A Neo-Liberal Trojan Horse: Rochester's Anti-Poverty Initiative

Note this is the shorter version of a longer piece. I will publish the longer version here later

 

A neo liberal Trojan horse

Rochester has a serious poverty problem. A 2015 report by ACT Rochester Benchmarking Rochester’s Poverty (an update to their 2013 Special Report on Poverty) notes that Rochester is the 5^th poorest city among the nation’s 75 largest urban areas, and the second poorest among cities of comparable size.  Only Detroit is worse. 32.9 % of Rochester residents live in poverty. Rochester also has the highest rate of extremely poor families with annual income under $11,000 a year. Childhood poverty is one of the highest in the nation.

Not surprisingly, Rochester’s crime rate is also one of the highest in the nation for cities of comparable size.  It has the highest rate of incarceration in New York State. Most are male and African American.  The School to Prison pipeline is common in Rochester, with many incarcerated for drug crimes. Once one receives a felony conviction   it becomes virtually impossible to qualify for jobs, housing and services

Like Detroit, Rochester has suffered the effects of rapid and devastating de-industrialization. Where Rochester was once an industrial powerhouse, with Kodak at its peak employing 60,000 workers (Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, and Delco were also major employers).Today these industries are mere shadows of their former self. Thus far despite hoopla strategies to revive Rochester's economy haven't worked very well. Overall incomes have declined. The ACT report notes that “the median household income in our region was $52,200 in 2009-13, a decrease of 14% from 2000. This was lower than the $58,800 in the state and $53,000 in the nation. The City of Rochester had the lowest median income in the region and the highest rate of poverty, with 33% of its residents living below the poverty line.” Young people are leaving the area; the number of residents in the region under 20 decreased 13%, and those 20-39 2% and 6% in the whole region, according to ACT Rochester.  While the population of the metro area is stable, the city population has undergone a precipitous decline. Between 1950 and 2000, Rochester lost 34% of its population.  Since then ACT Rochester notes it has lost another 4 percent to about 210,000 residents, dropping out of the top 100 US cities.
Much of the focus in Rochester has been on it underperforming schools.  The city has the poorest school district in New York State and its schools are ranked at the bottom of school districts in the state for its graduation rates. Many Rochester schools are on the state's list of poor performing schools and in danger of being closed

After years of inaction on the problem Rochester area leaders have called attention to the scope of the problem, ACT and the Rochester Area Foundation issued the aforementioned report in 2013 “Poverty and the Concentration of Poverty in the Nine-County Greater Rochester Area,”  that documented the problem. Rochester Area Foundation CEO Jennifer Leonard stated “It is time for us to acknowledge greater Rochester's poverty so that we can begin to address and reverse its insidious effects on our education, economy and future as a region.” Foundation Vice President Ed Doherty went on to note: “it became apparent that conditions of poverty in Rochester are extraordinary and not just reflective of typical urban patterns,” Local agency Action for a Better Community also held a symposium in 2014 on Poverty and Economic Security to address these issues.  Here poverty was also linked to larger issues of economic power, immigration, the school to prison pipeline and police treatment of minorities.

It is with this as a background that we can understand Governor Cuomo’s announcement on March 15 of this year, of the creation of an anti-poverty task force, to combat poverty in the Rochester area. A bipartisan political group chaired by Joe Morelle, the previous Monroe County Democratic Party chair and influential state assemblyman, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren and Monroe County Executive and Republican Party leader Maggie Brooks was given a $500,000 grant to come up with solutions to Rochester’s persistent poverty problem. The governor’s press release speaks of the need to create opportunity for all, economic security and family stability so that all have a fair chance. It speaks of creating greater empowerment for the worst off in our society.  However the key to the approach can be found in the proposal submitted to the governor in November 2014 The proposal takes off from persistent problems of poverty in the Rochester area and tells us that “Despite an array of traditional anti-poverty programs and investments to raise families out of poverty, this community still faces a devastating and accelerating poverty crisis.”  They proposed a wide ranging “public-private partnership to address this issue, including government, the Rochester Business Alliance, major foundations, universities, human service agencies, and others.” The governor’s announcement itself was full of high sounding language.  But the proposal is a Trojan horse. This is largely an elite driven approach to mitigating poverty that takes a neo-liberal marketizing approach to reform. The issues of the socio economic roots of poverty in the unequal distribution of power are downplayed and even the political roots of racism get short shrift. At first there were very few community members involved. Under pressure some low income residents were added to each subgroup, and a chair supported by the mayor was appointed,  but  the approach still is clearly is top down and  managerial. It seeks to discipline the poor under the guise of reform. Faced with the intransigence of poverty leadership want to sweep away old programs i.e. welfare state programs and create a public private system, that  is ”holistically integrated” and which will support families and give them a pathway out of poverty.  

This program is bold indeed, but in practice what is under discussion in the anti-poverty initiative is a set of neo-conservative and neo-liberal solutions that individualize the problems of poverty. They focus on changing individual behavior not on structural issues of large scale systemic inequality.  They want to create morally upright citizens who are at the same time entreprenurial subjects.  More in line with middle class values and more savvy at using the market to benefit themselves. It contains no suggestions for dealing with a political system that seems irredeemably broken and which reproduces inequality.

One should always be careful when politicians begin discussing private public collaboration, In practice this means offloading or privatizing services that ought to be public goods. Making them private means that there is less commitment to publically shared good and less obligation for governments to serve the public good. Services then are guided by private interests however well-meaning that lack accountability to a public sense of the good. For example offloading welfare services to religious groups can mean that clients are subject to religious moral coercion being forced to comply with norms which they don’t hold.

I was able to obtain a preliminary reading list for this working group. The selections are pre-structured in the direction of individualized solutions. There are few if any progressive approaches in this list, though the proposal sometimes uses the language of participatory social research it's focus is more therapeutic than participatory. Apparently critical analyses of social problems are part of the tired old failed approaches because none of them appear on the reading list. Instead the bold new neo-liberalism, many of whose proponents love to see themselves as radicals will sweep away the dross of dependency created by the welfare state. While it is possible the group will take a different direction, the list as it stands with a few exceptions is a pretty damning indictment of the committee’s direction.

Some readings on the list like Ruby Payne’s books A Framework for Understanding Poverty – A Cognitive Approach, revive a version of the culture of poverty argument. Poverty is caused by cognitive frameworks that is sets of behavioral expectations and rules that are often implicit. She sees the main problem in the creation of poverty as the failure by the poor to adopt these middle class expectations that guarantee success. Payne revives a lot of stereotypes about the poor. This approach supports a “deficit” theory of the poor. The poor are undeserving because of their moral spiritual or intellectual deficiencies. Several other contributions are by well know conservatives like Paul Ryan and the conservative Cato Institute. They argue the war on poverty has failed. The latest version of Ryan’s position avoids the makers and takers rhetoric of his earlier view but it still largely argues that government programs create and maintain poverty. In his view the basic problem is that the safety net discourages people from finding work. The Cato Institute paper “The work versus welfare trade-off 2013” included in this list, repeats the mantra that government program create dependency. It argues that government programs provide a disincentive for work.

A second set of articles revolve around the individual pathologies of poverty. Elizabeth Babcock in “Rethinking Poverty” argues that the stress of poverty often undermine an individual's decision making skills. Reinforcing the deficit theory approach these executive decision making skills, she claims are lacking in poor people. They are often overwhelmed by stress. This kind of trauma is especially damaging to children and can decisively affect their learning capacities and have a permanent effect on brain development. She proposes to follow a program developed at Harvard called the Bridge to Self-Sufficiency that addresses these ills.  The lack of proper impose control that Babcock identifies could apply to a wide variety of psychological disorders and to a wide variety of Americans. Saving money for example is  a problem for all Americans as is credit card debt.  Do all these people also lack executive thinking. Another problem lies in our predatory banking system but this issue is not addressed

While the connections between public institutions and private groups are seemingly uncontroversial, these proposals actually tend to take away any critical functions that nonprofits and educational institutions may have had and turns them into job training instruments. Either they directly impart skills or teach people the proper attitudes to be good market individuals. Non-profits have traditionally been at the forefront of social justice but in neo-liberalism\ they have very much been converted to a support structure for the economy. What we  have here is a set of market based and market oriented solutions to the problems of poverty that does not criticize the limits of the markets but presumes we can make this flawed system work better for us,

These articles which stress the pathologies of poverty (without mentioning racism) beg an important point. Poverty is a social problem not an individual pathology. It comes about because of social arrangements and relationships of social and political power. It is difficult to see how the cycle of poverty will be broken without larger scale social and political changes. If some groups in our society have the power to break unions and lower wages, no amount of individual therapy is going to get people out of poverty. Wages have been stagnant or in decline for 30 years, making many formerly solid middle class families much more vulnerable to economic shock and trauma.

Other articles reject the deficit model and stress an asset building approach. For some thins means the creation of self-sustaining communities, but in the hands of the Paul Allen foundation the cooperative model of asset building in self-sustaining communities becomes market driven. Assets are used to build capacities for accumulation not seeking sustainable cooperative communities. The emphasis is on the capacity to be frugal and to save money and manage it better. Here the Allen foundation also looks to families but see it primarily in terms of building economic capacities. The idea of building capacities used here is mostly a chamber of commerce one. It consists of helping small businesses with planning and finances and helping individuals save and be more savvy economic actors.

Of course the main reason that poverty exists in the first decades of the 21st century is the lack of good jobs. But it also has a good deal to do with subordination. The economic inequality of our social and political arrangements results in power asymmetries and makes the poor a second class group. The poor are not like us. Part of this is reflected in the idea that many of the poor are undeserving of our compassion and respect. However the readings here often leave aside the questions subordination and treat poverty as a failure to achieve the proper market behaviors, Moreover it leaves out the elements of community building and types of individual fulfillment  that are not market based

There is not a lot of evidence to support the idea of a culture of poverty or a deficiency in cognitive skills that are unique to poor people. In the neo-liberal utopia of market society, an ideal market society is perfectly just. Yet clearly it is not. It generates large scale inequalities. Almost all of us live lives of increased economic vulnerability and precariousness. Once caught in spiral of poverty it might be true that the disorganizing social conditions can cause disorganization of one’s personality, However, why not stop the condition from happening in the first place by changing economic and social conditions.

Obvious too is the existence of a great deal of embedded racism, ethnic and gender prejudice in our society. While some folks smugly think that we have achieved a post racial society, it takes an almost heroic level of self-deception to sustain these beliefs which are often used to mask a deep seated racism, people of color immigrants and outsiders are all parts of a new nativism that sees the problem. For most of these articles limit the discourse on poverty the exceptions are a couple of articles on white privilege but these stay on the level of cultural analysis. For example the Aspen Institute's paper seems to assiduously avoid any discussion of the economic system, but deals mostly with the way culture operates.  The structural approach these articles recommend is less focused on racial attitudes as the way institutions interact and in which seemingly neutral practices foster inequalities

The policies this approach endorses are very similar to assist building ones. For example such approaches have in the past supported IDA’ s or individual development accounts which encourage individuals start up savings, this is seen, along with some changes in housing laws to encourage homeownership. But it says little or nothing about the banking and credit policies which have put many into debt in the first place.

            The readings mostly seem to see the problem of poverty as a market malfunction. There is a lack of fit between the skills poor people have and the market. But there are significant problems with our market system that have to be addressed. If we want to end poverty we have to look at the economic conditions that generate it, if for example wages continue to decline because corporations and other economic actors exert downward pressure on wages and if Americans continue to have to work harder for less, it is hard to see how poverty won’t persist. Without more aggressive taxation of the wealthy the benefits of economic growth will still fall mostly on the wealthy. If more Americans are living close to the edge of poverty without changes it is a fiction to think that some won’t fall off the edge. If we don’t take action to eliminate racism and ethnic prejudice then it is hard to see how a number of those in poverty will be denied opportunity. We can’t bootstrap our way out of poverty.

 

 

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