Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  Redirection. The redirection theme involves the transformation of public assistance for poor families with children from a system of cash support based on economic need to one aimed at fostering individual and community change. The goals attached to the new concept of support have multiplied over time. At the local level, they may include communities coming together to improve parenting, family formation, family functioning, and decision making with respect to fertility and sexual activity. Some proponents of reform also anticipate that the redirection of welfare policy will help heal dysfunctional communities, restore public confidence in social assistance programs, and eventually result in better transitions into adult roles by poor and disadvantaged children.

  Reinvention. The reinvention theme embraces the transformation of public management from a focus on inputs and protocols for action (tightly allocated resources for specified purposes and explicitly spelled out procedures for which tasks should be done and how) to outputs (how well program goals are met). Proponents of the new focus argue that greater freedom for managers to structure the processes by which they shape and deliver services will enhance program efficiency and responsiveness. The reinvention theme also emphasizes accountability for results and working within market forces. Some went so far as to challenge the presumption of a public- sector monopoly on the provision of assistance. The challenge to the evaluation community associated with this trend is to develop social indicators to continuously assess the situation at discrete levels and put in place an appropriate data infrastructure to support this evaluation work.

  Reallocation. The reallocation theme encompasses the shifting of program and policy authority from higher levels of government to levels closer to the problems being addressed, not only from the federal level to the states but also from states to localities. The new flexibility afforded to lower levels of authority, proponents suggest, substantially increases both cost effectiveness and the responsiveness of programs to actual needs. This theme is reflected in a sense of professionalism on the front lines of service agencies where workers now exercise considerable discretion.

  These themes were producing a visible shift from a bureaucratic, centralized income transfer system to a professional mode better suited to changing complex behaviors. Nice words, but what do they really mean? The more I looked and talked and watched as people did their work, the more I saw the following. Program purposes were transitioning from income support to job placement to providing help to sustain and strengthen the person’s place in the labor force to focusing on family and community support. After all, as many officials told me, you cannot separate the link between strong families and good workers. Each reinforces the other.

  These emerging, elastic, dynamic organizational forms that were bubbling up just after the turn of the century were pregnant with possibilities. They represented a shift in the underlying paradigm of what we knew as welfare. The WELPAN network summarized their thinking about this transformative period as follows:

  Traditional welfare programs focused on the provision of specific benefits or services such as issuing a welfare check. Emerging perspectives now push us in the direction of thinking about ‘preventing’ counterproductive behaviors and achieving positive outcomes.

  Old ways of thinking typically focused on a case…often the adult in the household. Emerging strategies now have us considering entire families and the environments in which they work and live.

  Old ways of thinking considered the situation today of for this month. This is what we call a “point-in-time” perspective. New ways of thinking consider issues and challenges over time and across generations. We call this a “point-in-process” perspective.

  Old ways of approaching social assistance depended on autonomous workers in very isolated agencies carrying out a limited set of tasks using bureaucratic methods. New ways see collaborative workers operating in networks of service systems, employing professional models of intervention.

  Old welfare strategies tended to respond after problems became severe enough to warrant public attention. Now, some programs try to anticipate and prevent individual, family, and community dysfunction.

  Old ways of thinking offered band-aids for specific problems. Newer strategies work toward comprehensive solutions that cut across traditional program and service technology boundaries.

  As we moved further into the 21st century, I recall thinking how many of my candy counters were spilling over into one another. The work on social indicators and implementation methods, on the “holy grail” of service integration, and on WELPAN’s New Face of Welfare were merging into a foaming, churning froth of change. All that was most exciting! And yet, it also seemed time to think about closing my candy store to more business or at least cutting back on the hours it would be open. How could that be? A decade ago, it all seemed so promising. It was fun to watch dedicated public servants buck against inertia and fear of the unknown to try new things and to envision the improbable. Now, I was beginning to sense something else.

  I would sometimes muse that I had been there when they had put the nail in the coffin of the old individualized AFDC grant structure which had so much discretion built into the rules. We (some of us) thought it scandalous at the time when workers nosed into the client’s personal lives no matter the justification. We would end all that through flat grants, through new rules that did not permit any discretion, and though an automated case management system that wrested much control over the program from agency workers.

  Now, some three decades later, I was working with agencies throughout the mid-west and beyond to turn the welfare entitlement back into a people-changing system. Maybe that old aphorism is true after all…the more things change the more they stay the same. There was a wisp of despair in the air that the sense of change and innovation in the air could not be sustained indefinitely. Perhaps if we had all been a bit younger!

  Charles Murray had an article which was originally written for the Wall Street Journal republished in Focus not that many years ago. It called for a replacement of the panoply of welfare programs, as he called them, with a demogrant or basic income guarantee. It was a throwback to the Negative Income Tax schemes of the early 1970s. I was struck again by the circular nature of doing policy. I was taken by just how intractable wicked social problems are and how they defy permanent solutions. They keep coming back to us again and again like one of those fiends that terrorize sorority houses in horror movies. Just when you thought the monster finally dead, back it would pop to terrorize you just a bit more. It would be easy to get jaundiced and cynical and a tad paranoid.

  I will admit that even during the heady days of planning for a “new face of welfare,” there was the realization that darker days were ahead. As late as 2002, I was still optimistic. Then IRP Director Karl Scholz asked me to prepare the introductory essay for a major special edition of Focus where we asked our most iconic affiliates to prepare articles on various poverty issues. I titled my seminal essay The New Face of Welfare: From income assistance to social assistance. In this 2002 piece, I tried to lay out the future of reform and the outlines of a new age for helping our vulnerable citizens. Even as the words were yet drying on the page, it felt like a paean to an era soon to be lost.

  Already, though, people and politicians were forgetting about welfare as an issue. Poverty was being lost in concerns about terrorism and the continued drift of the nation toward the political right. The money would dry up. Attention and concern would move on to something or other that appeared more exciting or controversial. Finally, those most excited about the possibility of change would leave or retire or simply grow old. And all of this pessimistic scenario did come to pass, at least in part. WELPAN ended in 2007.

  Was there any sense of disappointment in the end? Not really! For one thing, the social policy world I would leave behind was not the one I inherited at the start of the journey. Like the many students who passed through my courses, I suspect I left behind many small and not so small contrib
utions. And even if I didn’t, hell, I got to work in just about the best candy store around. Of course, everything in the policy world is not cotton candy and games. Let me take a moment or two to explore the dark side in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 9

  DARKNESS AND LIGHT?

  The modern conservative engages in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

  —John Kenneth Galbreath

  Hiraeth is an old Welsh word. It means a yearning for a world that you believe once existed and is now lost, but in truth probably never existed. Such is the human condition…pining for some utopian dream while enduring what can better be described as a dystopian reality. Then again, our present situation cannot predict what is around the corner with any certainty. Progress is not linear, nor do socio-economic conditions inexorably get better over time, at least in any obvious way. In terms of public policy, we seem to have hit a rough patch.

  Progress toward an opportunity society stalled in the 1980s and has been on the defensive since. It is enough to tax one’s faith that all will turn out well. The inescapable truth is that doing policy is not just an intellectual endeavor. It is also an emotional journey. We would like to believe that only the prefrontal lobes are involved. Alas, the deeper reaches of our brains involving our emotional apparati intrude all the time as we explore in these next two chapters. Sometimes, that emotional element can be a definite drag.

  Looking back over my long life, it becomes clear that I have endured several normative and emotional life cycles, often tied to wild swings in the apparent condition of the world around me. As a kid, I was entombed in a dominant Catholic, working class, ethnic culture. It was a black and white world, governed by layers upon layers of stereotypes and prejudices. As such, it was a very conservative place to be even though everyone around me was a Democrat, at least in a nominal sense. We had to fight the Communists and WASPs and other sorts of evildoers. We had to be suspicious of all whom we did not see in the true church on Sunday and even those not seen in the ethnically defined true Catholic Church. Everyone who was not part of our ethnic, religious, and racial tribe was certainly suspect. We seemingly had a rather endless supply of suspects to fear and hate. Paranoia was everywhere.

  Fortunately, I managed to escape my cultural prison. By age twenty, I was the leader of the leftist group on my college campus, fighting what I considered an ill-considered war in Southeast Asia and an unconscionable racial apartheid system in the South. While a college student, I tried to help vulnerable kids in a poor neighborhood as part of the War-on-Poverty program launched by President Johnson along with working the eleven-to-seven shift emptying bed pans and performing other menial tasks in a large, urban hospital. I had become a hopeless idealist and do-gooder looking for small ways to save the world. And then it would be off to India as a Peace Corps volunteer, two years in the Rajasthan desert trying my hand as an agricultural guru. Okay, not all my adventures were well considered.

  In Confessions of a Clueless Rebel, I recount these early experiences and the transformations in me they generated. Instincts for seeking the common good for a larger community were always there for me. Even where obvious societal flaws existed, and many did, I had this primitive feeling that things would get better. Now, the truth is I am by disposition a jaundiced fellow for the most part, I now look back at my moments of early optimism with bemusement. Not long ago, I took note of the Brexit controversy in England. Will that country leave the European Union as it voted to do? Will Scotland and Northern Island break apart from the United Kingdom? Will that great collaborative experiment known as the European Union, born in the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War, fracture and fall apart? I thought the ties that bind across the pond would only get stronger. Even as a rather young kid, growing up in a narrow and provincial culture, I saw great merit in moving toward a one world government. I even joined some group called the World Federalists which, in hindsight, probably was a Communist front organization. This basic instinct for cooperation and community is likely hardwired within me.

  Eventually, I emerged into my professional life. I was saddened to realize that one could not put off adulthood forever. Rather than passion and commitment, reason and evidence dominated my approach to issues. Rather than overthrowing a corrupt or misguided system, I became more concerned about making our system work better. Reform over protest; Synergy over division. I kept looking for ways to bring disparate points into a sensible whole. There just had to be some way to bridge competing ideologies and normative positions, to get people to work together and not repeat futile arguments ad-nausea. By inclination, I was a man of compromise and the middle ground, searching for ways to make marginal progress in what I saw to be the issues that would elude any quick fix.

  As I type these thoughts, I am drawn once again to my days teaching the policy arts to second year Social Work master’s students. This was at a time far removed from the halcyon days of the War-on-Poverty where caring for the disadvantaged and vulnerable was an explicit national purpose and “what does it do for the poor” a litmus test for good policy. Our new mantra, as many wits have pointed out, had become a war on the poor, the new litmus test is “what does it do for the filthy rich.” Today, with Republicans controlling the major branches of national government, there is a systemic and almost frantic push to unravel what remains of the American safety net, the basics of which were erected from the 1930s through the early 1970s. Ayn Rand had replaced Mother Teresa as the spiritual icon to be worshiped.

  The political strategy employed to fracture our prior social compact, which had been premised on the understanding that we all bear some responsibility for one another, has deep roots. Deficits explode as huge tax breaks are enacted that are skewed toward the wealthiest citizens. Promises that lost revenues will be recovered by some fanciful economic boom are pure poppycock. The nominal rationale for this giveaway is that the economy needs stimulation. Deficit spending, either through increased outlays and/or reduced taxation are traditional ways to prime the pump. Typically, though, this is done when the economy is slack and demand lagging. At those times, increased public spending would seem the preferred strategy, if stimulus in fact was needed, which it is not. Increasing the demand for goods and services, a bottoms-up approach, is the most direct way to stimulate spending as rising income and wealth inequality dampens consumer spending among the many falling behind. Reducing taxes is less effective though conforms nicely to the discredited supply side theoretical framework preferred by Republicans. Give the rich more, they will take care of us. How can one claim such with a straight face?

  What could possibly be the rational for reducing taxes in an expanding economy, particularly for the wealthiest Americans? Unemployment is low, and the labor force is experiencing one of its longest growth spurts in history. GDP growth is modest but steady, and wages are beginning to respond to the healthy economy created over the Obama years. There is no need for a stimulus except for obsequious greed. In fact, the challenge facing America is not a sluggish economy but extreme and growing inequality along with a starved public infrastructure. The tax cuts imposed would only exacerbate this situation. For mainstream economists, there are profound concerns related to extreme wealth and income inequality. Can you maintain a healthy economy when the mass of people can no longer afford the basics? Can you ever respond appropriately to problems when your ideology prevents you from increasing public spending to sustain necessary levels of demand? The last time we saw inequality like this was before the crashes of 1929 and 2008. But why worry!

  For wealthy Republicans, the benefits of tax cuts are obvious. Sure, they might be uncomfortable for a moment or two when it is pointed out that they are violating the traditional tenet of the Republican fiscal prudence. The GOP was once the party of fiscal sobriety and balanced budgets, at least until the Democrats seized that role about a half century ago. At least, however, GOP rhetoric had always
been in the right place.

  Starting in 1980, if not earlier, fiscal insanity and trillion-dollar deficit explosions became good public policy. They changed for two fundamental reasons. First, the right needed to reward the uberwealthy who financed the political machine that kept them in power. Second, exploding deficits gave them an excuse to go after public spending on the nonwealthy. Nothing irks the super-rich more than benefits going to those who are not of their select tribe, even if withholding assistance results in human suffering and even amenable deaths. In past decades, Republicans would offer rationales for treating the less fortunate in such a callous manner. Now, they appear to feel that is no longer necessary. A generation or two of endless promotion of basic shibboleths such as government is always the problem and individuals can spend money more wisely than the public sector has transformed the underlying ideological framework for thinking about things. The emotional basis for our sense of political identity has been altered in a fundamental way.

  Traditionally, going after the poor has always been easy in America. The average American has always been uneasy helping the down and out, a disposition likely derived from our deeply-rooted tribal divisions. The built-in heterogeneity of our society serves to sustain the “us” versus “them” divisions that corrode the nation’s fabric. It has been too easy to see them as different and unworthy, the price we pay for a society that has been distinguished by ethnic and racial diversity. The real money, however, can be found in those more universal entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security. If you are going to be successful in redistributing massive amounts of money to the top of the income pyramid, you need a pretty good cover story as you attack the more broadly popular entitlements. Otherwise, old people with pitch forks will storm your political barricades. Even if you are not moved by the plight of starving children, a survival instinct kicks in for Americans whose own interests are threatened. You must protect your own tribe at all costs. It remains to be seen whether our exponentially growing debt, fueled by recent tax cuts, is a good enough cover for further redistributional policies from the less well off to the economic elite. It is the ‘we are broke’ so we must cut your social security argument. It might still work, but the recent Bernie Sanders boom introduces some doubt.