
          A Walk on the Supply Side
          
            
              Katz, Michael B.Michael B. Katz
            
          
          Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, p. 6
          
          "One of the most enduring and indivious social categories is
'stranger.' We engage the world as a series of concentric circles
based on degrees of relation: family, friends, neighbors, community,
strangers. The composition of the circles shifts over time, but
strangers remain always on the outside. Not surprisingly, they are the
primary objects of a continuing debate about, to use Michael
Ignatieff's evocative phrase, the 'needs of strangers.' As in England,
colonial American poor laws were clear about the limits of social
obligation. Parents and children remained responsible for each other;
communities were to ease the suffering of their members. But the
public owed nothing to strangers, who were to be shunted back to their
community of origin.
          "Within cities, poor people have almost always remained
strangers. We pass their houses on a train or in a car; read about
them as individual cases; study them as abstract statistics; and
encounter them asking for help in public places. Most of the writing
about poor people, even by sympathetic observers, tells us that they
are different, truly strangers in our midst. Poor people think, feel,
and act in ways unlike middle-class Americans. Their poverty is to
some degree a matter of personal responsibility, and its alleviation
requires personal transformation, such as the acquisition of skills,
commitment to the work ethic, or the practice of chastity. This
"supply-side" view of poverty, often despite powerful evidence, has
coursed through American social thought for centuries."
          --from the introduction to The Undeserving Poor, by
Michael B. Katz (Pantheon Books, 1989).
        