Cash transfer strategy shifted blame for poverty from government to individuals

Evidence

The income framework provided not only innovative ways to think about welfare, but also a way to restore “some sense of individual responsibility for outcomes” to African American families. As he noted, “Where a services strategy tended to locate in government blame for services that do not succeed, an income strategy would tend to implicate the individuals, who would make their own choices in the market.” — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets, 181

Categorization

• SEED: A crisp articulation of a blame-shifting mechanism that still structures welfare debates; usable as an argumentative core for an essay on cash-transfer politics.
• XREF: connects to: Erosion of agrarian and producerist political languages enabled modern cash transfers — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 61; Redefining poverty as a distinct culture justified cash floors over redistributive policy — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 149; Development economics RCTs blame individuals while ignoring poverty’s structural causes — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 289 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Elite economists blamed poverty on the supposed deficiencies of the poor themselves #corroborates (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 226
• Development economics RCTs blame individuals while ignoring poverty’s structural causes #corroborates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 289
• Blaming individual borrowers hides a systemic precariousness produced by finance #exemplifies (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 208
• Blame for the 2008 crisis was displaced from banks onto borrowers #exemplifies (0.82)
• Financial deregulation reframed poverty as a deficit of individual human capital investment. #corroborates (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 200
• Modern welfare ideology replaces moral blame of the poor with suspicion #contradicts (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115