Michael Katz's Contribution to Social and Social Welfare History

Michael Katz began work on social welfare during the late 1970s with a project entitled "The Casualties of Industrialization." That project led to a series of essays, Poverty and Policy in American History (Katz 1983), and a few years later to In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (Katz 1986). His reading in twentieth-century literature for Shadow—and the ideological and policy nostrums of the Reagan administration— allowed Katz to pivot to two books that frame contemporary welfare debates in their historical context—The Undeserving Poor in 1989 and The Price of Citizenship in 2001, as well as a set of essays Improving Poor People (Katz 1995) that he published between the two.

One might look at Michael's welfare writings and draw a straight line between them and his earlier work on education. In both areas, Michael broke with the existing conventional wisdom, typically a narrow institutional focus often written by scholars who worked in education and social work schools. Instead, Michael began outside these institutions and viewed them critically. In the process, he laid out fields of study to which other scholars have contributed.

Despite the apparent connections between Katz's education and social welfare writing, the story is a bit more complicated. Michael came to his social welfare work after a decade of work in quantitative social and family history. Most of this time was devoted to the Hamilton project, an intensive examination of that Canadian city during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. That project produced two books, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Katz 1975) and The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Katz et al. 1982). In particular, during the Hamilton project, Michael shifted his attention from the gap between the claims of reformers and social reality to the complex set of decisions that ordinary people made about their personal life within the constraints imposed by existing social conditions.

In the last stages of the Hamilton project in the mid-1970s, Michael focused on three sets of family processes: structure, strategy, and economy. The basic analytical framework was that families used a variety of mechanisms (strategy) involving shifting household membership (structure) to achieve a balance of their consumption and resources (economy). In The People of Hamilton, Katz found evidence of significant changes in the life course of the city's residents at midcentury. Most importantly, he pointed to the importance of a stage of semiautonomy of youth during which young people in their late teens and early twenties frequently lived as boarders or relatives outside their parents' household. In The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism, Katz and colleagues use ratios of work/consumption and wage/consumption as a way to characterize the family economy. The idea of a work/consumption index had its origins in the work of a Soviet agrarian economist, A.V. Chayanov, who developed it to make sense of the peasant economy (Chayanov 1966).

We expected to find that as families' consumption needs increased with the birth of children that they would use a variety of strategies to expand their resources. However, we discovered this didn't happen. For a number of reasons—limits on physical space, the rigidity of labor markets, the attenuation of kin relations—most families faced a predictable life-cycle squeeze in which poverty was more or less inevitable. How was it that a condition that a majority of North Americans faced—an extended period of life-cycle poverty—seemed to escape the understanding of the privileged few who wrote about poverty and ran charity organizations? It is this question that Michael takes up in the introduction to Poverty and Policy and ran through that book and In the Shadow of the Poorhouse.

A second aspect of Katz's social welfare work related to his intellectual style. Michael delighted in turning the conventional wisdom on its head. Irony, contradictions, and the gap between what people said and what they did were his stock in trade. In particular, he was suspicious of reformers. Well before conservatives used welfare "reform" and Social Security "reform" as cover for...