War on Poverty Brought Material Relief
Summer 1997, Volume 18, Number 2
Has America's antipoverty war failed?
Not necessarily, says University of Chicago sociologist Susan Mayer, who spent fall and winter terms as a visiting scholar at IPR. Mayer believes that evidence cited to support the claim of failure is sometimes mismeasured, frequently misrepresented, and often seriously misleading.
Most studies, she points out, have found small but positive effects of the major antipoverty programs. Food stamps, for example, have increased food intake, Medicaid has increased visits to physicians, and the benefits of job training programs for AFDC recipients have exceeded their costs. Yet she maintains that this evidence played a relatively minor role in the debate that led to the recent welfare reform legislation.
In an article for the second issue of NU Policy Research, Mayer focuses on cash transfers to families, noncash transfers to improve material living conditions of the poor, and education and job training. Among her conclusions:
- Official poverty statistics are misleading and therefore exaggerate the increase in poverty. But the official poverty measure is seriously flawed. When Mayer and Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks corrected some of the defects in the official measure, they found that the poverty rate may have fallen by 4.5 percentage points between 1969 and 1989.
- Material living conditions improved substantially during the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the money spent on the war on poverty went to improve poor people's housing, food consumption, and access to medical care, says Mayer, and "these programs worked." For example, in the two decades between 1973-75 and 1991-93, more poor families had central air-conditioning, two bathrooms, a car, and a telephone, and by 1993 the income gap in children's doctor visits had almost disappeared.
- Education and job training programs were relatively ineffective. Given the great disparity in federal spending for job training and education ($2-billion in 1992) compared with AFDC ($13.5-billion), food stamps ($32.6-billion), and medical care ($78.5-billion), "it was not surprising they failed to generate large improvements in earnings or large savings in welfare expenditures," says Mayer. Though test scores improved and more teenagers graduated from high school, the demands of the labor market increased even more, contributing in part to the decline in earnings of today's male high school graduates.
- Social problems could have been worse. There is no question that some social problems associated with poverty, such as single motherhood, crime, and joblessness, have worsened during the past 30 years, which suggests that improving the material living conditions of poor families is not enough to eliminate all of poverty's by-products, Mayer concedes. "But without improvements in material well-being, ignorance, disease, delinquency, crime, irresponsibility, immorality, and indifference might have been worse."