Poverty

Social insurance “consists in protecting wage-earning families which have developed standards of living from losing them, and in helping wage-earning families without standards to gain them.”

--Social Insurance: A Program of Social Reform (1910), Henry Roger Seager

I've been digging Matt's series of posts on the safety net and John's last one on whether a frame like "expand the middle class" is really all that different from one along the lines of "reduce poverty." I'm hoping to do some longer posts over the next few weeks on these matters. As a starting point, I think it's important for us to put to rest the distinction between welfare and social insurance. Conventional wisdom has it that programs like Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance are categorically different than programs like TANF, food stamps, and Medicaid. A common way of expressing this difference is that the first set of programs are “social insurance” and the second set are “means-tested public assistance” or, more pejoratively, “welfare.”

This distinction is both artificial and ill-conceived. Means-tested programs like TANF and food stamps should be thought of as a necessary part of America’s system of social insurance rather than as “welfare” programs that exist outside of, and have little in common with, that system. Like Social Security and other social insurance programs, means-tested public assistance programs protect Americans against various risks that can reduce their economic security. This essential similarity of purpose is more important that some of the design differences that exist among programs serving an income-security purpose.

In True Security: Rethinking American Social Insurance, Michael Graetz and Jerry Mashaw define social insurance as a set of programs and institutions that “cover common risks to income security across the life cycle of individuals” (45). In this conception, social insurance is defined by its core purpose—moderating the risks of income loss or inadequacy—and not by its funding mechanism or other design features. The Graetz/Mashaw project is best understood, not as a sweeping reconceptualization of social insurance, but as an attempt to develop a conception of social insurance that is more conceptually coherent and useful, and perhaps even more historically grounded, than the current conventional conception of social insurance in the United States.

In their view, the argument that social insurance programs cannot be means-tested is an “ahistorical” one that reflects a political strategy to distinguish Social Security and other programs from unpopular “welfare” programs like AFDC.

As a matter of history, protection against current low income because of defined personal or family circumstances, irrespective of past contributions or earnings, has long been a cornerstone of American social insurance arrangements. The original Social Security Act was a compromise between those who thought social insurance should be structured primarily as a protection against low income and those who saw it primarily as a protection against loss of prior economic status and wanted social insurance closely tied to workforce attachment. (62)

While the strategy of distinguishing social insurance from “welfare” may have been politically beneficial at times, Graetz and Mashaw view it as a “serious mistake.”

This artificial and ahistorical division of the social welfare world between contributory and non-contributory schemes strands crucial poverty reduction programs in political backwaters. It creates confusion in both public discourse and public perception whenever progressive benefit and contribution formulas for social insurance are proposed and discussed. This political separation poses political dangers for ‘contributory’ schemes as well. It highlights ‘individual equity’ or bank-account considerations in social insurance arrangements—represented recently by the ubiquitous calculations of each individual’s ‘money’s worth’ from Social Security—while submerging the social adequacy commitment that should be the fundamental norm in the design and defense of social insurance.

This doesn’t mean that public assistance programs are solely social insurance, or even that all public assistance programs are social insurance. While Graetz and Mashaw believe social insurance is not limited to Social Security and Medicare, their conception of social insurance as a protection against income insecurity is “considerably narrower than all the public activities that might be said to support American family income.” As an example, they note that education programs are not social insurance, since they don’t provide insurance against “a current loss of economic well-being.” Instead, such programs are more appropriately viewed as an investment in future economic opportunity. (58)

This distinction isn’t completely clear-cut. Education obtained in one’s youth, after all, does enhance income security over the life cycle. But Graetz and Mashaw argue that such a narrowing of the definition is necessary for pragmatic reasons.

If the definition is too broad, ‘insurance’ becomes a useless metaphor.... Important ideas about good program design—identifiable risks, moral hazard, adverse selection, and so forth—lose their salience. If the criminal justice system qualifies as “social insurance” (protection against loss of income or assets through theft, embezzlement, and the like), the concept fails to define a distinctive area of public policy. (57)

Social insurance also is distinct from other types of insurance, including insurance provided in markets where there is considerable government involvement or regulation. The adjective “social” is important in making this distinction. Social insurance is different from other forms of insurance because it is a “social rather than an individual (or group) contract” and is made for “the purpose of collective provision, subsidy, or regulation.”

In part II, I'll discuss a specific case—why that quintessential "welfare" program, TANF, is best thought of in social-insurance terms.

Last week’s flurry of activity around revising the federal poverty measure has provided an opportunity to revisit the perennial progressive policy debate of “You Just Want to Talk about the Middle Class” vs. “You Just Want to Talk about the Poor.”

This is a debate that always has struck me as one based upon an overly strict distinction between the “middle class” and the “poor.” After all, to a large degree anti-poverty policies aim to connect people to the resources and opportunities traditionally available to middle-class individuals while also preventing middle-class individuals from falling into poverty due to uncontrollable risks. If the point of an anti-poverty agenda is to help people move towards and maintain a traditional middle-class standard of well-being, why not say so?

To me at least, it seems that policies aiming to address poverty and those that aim to expand the middle class overlap significantly and differ mostly in terms of emphasis. The main advantage of speaking in middle-class terms is that it is more aspirational and better fits with American values regarding upward mobility. Being able to cast progressive social policies in a more positive light free of the baggage that unfairly accompanies poverty seems, at least to me, a useful way of broadening the debate and better building a constituency for progressive policies.

Perhaps it is my temperament, but I would rather argue in positive rather than negative terms. Earlier this year, I had a chance to write a family basic budget study for North Carolina. Even though the focus of the study was on low-income families and many of the policy recommendations were taken directly from the anti-poverty playbook, it was not framed as a poverty report. Rather, the report focused on ideas of upward progress. The media and public reception was extremely positive, and I have had the opportunity to speak with many groups that historically have shown little interest in poverty. Granted the reception may have owed a good deal to the report’s timing, but the point is that the more forward-looking message helped in some way to broaden the conversation.

This doesn’t mean that I am unaware of the fact that policies purporting to help the “middle-class” may penalize low-income families or result in an upward redistribution of income. Yet is the problem that the policies are targeted to the “middle-class” or that they are targeted to the rich who are described as being middle-class? The definition of the American middle class is famously fuzzy with many affluent individuals self-identifying as members of the middle class. Perhaps instead of trying to draw a bright line between the poor and the middle class, progressives would be better served by more clearly marking the boundary between the middle-class and the affluent. The result might be the infusion of a more realistic perspective into policy debates.

This month's Harvard Magazine has an excellent cover story on inequality. In this excerpt, Nancy Krieger asks the right question:

.... Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation. Tax policy and social-welfare programs, then, take on importance far beyond determining how much income people hold onto. The level of inequality we allow represents our answer to “a very important question,” says Nancy Krieger, professor of society, human development, and health at HSPH: “What kind of society do we want to live in?”

The story also includes two evocative metaphors to describe inequality:

To describe the distribution of income inequality in the United States, Allison professor of economics Lawrence F. Katz likes to use the analogy of an apartment building. “Over the last 25 years,” he says, “the penthouse has gotten really, really nice. All sorts of new gadgets have been put in. The units just below the penthouse have also improved a lot. The units in the middle have stayed about the same. The basement apartment used to be OK, but now it’s gotten infested with cockroaches and it’s been flooding.”

The argument that none of this matters as long as the overall economy is growing—that a rising tide lifts all boats, as President John F. Kennedy famously said—is the subject of vigorous academic review, with mixed results, but it may not be the most important question. Picture a buoyant luxury cruise ship surrounded by dilapidated dinghies, full of holes and on the verge of sinking. The fact that the tide has lifted them does not mean they are doing well.

Both of these metaphors arguably need some more tweaking to accurately get at the nature of current-day inequality. With the apartment building, the problem isn't so much that the basement apartment has become less habitable in an absolute sense, it's that the tenant in that apartment has to work a lot harder to maintain it in the same condition. And she or he still doesn't have a parking spot in back, even though they've been on the waiting list forever, and the penthouse owners now have 3 Hummer-size spots in an underground garage with a valet.

According to CQ:

.... Barack Obama .... has endorsed the idea of updating the federal measure of poverty, a proposal that is slowly gaining some traction after years of being confined to quiet talk among poverty experts.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg called for a new poverty measure this week, and Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington held a hearing on his own proposal yesterday in the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, which he chairs.

But Obama’s support for the idea has the potential to advance the idea significantly, if he wins the election and pushes for it aggressively.

“Senator Obama knows that the federal poverty guidelines, which were developed decades ago, simply do not take into account the rising costs of child care, health care, transportation, and housing that make it difficult for many families to make ends meet in our globalizing economy,” campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro told me yesterday.

“Senator Obama believes that we should modernize the federal poverty guidelines to more accurately reflect the costs of living and the economic pressures on American families. Without an accurate measure of poverty and economic insecurity in America, we will not be able to fully tackle the effects of these problems on our children and families.”

A new publication on poverty from the Century Foundation includes this statement:

Poverty levels have proved to be so difficult to reduce largely because poor people tend to be isolated in neighborhoods that predominantly consist of other poor people.

Economic isolation and segregation is certainly a problem, but it isn't actually the case that most people living below the official poverty line live in neighborhoods that predominately consist of people living below the poverty line. In fact, as this Urban Institute report shows, a majority of people with below-poverty incomes live in neighborhoods in which fewer than 20 percent of the residents have below-poverty incomes.

This week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed changing the formula for measuring poverty. Now Congressional leaders are holding a hearing on adopting a similar change at the national level.

This is all much ado about almost nothing.

At the national level, the proposal would move the bar ever so slightly, so that being poor equals household income of less than $21,818 for two adults with two children, up from the current $20,444.

To be sure, the new measure would be a better reflection of the rate of material deprivation in our nation than the current one.

Today’s measure still uses a formula based on 1950s household expenditures – before housing and transportation costs went up and two-income households became the requirement, causing average child care expenses to soar. In contrast, the new measure would allow for regional reflection of differences in the cost of living and would count some federally-funded employment benefits as income for the first time.

Yet, it’s important to note that we aren’t really accomplishing what we desire with this goal – even with a more accurate formula! This is especially true since this high-level reconsideration of the formula is occurring at a time when there are numerous calls for a national goal to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years.

What’s wrong with expending a whole lot of energy on this discussion?

First, it’s only a proposal to measure income and not the other resources that communities need for a strong economy and full participation in our democracy and civil society. The proposal isn’t about quality education or clean air or reasonable housing costs or access to health care or reducing prejudice…. and so on.

Second, a if we want a measure of income, a relative measure would be a much more useful test of how well our nation is doing at making sure all residents can contribute to a strong society. As higher income earners do better, low-wage workers must see increases in income relative to the higher earners – otherwise poverty increases. As one leading paper said of a new relative measure:

Certainly, the…relative poverty measure is hard to budge…Yet, when all the research shows that it is how one's income compares to the average that drives one's health, happiness and opportunity, the target must be the right one.

Third, while we do need a better standard for measuring progress as a nation on income deprivation, we’re not likely to succeed in achieving the goal of better policy outcomes if we insist on maintaining a subsistence standard. Indeed, if the goal is based on any measure of “poverty” as it is currently understood in this country – material deprivation blamed on immoral or ill-considered personal choices – we should not expect much policy progress on efforts to strengthen our economy.

At The Mobility Agenda, we’re engaged in a conversation about developing a goal that is more consistent with widely supported policy proposals – which tend to go way beyond income deprivation and which include paid time off at work, worker voices at the table for establishing workplace policy, fair wages, and access to affordable health insurance.

When we put the poverty headline over these policy options, policymakers face real resistance created by the widely-held public beliefs about causes of poverty. We cannot change these beliefs by adopting a goal to end or reduce poverty – regardless of which formula we use to define the term.

Of course, we should adopt a more current measure of income deprivation. Mayor Bloomberg and members of the House should be applauded for their effort to make the more up-to-date but unofficial Census measure more official.

Unfortunately, we're not doing so well on the policy front as it is, and changing the formula will not have much of an impact on this reality. Progress on policy requires a different goal and new measures for testing our progress toward that goal.

Cross-posted at http://www.dmiblog.com/.

I knew Barack Obama had never committed to the kind of specific UK-style poverty-reduction goal that Edwards and Clinton had endorsed, but I also wasn't sure if he had ruled one out. In his answers to this questionnaire, from the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, it seems that he is saying no to a specific target:

Would your Administration set a specific numerical target and timeline for reducing poverty and if so, what would it be? With or without a target, what would be your top policy priorities for reducing poverty?

Rising poverty is one of the most serious issues facing America today, and I believe that inserting simplistic tag lines or one-dimensional goals are unlikely to be helpful in meeting this challenge. As president, I will build off of my life experiences of fighting poverty and hopelessness as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer and elected official to make poverty eradication a top goal of my administration.

Also in his answers, some specifics on how many workers would be helped by his EITC proposal: "my plan will expand the EITC, which is considered one of the most effective pro-work anti-poverty programs to date, to 5.8 million more Americans. Additionally, my EITC plan will increase EITC benefits for another 6.2 million Americans." (To give you a sense of the size of these expansions, around 23 million Americans currently receive the EITC).

I want to second John's concern that the new measure proposed by Mayor Bloomberg, while a "useful step forward" from the current poverty measure, is also likely "to narrow and technocratic to have much resonance outside of policy circles."

My own personal favorite is a measure that sets poverty based on a percentage of median income, say 50 or 60 percent, the lineage of which goes straight back to Adam Smith. The basic idea is that poverty can only be defined in connection to the economic mainstream. Notably, this type of measure produces poverty thresholds that are much more consistent with where the public believes income poverty starts, according to public opinion surveys.

The median income approach to defining poverty is commonly called a relative poverty measure, but it's actually more objective in social terms than either the current US poverty measure or measures like that proposed by Mayor Bloomberg. As social scientists Lee Rainwater and Tim Smeeding note in their book, Poor Kids in a Rich Country, "Anchoring the poverty line in terms of the median is a way of focusing on mainstream incomes and talking them as a point of departure in measuring poverty."

I'll admit that I haven't paid much attention to the development of the revised poverty measure for New York City unveiled yesterday by Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Like most analysts, I recognize that the federal poverty measure is deeply flawed, and welcome any opportunity to focus public attention on issues related to poverty and economic opportunity.

That said, I wonder if the new measure is too narrow and technocratic to have much resonance outside of policy circles. Though an advance over the official measure, the revised thresholds still seem unrealistically low, especially given the high cost of living in New York. Is a four-person family with annual income greater than $26,000 really not poor? As Shawn notes, this level doesn’t track with basic budget studies for the New York metro area, and I doubt it will mesh with the experiences of many New Yorkers.

Additionally, the revised measure defines most families that earn more than the poverty level but too little to be economically secure out of the public debate. Bloomberg was quoted in Newsday saying, essentially, that if you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it. If that is so, then the revised poverty measure essentially chooses not too measure New York’s growing number of low-income working families.

Lastly, I wonder if the revised measure will do anything to change the tone and texture of the public debate about poverty and economic opportunity. In an interview today on WNYC Radio (streaming audio is wonderful), an administration official talked about “poverty” in a way focused on the traits of poor individuals and what can be down to help people who are somehow different than other New Yorkers.

Although the willingness of a prominent public official to push the issue of poverty measurement into the public debate is a significant development, Bloomberg’s initiative represents less of a major advance and more of a small but useful step forward.

NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveils a new poverty measure for New York City:

Under the federal formula, which is $20,444 for a family of four, some 19 percent of New Yorkers are considered poor, city officials said. Under the new formula, which takes into account New York's high cost of living, the poverty line is at $26,138 and 23 percent of New Yorkers are below it.

The new measure indicates a larger proportion of the city's poor is elderly, and that more working families are under the poverty line than in the federal measure. It has slightly lower poverty rates for children living in single-parent homes and people living in extreme poverty, indicating government programs are helping, officials said.

The new measure appears to be a variant of the one proposed by the National Academy of Sciences in the 1990s. Although an improvement on the outdated and basically arbitrary federal poverty measure, Bloomberg still sets the poverty threshold too low. EPI's basic family budget for a family of four in NYC is about $58,000, and half of median income (a common poverty measure in wealthy nations) in New York State for a family of four is about $37,000.

This month’s Atlantic has a story about housing and poverty, and to me it’s a case study in what’s wrong with the safety-net-as-opportunity narrative.

The article argues that Section 8 housing vouchers and the destruction of public housing are responsible for the uptick in crime in smaller-scale cities like Memphis, where much of the reporting was done. But the argument fails to pass the smell test because a)crime has largely been dropping like a stone for the last 15 years and b) it doesn’t compare statistics on Section 8 usage in larger cities, where crime hasn’t gone up. However, while it may not be structurally coherant, the argument does fit into the neoliberal narrative on anti-poverty policy, where good intentions produce bad results, and where it’d be nice to do something about poverty, but unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do. Sounds like it's ready to publish.

Putting crime aside, the article does tell an interesting story about how housing policy is changing. In the 1990s, housing policy focused on addressing concentrated poverty, which was considered to be more harmful and to offer less opportunity than diffuse poverty. Housing projects came down, Section 8 vouchers were given out, and people were supposedly on their way to greener pastures. However, most folks who moved out didn't do much better.

So has our housing policy really failed, as the article implies? I’d argue no, because the primary purpose of programs like Section 8 isn’t to make things better but to keep them from getting worse. Having a voucher helps ensure you won’t live in dilapidated housing or be forced onto the street. It is, in other words, a safety net program. To say that the program failed to achieve its goals is a distortion of what its primary goals are.

But this isn’t the author’s fault- both liberals and conservatives have sold housing policy as way to reduce poverty. Conservatives thought if you got rid of the projects, you’d get rid of poverty, while liberals thought if you let folks move out of the racism-created ghettos, you’d get rid of poverty. Turns out, it’s a bit more complicated than both of those stories.

Strangely, the article doesn't make it to this point, and I'd speculate it's because this safety-net-as-opportunity narrative contributes to individualistic thinking. Take the author's closing remarks:

The problems of poverty run so deep that we’re unlikely to know the answer for a generation. Social scientists tracking people who are trying to improve their lives often talk about a “weathering effect,” the wearing-down that happens as a lifetime of baggage accumulates. With poor people, the drag is strong, even if they haven’t lived in poverty for long. Kids who leave poor neighborhoods at a young age still have trouble keeping up with their peers, studies show. They catch up for a while and then, after a few years, slip back. Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.

As usual, the causes of poverty are reduced to the individual. Poverty exists not for lack of get up and go, as popular opinion has it, but for the psychological effects of a poverty-stricken environment. So poverty is a viscous cycle, and there’s not much you can do about it.

But that’s RIDICULOUSLY STUPID. People move out of poverty ALL THE TIME. The economy gets better, our policies shaping opportunity get better, and people move out of poverty. It's lost on the author that all the policies mentioned aren't primarily meant to lift people out of poverty, and that other policy does it more effectively.

This type of defeatism isn't particular to the safety-net-as-opportunity frame. Individualistic narratives of all types produce it. And even though there's leftward movement in our politics, Americans still tend to see social policy through the lens of individualism, unless otherwise prompted. While it may take a more subtle, though equally insidious, form in the Atlantic, you can bet its nastier cousin has an even stronger hold on media that doesn’t aspire to middlebrow respectability. The challenge remains to elevate the discourse to the systemic level, and the safety-net-as-opportunity argument consistently fails to do this.

When reframing anti-poverty work comes up, I often hear reservations about taking the word "poverty" out of our vocabulary. Lots of people think you can't address the issues if you can't speak about them directly. While I think they're wrong, the point gets at a deeper debate about how to talk to an American public that seems like it just doesn't care about poverty.

The first couple of times I heard this question raised, I thought it was easily resolved. There's a million and one ways to talk about poverty in different terms. Phrases like "low-wage work" have the benefit of being more specific (about jobs for low-income people) and get people focused on the structural causes of poverty. Maybe I'm being stubborn, but I just don't think this is an arguable point.

But if the debate was about words and not ideas, it would have ended long ago. Rather, I think the real debate is over what to do about American values. As you may know, it's been a while since Americans have done much to reduce poverty. Does that mean our values need to be overhauled? Or can we emphasize some part of American culture and deemphasize the rest?

I believe that all we really need is a change of priorities. Lots of public opinion surveys show that Americans believe "we're all in this together." That belief, however, must compete with individualism, the other major current in American political culture. Individualism may have been dominant recently, but in the not-too-distant past, Americans weren't quite so individualistic. Public-spiritedness once trumped individualism, and it can again. This is the idea behind the Demos Center for the Public Sector's work on framing government, EPI's work on framing the economy, and Inclusion's work on framing low-wage work.

Now, the folks who want to use the word "poverty" have legitimate concerns. One of those is that poor people will be framed out of the policy agenda, a la Clinton-style triangulation, if you don't talk about poverty. Sometimes I hear communications experts do this- they say, "forget about poor people, nobody will ever go for that. You gotta focus on the middle class." So their concerns are warranted, but they're being too cautious. Not all communications folks agree on everything, and there are ways of including low-income folks in effective frames.

Another concern: who's excluded from the "we" in "we're all in this together"- that is, the "other"- racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, rural folks, to name a few. Many Americans still have not embraced stigmatized populations, so frames rooted in a vision of an "us" could exclude them. It follows, then, that the poverty frame must be redefined and the lens through which Americans understand it changed fundamentally. If certain groups are always going to be excluded, then the only alternative is to get people to value poverty reduction per se.

There's also truth to this point, but it's too pessimistic. Far more folks are included in the national "we" than they think. Granted, much more could be done to get folks to see marginalized populations as "one of them." This is vital, but long-term, work. Indeed, much of it began in the '60s, and I think it's now paying dividends. While we still haven't destigmatized poverty, America has become a far more inclusive society since 1968. In today's environment, we will get results if we put our ideas into a frame that's tied to a vision of an expansive "us."

But a debate needs to happen over how to prioritize both the long-term work of broadening the "us" and the short-term work of building a frame for inclusive policy. This debate hasn't been happening, but it could help move things forward.

When analyzing the UK's child poverty target it is critically important to remember that it uses a relative measure. Poverty is set at 60 percent of median income. For the past decade, median incomes in the UK have risen above inflation. Reducing child poverty by 17 percent over 6 years, relative to a rising median is no small feat, and makes the UK’s efforts so very commendable. That the job is getting tricky in this economic and political climate is not surprising. With a reduction as dramatic as 17 percent, the message must have resounded with some segment of the electorate. But for a host of nuanced reasons, even jobless Brits are now more likely to give their vote to the Tories rather than to Labour. In most circles, this is viewed as “people just being tired of Labour,” a phenomenon we Americans tend to answer with the help of term limits and set election days, neither of which exist in the UK.

It’s undeniable though: since the Labour Government took power in 1997, the tide has raised all ships, and smaller boats have been towed closer to the fleet.

Having studied first hand the successes and challenges of British policies on social inclusion, I’ve been asked recently why my friends at inclusionist.org and I advocate so strongly for a relative poverty measure when “it’s not likely to happen”?

Here's my case:

1. We believe in a more inclusive society. We believe in a more inclusive society where our government, our public services, and our community-based organizations have the power to bring those who have been excluded back into the mainstream of society. The only way to know if this is happening is to take a social-inclusion approach that measures against what’s happening in the middle, and whether the gaps between excluded groups and the whole of society are narrowing.

2. We’ve got the political capital, and we can build the political will. We’re enthusiastic, hopeful and ready to demand a little extra from the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, and, c’mon – let’s start to believe it – a progressive president. To poverty and social inclusion analysts across the nation, we ask: “When is a relative measure of poverty more likely to happen?”

3. We don’t have to wait for the government to do it. There are some very encouraging poverty and child poverty campaigns that are building momentum in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut, to name a few. To achieve at least a smidgen of the success that the UK has achieved, they’ll need to start by re-conceptualizing their state’s notion of poverty by identifying the state’s median income and measuring from there.

Conventional measurements of 100 percent or 200 percent of the official poverty line are more easily calculated and sold, but it’s not really the smart policy we’re capable of developing. Without a true relative measure, we’re stuck in the same old school ideas that haven’t taken us as far as we might go. Generating ideas independent of government—isn’t that what America is bloody about?

(This guest post by Natalie Branosky of the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (CESI is a UK think tank, but Natalie is from the U.S.) was originally written as a comment on Shawn Fremstad's post about Kate Stanley's recent Guardian op-ed on the UK's poverty reduction goal. The Editors.)

From today's Guardian, IPPR's Kate Stanley notes that "the goal of ending child poverty by 2020 has failed to strike a chord with the [UK] electorate" and outlines some of the steps that need to be taken to actually meet the goal:

The next year will be a real test of the government's mettle: will it stand by its historic pledge and find the resources, in a hostile political and economic climate, to halve child poverty by 2010, or will it weaken and put resources into more popular causes? Strange though it may seem to many, the goal of ending child poverty by 2020 has failed to strike a chord with the electorate.

To meet the 2010 target, the method is quite simple. The government will have to find around £2.8bn next year and the year after to increase the child tax credit (or some similarly targeted measure).

Meeting the ultimate 2020 target will require a more sophisticated strategy. To start with, the UK has the highest proportion of children growing up in workless households, so more needs to be done to tackle worklessness. This will necessitate a more radical approach to welfare reform.

However, more than half of all poor children live in households where someone is working, so much more needs to be done to make sure that people move out of poverty when they move into work.

While tax credits will continue to have an important role in raising incomes, there is a limit to what can be achieved through tax credits alone. Measures are also needed to help households reduce the risk of poverty by having more than one person in the household in work. This means doing more to enable mothers and fathers to balance work and care.

And, of course, low wages have to be addressed. This means high-paying industries need to start paying their low-paid workers more and low-paying industries need greater support and greater challenge to raise their wages.

In the short term then, the challenge is coming up with significant extra cash to transfer to poor families. This will get the government back on track to meeting its ultimate target and send out a message that an anti-poverty agenda still sits at Labour's heart. In the longer term, a much stronger coalition between government, employers and citizens is needed to achieve sustainable change and end child poverty for good.

If a poverty reduction goal has "failed to strike a chord" with the relatively more liberal UK electorate--this is a country, after all, with a nationalized health system, one that makes the Canadian model look conservative--it seems safe to assume that such a goal may have even less resonance with the US electorate. One lesson might be that a goal by itself, particularly if set in a top-down manner by a government in power, may not be sufficient to mobilize public opinion in support of policies to meet that goal. In a parliamentary democracy like the UK, lack of broad public support might not be an obstacle to meeting such a goal, but it's of considerably greater importance in a non-parliamentary system like the US.

An emerging challenge for liberals is to how to frame the apparent success of New York City's program that gives cash rewards to low-income people who exhibit certain kinds of good behavior, like attending school and visiting a health clinic regularly. An individualistic perspective informs the program's design, and according to some recent evaluations, it's working fairly well (Kathy G has a good description of it).

So how should liberals frame it? Half-Changed World suggests the following:

I agree that I worry about the framing of these payments as all about overcoming poor people's bad values. You can also tell a convincing story about how the financial incentives make it possible for a worker who is paid by the hour to take off from work to go to a parent teacher conference, or wait in a crowded medical clinic to get the kid immunized, or let the parent keep their job by hiring a more reliable babysitter, but that's not how these payments are being covered in the media.

As true as this point is, I see a couple of problems with it. First, it seems like the tail is wagging the dog. These cash payments are conditioned on behavior. Changes in behavior are more a result of that fact than anything else. To me, the framing feels like an attempt to claim the policy's success for liberalism, but it just isn't. I worry that rather than reinforcing a progressive narrative, it would muddle what people think progressives are all about.

Second, it doesn't direct enough attention to systems as opposed to individuals. I don't blame the author for this- I've been thinking it over, and I just can't come up with a systems-based frame. I think the reason is it isn't about systems. It's about individual motivation. There's no alternative to the conservative frame, because it's conservative policy. You can't shoehorn everything into a progressive frame.

But that's ok. A better way to frame it is to admit it's working because of individual incentives but put more stress on a progressive narrative. I.e: yes, the program does encourage good behavior, but the far more important task ahead of us is to fix the systems that leave so many folks behind.

I also think it's important to encourage the kind of conservative thinking that led to this program. More conservatives should be thinking about how government programs can reward good behavior. Many are way too focused on punishing bad behavior by kicking people off programs or throwing them in jail. I've been reading Prof. Charles Karelis's book about what's wrong with the conservative economist's understanding of poverty, and I think it, like the New York City program, represents the compassionate side of conservative thinking on poverty. He denies that poor people are irrationally unmotivated and must be punished. Rather, he argues that they're unmotivated, just for the rational reason that work and work supports don't provide enough reward. What follows is a a larger role for government and an expanded notion of social responsibility.

But as much as I hope conservatives pursue this line of policy more, I really hope liberals don't. Plenty of progress can only be achieved by changing systems, and when we reinforce the conservative narrative, we undermine our own. I don't think that means opposing good programs, like New York's seems to be, but it does mean pushing for a different set of policies, advancing a frame rooted in systems, and condemning hyperindividualism.