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The Key to Success Is the Neighborhood
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20721 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
3,545 Words |
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An Interview With Robert L. Woodson
Robert L. Woodson is president of the National Center for
Neighborhood Enterpriseand chairman of the Council for a Back
Economic Agenda. His most recent publication is On the Road to
Economic Freedom : An Agenda for Black Progress. |
The World & I: What is your overall assessment of this country's social-welfare program?
Robert L. Woodson: It's been a colossal failure. The overall thrust toward poor people has been successful in some limited areas, but it's been like feeding the birds by feeding the elephants.
W&I: Where did we go wrong?
Woodson: Things worked best when, in the thirty years from the thirties to the sixties, we transferred cash directly to individuals, without a lot of overhead and without providing a lot of services to people. Then Lyndon Johnson started the Great Society, and there was a twenty five-fold increase in the amount of money that we spent on social services from the sixties to the present day, but what we did was take cash and translate it into services. Thus, a whole service industry was born, with a proliferation of schools of social work, all kinds of abstract master's degrees, all of this foolishness.
As a result, the United Way and the government and corporations and foundations began to invest in the service industry as a principal means to help the poor, so that now seventy cents of every dollar goes to the industry; only thirty cents goes to the poor people themselves.
There are perverse incentives to maintain poverty because we have a whole industry built on the backs of poor people; they ask not which problems are solvable but what's fundable.
W&I: Some critics claim that we've never really been serious about these persistent problems and never spent enough money on them, and that a just society is one that takes care of those who are in need. What about that?
Woodson: The question is, what have we gotten for what we spent? What is the relationship between expenditures and outcomes?
If we keep spending money on a football team and they keep losing games, would we say it's because we're not spending enough? Suppose we double the expenditure and they continue to lose? Would we then say, well, we're not spending enough?
That argument has been used to continue to proliferate and expand the welfare bureaucracy without any reference to
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