by Tom Corbett
Did everyone jump on the bandwagon? No, not really. The official poverty measure is still with us and remains the standard for most policy and resource allocation purposes. At the same time, experts are now agreed on a set of alternative measures that are in wide use. They are routinely published by government agencies and are the preferred measures for analytic and scholarly uses. Some in the press are also cognizant of the new measures often using them in more serious pieces on the topic.
The poverty measure debate is emblematic of the paralysis that has consumed Washington. If people associated with one side of the normative and ideological debate suggest a change, the other side feels compelled to oppose it. It does not matter how reasonable the suggested change might be or how obvious is the need for change. There must be some political advantage somewhere even if it were not apparent. Obamacare was a concept first developed at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and implemented in Massachusetts by the governor who later would be the Republican candidate for president. When a Democratic president embraced it, suddenly it was evil incarnate spawned in Lucifer’s lair. The political paralysis was never more apparent than after 2008 and Obama’a election. Republicans in Congress entered a pact to stonewall anything the new President did even if it would clearly benefit the country. Seizing power back took precedent over everything else.
In our earlier poverty measure debate it was never clear who would win and who would lose overall. A higher poverty threshold would lead to greater number of the poor, advantage liberals. Including excluded sources of income in the calculation of resources would result in lower poverty numbers, advantage conservatives. Of course, including in kind benefits in the calculation of resources might show a sharper drop in poverty from pre-transfer estimates to post-transfer estimates. This could advantage either side depending on how one views the world. Liberals might argue that the safety net works and should be further expanded. Conservatives might argue that the safety net works so well now that no further expansion is needed, maybe now we could even cut the net back a bit to give another tax break to the Koch brothers. As that old song says, the beat goes on.
Did we fail? This is hard to say. In doing policy, particularly those involving wicked social issues, there are few hard and fast victories. Failure can be equally elusive. Even debacles that appear definitive and irreversible don’t always last. Still, I suspect we did have a substantive impact over the long haul.
I recall one large conference on the poverty measure topic that we scheduled to be at IRP, not in D.C. Washington insiders from Census and Labor Statistics and other such technical agencies arrived the night before and joined us for dinner at a local restaurant. At one point, I apologized for dragging them all out to Mad City (Madison’s unofficial nickname), suggesting that they all could have gathered in D.C. with greater ease. One of them responded, “No, we couldn’t. The truth is that it is not easy for us to meet in Washington. We would have to get permission from people higher up if there was a hint that policy decisions were being discussed. Then, all kinds of turf and politics would intrude. But we can get permission to attend an IRP sponsored meeting. That is safe. People assume we are merely discussing technical matters that no one cares about except us nerds, and that is seen as appropriate. This is a godsend for us.” I spent enough time in D.C. to know better, but their plight never quite occurred to me before. I suspect my year there was a special time when the urgency of welfare reform overrode traditional turf concerns, at least for a while.
Again, we had prodded and pushed and nudged and got people together to exchange ideas and thereby motivate further progress. In the end, the world did move a little and that is a good thing. If we played a small role, so much the better! I do know that Mike Laracy gave a talk at IRP a while back. I was not there but colleagues told me that he mentioned that one of his first grants at the Casey Foundation was to IRP and Tom Corbett on the poverty measure issue. That gave me solace. He apparently did not see our work as a waste of the foundation’s money to be deep sixed in the archive of pitiful foundation grants.
The third act in this drama involves my participation on an expert panel created to look at how we should evaluate national welfare reform. The panel, the resources for which were provided by ASPE, was created under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. Apparently, ASPE officials agreed that welfare reform was altering public assistance in such dramatic ways that new and creative thinking was required when we tried to assess what was happening.
Connie Citro from the NAS staff called and asked if I would be willing to serve. I did not even have to say, “I will call you back.” Make no mistake, I was sure she meant to call some other Tom Corbett, but this promised to be fun, so I immediately took advantage of her error. I had been ruminating over these matters for some time during that period and this would give me an opportunity to muck things up on a larger scale, perhaps even bringing some prestigious co-conspirators into my nefarious web. And who knows, perhaps some of my tinkering on these evaluation questions described below had led to the creation of the panel in the first place. In any case, I dove right in not even bothering to see if there was water at the bottom of the pool.
The connection between science and the federal government, as represented by the National Academy of Sciences, goes back to the Civil War period. As iron clad vessels began to replace the traditional wooden ships, the ship captains discovered that their compasses were rather useless. It might strike you that this is not a good situation when people are shooting at you. The newly installed metal sides apparently impeded the compass needle from accurately seeking out the magnetic north pole. This surely would be a variable I would have to consider in estimating the length of the captain’s lunch break, my old algebra nemesis. In any case, Abraham Lincoln asked some leading scientists to figure out what to do about this dilemma, and they did. The president was happy. The union boat captains were happy. The confederacy, however, was not so pleased.
The full title of our group was the “Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs.” It was to be chaired by Robert Moffitt (Johns Hopkins) and staffed by Michele Ver Ploeg (NAS). The other members were John Adams (Rand), John Czajka (Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.), Kathryn Edin (then from Northwestern), Irwin Garfinkel (Columbia), Robert Goerge (U. of Chicago), Eric Hanushek (Hoover Institute and Stanford), V. Joseph Hotz (UCLA), Richard Kulka (Research Triangle Institute), Rebecca Maynard (U. of Pennsylvania), Susanne Randolph (U. of Maryland), and Werner Schink (former head of welfare research for the state of California).
NAS panels are selected for balance in terms of politics, perspective, and approach to the subject matter. I could sense the rationale behind some of these selections. Adams, Kulka, and Goerge were big data guys. Edin was an ethnographer. Maynard and Czajka were program evaluators. Moffitt, Garfinkel, and Hotz were skilled economists with considerable program and policy knowledge. Hanushek came out of education and was considered an excellent analytical guy with conservative credentials, and so forth. I suspect I was selected for comic relief.
We were vetted carefully and had to fill out exhaustive questionnaires. Most of the details now escape me but I do recall queries about the sources of research support and current and prior professional affiliations. I recall thinking that I hope they don’t chat with Tommy Thompson. If they had, my tenure on the panel would be short-lived indeed. In addition, no one apparently thought to mention that I undoubtedly had a file deep in an FBI vault somewhere due to my anti-war activities during my college days. Nor did anyone think to check with my high school algebra teacher. I recall writing on one algebra test the words veni, vidi, flunki. This was Latin for I came, I saw, I flunked, which paraphrased Caesar’s summation upon his conquest of Gaul. The teacher of the class scrawled a one-word response across my exam paper: almost.
I was also told they wanted people who would be able to get along with one another. You spend a lot of time together, d
ealing with tough issues from varying perspectives. Arrogant loners or rank egotists could cause no end of problems. Eliminating academics with those negative attributes immediately pares down the list of available candidates enormously. No wonder I made the cut, getting along with people must have been my strength. I did get along with people, other than my governor, of course. Besides, I had no ego left by this point in my life. I had nothing to be arrogant about. That had to be the reason I was selected.
In any case, there was a real need for the panel. Cash welfare had been transformed by the passage of PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) in 1996. The legislation had several parts, but clearly the most important was turning cash welfare from an entitlement into a block grant. The big picture is this. States would now get to make the big decisions on how to run their programs. They would have a fixed amount of federal dollars to help families and children previously served by the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Obviously, all that freedom brings with it a certain amount of uncertainty.
Even before PRWORA, cash welfare was dissolving before our eyes. I wrote a piece for Focus in the mid-1990s that showed the growth of federally granted waivers over the previous decade or so. At the beginning of the period examined, only a few states had secured permission to change existing federal rules and regulations. Moreover, the changes granted were limited in scope. By the time of national reform some 80 percent of all states had secured at least one waiver and a few, like Wisconsin’s W-2, were turning welfare upside down through multiple waivers. I am reminded of the same-sex marriage issue in recent times. What had seemed like an impregnable wall against recognition of these marriages, once broken, suddenly permitted a torrent of change.
Today, it may be difficult to recall the angst brought about by the 1996 law. Obviously many rejoiced either for ideological reasons or a belief that TANF might possibly help these families better than the former cash welfare program. But many advocates for the poor were crushed, with some verging on hysteria. There were estimates of a million or more children suddenly being thrown into destitution. In Congress, some opponents such as Senator Moynihan painted apocalyptic visions of mothers and infants huddled by grates for warmth on winter nights. Dickensian visions of the worst catastrophes imaginable were featured in the press and other popular publications.
Foundations threw money at anyone who would document the impending disaster in some convincing or compelling way. Many so-called leavers studies were done where those exiting welfare were tracked for a while. Most indicated some hardship but nothing in the way of apocalyptic doom anticipated by some. Neither did these studies provide support for miraculous increases in work or family stability among low-income families with children. It was all rather ho-hum. Of course, we knew less about those who might have sought aid under the old regime but never bothered to apply under the new rules.
I did not join the chorus of doomsayers though I had concerns of course. The evidence from Wisconsin, which was ahead of the curve, left me somewhat sanguine about the consequences of wider reform. Besides, I had long been saying that AFDC was disappearing whether reform happened or not. To repeat my standard joke about welfare from my D.C. days, “We had better reform it before it disappears.” AFDC did nothing to provide recipients with anything close to an acceptable living standard, never mind lift families out of poverty. The program had been the object of such loathing in its last years that most did not mourn its passing for long. Many, however, did worry about what would happen in its absence if you see the distinction.
In any case, our role was to be scientists. As such, we were not to be sidetracked by trivial concerns like, for example, real people. I am being facetious here but only to a point. Our deliberations could not be influenced by any prior normative agendas we might hold as individuals and they were not in any obvious way. There is, however, a built-in bias into any deliberations within what I call the academy, as with any other group. Every group has a culture that shapes attitudes and behaviors.
The assembled group was very smart indeed. They were, however, for the most parts, eggheads or (as my good friend Karl Scholz often calls his econometrician colleagues) propeller-heads. They spent most of their time working with equations and data and talking to other propeller-heads who were equally fascinated with equations and data. Even Werner Schink, the genial evaluator from California state government, was ensconced in the safe cocoon of Sacramento. Okay, Kathy Edin did talk to poor women on occasion; and Becca Maynard had been out in the real world from time to time, but she was now mostly in the academy. As the deliberations went on, I was struck by one uncomfortable fact. My very smart colleagues knew little about the real world or the rapid changes taking place there.
Why is this important? Well, a key to doing research is getting the question right. If you fail at that, you cannot later be bailed out by fancy methods or whiz bang econometric tricks, at least not in most cases. I had been spending a lot of time in welfare and human service agencies throughout my career and would continue to do so until I hung up my policy shingle. A lot of that hands-on work in the later years was due to WELPAN along with my fascination with service integration. In truth, many of my projects had gotten me out into the world where I could see things up front and personal.
Whatever the reasons, I was talking to a lot of officials and workers who were doing reform daily. I was seeing what they were talking about, how they were seeing the world, what visions and goals were driving them on. I also went into what we called “lighthouse” sites to film what was happening both for WELPAN and a related Distance Learning project. This little sideline turned out to be serendipitous indeed. Why? When the panel started its deliberations, they still saw TANF essentially as a cash assistance program. Of course, they could see the federal changes in the law, the new freedoms given states, a new funding formula. But the real impact on what localities might do with newly acquired discretion had not fully revealed itself yet. Caseloads were falling but the dynamics at the operational level behind these trends were poorly understood. The videos would fill in that informational gap.
I was beginning to get some data at this time through WELPAN that would show just how transformative reform was in some places. Some 72 percent of AFDC dollars in the seven Midwest states had been going for cash assistance in the old welfare era. That proportion had fallen to less than one-third of expenditures in the post-reform era. In Wisconsin, it fell to something like 12 percent. The biggest expenditure item was now child care. In addition, significant sums were going for training and various human services to strengthen and stabilize families, ends long neglected in the cash-transfer era. The transformation shocked even the members of WELPAN who had their staffs put the numbers together. It was part of a thought I had that we could track the meaning of reform by “following the money.”
As I said, I had been thinking about these issues even before I was asked to be on the panel, thinking of related activities that might even have inspired the creation of the panel. I had started working with Barbara Blum (and with Bobbi Wolfe and others) on thinking through what changes would be needed within the evaluation community to accommodate the realities of a changing welfare world. The reform movement was emblematic of the change but perhaps the transformation went beyond PRWORA. Perhaps we were on the edge of a new era of social assistance. I will get back to that thought in a moment.
Would my fellow panel members believe me if I said they were missing the boat, that the welfare world had changed beyond what the academy had observed? Probably not! I have an honest face but still. I had a plan, though. Have I said I love plans before now? If I could get the panel to view some of these interviews I had taped during my numerous site visits, perhaps they would get a glimpse of the larger picture of what I believed was happening out there. Perhaps they would believe those doing reform even if they thought I was full of bull-hockey.
“Hey, guys,” I suggested, “want to see some movies? No, they
are G-rated, sorry to disappoint you Becca.” I did take some expected grief about who would bring the popcorn, and whether there would be a cartoon along with the main feature and so forth. Despite the ribbing and perhaps skepticism, I did show the videos at the next meeting. I looked around, they were watching. Eric Hanushek told me later he learned more from the videos than from anything else on the panel. And I do believe the tone of the dialogue changed after that. Frankly, I am certain it did.
The eventual report issued by the panel was titled Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition: A Report of the National Research Council. The report was long and technical, a real snoozer as most such reports are. But the main points were on the mark as I saw them. Very simply put, it argued that we had to broaden the populations of interest to virtually all the low-income population with children. Beyond the leavers who were getting a lot of attention, we needed more focus on families yet receiving benefits and those not on assistance because they were diverted, rejected, or discouraged from applying. Families with special needs—physical and mental—constitute the core of the hard to serve population and deserve special attention. These are the FUBARS I worried about while at ASPE.
The report also called for an expansion of the outcomes of interest. The motivation here is that different stakeholders (national or state legislators, administrative officials, specific interest groups drawn from distinct segments on the ideological spectrum, and so forth) will focus on different ends for welfare reform: increasing work and self-sufficiency, reducing out-of-wedlock births, promoting marriage and family stability, improving the general well-being of families and children, and spurring programmatic innovation by giving locals more control. The report then went on to enumerate several domains within which specific dependent variables were described.
