At last, I’m starting my next major project: Poverty: Who To Blame. As usual, my first step is assembling and reading several tall stacks of research.
One of these stacks is the “cultural of poverty” literature, and one of the classics of this literature is Hyman Rodman’s Lower-Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad (Oxford University Press, 1971). Rodman provides a detailed ethnography of impoverished Coconut Village (location name changed to protect subjects’ anonymity). While Rodman runs through numerous social angles, the most glaring feature of this subculture is extremely short-sighted sexual behavior. Courtships are brief, marriage is rare, breakups are common, cheating is endemic, and contraception almost unknown. As a result, few children grow up in homes with a reliable provider and a reliable caretaker. Kids can really only count on their mother’s support – if that.
One way a mother has of signifying paternity is through the assignment of the father’s title, or surname, to the child…
The reaction of the reputed father, however, is the most important factor, for, in effect, he holds the power of veto. If he is living [cohabitating] or married he has come to know his wife well and is probably convinced of her fidelity. If he is friending [casually sleeping with] with the girl, he has visited her at irregular intervals to see whether he could “bounce up” somebody else that she was seeing. If he is satisfied that the woman has not been friending with anyone else, and that the child is his own, he will ordinarily acknowledge the child and contribute to its support, for “who disown it, and know the child is yours, is wrong, is bad.”
There will also be some social pressure upon the man to support the child, particularly if the girl is known as a quiet, respectable girl who does not run around. But if there is any element of doubt in the man’s mind, he can disown the child and not contribute to its support, and these social pressures will not usually be able to force him to own his child. Moreover, even if he believes that the child is his own, if he does not want to support the child he will disown it, and usually with impunity, unless the girl should bring him to court for the maintenance of the child. [which very rarely happens, and does little good in any case]
The most arresting claim in Rodman’s work, however, is that sexual behavior in Coconut Village (and, he claims, similar subcultures around the world) is in fact socially functional:
There are many observers who are quick to focus upon illegitimate births, non-legal marriages, female-headed households, and deserting fathers as the major problems of the lower class… My own intention is to avoid a moral stance and to describe the situation as objectively as possible… Others terms with pejorative connotations are avoided (and new terms such as “marital-shifting” and “child-shifting” have been used) in order to prevent middle-class moral judgments from creeping in. The result, as the reader will see in the theoretical chapters, is that family patterns which are frequently referred to as problems of the lower class are perhaps better seem as cultural solutions of the lower class to other, more basic problems.
This seems like an awfully tall order. How on Earth is impulsive sexual behavior supposed to be a “cultural solution” for anyone – much less people in dire poverty? Rodman’s response is underwhelming:
The man’s role as worker-earning lies at the center of an explanation of lower-class family relationships in Trinidad. The man is expected to work and to earn for his family… Unfortunately, the lower-class man is involved in much unemployment, underemployment, poorly paid employment, and unskilled employment. Because of these handicaps in his occupational role he is frequently unable to fulfill his provider role…
The consequences for the man are particularly far-reaching when damage is done to him in this crucial joint role. He loses status, esteem, and income power, and this influences his position in the community and the family. He is held in low esteem by the members of his own family when he is unable to fulfill their expectations of him as a provider. As a result, he often seeks gratification and relationships outside his family. This may be a factor in explaining the strong peer relations that develop within the lower-class community. Male peers who are in similar circumstances are able to develop relationships through which it is possible to gain gratification. Similarly, in extramarital relationships a man may have sufficient resources available in order to provide adequately for another woman, if even only for a short period of time.
And that’s pretty much it! You might think that the difficulty of supporting a family would be a good reason to delay fatherhood, but no. To Rodman’s mind, it’s a good reason to spend resources your kids desperately need drinking with your buddies and courting new girlfriends. While many men will see the appeal, this hardly shows their behavior is a “cultural solution to basic problems of the lower class.” Above all, how could anyone imagine that this is a “cultural solution” for mothers or children?
Rodman closes Lower-Class Families with scorn for the straightforward interpretation of his own research:
It must be remembered that words like “promiscuity,” “illegitimacy,” and “desertion” are not part of the lower-class vocabulary, and that it is misleading to describe lower-class behavior in this way. These words have middle-class meanings, imply middle-class judgments, and should not be used to describe lower-class behavior – unless, of course, our intention is to judge this behavior in a middle-class manner in order to bolster a sagging middle-class ego.
Reply: The absence of these terms from “lower-class vocabulary” credibly explains why the people of Coconut Village are lower-class in the first place. If they adopted middle-class norms, they wouldn’t become rich overnight. But over time, delayed gratification would sharply raise their standard of living – especially for mothers and children. While Rodman inveighs against the “middle-class ego,” the root cause of the misery he describes is rather the inflated lower-class ego. In any walk of life, it is wisdom for less successful people to emulate more successful people. This is true in sports, games, school, jobs, and life itself. Only foolish pride says otherwise.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Dec 12 2018 at 3:36pm
I wonder what policy implications he draws from his study? Would some sort of wage subsidy with income being subject to court mandated child support have the effect over time of producing more responsible behavior?
Mark Z
Dec 12 2018 at 5:20pm
He seems to imply that something like court-ordered child support already existed on the books but merely wasn’t well-enforced.
In the US, child support can have adverse effects: it can incentivize non-custodial fatherhood for unmarried parents, since it’s difficult to work to support yourself and pay child support, while also being an active father. Ideally, there’d be a tradeoff: the more actively involved in parenting the father is, the less he should have to pay in child support. (well, IMO, ideally, compulsory child support shouldn’t exist, but that’s a digression)
Matthias Goergens
Dec 13 2018 at 10:41am
I guess in some ideal sense couples should negotiate these kinds of questions before they procreate and then be able to come to a binding agreement? (Even if the outcome of that negotation just amounts to, “let’s just go with whatever our society’s default rule is” in most cases.)
Mark Z
Dec 13 2018 at 1:00pm
This is my thinking. It’s fine for there to be a default contract for which consent is assumed (likely even necessary), but that could be subject to revision upon request before having children.
HH
Dec 12 2018 at 4:23pm
I do enjoy the exhortation not to look down on people that he linguistically places below us.
Hazel Meade
Dec 13 2018 at 9:54am
We need a new term for “lower classes”
Mark Z
Dec 13 2018 at 1:04pm
I think part of the issue is “poor people” or “lower income groups” can be insufficient. Graduate and professional students can be poor or ‘low income’ (I know from experience), but aren’t necessarily ‘lower class,’ as they likely will be marginally wealthier later on. One’s ‘class’ I think implies one’s long run situation more than any one current variable can.
An-arrgh-chy
Dec 12 2018 at 4:28pm
But what would Pete Leeson say about it?
Mark Z
Dec 12 2018 at 5:14pm
I’m inclined to contrast Rodman’s description of Trinidadians’ purported response to poverty with Thomas Sowell’s description of Italian immigrants to South America in his book Migrations and Cultures (if you haven’t read it it’s definitely worth reading for anyone interested in migration). Italian immigrants were often destitute when they arrived, but, for essentially ‘cultural’ reasons, they became renowned for their abnegation; they had extremely high savings rates, worked very hard, had low rates of promiscuity, and were very shortly disproportionately represented among business owners; within a couple generations they dominated entire sectors of urban economies in Argentina and Brazil and were disproportionately wealthy.
There are enough examples of differential economic outcomes between equally poor demographic groups to cast suspicion on the ‘poverty explains cultural dysfunction, not vice versa’ assumption, especially when the cultural dysfunction has obviously significant costs (which is why we call it a dysfunction).
Matthias Goergens
Dec 13 2018 at 10:38am
Isn’t that also often the fate of Chinese migrants?
Hazel Meade
Dec 13 2018 at 4:37pm
That’s interesting and somewhat ironic, because I have occasionally heard complaints that Italian communities in America remain relatively poor and this being attributed to their Catholicism, and/or less Northern European cultural (and implicitly genetic) ancestry.
It’s one of those wierd things that I had assumed nobody in the US cared about anymore that seems to have returned with the alt-right.
(Then again, I sort of have a theory that you can tell which commenters are Russian trolls by their strange adoption of ideas that seem bizarre from a modern American perspective – looking down on Southern European ethnicities might be one of those things. Americans pretty much think in terms of large groupings like Black vs. White vs. Asian and don’t parse differences between Italians and Germans so much. BTW I don’t think you’re a Russian troll, since you’re implicitly putting Italians in the “white” bucket here.)
Mark Z
Dec 13 2018 at 10:56pm
Most northern Europeans – especially if one includes the Irish – came over significantly before the Italians (the Irish mostly 1840-1880, the Germans 1860-1900, and the Italians 1880 to 1920, are roughly the periods of peak migration I think), and I’d expect 5th generation Americans to probably be slightly better off on average than 4th generation ones. And according to Angus Maddison’s statistics, Germany was significantly wealthier than Italy (and developing faster) by the late 19th century, so Italian immigrants were probably poorer and less educated than contemporary German immigrants at the outset. Argentina and Brazil were also poorer and less educated than the US, so Italian immigrants to the US also started out further away from the mean than Italian immigrants to South America.
E. Harding
Dec 12 2018 at 5:38pm
The “culture of poverty” (really, the culture whose only possible outcome is poverty) is in no way functional. It’s a product of instinct and short-sightedness. I know of what I speak.
Jay
Dec 12 2018 at 7:05pm
A culture can be dysfunctional from a capitalist, economic point of view (by never producing a surplus and using it to produce more wealth) and be entirely functional from a biological, Darwinian point of view (its people are effectively maximizing offspring and inclusive fitness). Capitalism is maybe 400 years old and evolution is closer to 4 billion, so I’m not sure they’re not the ones who are really taking the long view.
john hare
Dec 12 2018 at 8:27pm
It’s only functional from a biological standpoint if more responsible populations subsidize them. Societies of that nature left completely to their own devices, the four horsemen will ride. Overpopulation by the helpless can get ugly.
Jay
Dec 13 2018 at 6:33am
The four horsemen come and go. A successful evolutionary strategy gives you enough offspring that, when the horsemen recede, the population that’s left has more of your genes than the population you started from.
And yes, it is often ugly, but our value judgements matter very little in the long run.
John Hare
Dec 13 2018 at 12:56pm
Sometimes it happens that entire societies are wiped out. Then more babies are just more dead bodies. There must be functional elements in the society, or it must be supported by one that is functional. The historical record is not always kind to those that don’t think ahead.
Jay
Dec 13 2018 at 5:32pm
The historical record isn’t always kind to anyone. Hell, Jews are generally considered one of the smartest ethnic groups around, and they had a really bad few years a while back. When life is unpredictable, there are worse strategies than maximizing your offspring and hoping some survive.
Mark Z
Dec 13 2018 at 11:12pm
“When life is unpredictable, there are worse strategies than maximizing your offspring and hoping some survive.”
There are also potentially better ones. Humans supposedly adopted monogamy in large part because having two parents allowed us to ‘devote more time to development’ (biologically speaking) and improved the survival rates of our children. So having fewer children (by fewer mates, usually) and devoting more time and energy to them may increase the probability of passing on your genes.
Also, returning to John Hare’s original point, this is an evolutionary strategy whose success depends on some other people both refusing to choose this strategy and being altruistic toward those who do. In essence, it’s a parasitic strategy that depends on a population of willing hosts. It also thereby creates pressure for the hosts to change their behavior. If you have two communities, each where half the population is ‘responsible,’ the other half ‘irresponsible,’ but in each, the irresponsible people initially largely live off the largesse of the responsible one and are more likely to pass on their genes than the responsible ones, and in one community, this arrangement continues, while in the other, the responsible ones gradually stop supporting the irresponsible ones, who then starve, the latter community will tend to be more successful than the former.
This is because, again, the irresponsible strategy is essentially parasitic, and its success (leading to more irresponsible offspring growing up to be irresponsible adults) undermines its advantage by reducing the relative population of responsible people; i.e., it gradually kills off its host. Or if, we think about it less less in terms of biology (a far more dismal sciences than economics imo) and more in terms of culture and economics, the more people choose the irresponsible strategy in a society, the more burdensome the responsible strategy becomes, and the stronger the incentive to choose to be a parasite rather than a host becomes, once again, “killing off” the host population. So the population that deters ‘socially parasitic’ behavior will tend to be more successful.
Jay
Dec 14 2018 at 6:45pm
Re: Mark Z – That depends on the opportunities available on Coconut Island. If there are numerous opportunities for people to become doctors or aerospace engineers, then investment in one’s offspring may be a great idea. If most everybody gets by as a subsistence farmer or fisherman, then it’s likely that there’s very little reward for investing in one’s offspring. In such a case the “irresponsible” are likely to be about as productive as the “responsible” because small-scale farming and fishing don’t reward much education. The “irresponsible” then win by sheer numbers.
I don’t know anything much about Coconut Island, but if “irresponsible” fathers are becoming more common, then evolution is telling us something.
Mark Z
Dec 16 2018 at 7:48am
Jay,
“I don’t know anything much about Coconut Island, but if “irresponsible” fathers are becoming more common, then evolution is telling us something.”
A trait becoming more common isn’t proof of its fitness. Otherwise obestity must be fitness improving. And even if it is a marginal fitness improvement, local optima are not necessarily global optima. This may be a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ situation where the strategy that is in the interests of the individual Coconut Islander is ultimately to the detriment of the population.
Lastly, why should we care about what ‘evolution is telling us?’ Why should any polity have optimal evolutionary strategy as its policy goal?
Jay
Dec 16 2018 at 10:35am
A trait becoming more common isn’t proof of its fitness.
To the extent that a trait is genetic, becoming more common is exactly what fitness means in evolutionary theory. It doesn’t necessarily correspond to our idea of “good” traits. To use your example, genes for obesity exist because they have high inclusive fitness in certain environments (usually environments with long winters or food shortages; fat is a food storage adaptation).
Lastly, why should we care about what ‘evolution is telling us?’
The same reason we should care about what any other branch of science is telling us. We can often harness nature, but can never overcome it.
Mark Z
Dec 18 2018 at 6:43pm
A trait that leads to an expanding population is often very unfit in the long run, e.g. strains of parasites that are too aggressive and kill off their hosts. Every species or strain that went extinct while others survived was, at some point before its extinction, expanding.
And sure, we can harness nature, but to what end? Why, as a matter of policy, should a state or society seek to improve the evolutionary fitness of its population? Perhaps what they’re trying to optimize is material well-being of current members of their society? What’s the relevance of evolutionary fitness here? What if they choose a policy regime that reduces the population’s fitness? What objection can one make? They should choose to do what optimizes evolutionary fitness because… that’s what optimizes evolutionary fitness?
Jay
Dec 19 2018 at 6:05pm
Politicians shouldn’t try to promote evolution, any more than economists try to promote greed. Those things happen on their own; they’re natural parts of the human condition. Capitalism works by harnessing greed to useful ends; communism fails because it tries to overcome greed. We haven’t yet worked out how to make evolution work for us, but we probably should.
Salem
Dec 13 2018 at 5:03am
Sounds very much like the other half of Promises I Can Keep.
Jay
Dec 13 2018 at 6:38am
Kathryn Edin wrote another half of that book, called Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City. And yeah, it’s pretty much the same.
Matthias Goergens
Dec 13 2018 at 10:36am
More specifically, emulate how successful people became successful. Don’t necessarily emulate what they do now.
(That was an important message in the book ‘Just get out of the way’ about how developing economies should rather look for inspirations at regulations that now-rich countries had when they grew rich than the follies they can afford in the present.
Of course, inspiration doesn’t mean slavish emulation. Since you always have to take survivorship bias and different circumstances into account.)
Mark Z
Dec 13 2018 at 1:12pm
I think there’s also an ambiguity in what it means to imitate. One might observe that a growing fraction of middle and upper class people are having children out of wedlock, for example, and conclude that cohesive family structure is unimportant for success, but many of those middle and upper class people who eschew formal marriage while having kids are nonetheless ‘functionally married,’ just not officially; they also tend to be older, often well into their 30s, and already economically well-off. A working class couple having kids out of wedlock in their late teens is a hazardous way to ‘partially imitate’ what economically successful people do. (wealthier people can also afford to pay for full time day care and have other advantages that help offset the costs of accidental pregnancy).
James Oliver
Dec 13 2018 at 1:19pm
You’re tougher than me on those folks and I’m pretty tough.
One thing that I find interesting is that here in the USA you could build tiny homes/apartments that could be very cheap and affordable by the bottom 5 or 10% but people don’t and I assume that it is because the lowest income people here are unreliable payers. A bad effect of this is the low income folks who are reliable end up having to pay more for housing.
Also there is an immigration angle to this, people are quick to point out that Mexican and Central American immigration pushes down low skill labor wages, but I have a friend who used to live in the worst housing in my city and his neighbors where awful. For example one neighbor stole his car, but once I was driving him home and he pointed to some Mexican guys who had moved and he said he met them and they were good guys. It seems immigration lets low income Americans live around a higher class of people.
A Country Farmer
Dec 14 2018 at 1:28am
Perhaps the rigors of science inculcate too much self-doubt that so many academics fear the obvious.
LemmusLemmus
Dec 14 2018 at 1:37am
Along similar lines, see Wilson and Daly (scroll down):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2126620/pdf/9154035.pdf
Thesis: Where life is short, people’s time discounting is more extreme. The empirical analysis is unconvincing, but the hypothesis is interesting.
LessStarvingStudent
Dec 15 2018 at 4:38am
As someone who is no longer chronically poor but has experienced the constant mentality of “cherish the good moments while they last while simultaneously also needing to seize every opportunity”, I wonder if this study would have the psychology fall more in line with the English Cavalier poets of the 17th century: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” than just a base outline of poor impulse control.
I also wonder how readily available forms of birth control or family planning were during the 70’s. “Planning” in any of its forms can have a drastic affect on poverty rates.
How has this village’s poverty changed in the last 40 or so years?
Also, are/were there any similar poverty rates in America or Canada that could have been used for comparative analysis? Grandparents raising grandchildren has been quite common here in Canada in my limited experience.
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