Valentine's Day: David Brooks edition

Just finished reading Charles A. Valentine's Culure and Poverty, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the culture of poverty literature. It dismantles the culture of poverty thesis step by step, beginning from a consideration of the role of culture in anthropology, its emergence as a concept through imperialism, and narrowing in to a close consideration of the culture of poverty in how it was developed and deployed by academics and policymakers.

Valentine provides an excellent critique of the sloppy use of the concept of culture (indicators of the culture of poverty include persistent unemployment, lack of education, low status occupations, and meager wages, all of which Oscar Lewis categorizes as part of a "design for living" "handed on from generation to generation") and of the disappearance of any sort of structural factors that might result in higher unemployment other than cultural pathologies, while highlighting that most of the actual empirical work and anthropological immersion in culture of poverty works support the exact opposite conclusion (namely that there is a broadly shared culture between the poor and non-poor, but that there are substantially different opportunities).

A healthy contrast to David Brooks, who is probably the most prominent exponent of the thesis that poor people really only have their own shoddy selves to blame for their poverty, a recurring claim in his work that he found in Haiti's tragedy yet another opportunity to expound upon.

And speaking of David Brooks, does anyone else find any tension in his beliefs that (1) government intervention in the economy is nearly always destructive, as the emergent complexity of the market is nearly always too much for the limited rationality and constrained options of individual decision-makers, and (2) his belief that in regards to culture "intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values" are the "remedy for the achievement gap."

Pointing out tension, and even contradictions, in people's beliefs and policy positions is no great accomplishment. I've got em, you've got em, we're all pretty mucked up by contradictory beliefs and positions. But given that we have numerous successful instances of government intervening in the economy (1) but very few successful instances of top-down restructuring of persistent cultural norms toward a specific end-point (2), my initial bias would be the other way.


(I really need to read some more recent critiques of culture of poverty... Arneil's Diverse Communities, which takes aim at certain varieties of the social capital literature, wavers between the excellent critique of Putnam's implicit, and occasionally explicit, view that women need to bear the burden of renewing civic life)