Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  In any case, here we go again…naively asking people what was in their heads. I guess I would never learn. However, I could not escape my concern that making inferences of intent from observed behavior, no matter how reasonable, was inherently subjective. Fortunately, we had access to enough data to ascertain patterns of movement in and out of the state over time. We could tease out whether migration was basically a one and done phenomenon or something more complex. A one and done move would involve a poor family moving from a less generous state to Wisconsin and, once realizing they were in welfare heaven, settle down for good. That, after all, was the common consensus about what was happening.

  Let me pause to bring you up to speed on the tenor of the times. The 1986 governor’s race was in full fury as we moved to conclude the study. Moreover, the welfare magnet question (and welfare reform more broadly) were big campaign topics, a fact I repeat since it leads to a priceless vignette. Since the magnet topic was so super-hot politically, we were assigned a small advisory group of political actors to oversee the research. I do not recall the membership except that the group included someone from the governor’s office and someone from the all-powerful Department of Administration. They were charged with monitoring us to make sure we didn’t do too much mischief. While members of the research team could always meet, when we got together with the advisory group, it was deemed an open, public meeting. Those sessions had to be duly posted as such in advance.

  So what, you say. Well, idiots that we were, we scheduled a meeting to first discuss results the day before the election. Naturally, when we arrived for the meeting the press was there with film crews ready to cover the breaking news. They were waiting for the experts to confirm that hordes of welfare barbarians were pouring over our borders to loot the state’s treasury. Hell, this breaking news might sway the election results, which was expected to be close.

  There was a moment of panic. We did not want to become the lead item on the evening news. Besides, we were far from issuing any summative statement of the research results. After a quick private consult, we decided to start the meeting by covering the most boring methodological issues we could envision. We droned on for a while about sample sizes, statistical error ranges, threats to population representativeness. These were discussed in an excruciatingly boring manner which, for academics, is quite easy to manage. I know I was soon asleep. One by one, the press folded up their cameras and left. One of us followed the last of the press to ensure they had, in fact, left the building. When we were convinced that it was now safe, we opened the discussion to a review of some very preliminary results.

  The day before we were to present the findings to the full committee, Paul called me over to his office. All the data had not been analyzed yet though we had a pretty good idea what the story line would be. It went something like this. Yes, we did find evidence that the welfare magnet phenomenon was real. However, the magnitude of the effect was reasonably small, and probably did not rise to the level that warranted any serious response that would further impoverish struggling families. These results were comparable to what other quantitative studies would find in the coming years.

  We also found that residential mobility among low-income families was much greater than supposed. Significant numbers moved into and then out of Wisconsin, often going back and forth between states several times. Why? Proximity to families and social networks were important. Some personal crisis would occur, and they might return to their former state, since most were less rooted in one place by career considerations. Clearly, the narrow view that migrant families move in and stay forever was not borne out by the data though, of course, many surely do.

  The reasons for relocating were also complex. Strikingly, ease of getting welfare seemed more important than the differential in welfare guarantees. In addition, disadvantaged families tended to move for some of the same push and pull reasons we all do. They were looking for good schools for their kids, safe streets, freedom from gangs and drug peddlers, better economic opportunities, better housing, closer proximity to friends and family who may have relocated earlier. Few, however, mentioned the weather as a salient factor for moving to the badger state, which I thought gave our data some surface credibility. What jumped out at us was that a single, declarative answer as to why people relocate would prove way too simplistic. In a popular measure being floated at the time, migrants would receive the benefits they would have gotten in their former state for some limited period. That initiative seemed unlikely to affect relocation patterns, at least in our opinions, though politicians could claim they were doing something.

  Paul asked me what I thought our bottom-line conclusion for the committee should be. I strongly urged that we stay away from any such summative statement. Let us present the data as coherently as we can. Then, let the committee develop a story-line. They are the decisionmakers and we merely are the hired guns. It is their judgment and expertise that counts, not ours. Paul did not buy it, however. “We are the ‘experts,’” he argued. “They want our opinion, not just our findings.” I remained unconvinced but agreed to go along. He had seniority.

  The next day, we provided the committee with a long-winded narrative somewhat along the lines so very briefly outlined above; of course, we had many charts and many numbers just to look expert-like. I found press coverage in the four major papers the next day illuminating. Three concluded that the research proved that Wisconsin was not a welfare magnet, and one concluded that we proved it was a magnet. I had been hoping for a split vote.

  If you think anything was decided by our research efforts, you do not know much about the welfare wars. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), which at the time had little to do with research and much to do with advancing conservative causes, later hired an economist from Emory University to attack our results. Their hired gun tore into us saying that it was totally stupid to ask people why they moved. They will lie. They will give socially desirable responses, and blah, blah, blah.

  Then he went on to “prove” that the welfare magnet “crisis” was costing Wisconsin something like $117 million per year. Yikes, how could I have been so blind? To come up with this figure, he basically assumed that anyone who had lived in another state in the past was a welfare migrant even if they moved into the state a decade before applying for assistance, or even had relocated here as a child with their parents. Apparently, this last group wanted to get an up-front spot in the applicant queue. He also assumed that they stayed on welfare and in Wisconsin forever; assumptions clearly contradicted by our data. The “fall down while laughing your fanny off” part of his analysis, in my mind at least, was an assertion that the state had to hire hordes of new workers to handle the burgeoning welfare-migrant induced caseload growth. The problem was, he never bothered to look at actual caseloads which were falling rapidly during the period of his analysis. Reality is a cruel mistress.

  I guess the lesson here is never let a little data get in the way of a good story. Unfortunately, it was such a good story that his conclusions were printed in the New York Times. So much for “all the news that’s fit to print!” I later heard that this rebuttal of our work was subsequently used in some Public Policy courses as an example of an atrocious, politically motivated hatchet job. Jim Miller, the director of WPRI, laid into me when we met one day, “How could you be so stupid and ignorant not to believe that all these poor (read Black) people are not pouring into Wisconsin for welfare.” I think he went on to assert that I must be developmentally disabled.

  In a larger sense, the welfare migration controversy is a good example of an inherent challenge in doing policy. When opinions are closely held and are sustained by an emotional component that ties together a coherent world view, conflicting data seldom makes a difference. That is why I am impressed with scholars who do follow the data. Sarah Mclanahan, another IRP affiliate now teaching at Princeton, had raised her children as a divorced mother before marrying Irv Garfinkel. She was convinced that children raised by
a single mother could fare just as well as those raised in two-parent homes. Her research, no matter how she ran the numbers, did not support her priors. So, she changed her mind. That story, a scientist who faithfully followed the evidence, was eventually told in a popular magazine. In a world where opinions and beliefs have ossified, it is good (and apparently rare) to see intellectual honesty.

  Not long after all this, I wrote a piece for Focus, the IRP publication, which is widely read in the policy world. The title was something like The Wisconsin Welfare Magnet Debate: What is the ordinary member of the tribe to do when the witch doctors disagree? While I did review the Wisconsin welfare magnet debate, my main purpose for doing the piece was to argue for a more civil dialogue in public policy, one based on reason and evidence and less on ideology and emotion. True, this is a bit like spitting in the wind but Herb Kohl, Wisconsin’s senior senator at the time, found it so persuasive (or his staff did) that he had it read into the Congressional Record and strongly urged his colleagues to read it. I did not spend much time hanging around waiting for fan mail.

  Is the magnet issue over? No, of course not. That issue taps into primal fears many retain about the “other,” in this instance poor Black families, who threaten them in some way. That fear has moved on to newer opportunities, the fear of foreign-born, dark-skinned terrorists being a great example. The introduction of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) offers a subtle illustration. Some states have aggressively supported the law and others have not. Some have expanded access to Medicaid while others have refused to do so. This uneven pattern of acceptance and implementation creates situations where the same individual or family cannot get health coverage where they live now but can get it if they move to the neighboring state. Will they move just to get health care coverage? Some might, depending on their situation, many won’t. Whenever differentials in coverage across jurisdictions exist, fear of benefits-induced migration will never disappear. To date, though, nothing matches the welfare magnet fears of the 1980s.

  Let me continue this tour of the growing welfare wars by browsing in another counter of my candy store. By the mid-1980s, the intrepid legislator from our Welfare Study Committee, Tom Loftus, had risen to be majority leader in the Assembly. As such, he got to call the shots. Undoubtedly, he noticed that the political dialogue around welfare was drifting in a harder, more vitriolic direction. Led by the Reagan revolution, the politics in Washington were less than sympathetic to the poor. As noted, popular books by Mead, Murray, and others were transforming the intellectual climate and casting doubt about the existing welfare state. A more confident and assertive set of conservative think tanks (Heritage, American Enterprise Institute, Cato, etc.) were blasting away at that welfare state and the remnants of the War-On-Poverty with unrelenting attacks. Locally, there were increasing calls for workfare as a solution to the welfare “crisis” with some of these calls coming from Tom’s own Democratic Party.

  Roughly at the same time I was poking around the welfare magnet issue, Loftus set up a legislative committee to look at AFDC, and to see what could be done to enhance the connection between work and welfare; and to explore any other changes that looked promising. This was nothing like the Welfare Study Committee discussed in the previous chapter. Rather, this committee was comprised of legislators who were directed to come up with specific reform proposals that would be considered by the broader legislative branch. In a very unusual move, though, Tom asked Irv Garfinkel and me to serve as unofficial or nonvoting members of the committee. We were to be expert resources who could keep the debate somewhat evidence focused and rational.

  I suspect he feared that once the genie was out of the bottle, anything could happen. The committee might run in directions that Loftus might find reprehensible. Requiring applicants for public assistance to endure a medieval water-test was not out of the question. What is that you ask? The medieval water-test as applied to welfare would go like this: miscreants who dared seek help from the public’s largess would be thrown into a body of water. If they floated to the surface, they were deemed to be guilty and hung or, in this case, declared ineligible for help. If they sank and drowned, that would be a sign of their innocence or, in this situation, their worthiness for assistance. Of course, those poor souls would be dead, so cash assistance would be of little comfort to them.

  John Antaramian, a Democratic legislator representing the blue-collar city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, was tapped to chair the group. John was rather small of stature but large of heart. He was called the Lebanese flower by some who knew him, capturing both his heritage, and the fact that he was pleasant to be around. He was naturally gregarious, not a bad attribute for a politician. There also was a down-to-earth quality about him as he would always whip his tie off as soon as he got into his office. At the end of the day, he cared about public policy. There was little artifice in him. He basically wanted to do good even if what was good could be very elusive.

  I don’t think that Irv got into the committee’s work as much as I did. He continued to focus on his child support initiatives. He probably only agreed to do this as a favor to Tom Loftus in the hope that Tom would continue to lobby on behalf of Irv’s first love—the Assured Child Support benefit. I, on the other hand, had the attention span of a gnat, and was always looking for the next debacle into which I might sink my teeth.

  I was a bit taken by how much the legislators looked to us for guidance. They listened when we brought ideas in for them to consider, unlike my spouse or anyone else who knew me well for that matter. Okay, one more digression here!

  I once thought my spouse was beginning to have a hearing problem since she never seemed to hear anything I said. One day, I screwed up my courage and mentioned this to her. Dutifully, she went through all the hoops to get to a hearing specialist who gave her all kinds of tests. At the end, the audiologist asked her why she had come in the first place. When she explained about my concerns he immediately broke into a smile. “Yes, we see this all the time. Your hearing is perfect. You just can’t hear anything your husband says. We call this impairment the selective spousal hearing syndrome.” True story by the way!

  Back to the main narrative! Sometimes a legislator sitting next to me would lean over and ask in a low voice, “How should I vote on this one?” In addition, I searched for models that tried to strengthen the work component of welfare programs. There was nothing earthshaking out there in my estimation, but there were bits and pieces worth looking at. I recall drafting a very detailed model that represented my best thinking (at the time) for accomplishing what I thought the committee might accept. I laid it out in excruciating detail, with lines and circles and triangles and rectangles all signifying an action or decision or programmatic input. It was a nerd’s dream of how clients would move through a future welfare office that emphasized work and cash assistance with equal force. I believe I caught several committee members dozing off as I went through it. Funny, I found it quite compelling.

  At some point, I realized two things. First, there were few additional resources to make this vision a reality statewide. Contrary to what many people thought at the time, a work-oriented welfare program cost a lot of money. The additional child care costs alone would break the state’s piggy bank. Second, locals had to buy into any innovation that altered the basic way they did business. Even I knew that prescribing a top-down model of change was fraught with peril. This would be particularly true if the changes demanded were consequential in character…if they required that people really do things differently. When you ask people to alter the core technology of their agency, what it basically does, it is far better to work from the ground up than the heavens down.

  In the end, what I really argued for was a “lighthouse” approach. Choose a few sites, work with them closely. Focus more on what you want to accomplish and less on how to accomplish it. Provide lots of help but don’t be overly prescriptive. Evaluate and monitor things closely, document what is working and why. Also, be honest about what is no
t working and why. The purpose here is not to be right but to learn. Be flexible and keep changing. You won’t get it right the first time around. Then use these so-called “lighthouses” as exemplar models that others might follow, not slavishly but as a source of inspiration and guidance.

  It was not an easy sell at first. Politicians would rather do something big and splashy even if the intervention were shallow and likely to fail. They want to be seen as solving the big problems in a big way. You know, we passed a bill and now all welfare recipients are working. The slow and steady progress of the tortoise appears tepid against the speed and flash of the hare. John Kennedy may have fully appreciated the ancient precept that the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, but he was an unusually wise man. Still, my general approach prevailed in the end.

  Several things came out of this committee, but the primary product of interest to me was passage of the Work Experience and Jobs Training Program or WEJT (pronounced widget). Five sites were selected to launch experimental efforts to better link welfare with work. They would get additional resources for the task, sufficient resources to have a shot at doing something substantial. I was pleased but cautious. I realized that legislating something and making it work were two different things. If the pilot sites were not provided support and guidance, they could easily founder and lose their way. But hey, Irv was after me to keep pushing the child support agenda; and there was that damn dissertation still hanging over my head. I thought I would keep my head down and just wish them well. It was a nice thought, but once again I was wrong. But I will save that story for later.

  Over the course of my work with the committee, I became pretty good friends with John Antaramian who eventually made it to the Joint Finance Committee (JFC). This was an important move for him. Only the more powerful representatives made it to Joint Finance since it dealt with money issues…the engine of politics. I recall getting a call from John one day after the committee had done its work. “Tom,” he lamented, “I thought I was doing good things with the committee and now everyone is mad at me. What did I do wrong?”