There are many things we tell people on welfare to do that we don’t actually make very easy for them to do. It belongs with the others I have been writing about:
Get a job. Get some training. Save some money. Get help from your family. Find someone to share the rent with. Travel if that is what ordinary family life or opportunity requires.
These are all perfectly normal things for the rest of us to do. In fact, they are mostly things we associate with becoming more independent.
But there is another one that I think goes even deeper.
Relying on other people.
We don’t usually say that one out loud. In fact, welfare programs tend to say almost exactly the opposite. Their great objective is “self-reliance.” The person on welfare is supposed to become independent, and independence has somehow come to mean doing things on your own.
There is only one problem. Almost nobody who is successful does that.
Angela Duckworth, the psychologist who became famous for her work on “grit,” has just written an interesting piece in the New York Times called I Study Successful People. They Have One Habit in Common.
You might expect the answer to be grit. It isn’t.
It is getting help.
Duckworth says that every high performer she has studied credits other people with helping them succeed. Students who ask for assistance tend to do better than those who don’t. Entrepreneurs do better when they learn from other entrepreneurs. Successful people have assistants, colleagues, advisers, mentors, friends and family members whom they rely on.
This should not be surprising. Look at almost anyone you know who is doing reasonably well.
They heard about a job from somebody. Their parents helped them out at some point. Somebody looked after the children. A spouse paid more of the bills while the other went back to school. A friend knew somebody who knew somebody. Somebody lent them money. Somebody gave them advice. Somebody talked them out of doing something stupid.
We call that networking. Or family. Or friendship. Or mentoring. Or social capital.
We certainly don’t call it dependence. But put someone on welfare and things get turned around.
Now the questions can become: Who gave you that money? Who is paying for that? Who lives with you? What exactly is your relationship with that person? Are you sharing expenses? Was that money a gift? Is somebody supporting you?
Things that are evidence of a good support network in middle-class life can become matters of administrative interest when you are poor.
I wrote about this 10 years ago in a Metcalf Foundation series called Solitary Confinement. What bothered me then still bothers me now. Welfare is overwhelmingly organized around individuals. Individual files. Individual caseworkers. Individual employment plans. Individual responsibility. Individual self-reliance.
But people don’t actually live that way.
I remember thinking about several women on Ontario Works who had different abilities and different needs. One needed child care. Someone else was good at looking after children. Someone needed transportation. Someone else might be able to provide it. Why couldn’t the employment plan be about what they could accomplish together rather than what each one was supposed to accomplish alone?
There was an even better example involving six men who between them knew about farming, baking, import-export and computers. Look at them separately and you had six welfare recipients, each with an employment problem. Put them together and you could see the makings of an Afghan bakery.
That is a very different way of looking at people.
And it raises a question I don’t think we ask nearly enough.
How much more capable would people on welfare be if we allowed them to be capable together?
Take four people on Ontario Works. One is a good cook. One has a driver’s licence and an old car. One is good with numbers. One knows computers.
The welfare system sees four separate cases.
But perhaps there is only one problem: none of the four has enough resources individually.
Together they have a car, transportation, bookkeeping, computer skills and somebody who can cook. Maybe they won’t start a business. Most people don’t. But they can certainly help one another.
They can share the internet bill. They can buy groceries together. One can drive another to work. One can watch a child while another goes to an interview. The person who gets some temporary work this month can pick up a little more of the rent. Someone’s mother can send $300 when the car breaks down.
That is how people get through life.
And here is the odd part:
The further up the income scale you go, the more acceptable this becomes.
Nobody tells a successful businessperson that relying on an accountant demonstrates a failure of self-reliance. Nobody tells a CEO to fire the assistant and figure everything out personally. Entrepreneurs are actively encouraged to find partners. Governments finance business incubators so entrepreneurs can work beside other entrepreneurs. Duckworth points out that Y Combinator actually prefers co-founders and deliberately brings entrepreneurs together so they can exchange ideas and help one another.
Yet somehow at the bottom we have constructed a system around the heroic individual.
Get yourself a job. Get yourself trained. Get yourself off welfare.
Maybe we have the meaning of independence wrong. Independence doesn’t mean that nobody helps you. If it did, almost none of us would qualify.
Independence means having enough control over your life that you can make your own decisions. And one of the ways human beings acquire that control is by relying on other human beings.
This is where this seventh secret joins the other six.
The strange thing about welfare is that so many of the behaviours we associate with successfully entering or re-entering mainstream life can become problematic once you are receiving welfare.
Work. Train. Save. Accept family help. Share housing. Travel. Work with other people.
None of these things guarantees that someone will escape poverty. But they are the things people who aren’t poor routinely use to make their lives work.
I don’t think welfare administrations deliberately set out to stop people from cooperating. Most individual rules have an explanation. Government has to know what income someone has. It has to determine who is actually eligible. It has to prevent fraud. It has to administer public money properly.
The problem appears when we stand back from each individual rule and look at what all the rules add up to.
They add up to something resembling solitary confinement.
And I wonder what we have lost because of it.
What businesses didn’t get started? What jobs weren’t taken because two people couldn’t confidently share transportation? What training didn’t happen because informal child care couldn’t be arranged? What housing arrangements weren’t made? What skills never got combined? What little pools of capital never accumulated?
We don’t know.
That may be the most interesting part of the question. We have spent decades studying what welfare recipients lack. We have spent much less time asking what they might be able to create if they could safely combine what they already have.
Perhaps that is where welfare reform should start.
Instead of always asking, “What does this person have that should reduce their welfare?”, ask another question:
“What is this person building that might eventually mean they don’t need welfare?”
Sometimes the answer will be a job. Sometimes training. Sometimes savings.
And sometimes it will be other people. Angela Duckworth has discovered something successful people apparently know very well.
People get ahead with help.
Why have we designed welfare as though poor people should be the exception?