the poverty of social scientific culture

According to the New York Times, the cultural explanation of poverty (i.e., the “culture of poverty”) is back in. The Times confirms this fact with a quote from an essay by Mario Small, David Harding and Michèle Lamont: ‘“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,’ the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.” Searching the globe for further confirmation, we are informed, based on the golden chestnut of the censorship imposed by “political correctness,” that: “We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.’ We are then offered a presumably un-PC and deeply thought definition of culture: “‘Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as ‘shared understandings.’” Best understood: but for whom, social scientists?

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The problem is these particular scholars of poverty (excluding Lamont) don't know what "culture" is from a scientific point of view, aren’t “current” with the ways contemporary scholarship on culture has developed, and end up reproducing folk knowledge derived from a folk category (as Bourdieu might say) rather than anything approximating social scientific knowledge. What’s equally ridiculous is that complaints about “the poor” have been couched in moral terms since the 17th century: they drink too much, fuck too much, have too many babies, are godless, and so on. The same moralistic language was behind the “welfare reform” of 1996, which presumably “ended the welfare state as we know it” (Bill Clinton's goal). The aim of that legislation was to “reduce illegitimacy.” People didn't wait for Rob Sampson, or Saint Daniel Moynihan and the benighted Oscar Lewis (who actually emphasizes social structure), to produce a cultural explanation of poverty. Meanwhile a "full employment policy" that was in discussion during the 1940s never got off the ground because, well, gubmint shouldn't compete with the free market. Oh well: maybe those politicos and their social scientific epigones are the ones with an impoverished culture of civic duty, not to mention a culture of intellectual poverty.