Sometime in the early 1990s, I found
historian Michael B. Katz’s book The Undeserving Poor, which had been
published a few years before. I still remember sitting in my small back bedroom—a
makeshift study—scribbling notes all over the pages of the book as Katz described
and analyzed the ways Americans have defined and discussed poverty. He had me
hooked from the first sentence: “The vocabulary of poverty impoverishes
political imagination.”
The Undeserving Poor was not
so much a history of poverty in the United States as a history of ideas about
poverty, and the ideas were complex and, for the most part, troubling. I began
to understand how it is that poor people are so often categorized and
characterized in such one-dimensional and insidious ways: as shirkers, or
passive, or morally defective, or stupid—as people responsible for their poverty
because of some damning personal or cultural quality. I also began to
understand the reasons behind various interventions aimed at poverty—or
refusals to intervene. I had never read a book quite like this, one that
demonstrated just how much the ideas
and language in the air matter in the
construction of public policy. As someone who had a background in literature
and in psychology, I certainly was trained to appreciate the power of language,
but Katz helped me see the intimate connection between words (and the ideas
driving those words) and specific social attitudes, political positions, and
legislative initiatives. The book was eye-opening, and it would have a profound
effect on my own way of understanding social issues and writing about them.
The Undeserving Poor has just
been reissued by Oxford University Press, and Katz has used the occasion to
revise the book in major ways, not only updating it but adding a good deal of
new material to it. Let me admit that Michael Katz is a friend, and we have recently
written together, but my initial impression of The Undeserving Poor was
formed years before I met him. I thought it was a hugely important book when I
first read it, and I think this new edition is hugely important as well.
Especially now. We as a nation pretty much ignore poverty as a public policy
issue. The ideas in the air regarding poverty in the U.S. are, to use Katz’s
1989 phrase, “impoverished.” The solutions that have political sway are either
market-based (during the last election some conservatives were suggesting that
the poor needed to start their own businesses) or involve educational or
social-psychological interventions, such as helping the poor develop mental
toughness or “grit.” There is no serious talk about jobs programs or housing or
expanded social services or restoring the safety net. Within such comprehensive
policies, educational and market-based interventions would make more sense and
have a chance of succeeding.
More than any book I know, The
Undeserving Poor helps us understand why Americans talk about poverty the
way we do and why our public policy—sometimes noble, sometimes
mean-spirited—takes the shape it does. It is one of the important social
science books of our time.
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