Failed reforms get blamed on poor people’s culture and attitudes

Evidence

Others— Edward C. Banfield and Daniel P. Moynihan prominent among them— have found a ready audience for their view that the failure of liberal reform is to be located not in the genes, but in the attitudes, time perspectives, family patterns, and values of the poor. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 197

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the culture-of-poverty explanation and the genetic explanation are opposing conservative framings, yet both conveniently shift blame from structures to the poor.
• XREF: connects to: Blame shifted from children to their poor and immigrant families. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 488; Colonial officials blamed reform failures on indigenous vanity rather than state abandonment; Ethnicity theory blamed people of color rather than structural injustice for failed reform — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial officials blamed reform failures on indigenous vanity rather than state abandonment #exemplifies (0.90)
• Culturalizing explanations of Muslim inequality blame victims while masking structural causes. #exemplifies (0.90) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 173
• Cultural deprivation theories blame family values for what are really symptoms of economic deprivation. #exemplifies (0.90) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1289
• Colonialists blamed Islamic endowments for economic stagnation and cultural decline #exemplifies (0.90) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 239
• Post-civil-rights reform failure forced ethnicity theory toward blaming people of color #exemplifies (0.90) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55
• Ethnicity theory blamed people of color rather than structural injustice for failed reform #exemplifies (0.85) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55
• Modernization theory blamed underdevelopment on internal cultural flaws within societies #exemplifies (0.85)
• Italian economists blamed poverty on working-class moral defects rather than economic causes #exemplifies (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1141
• Penal reform fails whenever it is detached from general social progress #qualifies (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 969
• Development economics RCTs blame individuals while ignoring poverty’s structural causes #exemplifies (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 289