[Fwd: CHILD POVERTY RATES REFLECT FAMILY STRUCTURE, NOTRACE,ANALYSISSHOWS -5/01]

[Michael McIntyre]

I'm too damned old to be "PC".  I still remember when it was a term we used to send one another up.  As it stands, though, the straightforward interpretation of the Heritage data is that time spent receiving welfare is an INDEX of poverty, not a CAUSE of poverty.  If you want to spin some complex causal story about possible feedback loops, then I'll entertain that as a hypothesis.  And then I'll wait for you to quote Rousseau:

"J'ai bien plus que les preuves; j'ai l'evidence."

L'evidence - Heritage n'en a pas.

Michael McIntyre


>>> sokol at jhu.edu 05/30/01 01:08PM >>>
At 10:44 AM 5/30/01 -0500, Michael McIntyre wrote:
>Using the term loosely!  Look at the link and you find that the variable
that outweighs all others in "producing child poverty" is "amount of time
spent on welfare."  And you thought all this time that people went on
welfare because they were poor!  Au contraire, mes amis!  Welfare causes
poverty!  The data prove it!  Heritage dixit.

Heritage's political agenda aside, the relationship between 'amount of time
spent on welfare' and 'child poverty' is not necessarily spurious - IF, the
former is a proxy for the duration of living in poverty.  People with long
history of poverty are less likely to teach their young what it takes to be
admitted to the middle class: the importance of formal education, and the
accumulation of 'social capital' (i.e. learning the right mode of speach,
dress code, and manners, getting to know the right people, etc.

Lest the pc crowd on this list starts screaming "culture of poverty" - this
argument does not have to lead to the "family values" and "personal
responsibility" mantra.  It can be used to argue for an effective public
education system that can overcome the shortcomings of nuclear families
(whatever their roots) by teaching the disadvantaged kids the skills that
their nuclear parents cannot.  

It would be a very clever thing to use the Heritage's own findings to that
end, no?  As an ancient Sufi proverb has it, "a fool tries to convince me
with his arguments, a sage - with my own." 

wojtek