its Spring 2015 edition.

But instead of using non-punitive language to discuss the underlying causes of poverty, the journal’s language is not too different from the original report: “Having grown up in a broken family (pg. 7);” “breakdown or disintegration of the family,” “lower class families falling apart,” “largely because of broken families (pg. 9);” “the relationship between broken families and poor student performance (pg. 12).”

By contrast, Robert Putnam’s new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis focuses on poverty through a different lens: social mobility. He details structural causes of poverty, such as the loss of manufacturing jobs and increasing socioeconomic segregation where people live and go to school. He also shows the numerous ways cultural capital advantages privileged children, particularly in education. Ultimately, he argues that growing social isolation – such as growing class segregation and weakened supports and resources that were once available through a shared community – is causing growing opportunity gaps.

But Putnam ends up not giving a free pass to behavior either. During a talk at the Fordham Institute last week, Putnam talked about how “changes in morals have led to the collapse of the working class family,” and “poor parents that un-expectantly have it together.” Both Putnam – and President Obama, in a panel discussion at Georgetown University last week – support “purple” solutions that recognize complex causes of poverty.

But “purple” policies of the last decades – Clinton’s “End Welfare as We Know It” and the Bush Administration’s marital initiatives (e.g. the Supporting Healthy Marriage Project and the Building Healthy Families programs which involved marriage education workshops and relationship counseling at an average cost of $9,000 per couple, “date nights” hosted by religious groups, and paying professional athletes to appear in public service announcements promoting marriage) that diverted $300 million from poverty programs – were all unsuccessful (see here, here, here, here and here!). Studies show that convincing poor single moms to get married may actually cause them more financial harm than if they never married at all.

Meanwhile, consider the following findings:

Ludger Woessman, concludes that “the achievement gap between single-parent and two-parent families reflects other background differences … rather than a genuine effect of family structure.” He found that the achievement gap between US single-parent and two-parent families declined 29 percent between 2000 and 2012. When socioeconomic factors are controlled for, the 27-point family structure gap shrinks to 10 points.
Raj Chetty found that environment matters. Children in poor families given vouchers that enabled them to move to better neighborhoods have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere.
The Economic Policy Institute’s examination of the overall US poverty rate found education and income growth were the two biggest poverty-reducing factors. High inequality of market income – how much people get paid for the work they do (income inequality) was the largest poverty-increasing factor. Relative to these factors, racial composition and changes in family structure have contributed much less to poverty, particularly in recent years. The Institute’s recommendation is to increase wages for those at the bottom and middle of the income distribution.

So despite evidence that economics matters more than family structure, punitive public discourse leads to punitive public policies.

Both conservatives and liberals deeply care about the poor. As we can hopefully work together to find solutions that help children, we must all keep in mind Putnam’s central thesis: the growing divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is due to social isolation.

Now, social isolation isn’t just about living in different communities and going to different schools. It also affects interpersonal interactions and how the poor make sense of themselves and their world. In my previous research, single mothers described chronic stress and worry and tenuous networks of support – having none of the “air bags” the rich have to cushion hard times. In addition, feelings of “otherness” wounded their souls. Shopping with Strangers, written by one of the mothers that I interviewed, captures how she feels negatively judged and marginalized:

A critical start to building policy bridges and meaningful connections across communities would be to be more deliberate with language. Just as we’ve stopped referring to immigrants as “illegal” and “unwanted” pregnancies to “unplanned,” we’ve got to stop calling single parent families “broken.”

Because until we stop casting poverty as the result of poor morality, the public will never completely buy into “Our Kids.”