Poverty: the need for diverse, adaptive approaches

The Economist writes about US President Clinton's 1996 welfare reform package. Under the sub-head Blockheads:

Challenged to reduce the number of people receiving welfare, many states merely shifted people onto disability insurance instead, declared victory and sent the bill to Congress.... How might the reform be reformed? Most vitally, by concentrating attention and resources on those 1.5m families at the very bottom. Since this is the hardest group to reach, the federal government should use its money to encourage states to find new ways to help them. A patchy record at 20, the 'Economist', 20 August

Quite so. Clarity about aims is an essential and inescapable first step in implementing a Social Policy Bond regime. Unfortunately, policymakers under the current system can get away - or get rewarded for - with shifting people from 'receiving welfare' to receiving 'disability insurance'.

The article continues:

A useful model is “Race to the Top”, an education initiative from the Obama administration which rewards states that achieve improvements with extra money, in the hope that others will copy their success. There are plenty of policies worth experimenting with: expanding tax credits for those without children, extra government help with finding a job and even public make-work schemes. But this must be experimentation with the right purpose—helping the poorest into work rather than simply cutting welfare rolls.

True: the aim is not to cut the number of people on welfare. But I question whether raising the number of poor people in work is exactly what we want to achieve. I would think our over-arching goal is to eradicate poverty over a sustained period. Increasing employment among those currently poor may be one way of doing that, but we should not assume that it is the most efficient way. Nor the most compassionate: it's not difficult to think of people for whom employment would be less helpful than other interventions. For instance, a struggling single parent of several small children could benefit more from, for instance, help with childcare. Society as a whole would benefit more, in the long term, by improving the children's education and healthcare or their physical and social environment, or improving the parent's access to information about how best to nurture children. If parents were compelled to work, the benefits of a higher household income could be outweighed by the negative effects on the children.

As Barbara Ehrenreich put it:

The "working poor" ...  neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone. Source

Social Policy Bonds targeting poverty could encourage the exploration and implementation of whichever approaches would best suit the varied and ever-changing circumstances of a population. Every one of those 1.5 million worst-off families referred to in the first excerpt above will face different challenges. Employment will be a solution for some, but not all. Social Policy Bonds would motivate people to find the diverse, adapative solutions that extreme poverty and many other social and environmental problems require if they are to be solved, rather than merely disguised.