If the “nudge” notion of government worked, it’d be pretty creepy:
If poor people did the stuff that middle class people do, it’s possible — maybe probable — that they wouldn’t be poor. But this is much harder than it sounds. As John Scalzi once memorably put it, “Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.” Which often means, he might have added, spending your whole life doing the sort of jobs that middle class people sometimes do when they’re 14. It isn’t that people can’t get out of this: they do it quite frequently. But in order to do so, you need the will and the skill — and the luck — to execute perfectly. There is no margin for error in the lives of the working poor.
And some problems are collective problems. It’s all very well to say that poor women shouldn’t have kids unless they can find a solid man to help raise them. (And I agree that this is a superior strategy). But men with solid jobs are rather scarce in many poor communities, not least because we’ve imprisoned so many of them. What you’re asking poor women to do is actually, for most of them, to not have babies. This is an easy edict to deliver from a comfortable middle class home where you have all the kids you want. It probably sounds pretty shitty, however, to the poor women who you are blithely commanding to spend their lives alone.
[. . .]
What I am struggling to say is that however much those choices are now inflected by what went before — and the problems of other people in their families and communities — they are choices. We understand that the middle class girl I grew up with is driving her situation by behavior that is probably not very amenable to outside influence. Why do we assume that people who grew up poor are somehow more pliable simply because similar choices are influenced by decades of generational poverty?
As adults they are the products of everything that has happened to them, and everything that they have done, but they are also now exercising free will. If you assume you know the choice they should make, and that there is some reliable way to entice them to make it, you’re imagining away their humanity, and replacing it with an automaton.
Having higher wage jobs available would give people more money which would be a good thing, and it would solve the sort of problems that stem from a simple lack of money. But it would not turn them into different people.
Public policy can modestly improve the incentives and choice sets that poor people face — and it should do those things. But it cannot remake people into something more to the liking of bourgeois taxpayers. And it would actually be pretty creepy if it could.
