Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.–Oscar Wilde

It’s been a couple of weeks, so first a brief recap: in the first entry, I looked the recent article on Salon about “hipsters” using food stamps to purchase luxury foods, which was maddeningly imprecise about the employment and financial circumstances of newly-qualified food stamp recipients and what they’re actually buying, as opposed to merely sauntering past. Relying almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence and rumor, the original article seemed designed primarily to build on popular stereotypes about “hipsters” and elicit outrage about this potentially-apocryphal trend in food stamp use.

In less than a week, the article attracted nearly 500 comments (Salon closed it down at 473). I didn’t read all of them, partially because a few themes emerge pretty quickly and they all start to sound the same. Here are the primary camps:

1. Outraged sheeple—a lot of people were completely sold on the veracity of the trend and responded exactly the way the article primes them to, i.e. how dare people who receive food stamps shop at Whole Foods, purchase gourmet or exotic ingredients, or ever buy anything more expensive or pleasurable than the bare minimum required to ensure their survival. This camp is split between people who object only to food stamps being spent on non-“essential” foods and people who apparently believe that people receiving public assistance should not be able to purchase anything that might be construed as a “luxury,” even with their own money.

2. Better than Doritos—another group of people who believed the story thought it was a good thing, at least as long the food they’re eating is healthier. This was frequently accompanied by the suggestion that eating “better” food would prevent them from getting fat and becoming a drain on the health care system. Virtually no one defended the purchase of “premium” foods on the grounds that they might be more pleasurable than whatever kind of gruel or cabbage soup might be the cheapest way to fulfill your nutritional needs.

3. Critics of the article and the sheeple—a number of people brought up the work requirement for food stamps (which has been temporarily lifted in most states by the emergency relief act). Others noted that people qualify for some set monthly allotment of food stamps so it’s not like they get more assistance if they choose to purchase expensive things. This was often expressed as a hope that this article or the idea of hipsters taking unfair advantage of the public food assistance wouldn’t be used as political leverage against food stamp programs or welfare in general.

4. Critics of welfare qua welfare—a lot of people who commented on the article seemed less concerned about what people are buying with food stamps than the fact that anyone who might be described as a “hipster” would qualify in the first place: 

My issue lies with the fact that young, healthy, educated people are receiving government assistance in the first place. Rather than sully their precious hipster cred with some dreaded, uncool job such as waiting tables or manning the counter at Borders, these spoiled, art-damaged infants decide to go on food stamps. –SadieG

I belong to the third camp, which is basically what the first entry covered. I’ll look at the first two responses in more depth some other time. In this entry, I look at the misconceptions and anxieties expressed by this last group of comments and explain why some people find the idea of educated, young people being the recipients of food stamps—whether they’re using them to buy ramen or rabbit—so very infuriating.

Choosing to Be Poor

One of the main factors in this flavor of outrage is the mistaken assumption I discussed in the first entry that people have to be unemployed to receive food stamps. What seems to rankle the welfare critics is their belief that that young, able-bodied, educated people must be unemployed by choice and thus responsible for their poverty. SadieG was far from alone on this:

These are able-bodied 20/30-somethings with education. Granted, the job market is extremely weak but I have a hard time believing these people truly exhausted their options. Did they look into fast-food, janitorial services, retail? Those types of jobs have lots of turnover, so there's almost always something available. Did they look into picking up a trade? I would say the chances are No - these type of jobs don't fit into their self-image as an artist or whatever. So, even though this is a situation of their own making - they're expecting the government to subsidize their lifestyle. And its all being paid for by people who actually bite the bullet and work at jobs they don't necessarily love do what they do in order to support themselves and their families and not be a burden to society. Yeah, its pretty appalling. –CBFE

I don't like that food stamps and unemployment are so readily handed out to people who are arguably unemployed or underemployed by choice for years at a time. –ohthatkate

It amazes me that people can insist on saying they would never do anything they consider "beneath" them, that is never some kind of job that is not "art related", and therefore status-y, but still have no problem taking charity handouts. These people need to either find a way to make a living or face reality. –Luccianna

Maybe a degree in post feminist analysis of Sumerian Temple Prostitutes wasn't such a wise choice after all. —Senator Neptune

The author of the original article didn’t actually specify whether the people she interviewed were unemployed, and none of the people she interviewed said anything about refusing jobs that were “beneath them.” However, her anecdotes certainly implied that this trend was largely driven by unemployed artists and people with humanities degrees. For many readers, the anecdotes clearly spoke louder than the dismal unemployment statistics she mentions or the fact taking a low-wage job you might be overqualified for wouldn’t actually disqualify you from receiving food stamps.

As the original article notes, unemployment rose by 176% between 2006 and 2009 for college-educated people between the ages of 20 and 24. The biggest caveat attached to the recent economic “recovery” has been the persisting unemployment disproportionately affecting young people. Increasingly, even for people with college degrees, unemployment or underemployment isn’t a choice right now.  

But even setting the reality of the job market aside, let’s take this brand of outrage to its logical conclusion: if it’s wrong for people with college degrees (or certain kinds of college degrees) to get food stamps, then presumably, that should be added to the list of disqualifying factors. In light of the specific ire directed at the arts and humanities, the exclusion could be limited to graduates with degrees in the actual analog of Senator Neptune’s “post feminist analysis of Sumerian Temple Prostitutes.” It wouldn’t even be difficult to enforce—I’m sure the administrators of the program could check for applicants’ degree history just as easily as they can verify that senior citizens in the program have no more than $2,000 in assets, and there wouldn’t even need to be a debate about what counts—states could just use the CIP codes for the “humanities” assigned by the U.S. government.

Based on that system, a low-income college graduate who majored in something like math, astronomy, or sociology could still get supplementary nutritional assistance, but one who majored in history, linguistics, or philosophy would be out of luck. Would that really make any more sense or better fulfill the goals of the Food Stamp program? Are people who study art history and end up working minimum wage jobs any more culpable for their poverty than sociology majors? Should the government really deny assistance to people with the naïveté or gumption to major in poetry writing, but extend benefits to journalism majors who chose to ignore the fact that the profession they were training for was in the middle of a precipitous decline?

Especially in the current economic climate, no one is guaranteed a job—let alone one that pays more than poverty wages—regardless of how much education they have and what kind. Aside from unfairly punishing people whose particular interests or talents might not have been well-served by one of the sciences or a pre-professional program, this kind of policy might well discourage people from finishing their degree if they don’t have guaranteed employment. College drop-outs would at least still have a safety net. It might also discourage students who don’t come from wealthy backgrounds from majoring in English or History.

The primary faulty assumption these comments seem to rely on is that if you have a degree, you should be able to get a job, and if you can’t, you have done something wrong—gotten the wrong degree, been unwilling to accept menial or low-paying work, failed to consider all your options, etc. And therefore, taxpayer dollars shouldn’t go towards making your life even marginally more tolerable.

The Meritocracy Myth

If white kids with educations - who should be entitled to the good life - end up on food stamps, that bodes ill for everyone. Clearly they must be cheating or bad people, because good people can avoid such problems.—softdog

People tend to attribute the especially fervent faith in meritocracy in the U.S. to the “Puritan work ethic” or the fact that from its founding, America was seen as a “land of opportunity” and mobility in contrast with class-bound Europe. Although opportunity has never been as universal as the American Dream suggests, the idea that hard work could get you farther in the U.S. wasn’t entirely a fiction for at least the first two centuries after the nation’s founding. According to Joseph Ferrie's analysis of U.S. and British census records from the 1850s through the 1920s, more than 80% of the sons of unskilled men born in the U.S. during that period moved to higher-paying, higher-status positions while fewer than 60% of the sons born in Britain did so. The economic prospects for non-white, female and immigrant Americans were considerably bleaker, but throughout much of the 20th C., intergenerational income mobility in the U.S. increased regardless of race, gender, or nation of birth.

Intergenerational  income mobility—or the chances of making more money than your parents—began to fall sharply in the early 1980s and have been declining ever since according to a 2008 study. Families have also become less likely to move out of their starting income quintile in recent decades—the panel study whose results are shown in the chart to the right found that between the 1970s and 1990s, the chances of a family moving up or down the income ladder decreased. As a result, contrary to popular belief, class structure in the United States in 2009 is less fluid than it is in countries like France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, and Canada.

Nevertheless, survey research suggests that the vast majority of Americans not only still believe in the possibility of mobility, that belief has actually increased even as mobility has declined. In 1983, only fifty-seven percent of respondents claimed to believe it was “possible to start out poor in this country, work hard, and become rich” and thirty-eight percent said it was “not possible.” In 2005, eighty percent  said they thought it was “possible to start out poor in this country, work hard, and become rich,” versus only nineteen percent who said it was not possible. And people are not only increasingly likely to believe that mobility is possible, they also tend to say that mobility is increasing rather than decreasing. The most popular response to a question in the 2005 survey about the “likelihood of moving up from one social class to another” now compared with 30 years ago was “greater” (forty percent).

What these statistics suggest is that the myth of meritocracy isn’t just some historical holdover from America’s Puritan roots—it’s an ideology that has become far more dominant in the last few decades. It’s also worth noting that the “rags to riches” stories associated with Horatio Alger emerged in the Gilded Age, another period of dramatic income inequality and relatively low mobility. Of course, there are lots of reasons why people might want to believe that hard work pays off and talent and effort are reliably rewarded in any era. It enables people to take credit for their success and represents a kind of basic fairness. But I think the reason faith in meritocracy increases as the prospects of mobility and job security decline is that it also offers a form of false but powerful reassurance that becomes more compelling in periods of insecurity and stagnation.

The myth of meritocracy makes people think that they can insulate themselves from failure or poverty by simply making the “right” choices. The more threatening those things get, the more people cling to the myth. To accept the alternative—that making the right choices can’t protect you and systemic instabilities make everyone vulnerable—means that no one is safe.

But of course, that’s the whole point of social welfare programs. No one is safe. Especially since the recent recession, when even many elite law school graduates have been unable to find jobs—or at least ones that will ever enable them to pay back their debt—it’s not just artists and the mythical majors in “post feminist analysis of Sumerian Temple Prostitutes” faced with lingering unemployment or underemployment. The idea that people choose to be poor because they can get food stamps or that food stamps represent some excessive government largess is, at best, willful ignorance.

Coming in part III, more thoughts on the various ways people in the first two camps are basically in the same camp—although they disagree about the details, they both want to impose their own ideas about how people should eat on the recipients of public assistance.