Mind the gap: facing up to inequalities

REBECCA BLANK and Ron Haskins's volume sets an even narrower agenda. Its 19 articles evaluate various aspects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. The editors are social scientists with experience in Washington. Blank served on President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and is dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Haskins, a developmental psychologist, was the principal staff consultant for the House Republicans on welfare reform and is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. The editors set out to demonstrate the value of social science in evaluating the successes and failures of PRWORA and to recommend revisions during reauthorization. This book does not invite cover-to-cover reading, but selected articles reveal a great deal about the interaction between the social sciences and ethics on anti-poverty policy.

Despite their moral and political differences, the essayists agree that PRWORA policies must be judged on empirical evaluations of their success. Many of the authors have altered their policy judgments based on such evaluations. However, they disagree sharply on the outcomes by which public assistance programs should be evaluated. Haskins is unapologetic about his goal for PRWORA. Conservatives, he says, would have considered reform a success had it changed the source of income for the poor from government assistance to labor-market earnings, even with no accompanying increase in income.

The other essays exhibit an astounding, often incompatible array of outcomes by which the success or failure of PRWORA should be measured. These outcomes include reducing the welfare caseload; employing former welfare recipients; increasing incomes for the poor and near poor; improving the cognitive, physical and social development of children; reducing out-of-wedlock births; improving health care for low-income residents; and bolstering job stability and advancement.

The social sciences play a principal role in determining what variables promote specific outcomes; they cannot, by themselves, justify outcomes. They do not, for example, show us why reducing the welfare caseload without decreasing poverty and inequality is unjust. The unresolved questions about outcomes reveal the necessity for theological and ethical arguments.

The social scientists do, however, reveal a dimension of the moral problem of poverty that the other three books neglect. Liberal and conservative alike, they demonstrate why and how Americans with low-incomes and deficient capabilities can benefit from being held accountable for behavior that fits with receiving wider opportunities to participate in an interdependent society. Page and Simmons implicitly reject incorporating recipient accountability into anti-poverty policy. A few left-of-center philosophers such as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (in Democracy and Disagreement) offer a moral defense of accountability for work in the labor market under specified conditions.