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Welfare Concepts

Key concepts you should know

• Ascriptive and achieved status–Ascriptive status is what you are born with–gender, race, ethnicity, age, etc. Achieved status could be CEO, college graduate, GED certificate holder, student, teacher, parent, etc. Sounds simple, but obviously those born with certain privileges will have a much easier time going to the best colleges, finding work, making important contacts, etc. While social class is something we’re born into, there is some social mobility and some people do move up and down the social class ladder.
• Class–definitions of class can vary. For instance, Marx considered two classes–the owners of capital and land (bourgeois), and those who worked for them (proletariat). We often use loose terms like ‘middle,’ ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ that by proxy refer to income. But class is about more than just income, as people coming from different classes clearly have some general shared traits (in terms of values, use of language, work experience, educational background, etc.). I’m mainly interested in you understanding that social class makes a difference, and there is limited social mobility between classes.
• Poverty–It is both a concept and a process, with urban and rural dimensions. Poverty can be seen as absolute (that is, households making under a certain amount fall below poverty line) or relative (accounting for cost of living differences, or relative to other people in a society (meaning some would always be classified as ‘poor’ in any society, compared to the wealthiest, simply because of the difference between the wealthiest and ‘poorest’ in that society).
• Systemic racism–This refers to racism as a structural facet of society–in other words, it transcends individuals’ beliefs and values, and pervades most every institution–government, education, business, law enforcement and the courts, media, health care, community, etc. Racial minorities are prone to different treatment within these institutions, leading to worse outcomes. For instance, people of color are less likely to own homes, less likely to have jobs that provide insurance, more likely to suffer underlying health conditions, and more vulnerable to infection, sickness and death by a pandemic like Covid-19.
• Privilege–Majority groups in society often benefit from privileges that their members don’t really have to think about, that they may in fact feel they have earned. This does not mean that individuals take part in and perpetuate inequalities based on skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, culture, physical ability, etc. It does mean that those who belong to a majority group, whose members are less likely to have to think or worry about discrimination, may not understand what it means to be denied such privileges. It may also be easier to simply take a path of lesser resistance when these inequalities become apparent, because to do otherwise might involve social sanctions (e.g., a person whose friends are unsympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement and consider it violent and unpatriotic might be excluded from social gatherings).
• Human capital–economic capital may refer to money, machinery/equipment, etc.–factors of production. Natural capital might refer to natural resources–timber, minerals, water, etc. Human capital refers to skills that an individual acquires, for instance, you might be bilingual, know how to fix aircraft engines, use various software programs, be familiar with state bureaucracies, work well in small groups, write grants–these are all part of our skills sets, or human capital.
• Social capital–Social capital is sometimes thought of as a bank of ‘favors.’ For instance, you have a meeting after class about a term pproject (hint hint …), you need someone to help out with child care, it may be a relative, friend, etc. Your membership in the rotary club gives you access to business people that helps you figure out what the local business climate is, and make decisions. A support group is another example of social capital. In other words, as opposed to the personal skills you possess, social capital includes the ‘social’ assets that you can draw on.
• Social mobility–the ability to move from one stratum or class in society to another–it could be up, it could be down, it has more to do with mobility than direction. Not all societies provide easy means for achieving social mobility.
• Social inequality: unequal access to valued resources, services and positions–schools, for instance, or even decent voting machines, transportation services. As opposed to income inequality (which would basically be just measuring income differences).
• Social stratification–When inequality becomes rigid, hardened, institutionalized (severely limiting social mobility, for instance).
• Means-tested programs–these one must qualify for (there is a ‘means test’). Generally, these programs are more stigmatized than insurance programs (the concept of the able-bodied, ‘undeserving’).
• Social insurance programs–generally go to the ‘deserving’ population that has paid into them (unemployment, Social Security, Welfare). We really only talked about Social Security here.
• Welfare-a multi-dimensional concept–I’ll let you wrestle with this one.
• Block grant–fixed sum of money usually from the federal to the state government. Because it is not necessarily tied to need, block grants can provide surplus assistance (when income tax collection and the economy is good), or come up far short when the economy is in a downturn.
• Cash vs in-kind–Welfare programs may distribute cash (e.g., TANF), or they may provide in-kind services, which may take the form of cash for food (e.g., food stamps, farmers’ market vouchers, WIC), or other services (e.g., health care, child care, job training).
• Entitlement–generally refers to a welfare program that, if one qualifies, one is entitled to receive. Entitlement programs can be expensive and make budget planning difficult during difficult economic times. However, they offer the guarantee that if one qualifies, the services will be available. The 1996 Welfare Reform changed AFDC from an entitlement program to a block grant. ‘Entitlement’ is used by critics of the US welfare system in a perjorative way (equating them to ‘handouts’ or expensive government programs), however the concept of ‘entitlement’ more broadly considered applies to any social class (for instance, people in the grocery store who feel ‘entitled’ to tell someone using a SNAP card what he or she shouldn’t be buying with his money (tax revenue).
• Welfare reform–know what welfare reform tried to do; understand the rationale behind work and family values enforcement, what sanctioning means, the role of social control and the rules that govern the welfare reform law PRWORA