Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
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Investigators, however, caution that it is difficult to disentangle fully the separate effects of policy and economic changes, especially since reform was implemented during a period of great economic prosperity.29 Also, despite welfare reform’s goals of decreasing the nonmarital fertility rate and increasing marriage, analysts have found reform to have virtually no effect on marriage and childbearing patterns.30 Even so, early studies celebrated what seemed to some like enormous positive effects of reform or, to those more skeptical, at least much less disastrous effects than originally predicted.31
These findings at first seem to throw into question the validity of my assertion in the Introduction that the struggles of the women I interviewed after welfare reform do not look very different from those I interviewed before reform. Adding to the confusion, I am not the only one to make this assertion. Other investigators similarly find that reform did not change the qualitative nature of life for low-income mothers. In her book Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform, Sharon Hays asserts that reform did not help the women she interviewed because of its contradictory messages. She argues that it simultaneously urged mothers to follow “the Work Plan,” which promotes single-minded independence, and “the Family Plan,” which encourages marriage and commitment to others. Hays concludes that following both at once is nearly impossible and that her respondents were consequently unable to succeed or benefit from reform’s initial promise.32
In American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare, New York Times journalist Jason DeParle suggests that welfare recipients are too busy trying to keep their heads above water either to pay attention to welfare policy or to feel any impact of it. As Angie, one of his three main informants, told him when asked about welfare reform, “I don’t pay no attention to that crap!” DeParle goes on to write, “With welfare or without it, Angie said, ‘you just learn how to survive.’”33
While the initial quantitative evaluations of welfare reform showed great promise for the effectiveness of the policy and improved outcomes for low-income families, later work began to question how far-reaching and long-lasting these effects would be. These later quantitative studies are more in line with the results that Hays, DeParle, and I discuss.34
For example, one study questioned the standard practice in early studies of focusing on average effects.35 Results based on what happened to families on average mask variation across families and thus hide the fact that some families may not be helped by reform and may actually be hurt by it. To address this problem, analysts investigating a Connecticut reform program examined effects separately for welfare recipients in the top half of the income distribution (among program participants) and those in the bottom half of the income distribution. They discovered opposite effects of reform measures for the two sets of recipients.36 While the relatively advantaged recipients experienced earnings gains as a result of reform, the more disadvantaged women experienced no earnings gains and often even had earnings losses. These findings suggest that many current and former welfare recipients may not be sharing in any of reform’s potential benefits and may instead even be financially suffering as a result of reform.
Another study showed that while reform might have reduced poverty rates, it did not actually change low-income mothers’ standard of living or lower their levels of hardship.37 Between 1997 (the year reform was implemented) and 2003 (the year before I conducted my second round of interviews), low-income single mothers were no more likely to obtain health insurance coverage or establish their own households than before. They were also no less likely to worry that they would run out of food by the end of the month or to have a child go hungry for an entire day in the previous twelve months. In other words, while officially their rates of poverty might have gone down, their standard of living remained the same. The study authors explain that going to work probably raised the women’s incomes but that employment entailed work expenses. The increase in their incomes was spent on transportation, child care, and uniforms, leaving no money to actually make life easier. Since work expenses are not calculated in determining the federal poverty line, increased work hours and income translate into lowered poverty even if employment entails expenses that actually mean lower discretionary income for a family.38 No wonder my post-reform respondents described the same struggles as the women I interviewed before reform.
Additionally, studies found that as the years wore on, those who left the welfare rolls began to experience less positive outcomes than those who had left shortly after the implementation of welfare reform.39 This was so in part because the most employable recipients left the rolls early (or chose not to apply for welfare in the first place given the new requirements), leaving behind those less likely to do well. One clear indication that the welfare rolls are increasingly filled with families with more problems is that the number of families on welfare with active involvement with child welfare services has increased significantly since welfare reform.40
The increasingly less optimistic findings on reform’s effects are also due to the fact that the robust economy of the late 1990s gave way to a recession in the early 2000s.41 It is too early for a complete analysis of the much more dramatic “Great Recession” that began in 2008, but it undoubtedly has eroded the well-being of families who leave or decline to take up welfare, and it threatens to drive poverty rates to their highest levels since the 1960s.
Today’s low-income families also face an environment of budget cuts to a variety of programs from which they might receive support. Since welfare reform ended the federal entitlement to cash assistance, state governments are free to make cuts to their TANF programs. Many in fact are taking money from their TANF budgets to fill other budgetary needs.42 Mary Jo Bane, who, as noted above, resigned from the Clinton administration in protest of the version of reform that was passed, writes scathingly in a 2012 article of the damage welfare reform did to the safety net that the poor need in recessionary times.43 She cites that between 2007 and 2011 the number of children in poverty went up by three million, but the number of children receiving cash assistance through TANF went up only by half a million. In 2010, this meant that of the 16.4 million children in poverty only 3.2 million were being served by the cash assistance program meant to address “needy families” in times of economic crisis. She concludes, “I continue to believe that the moral measure of a society is the way it cares for its poor and vulnerable. By that measure, we should all be ashamed.”44
The later quantitative findings are sobering. Welfare reform coincided with a dramatic decline in the caseload (70 percent between 1994, when the rolls started to decline, and 2008),45 but how long term and how far-reaching any actual improvements are in low-income families’ lives is much less clear. The studies I have discussed provide evidence that many families have not seen positive changes as a result of reform and some have seen negative ones. There are multiple reasons for why that would be so, including the declining economy and a host of barriers low-income mothers face in successfully transitioning to work. This book argues that an additional important, yet mostly overlooked, reason is that welfare reform ignored the sources of distrust in low-income women’s lives and hence was not able to overcome distrust’s effects.
WHY TRUST AND DISTRUST MATTER
The more mothers like Bethany Grant and Susan Schiller trust others with whom they interact (their “interaction partners”), the more willing they are to take risks like responding to welfare policy’s employment incentives, taking a job, leaving their children with a child care provider, marrying their romantic partners, involving their children’s fathers in their children’s lives, and relying on network members for help. The more they distrust their interaction partners, the more hesitant they are to take such risks.46
In this way, they must make choices about trust in the face of risk, as did the diamond merchants in James Coleman’s classic article on social capital.47 For the diamond merchants it was an efficient business practice to allow other merchants interested in buying their goods to take stones home to examine them. It saved time compared to having to conduct all such examinations in person. However, this practice risked the possibility that the diamonds would be stolen. The diamond merchants that Coleman describes trusted other merchants not to steal because they all came from the same, tightly knit ethnic