Governments preferred commissioning street-level bureaucrats over redistributing income to solve social problems.
Evidence
In the 1960s and early 1970S the modal governmental response to social problems was to commission a corps of street-level bureaucrats to attend to them. Are poor people deprived of equal access to the courts? Provide them with lawyers. Equal access to health care? Establish neighborhood clinics. Educational opportunity? Develop preschool enrichment programs. It is far easier and less disruptive to develop employment for street-level bureaucrats than to reduce income inequalities. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 95
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Piven & Cloward’s ‘Regulating the Poor’ argument that relief bureaucracies absorb protest while avoiding structural redistribution — the same displacement mechanism the reader tracks in other books. — connects to: Governments respond to social inequality by hiring more public servants rather than redistributing income.