(00:00:00) Live broadcast of the Minnesota meeting are made possible by the Twin Cities based law firm of Oppenheimer wolf and Donnelly. (00:00:11) I'm Harlan Cleveland the Humphrey Institute of public affairs and also a member of the Minnesota meeting Board of Trustees. I should first explain why I have a Hawaiian lei on because the conference of which this Enterprises apart has some people who came from Hawaii and everybody who comes from Hawaii is especially endowed with the Aloha spirit and I used to live out there for five years. So they were good enough to bring me ale and then they said would I like to take it away and put it in a nice box, and I said no Andy, I'll wear it. So welcome to all of you to Minnesota meeting today. We also want to extend a welcome to the radio audience throughout the Upper Midwest. We're hearing this program live on Minnesota public radio's. Midday program. This broadcast is sponsored by Oppenheimer wolf Donnelly Law Firm. Minnesota meetings are public affairs Forum which brings National and international speakers to Minnesota more than 1800 corporate government Community leaders belong to this club. The next schedule speaker for Minnesota meeting is Roger Fisher director of the Harvard negotiation project at the Harvard Law School will (00:01:41) speak on November 17th on negotiating with the (00:01:46) Russians and your spouse. Is there a difference? Minnesota meetings very pleased to present today's speaker. Dr. Glenn Lowry in cooperation with the Ramsey action program and the Minnesota Department of Jobs and training this occasion. In fact is a part of the conference on issues into action a national Symposium on welfare reform and self-sufficiency. Dr. Lowery is a noted critic of many current social programs aimed at helping low-income people. He was awarded his PhD in economics by MIT in (00:02:38) 1976. He's (00:02:40) taught economics at Northwestern University of Michigan and since 1982 at Harvard. The focus of his work is on politics and economics of (00:02:50) racial inequality in the United States (00:02:53) and his essays on this subject of (00:02:54) appeared widely and in the (00:02:56) best places, Washington Post New York Times time Newsweek, the Republic commentary and public issues following. Dr. Lori's presentation. He'll address questions from the (00:03:09) audience you can use the (00:03:12) index cards at your table to jot down questions for discussion. Steve Young from the University of Minnesota law school and Jane Rasik executive director of Minnesota (00:03:23) meeting will move among you with a (00:03:25) live mic to manage the question and answer session. It's now my pleasure to present to you. Dr. Glenn see Lori Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here. (00:03:47) Few issues. It seems our more politically polarized in our society than those having to do with the government relations to the poor. We all know after all that conservatives and liberals differ sharply in their attitudes toward the poor put sharply, maybe a little crudely conservatives think that Parvati results from individuals failings of character that agitation for greater public assistance to the poor is just a disguised argument for soaking the rich and that rational individual responses to transfer programs will probably only increase poverty while liberals according to this stereotype see poverty is linked to fundamental failings of the economic system on employment discrimination. Largely Beyond individuals control. Insist that the more prosperous as a moral matter Owen obligation to their less fortunate citizens and believed to be negligible the effects of the provision of assistance on the behavior of recipients. I'd like to see if we couldn't move a little bit beyond these crude (00:04:44) stereotypes (00:04:46) to make progress in this debate. I think we might Begin by distinguishing two sorts of issues those of causation and those of responsibility What forces cause poverty in any particular instance who is responsible for the indigent? Now we needn't agree on the answers to these questions to see their clothes connection. After all, we're less likely to hold a victim of circumstance responsible for his or her condition than one whose willful acts have brought on their misery people whose mental illness compels them to commit criminal acts are not punished. They're treated hungry children are to be fed. Not questioned about their parents attitudes toward work. This inclination to absolve of responsibility those whose Behavior did not cause their condition is all the stronger if the circumstances that victimized the individual involved patent and Justice the exploited the discriminated against the oppressed tend to be seen as worthy recipients of assistance, even when their need results more directly from their own behavior. Our Notions about responsibilities depend in other words on our beliefs about causation. And this is not always a healthy thing. I might suggest for example, the fact that unjust victimization seems to indemnify the victim against being held responsible for subsequent Acts or indeed against the very possibility of being regarded as a morally responsible agent might be regarded as not such a good thing. We see such thinking at work. For example, when an extreme case racism among the victims of racism in the past is excused by reference to that history of past oppression. (00:06:30) But what of private (00:06:32) responsibilities are there, not circumstances in which the burden of responding to the problem of poverty more properly rest in private hands including importantly the hands of the poor themselves. This is a volatile question. But we certainly do expect and through the law can attempt to compel parents to provide for their children to the extent that they can and in some sense. That's a reflection of our sense of private responsibilities are placement of responsibility on individuals couple of years ago, Senator Moynihan focused public attention on the extent to which the problem of poverty has become a problem of women and their children with insufficient resources to live decently. He noted that over the last half century. We've reversed the traditional relationship between poverty and age so that now it's the young were more likely to be living below the line than the agent who are protected by an extensive public system of income and health support. Who is to be held accountable for this change? What are the public and private responsibilities? We can ask the Liberals and conservatives will have different answers here surely. It is relevant to both that unlike the case of the elderly. The circumstances of children are largely determined by the behaviors pre and postnatal of their parents. In seeking to limit the poverty of children in contrast to the elderly. Therefore, we must consider how the private discretionary actions of our agents their custodial parents promote or impede the betterment of the children's condition (00:07:54) some Fathers as has (00:07:55) been widely noted by now are getting quite a free ride. Some of these poor children are suffering because of their parents dereliction of responsibility beginning even before they were born who if anyone can or should make these sometimes teenage parents behave more responsibly and what role does such a consideration have in the formulation of public policy. I would like to suggest without giving definite answers to those questions that liberals and conservatives can find quite a bit of common ground to explore in their efforts to deal with them. These are not idle questions we devolve on these young parents enormous responsibilities for which they are too often unprepared consider the case of a pregnant minor trying to decide whether she should abort or put her child up for adoption or bring the baby home to a possibly though by no means necessarily chaotic environment. It's her decision alone, but it is a faithful one for which she may not be fully prepared. We do not permit this very same minor to decide legally about alcohol consumption. We strictly ration her access to an automobile prohibit her from participation in our Civic life through voting and legally though obviously not very effectively prohibit her from considering the sexual intercourse with an adult male yet. We leave the awesome choices about pregnancy entirely in her inexperienced hands while standing ready to pick up the pieces with various programs of assistance. Should that be necessary now, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting here that we should do otherwise than we should take that decision out of her hands, but what I'm trying Nine to get across is to call attention to the critical importance of the allocation of responsibility in situations such as this. Now it's worthwhile at this point. I think stating the broad outlines of the case, which has been made in recent policy debate. For making a focus on behavioral dysfunction at the level of the individual a central feature of our current rethinking of the objectives and mechanisms of Public Assistance. The fact is that dependency is sometimes caused by personal behaviors that are both discretionary and dysfunctional early unwed pregnancy week intermittent attachment to the labor force drug and alcohol abuse chronic involvement in criminal activities, dropping out of high school and poor school performance in the like recognition of this fact has led to a renewed emphasis on behavioral dysfunction and contemporary discussions of social welfare policy. Now the case for this renewed emphasis on my judgment rests upon some empirical generalizations and upon some Central philosophical premises empirically. It has been demonstrated from careful analysis of longitudinal surveys of the poverty population that there is a great deal of diversity among persons as to the duration of their spells of poverty and consequently their dependence on public assistance while poverty and welfare recipients e is a transient short-term circumstance for the majority of persons who encounter these conditions over any period of time there is a non-trivial minority for whom these problems are chronic long-lasting features of their social experience. And so one can find my colleagues David Ellwood Mary Jo beIN writing and I quote them. Thus most of the people ever helped by afdc do not stay on very long, but most of the resources and most of the people in the program at any point in time our long-term recipients. Moreover it has also been shown that the length of a spell of poverty or welfare recipients e can be at least in part predicted and depends upon the specific events which engendered the initiation of the spell in the first place. For example a young woman with little education or work experience who enters the condition of welfare recipients e by virtue of giving birth to a child out of wedlock as a statistical matter has a far longer expected duration on the welfare rolls than the average new entrant again, my colleague David Ellwood has estimated using a simulation model that while the average duration of the first spell of welfare recipients e is about four point three years women who are single when they begin their first bill of afdc will have an especially long duration estimated at roughly seven point three years on the average. This heterogeneity of the dependent population suggest several things. It suggests the possibility of a hardcore long-term element in the poverty population, which although being a minority of all poor. People are nevertheless a much higher a much larger part of the problem than their raw numbers suggest. It suggests that targeting assistance at the causes of long-term dependency would be a particularly productive use of public resources. And it also suggests that for a significant portion of proportion of recipients. Their dependency is not a short-term circumstance in gendered by fortuitous events beyond their control, but rather is a long-term condition arising from behaviors for which we might want to hold persons accountable. That's the thrust of my remarks here getting us to think about the circumstances and conditions under which it's appropriate to hold individuals at least in part accountable and responsible for the actions that precipitate their condition. And what I want to try to suggest in the ensuing remarks is that that can be done without abandoning the moral imperative that induces us to have concern for the needs of persons generally indeed. I'm going to go on to argue and I'll preface the argument a bit here that a genuine true commitment to equality and respect for individuals will require us to hold people responsible under certain conditions for their own (00:13:41) behaviors. (00:13:45) Let me go on and make that argument because one can also argue that social justice demands a policy toward the needy formulated. So as to encourage Behavior among recipients, which may lead to their ultimate Independence, I would suggest to you that public actions while they must be guided by a means in calculation as to the efficacy of particular policies. Must also especially in a political Community giving powerful way to the consent of the governed concern themselves with the kind of relations among citizens, which are encouraged by the public Acts. Sustaining broad public commitment to State action aimed at helping the poor requires maintenance of the perception that what is undertaken as reasonable and fair not just for the recipients, but for all of us the duties and obligations, which members of a political Community 02 each other the expectations which are appropriately held about individual Behavior by fellow citizens the responsibilities which in the ordinary course of public discourse are assumed properly to be placed respectively upon the citizen and upon the state these two are factors, which must be considered in the formulation of any public undertaking thus for example, we punish criminal offenders, not only so as to deter future a future crime by the specific offender or others in the general population, but also to Signal the state's intention to maintain order and to demonstrate our Collective abhorrent of the offending act. That is we punished not only because to do so encourages desired ends, but as well for the affirmation, that is thereby given to broadly Accepted Notions of what is reasonably expected of members of the society. Now self-reliance the concerted effort to make one's own way to carry one's own weight is one of the things expected of people in our society. It is a good in itself. Protracted dependency on public assistance for those who are not incapacitated gives offense to this expectation. Public provision to some supported by the tax dollars of others who may not be dissimilarly situated therefore raises profound issues of Justice. Students of social policy have come increasingly to consider the desirability not of course of punishing dependent recipients, but of placing upon them obligations to be engaged in activities aimed at limiting their dependency as a condition of the receipt of assistance and thus the various workfare and related compulsory schemes. That one finds being offered by various commentators these days indeed as an aside. I was quite intrigued to hear candidate Gore saying that Democratic candidates domestic policy debate the other day that he thought it worth entertaining that the provision of Public Assistance be made conditional upon the obligation of recipients to address their literacy problem. If they happen to have one, I'm not necessarily endorsing that policy but I give it as an indication of the kind of thinking that being willing to factor in obligation and responsibility into the equation will lead to (00:16:51) Now this kind of (00:16:52) thinking is often attacked as being punitive. We're punishing recipients. We're blaming the victim. We're visiting upon people a cost purely because they happen to be in a state of need. But I disagree with that judgment far from being punitive the imposition of this kind of an obligation that is a positive Progressive obligation an obligation whose intent is to leave the person at the end of the day in a position where they will be better able to fend for themselves the imposition of that kind of obligation far from being punitive represents a keeping of Faith with a social Accord of mutual expectation. And the key point to recognize is that the state doesn't escape the necessity to communicate some kind of moral message by the actions is take it takes even if only by default the failure to ask of those who are in need the failure to set standards and to have expectations of those who are in need is also an action by the public which also signals something tacitly about what's valued in the (00:17:49) society. (00:17:52) And so you have for example Professor Lawrence Meade of NYU who in his recent book beyond entitlement the social obligations of citizenship spells out this argument for obligation. He draws a contrast between on the one hand Freedom that is the removal of external constraints. (00:18:08) And on the other hand order (00:18:10) that is the imposition of standard. So is to induce socially approved Behavior as respective objects of social policy arguing that the former that is freedom has long been more important in the American political tradition than the latter that is ordered and yet he insist as an empirical matter that today's social problem is not due to oppression in the main but rather he argues results from functioning problems among some of the poor and I should say here that this argument applies to long-term hardcore dependence not to people who are in a transient condition because of some existence e And so he concludes that caring for the needy now requires governing them in some ways not just defraying their needs. Well one can see lurking in this argument dangers to be sure and one can hear the conservative tone of it talking about order as a priority over freedom and all the rest, but I suggest to you that you take a walk through some communities that are not too far away take a look at the nature of social life there and ask yourselves whether or not an attention to order an attention to an effort to restore patterns of behavior that are more compatible with success in American society isn't at least deserving to be a part of the agenda of deliberation about how to deal with these problems. (00:19:39) Wow. (00:19:40) But I also want to go on to say to you that more than maintaining a kind of horizontal Equity that is a balance in the positions before the state of those receiving assistance and those for going it and Beyond signaling the proper moral values in the society. The imposition of obligation actually shows respect for the recipient. It actually enhances the Dignity of such persons for by holding up a common standard of behavior to all able bodied citizens. We evidence our confidence that those who may now need our assistance are nevertheless capable of becoming self-reliant. This avoids the situation in which we who are capable both of responsible conduct and generosity deign to provide for them who by virtue of their dependency are rendered objects of our concern, but who because we expect nothing of them. Are not treated as responsible moral agents. The notion that to treat the poor with dignity one must withdraw all constraint on the recipient and simply hand over the benefit unencumbered flirts with contradiction. (00:20:53) For (00:20:54) if all citizens are at a similar risk of being in need and the state of dependence is indeed induced by events beyond the individuals control which happens in Social Insurance programs, like unemployment compensation or Social Security then clearly the provision without obligation of a benefit is consistent with the maintenance of symmetry between those in need and those making the provision that is anybody could have been in that situation. It just happened to be Joe Blow. We all make a compact that will contribute a certain fraction our earnings to the pool. And when any one of us falls into this random situation, we draw on the pool and we underwrite the cost of helping the person there's symmetry in that between the helper and the helpee But when some citizens are systematically more likely to make claims against the states than others and when those citizens can be identified by characteristics like their race when they live in particular places that come to have a role in our culture that come to take on a symbolic significance like big inner-city ghettos when in other words those citizens become political realities distinct from the rest of the population. And when it's widely believed and there's evidence to support the notion that at least some of their claims arise from Individual actions over which we among ourselves ordinarily take ourselves to plausibly have (00:22:10) discretion and that (00:22:13) situation the notion that unencumbered entitlement conveys dignity is simply untenable. Under such circumstances provision marks the recipient as unlike the rest of us. And the absence of an enforced expectation that those in need will in due course join the self-supporting tacitly concedes that the needy are incapable of actions regarded as minimally expected of ordinary citizens. For the recipient. This is neither a dignified posture nor a politically secure one. Thus to treat people equally we must take them. Seriously. That is we must expect something from them. Not unlike what we expect from ourselves doing. So while sometimes difficult for all parties concern seems to be essential if we are to overcome the problem of the behavior of this function. But will doing so be enough. Can the simple establishment of serious behavioral standards and expectations for the recipients of Public Assistance reverse patterns of Behavioral dysfunction as extensive and profound as those to be found in the worst inner city neighborhoods for instance. It is one thing to argue is I have done that welfare policy must give the right moral signal by affirming the expectation that certain modes of behavior are more conformable with societal Norms than others. It is certainly proper to insist that reasonable obligations be placed upon those in need obligations consistent with our expectations for the behavior of all citizens and one hopes sufficient to induce behavior and recipients that will enhance the chance of their becoming independent that's been the burden of my argument to this point yet. It is another thing altogether to believe as the most Ardent workfare proponents seem to believe that the mere imposition of constraints and requirements of the sort which can be implemented through public agencies will be adequate to replace the Myriad and profound influences on the formation of character which occur within the home the religious group the local community of peers in the like The argument for obligation rest on the need for the state to address functioning problems in the interest of order through a willingness to govern otherwise unruly citizens adopting Meads language. This leads Scholars like me to conclude that work should be required of recipients for otherwise too many of them will not find their way to it. But this proposal is at best a necessary condition for the resolution of the problem of Behavioral dysfunction. It's far from clear that such a limited governing tool will be sufficient to change people's attitudes and their lives my own view is that a generally will not be sufficient and that private and voluntary and Community oriented activities of one sort or another with in poor communities must be undertaken if these functioning problems are ever to be overcome. Now this brings me to the subject of race and poverty which I would like to speak to you for just a moment. They'll often not directly addressed in. Our public discourse has its nevertheless the case that the severe social problems which plagued our large Central citizens cities involving disproportionately non-white Americans have constituted a major impetus to the re-examination of social policy, which has been undertaken in recent years after all one of the most compelling themes and Charles Mary's Infamous and important book losing ground. Is this observation that the social circumstances of young urban black male seems to have worsened over the very period during which extraordinary efforts on their behalf of being undertaken. The so-called Urban underclass a population consisting of inner-city welfare families and drug addicts and hard to employ High School dropouts and participants in the criminal labor market preponderantly Black and Hispanic has been a central theme in the popular in journalistic writings on social policy in recent years the power and Dread which surround the topic of race in American politics and culture thus come fully into play and discussions about welfare policy because of the visibility of the minority Urban poor and the sense that the problem of this function which any reform effort must address is most acute and these minority populations. The over representation of minorities among the poor has altered and especially blacks has altered our public discourse about the nature of poverty, ironically two contradictory effects. It seems to me are at work here popular discussion of the problems of the so-called Urban underclass. Has often been identified with analysis of the problems of the poor yet this underclass even more disproportionately black than a set of people in poverty at any point in time appears to constitute a minority of the chronically poor and an even smaller fraction of those whose experience at some point who experience poverty at some point during their lives. This notion of the underclass seems to have more impact on our deliberations and discussions about poverty than the pure numbers of persons suggested odd. And I think that race is a factor in that for example on the numbers a recent analysis of this panel study of income Dynamics one of the best data sources for learning about the characteristics of the poverty population has shown that two-fifths of those who were persistently poor during the decade of the 1970s and that means having incomes below the poverty line and eight out of ten years two-thirds of the persistently two fists of the persistently poor lived in households help headed by a disabled person, not your ordinary conception of the underclass one-third of the persistently poor were elderly or lived in households headed by an elderly person and 2/3 lived in the South only one-fifth of the persistently poor in that decade lived in large urban areas. And so while the inner-city underclass is a real and deeply troubling phenomenon it constitutes and I believe it constitutes the most important and intractable element of the problem of racial inequality in the United States. It is not coincident with the poor and should be considered as distinct when thinking about policy questions yet because race and poverty are so closely Linked In political advocacy and in the public imagination and because poor inner-city minority populations are such a large part of this underclass. The distinction is often not made at the same time at least until quite recently the very fact that this so-called underclass is disproportionately black has impeded a full analysis of the underlying behavioral basis of its problems. Since the difficult days of the mid-1960s scholarly inquiry into the social phenomenon has been limited and public discussion as to how it might be approached has been much impoverished. The tendency among liberal social analyst has been to see the poverty of this population. Especially if this population is inherently linked to racial disparities in Opportunity past and present the behavioral elements for which individuals might be held accountable has been minimized so as to avoid blaming the victim But this has been a costly Omission liberal sociologist William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago has written and I quote him the liberal perspective on the ghetto has become less persuasive and convincing an American public discourse principally because many of those who represented traditional liberal views have been reluctant to discuss openly or in some instances even acknowledge the sharp increase in Social pathologies and ghetto communities. We know what happened to Daniel Moynihan win 20 years ago. He came forward with his observations about the problems of instability in the black family. We know what happened to the political agenda that was attached to those observations and went nowhere. It was wiped off the face of the political discourse of American politics. We continue I think to labor under the consequences to labor somewhat under the consequences of those past mistakes, but in this brings me to tying in the first and second parts of this talk, there's a particular feature of our contemporary discussion about welfare form that makes the matter of race, especially important and that's this greater emphasis that's coming to be placed and that I'm arguing up be placed on the theme of Behavioral dysfunction among the poor and the need for policy explicitly to consider how it might be mitigated because the fact that the extent of dysfunction is apparently so much greater in minority low-income populations leads to a circumstance where a focus on this dimension of the welfare debate necessarily raises racial issues. And such a focus also forces us to confront the limits on public policy as a means of effecting the desired behavioral shifts and the importance of the private voluntary community-based Hands-On direct person-to-person contact activities of the sort that I talked about earlier Within These communities for addressing this problem. One reason for believing that there are strict limits on the relative efficacy of public action in this area of encouraging good behavior. Is that working in this area intrinsically requires that discriminations be made among persons who are similarly situated based on assessments that are difficult for public agencies to make That is let me just step aside to make sure you're clear on exactly where I'm going. I'm trying to make the argument now that although the imposition of obligation is a necessary part of the administration of Public Assistance. It's not sufficient to solve the problem of behavior of this function. I'm trying to suggest why there are fundamental limits on public action as a solution for the resolution of that problem to deal with that problem. We must first assess when it is that individuals Behavior runs afoul of some normative expectation and then redress that Divergence that means we have to make discriminations among the behaviors of persons. We have to distinguish between the same people and Employment Program as to those who were behaving the way we want to and those who are not and maybe we have to exclude some of the people who were not or in other ways Place penalties on them that communicate our expectation about how they should behave we have to be prepared. For example, perhaps to enforce rules about behavior in school context that will cause some persons 2mm incur cost in view of the fact that there Here is out of line with what we expect of students in the school. We have therefore to make discriminations between (00:32:26) persons. (00:32:28) It's very hard to make discriminations between persons. If you Republic actor when those discrimination start having disparate impacts. along racial lines the tools available to a public agent for the shaping of individual character our course in relatively indiscriminate and comparison particularly to the kinds of distinctions and judgments which people make in their private social lives all the time. The requirements of due process force a heavy burden of justification upon a public agent who wants to treat individuals differently based upon small but significant differences in their behavior to take but one example school districts with rationally truth racially disproportionate student suspension rates have had to face racial discrimination charges and investigation by the office of civil rights at the US Department of Education. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. I'm not saying I haven't been school districts who were racially discriminating in their administration of suspension practices. What I'm saying, is that our need to guard against that possibility makes it difficult for any school district for whatever motives to engage in Behavior the consequence of which would be to have a disparate impact and what it's doing along racial lines. I could give other examples Blanche Bernstein the former New York City Welfare commissioner writes in her book the politics of welfare of the nightmarish difficulty that the city of New York had an issuing to party rent checks to welfare recipients who had become delinquent in their rent payments and who thereby risk being evicted from their Apartments. The idea was that the two-party check would have to be signed by both the landlord in the recipient that would ensure that the landlord got the rent if the recipient had not been behaving responsibly and paying the rent that would ensure that the recipient wouldn't be evicted and therefore have to be housed in a welfare hotel at some very large cost to the city budget and yet the due process and legal constraints on the ability of the city to do that where so substantial that they fought without complete success over a protracted period of time to be able to implement this relatively modest and I think not especially offensive reform. (00:34:31) in any (00:34:31) event the ways in which a public agent can sanction individual Behavior, which is dysfunctional withholding a financial benefits primarily may not be as compelling as the threat of social ostracism in peer disapproval which is readily available in private and voluntary associations moreover public action, which is encumbered by the diversity of views as to what constitutes appropriate values in our society is therefore also Limited in this area as to its efficacy for example, the conflict over sex education curricula in the public schools provides a classic illustration of this point that consider how that debate developed a couple of years ago in New York City a new sex education curriculum was introduced there amidst much controversy in 1984 local clergy objected to a plan course of instruction, which was devoid of judgment regarding the relative merits of single-parent family structures and whether or not birth before marriage was a (00:35:29) A bad thing the (00:35:30) clergy wanted the school system to take some position on that. Of course the New York Times observed that the school system couldn't do such before to do so would be to teach the preferably of intact families to a great number of students who did not enjoy such backgrounds and therefore tacitly to somehow criticize their own background. This is a very difficult question. And again, I'm not trying to take aside as to what the right answer is, but I want to point out that what's at issue is whether or not the high incidence of out-of-wedlock births in New York City, especially great in minority communities in one recent year nearly four and five children born in central Harlem were born to unwed mothers. Whether or not that high incidence requires a public neutrality concerning the propriety of early unwed pregnancy or quite to the contrary implies the need for a concerted effort to reaffirm values in the public schools to Children unlikely to have that judgment confirmed in their private lives. Well, we know that these are politically extremely difficult questions not to mention the Constitutional pitfalls that lie here so my point public agents fundamentally constrained in their capacity to make the discriminations in the communicate the kinds of values that might be needed in order to ultimately get at the behavioral problems when those are the core problems going on. Now let me conclude by suggesting that mutually concerned persons who trust one another enough to be able to exchange criticism constructively established codes of personal conduct and enforce social sanctions against what they judge as undesirable Behavior may be able to create and enforce communal Norms that lie beyond the capacity of the state effectively to promulgate. The coercive resources of the state though. Obviously great are also obviously not especially subtle. This is a critical and often overlooked dimension of the argument that I and others have made for greater self help and on their class communities for the call for direct engagement by the better off blacks in the lives of the poor blacks for example is often looked at as a mere supplement to the activity of resource transfers associated with public assistance critics are inclined to sneer at the end probability that such a small and tenuous middle-class could ever significantly augment the cash transfers provided by the state. In fact, however, the private sphere affords an entirely distinct kind of assistance that focused on transforming the behavior of dependent persons through social not Financial incentives the issue here is more than the typical left right liberal-conservative question about redistribution about how much inequality the question of motivation and the involvement of person in other people's lives through mediating structures involves the relatively unexplored issue of what I term the social relations of helping. How is it that those who would help relate to those who are in need? What is the structure of our interpersonal context as distinct from the rather more familiar radical notion of the social relations of production who owns Capital how the rich are screwing the poor and all the rest. These are very very different things. Think about it within one's own family. The easiest thing to do if you have money is to give it to your relative who is in need. The hardest thing to do is to engage the person find out the root cause of the need establish a modus vivendi so that you can actually have some influence over the deeper behavior that generates the need in the first place that's real work that asks for something of us not simply reaching into our pockets, but rather something that may take even more courage looking at somebody else directly in the eye and saying to him this is how I think you that is we ought to live This is much more difficult for the state to do than it is for people who are directly tied in and who have the credibility that comes with that involvement to do. When we begin to think about the social relations of helping we have to think more carefully than we're often inclined to about exactly what the relationships are among persons who are putative Lee concerned about each other. What does it mean to really care about somebody? We have to think more deeply about those questions than we may heretofore have been inclined to do. So for many discussion of public and private responsibilities in the struggle against poverty means a discussion about the appropriate distribution of income a discourse in the field of social justice. I hope to have at least stimulated you to think here that's such a view of the problem is too limited. Of course, there has to be political debate about the extent to which the well-off are obliged to the less fortunate, but the problem of poverty is not simply equivalent to an absence of money among certain household heads and finding the right public policies to deal with the problem requires more from us than a determination of the extent of Our Mutual Financial Obligations. I've argued that to the extent that long-term poverty reflects behavior that can be modified only by changing people's basic values and aspirations. Such Transformations must necessarily occur primarily through non governmental activity. I'm not against the government. I'm all for it. I regard the two kinds of activity is complementary not substitutes, but I do suggest that the government cannot do everything that needs being done in this area. No degree of mutual social obligation and forced through taxation and transfer policies of the state can substitute for what is to be had within freely entered associations of individuals such associations can establish and enforce for their members communal Norms that work to reduce the prevalence of poverty inducing Behavior. Finally, there is the question of private responsibility within the family versus public responsibility to the Indigent the well-being of many of the poor that is poor children depends upon the proper discharge of familial responsibilities by their parents so long as children remain in the custody of their parents public efforts to assist them will necessarily be mediated by parental Behavior putting more money into the hands of these parents without changing their attitudes and behaviors, which bear on their children's life chances may not alone be sufficient to affect the Improvement in child welfare that Justice would demand. Thank (00:41:31) you. But thank you very (00:41:44) much. Dr. Lowry. My name is Steve Young and I will be trying to moderate the discussion question and answer period with help from Jane mrazek. Those of you attending the (00:41:55) conference who don't know our (00:41:57) pattern at the Minnesota meeting. What we like to do is sort of (00:41:59) wandering among the tables and either you catch our eye or we look at you or raise your (00:42:04) hand and we'll give you the mic to engage. Dr. Lowery and a discussion or a common but first I'd like to go to George Latimer the mayor of st. Paul is with us today for a reaction. I think mr. Mayor and dr. Lowery that Minnesota is a marvelous place to have these remarks because we have a very strong work ethic here. And we also have a great deal of compassion and a long tradition of liberal compassionate if Will dependency sustaining programs, but we also believe in the work ethic. So maybe Minnesota is a place where we can try to put the two extremes together mr. Mayor. We'd like your comments. (00:42:44) Dr. Lowery. Welcome to st. Paul. Thank you. If you set out to stimulate us you succeeded. I'm sure actually Steve Young's remarks I think are perfect threshold for any questions. All of us might have my own inquiry goes like this and I need to make a few assertions later on when people ask questions, perhaps you can let me know whether my assertions are correct in following your remarks. Most of which I agree with number one that there is not an absolute correlation between poverty and what you call socially pathological Behavior. Number two that from evaluative judgment you've concluded that unless a sense of obligation inherent with self-reliance is combined with any kind of effort it will it will fail because it will create dependency rather than dignity that comes with the obligation of sense of sense of self-reliance, which I agree with also number three that highly centralized Solutions and are probably going to work in that Grassroots voluntary not-for-profit neighborhood church-related conduits to deliver services are preferable. And number four. I think you said that in providing the help to help themselves that we should render a certain signal for proper moral values and that that's an end in itself as well in that last that last mandate is where we get the hang up and that is if you really are going to decentralize and go through voluntary self-help non not-for-profit and church organizations. How then are you also and you're going to be grassroot? How are you going to determine without some external or a centralized mandate what the quote proper moral values are that you wish to inculcate? What if in fact the solving agencies are part of the problem and how would you deal with that from a I know you're not here to draft legislation, but I'd like you and I'm told not to ask question now, but I just to plant a seed if you were to recommend if you were to recommend to legislatures how you're going to combine those two and how do you get that kind of commitment for the moral values refer to and at the same time permit the diversity of Grassroots organizations go which themselves may not Embrace those moral values that you've talked about. (00:45:39) Should I try to answer that please in five four and five words or less? Okay. Now I think you know your summary is is apt with this exception. I'm not suggesting that the legislators enacted program ought to stipulate that if you are a local agency and you get some money then you have to subscribe to the following list quite the contrary what I'm saying is that because that is impossible politically and in all probability constitutionally impossible and yet because I believe that some sense of normative expectation is critical to getting people to change the way they act, you know, if I'm trying to reduce the problem of teen pregnancy and a big Inner City Community some sense of the how the peer group of young men and women interact with each other and what they what sort of circulates in that ethos as an expectation of what is good and bad acceptable and unacceptable approvable and not a provable stupid and smart Behavior some such conception is important because I think that's important. Morning, because I don't think that a public agent can do it all the more reason why the role of the non-public voluntary Church community based entity is critical. These entities will have different conceptions of what the good life is. I would imagine a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn will have a different conception than would a black Muslim Community in Chicago than wood and we can fill in the Gap net Appalachian community and West Virginia, but I'm very impressed. For example by the the instances that people can point to where dramatic results have been had with in this kind of context. I think for example of the ministry that the Reverend Falwell and I'm not endorsing his politics, but I'm just observing that he runs a Ministry in wet and Lynchburg Virginia with unwed mothers and their children the primary objective which of course is to convince mother's not to have abortions in to have the children, but that has also had a remarkable. Fact that reducing the incidence of second pregnancies among teenagers teenage girls who have the first baby. Now people have studied this problem know that that's a very very serious problem very very high rates of second pregnancies Ford Foundation spent a lot of money in a big project unable really to reduce those rates fall while gets the rates or his people his church is entity down almost to Zero by getting inside the heads of these young women and changing the way they think about themselves and the world around them. I'm not quite sure exactly how he does it but the Christian dimension of that Ministry has something to do with his success there. (00:48:13) beard (00:48:17) Yeah, your soul will burn in hell. I'm not sure what he tells them. The point is they believe it and it changes their behavior. He couldn't get up and proposed it as a piece of national legislation, but you might imagine a hundred similar entities around the country being able to have a comparable impact on their small group of persons through some like mechanisms. That's the kind of thing I'm (00:48:36) saying. and over there My name is Martha at water and I want to ask you if you can give some examples of private programs around the country. In addition to Jerry falwell's that you think are constructive. Well, I would of course point (00:48:53) to the resident management groups in public housing projects that have gotten a fair amount of national attention. There's one in st. Louis that was on 60 Minutes for six months ago. There's one in Washington DC that's been highly touted. There's there's one in in Boston at the Bromley Heath public housing project there. These are groups of persons resident in public housing projects who have band together to one extent or another to take over the management and control of their immediate living environment including in the case of the st. Louis project. The screening of applicants to come into the project the policing of the behavior of teenage children in and around the vicinity of the project the sort of bringing of informal. Pressure to bear on people whose Behavior seems to be inconsistent with the notion of what kind of neighborhood they want to have and so on in Washington the Kenilworth Parkside resident Management Group, which has been highly touted these people have have been written up in the newspapers and on television all they've really had some quite remarkable results. I don't know all the numbers right off the top of my head but dramatic increases in the number of young people coming out of the project going on in the college so much so that the group has been getting corporate donations of vans in order to carry youngsters back and forth from the project to colleges up and down the East Coast because so many kids are now going to college out of high school. I have a project which 15 years ago was turning out a relatively few high school graduates. Let alone College attendees, they've driven drugs and the drug pushers out of their living environment, which if you live in a place where people are dealing drugs on a regular basis, you know them has a big impact on the quality of life for people. They begun to have some some kind of impact other examples could be cited. This is not though. I mean, I don't have a schematic kind of formula in my head that I think would apply. I mean I my notion is more of one of letting a thousand flowers bloom more more one of thinking that the creativity is really out there and that if we're prepared to take the people seriously and to help them in the effort that will be surprised what they can tell us about what it is that they can do. (00:51:13) Thank you. Dr. Lowery. We have another question here. question primarily on the single-headed household female-female single-headed household and teenage parents poverty and I guess that my concern is if they there are other people who are living in poverty my figures that I had heard was two-thirds of those people are not the category you're talking about and if that's so and how do you then look at the large increase of low low wage jobs minimum-wage jobs and of the decrease in high-paying labor jobs, and what about that poor that I don't think it's a value issue that you're talking about. Now, how do you address that shark is focusing on the racial things and the females (00:52:13) I think that's a very fair question. Perhaps I didn't make myself sufficiently clear at the outset. I distinguish between long-term hardcore poverty welfare population on the one hand and transient intermittent poverty population on the other acknowledging that by most measures of head counting the latter considerably outnumber the former. I then went on to say however that looked at from the point of view of at any point in time who's on the rolls or from the point of view of where do most of the resources that are being expended for public assistance go you see that long term if you will chronic dependents are taking up a substantial amount of the of the resources and are substantial part therefore of the problem. So I wanted to make a distinction I could have made that I could have elaborated that distinction by saying that from the point of view of people who are experiencing transient periods of extreme economic distress, probably the single most significant thing that we could do would be to sustain economic growth and high levels of employment. This has been one of the results that has come out of the social science literature and research and all on this poverty question in the 70s and 80s that economic growth avoiding a recession keeping a relatively full employment economy is the single most important factor in reducing poverty among the general population, but that's not the case among the hardcore long-term poor and I would point to the state of Massachusetts is a case in point Governor Dukakis proudly and rightly points to the two and a half percent unemployment rate that we now enjoy there and he also points to the success the relative success of his employment and training program, but if the full story is told he would also have to point out that when you go to the inner city communities of Boston or the poor. Or Portuguese communities of New Bedford or Lawrence or the other cities in the state of Massachusetts. You will find in the hardcore of a much more severe problem than you find in the state as a whole. I don't know the exact number of the minority unemployment rate in the central city of Boston today, but it's substantially higher than the national unemployment rate among all persons. Let alone the state unemployment rate among persons in Massachusetts the point being that the rising tide can't lift sunken boats. The point being that if you're not in a situation where you can even credibly present yourself for a job because you're dealing with a drug habit because you're not literate because you're 21 year old woman with three babies in an apartment somewhere. It's going to be very very difficult for the economic growth factor to reach you. So had I made that distinction more clean the first place you might have understood that I mean to be talking about different elements of what is necessarily a very heterogeneous population and trying to identify different strategies for addressing their (00:55:06) problems. Thank you Jane. We have a question there. Dr. Lowery popular evangelist made a statement. I like to incorporate that it takes as much money to do good as evil and implementation of your concept one of the major problems in a practical application of public policy is how to redistribute money that is now feeding it in our state perhaps a half a billion dollar welfare industry. When you begin to implement or try to modify public policy to redirect I would assume that money committed to administration of salaries of MSW and $40,000 administrators. They then become a counter Force within the implementation of public policy you have any suggestions on how we've effectuate that set of circumstances? (00:55:59) Yeah, I understand the question. You're kind of asking me do I have a solution to the fundamental political problem of our time or something and the answer is no I don't have a magic wand but I'm you know, yeah, I know what you're what you're saying. I've heard Educators argue from a similar position about the position of some teachers unions for example with respect to implementing educational reform. They dare to suggest that vested interest May stand in the way of doing things that are in the good of the poor are the common Citizen and you know, I just got to tell you what I'm going to say is some is going to sound like a platitude because I really don't I don't know the truth and I don't know if anyone in here does know I think they ought to get the microphone but I think you got to have political leadership that is sufficiently courageous to try and mobilize the people whose real interests are at stake because there are more of them than there are these MSW is that you're talking about. I mean, we all know that and again, I'm not I'm not anti. National Education Association, but I do have to observe that the National Education Association has a significant fraction of the delegates that go to any given Democratic Convention. Okay, and the Democratic party's platform on educational issues obviously has to reflect that. Okay, that's because people are mobilize people are politically conscious. They spend a lot of their time and resources staying that way they're well wired and connected but there are only two million members the National Education Association you think only is a joke know. There are 200 million Americans If there really were a conflict of interest between the members on the one hand and the rank and file on the other isn't there an opportunity for a politician to take advantage of it? That's the kind of thing that I would suggest that at the local level to the extent that you can get the Grass Roots people to perceive that their interest is not necessarily served by one more application of this tired old formula where the benefits really go to someone else to that extent that you can get those people to be a political. Actor it seems to me that you may have a lever to be able to move in this direction absent that it's all going to just be be words. Dr. Lowery, thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to have a Harvard Professor reveal not only truth. But where the sunken boat (00:58:18) slide. (00:58:29) Here's at Harvard before the question and answer session. He spoke on the topic self-sufficiency and responsibilities new directions for relationships between the needy and the state our live broadcast of the Minnesota meeting are made possible by the Twin Cities based law firm of Oppenheimer wolf and Donnelly now, here's a fellow we haven't heard from in a while. Good afternoon. This is Gary eichten inviting you to join us later this afternoon for MPR Journal today. We'll have more on local election results with a focus on the Minneapolis School elections and the defeat of Bloomington mayor. Jim Linda also will have some more results from the University's study of identical twins MPR Journal is broadcast at 5 on FM 5:30 on thirteen Thirty a m-- and that's our midday broadcast for today. Stay tuned. This is Bob Potter speaking. Minneapolis st. Paul area weather forecast calls for slowly falling temperatures into the mid 40s this afternoon and then it'll be partly cloudy tonight and tomorrow continued cold right now in the Twin Cities sunny and 53 degrees. This is ksjn Minneapolis-Saint Paul the time now exactly one o'clock.