Education, Personal Responsibility, and the Fundamental Attribution Error

George Will argues that Democrats are making a mistake by framing the country's failing education system as a civil rights issue rather than a crisis of minority families. He's probably right that in this particular circumstance (an address by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan) the administration is taking a safer line with their base because critiquing the performance of families is politically difficult.

However, the President hasn't shied away from appropriating some of the conservative rhetoric on parents' personal responsibility, as for instance in his speech to the NAACP in July 2009. Additionally, he's been a big supporter of the Harlem Children's Zone which takes a comprehensive approach to improving the well-being of kids by giving everything from classes to families expecting children to mentorship and other forms of support once they enter school. This approach aligns more with a recognition that impoverished parents are less likely to create assets for their kids not because they lack the will but rather because they lack those assets themselves. Check out this short discussion between two professors regarding scarcity of time as a tax on the "mental bandwith" of single mothers. The political discourse of personal responsibility that Will dances around too often falls into the fundamental attribution error - assuming that a negative outcome is the result of an individual's personal failing alone rather than a product of circumstances. So many of our policy debates, domestic and foreign, would benefit from some more empathy - not sympathy, but the ability to put yourself in another's shoes and really understand their mental calculus.

Food Stamps Back in Fashion

According to the NYTs, “One in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children.” For at least six million Americans, food stamps are the only reported source of income. Food stamp enrollment is so high in part because food is a relatively low-controversy handout and in part because, although states administer the program, the federal government picks up the entire tab.

In the article, a Republican Congressman (not from Dalton, I checked) sang the old refrain: “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

An article that ran the day before the food stamps piece described rising homelessness among New York City’s population of mostly undocumented day laborers. (About 75% of day laborers nationally are undocumented workers.) These guys do not collect any entitlements. They will take any job. But they’ve stopped sending remittances, and they’ve started moving out onto the street. To me, that’s a testament to the current scarcity of jobs that resonates even more than the stark unemployment figures. In this (slumping and/or capitalist) economy, a portion of the population will be unable to support itself. That will include a large number of documented people who have no desire to live on the government dole.

I’ll conclude even more didactically. The degree and mechanisms of support a society offers to its most vulnerable, down-and-out citizens constitute decisions that involve calculations of both efficacy and ethics.