To the extent that deprivation is still in part
“structural”—that is, the product of larger economic and
institutional forces shaping labor markets, economic
opportunities, and the distribution of wealth—programs like
work-support and tax credits for the working poor are now the
instruments of choice. But decades of experience and study have
revealed that some poverty is rooted in behavior. And
programmatic attempts to improve performance have taught us that
understanding causes does not necessarily point the way to
effective solutions. Because behavior is hard for governments to
control, the study of poverty reveals the limits of the
government’s power and counsels a more modest approach to what
it can accomplish.In my response, here, I accept the value of
Wax's course, but make a case for a different, emphatically
historical approach to the topic: My goal is for students to
understand the origins and evolution of legal responses to
poverty in the United States and to thereby develop an
understanding of how