The Cost of Cost Analysis: Changing Agendas in Poverty Research

Alice O'Connor. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 392 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

When President Clinton signed into law the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, repealing the 60-year-old entitlement to government assistance for jobless and low-income Americans, many liberals expressed a profound sense of betrayal. Yet as Alice O'Connor's remarkable study shows, Clinton's move should hardly have surprised policy makers, of the left or right. O'Connor's work traces the evolution of dominant theories about the causes and solutions to poverty in America, which she labels "poverty knowledge." Though not inevitable, welfare repeal rested on long-standing liberal assumptions, which had narrowed the scope of research into poverty and sought to remove the taint of ideology from poverty studies. By the 1990s, O'Connor argues, social scientists' claims to scientific objectivity left Democratic policy makers without a political strategy to combat the conservatives' explicitly ideological campaign against the welfare state. How the development of poverty knowledge led, sometimes circuitously and often unintentionally, to a Democratic president signing the Republican-sponsored welfare repeal legislation is the subject of O'Connor's book.

An academic who began her career working in liberal philanthropic institutes, O'Connor is particularly well-positioned to take on an intellectual history of poverty theories. She took a job as an assistant program officer at the Ford Foundation in the mid-eighties, just as conservative and libertarian think tanks had gained control of the terms of the poverty debate. Charles Murray's influential attack on the liberal welfare state, Losing Ground, had shattered the policy proposals of the liberal research establishment. Murray's conclusions proved "easy to demolish" from an empirical standpoint. But, O'Connor quickly realized, liberal social science, expressed in the language and conventions of political neutrality, proved no match for Murray's "ideological manifesto."

While at the Ford Foundation, O'Connor came to appreciate the role of foundations and government agencies in setting research agendas. The nation's leading philanthropic institutes, whose directors and researchers often move in and out of government jobs, determine who gets funded and who is authorized to speak as a policy expert. She later worked on the Rockefeller Foundation's Social Science Research Council's Program for Research on the Urban Underclass, which she describes toward the end of her book. There, she confronted the inescapable clash between academic and applied policy researchers, between social science "experts" and neighborhood activists. And, there again she found the researchers enmeshed in a long-standing and narrowly focused debate: whether poverty was "structural" and thus the result of shortages in "human capital," or cultural and measured by "various indicators of bad behavior" (pp. 8,9). Wherever they stood in that debate, researchers conceptualized poverty as an individual problem, never addressing what O'Connor now sees as the underlying cause of vast inequality of wealth in America: "markets as social and political as well as economic institutions, shaped by relationships of class, gender and race" (p. 292).

Combing the insights gained in working inside the poverty knowledge industry with a scholar's meticulous analysis of primary sources, O'Connor has produced an incisive--and often depressing--account of established social science work on poverty. She has read widely and deeply the major works on poverty, juvenile delinquency, family disintegration, racial segregation, and economics. In her final chapter she offers the outlines for a research agenda that moves beyond the limited scope of cultural or individualistic explanations, and beyond the more recent research obsession with welfare reform. Readers, from both the policy and the academic worlds, will find this an illuminating and cautionary work.

Poverty Knowledge adds considerable weight to the series of excellent revisionist studies of the politics of the welfare state produced in the past two decades. Paying particular attention...