Redefining poverty as a distinct culture justified cash floors over redistributive policy

Evidence

Poverty of this magnitude seemed to imply that not much had changed since the New Deal and that, if “new strategies” were not deployed, this hidden America would “irrevocably stay away from abundance.” For Lampman and many experts of his generation, “a redefinition of the contours of New Deal liberalism” was “essential to better tackle relative poverty.” … This idea ran back to Oscar Lewis’s culture of poverty, popularized through his 1959 book on Mexican slum dwellers. For Lewis poverty was not only a material situation shared by very different groups, but a “sub-culture of its own” with “its own modalities and distinctive social and psychological consequences for its members.” In the same vein, Harrington postulated that poverty formed “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life”; … Not incidentally, the words “inequality,” “socialism,” and “market” did not appear in Harrington’s best seller, openly breaking with progressive thinkers, who rarely segmented these questions. — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets, 149

Categorization

• XREF: Builds toward the thesis elaborated across chapters: that redefining poverty as a segmented culture converted policy from redistribution to floor-setting, disconnecting from inequality. — connects to: Cash transfer strategy shifted blame for poverty from government to individuals — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 181; Erosion of agrarian and producerist political languages enabled modern cash transfers — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 61; Moral-poverty framing revives discredited cultural pathology arguments (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Moral-poverty framing revives discredited cultural pathology arguments #corroborates (0.80)
• Neoliberal culture recasts welfare-state dependence as a moral failure to embrace risk #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 338
• Neoliberal development framed egalitarian welfare norms as obstacles to be overcome #complicates (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 409