Morning Bell: The Left Still Doesn’t Get Poverty
Conn Carroll /
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback reads the headline from this past Sunday’s New York Times. Patricia Cohen goes on to report: “[I]n the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word ‘culture’ became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned. Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.”
At first, this may seem like the left is finally ready to make a major concession to reality about their decades-long War on Poverty. But a closer reading of Cohen’s source materials, a recent symposium on poverty in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, shows the opposite is true. The left is just as clueless about poverty as it has ever been. Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies Robert Rector writes at National Review Online:
One might imagine that experts researching the “culture of poverty” would examine how marital collapse, eroded work ethic, and indifference to academic study contribute to financial poverty. Guess again.