****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
There are three things that strike me about The New Politics of Poverty. First, the mean-spirited attack on poor people, but especially poor children. Second, poor logic and weak evidence is presented as indisputable fact. Finally, the extremely important role this book has played in American politics.The argument that poor people are poor because they are in some way defective-especially that they are lazy-is a recurrent theme throughout this book. If you accept this argument, you are likely to find TNPoP compelling reading. The call for poverty programs to be work tested, that is, to make government assistance dependent on willingness to work, is supported by anecdotes, logic and statistical proof. All of it is presented in a way that is generally easy to follow. It is, however, based on a weak theoretical foundation. This foundation is that people who do not work are not worthy of government assistance. This is a neo-liberal argument that has been implemented not only by conservatives, but also by the "New Left," politicians like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder.The weakness is that if we accept Meads' argument, we are willing to argue that children and the infirmed are not only not eligible for government assistance, but that they do not deserve it. This is a classic argument against the neo-liberal idea, even before there was a neo attached to it. Hobbes has often been critiqued on the problem of social contract and the "unable." Mead has nothing to add to this argument, instead ignoring it or blaming impoverished mothers for the plight of their children.Perhaps I am naïve, but I believe that most Americans do not, ultimately, believe that children and the infirm are unworthy of government assistance. Thus the internal logic of this book is weak. Statistics are used convincingly, but often in a way that is easily critiqued, for example using obviously spurious relationships to prove a point. At one point, Mead cites an offhand remark by a graduate student as evidence-which borders on being intellectually dishonest in my opinion.Nevertheless, this book seems to represent a large portion of the policy scholarship that has led to the passage of the Personal Responsibility Act and the ultimate victory of the neo-liberals in reshaping the American welfare state (such as it is.) The model here may have been weak, but its political argument was very convincing and the winning side succeeded in portraying the poor as being victims of their own laziness and irresponsibility. The great lesson of TNPoP is not about poverty, but about social construction as a means of winning a policy debate using faulty logic and evidence in a convincing way.
