When trying to understand social problems, what they are, how to identify them and how to analyze and understand them, a very useful way of looking at the world is to distinguish between structural and individual lenses. For instance, many of us grow up learning, from a variety of sources, that poverty is a problem of individuals who lack motivation, don’t want to work, etc. It’s an individual’s problem. Framed in such a way, the solutions would tend toward addressing individuals and what they can do to make themselves “better.” Or at least punishing the ‘lazy’ (by reducing welfare benefits, making it harder to get them, etc.). In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed a welfare reform law, titled the ‘Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act’ (PRWORA). The name said it all. It increased work requirements for the poor to receive welfare, promoted publicly funded programs that encouraged marriage and abstinence, and set a five-year maximum time limit for receiving public assistance. A problem defined as individual leads to solutions demanding more from individuals.

PRWORA was not designed to reform the causes of poverty, but to reform welfare programs. The solutions offered suggest poverty is caused by a lack of marriage, lack of work ethic and immorality.

Beware of strangers offering such simple solutions to complex problems.

Let’s examine poverty from a more structural viewpoint. Wages have remained stagnant relative to cost-of-living increases (think housing, transportation costs, health care …). The federal minimum wage (now $7.25 / hr) is barely better when accounting for inflation than it was in the 1970s. Many of the well-paying manufacturing jobs of previous decades have been ‘outsourced’ to poor countries where people are willing to work for even .25/hr. Those well-paying jobs are replaced by low-wage jobs selling back to American consumers (on their credit cards?) the cheap goods produced overseas.

This may lead to lower incomes and less tax money to support public education in some areas. Poorly-funded K-12 school districts in poor areas produce students who realistically are not prepared for college nor competitive with students coming from well-funded suburban schools with adequate property tax bases. Blacks with a college degree on average earn the same as whites with a high school degree. Blacks enlist in the volunteer army at twice their numbers in the general population. Why?

And ….. if all of those labor costs were reduced to pennies on the dollar ….. who benefited? How have investors done as a result of outsourcing? And do the below graphs, when compared, suggest the wealthiest 1% of income earners needed a tax cut?

Here’s an interesting tidbit for you: The top 400 income earners in the United States–a country of over 318 million people–earn the same amount as the bottom 50% of Americans–households representing roughly 159 million people.

Who do we blame? Individuals? Corporations? Systems?

Can the above problems be attributed to individuals, or do they involve much deeper, structural, barriers to achieving the so-called ‘American Dream’ and escaping poverty? Is it an individual’s fault if his/her job, or even skill set, is ‘outsourced?’ Is it possible that a lack of marriage isn’t at the root of poverty, but that poverty may lead to decreases in marriage rates? This is a question we can ask, and address, scientifically.

Put another way–if all of those ‘lazy’ poor people turned their lives around tomorrow and decided to go out and look for gainful employment–would poverty end?

Let’s take a seemingly trivial example to illustrate structural arguments. Why do you brush your teeth in the morning and evening? Because you as an individual choose to, right? Because you know that brushing your teeth prevents tooth decay. Aaaah, but how do you know this? Because of medical and dental research, because of certain scientific disciplines who study such things? Because of TV commercials and the advertising industry telling us we’ll lose all our teeth if we don’t buy the latest high-tech product, like the toothbrush with an onboard computer??

Okay, forget the tooth decay argument. What would happen if we didn’t brush our teeth every day (besides possibly losing them)? We’d have lots of bacteria multiplying in our mouths, creating . . . . the dreaded halitosis (a term invented by advertising geniuses at Listerine to make bad breath sound like some sort of awful disease)! Even if we weren’t terrified by the dread specter of halitosis, is there peer pressure to brush daily? How do we know that flossing or tongue-brushing is good for getting rid of bad breath? Who benefits from a society where unpleasant smells are stigmatized, and a vast array of products offered to prevent or mask them?

Now we’re talking structures. Yes, we all get to choose how to practice dental hygiene, but there are influences out there, often times influences we’re unaware of, and many times the messages we hear are that ‘poor people are lazy and unmotivated,’ or ‘the U.S. Army doesn’t torture, it was just a few bad apples?’ Or the rise in health care costs is because of frivolous malpractice lawsuits and huge jury settlements, rather than other more structural causes, like skyrocketing insurance premiums, 45 million uninsured Americans using expensive emergency care when they get sick, or the high rate of medical errors that kills some 98,000 Americans annually? In 2008 John McCain’s campaign advisor suggested that the number of uninsured is much lower, because everyone can go to an emergency room. Problem solved (not)!

If one person in the country is unemployed, it might be because that person is the world’s worst employee (we all know one of those …). But when 30 million people are unemployed, then obviously something is going on in the economy that is of a more structural nature. Surely not all of those 30 million unemployed are lazy and unmotivated. Sure, some get hired before others, because they may have friends or a better network of contacts, more qualifications and formal education, better communication skills, etc. But maybe they also had more opportunities to acquire the kinds of things that make them more marketable in the workplace? We’re back to understanding structure, class, social mobility, culture, etc.

What is structure?

What do we mean by structure? Think of a building, a handshake, your daily routine. Most of us get up in the morning (oh! and brush our teeth!), eat breakfast, get dressed, wear pretty similar clothes as our roommates/spouses/significant others/friends, go to work/school in some sort of vehicle or mode of transportation, arrive on time for class, follow the rules laid down in the syllabi, raise our hands before speaking up in class, sit in chairs facing the front of the room, leave at the end of the class period for another class, etc. Pretty predictable critters. Why are we all so similar–because we as individuals choose to be? I’m not suggesting that we’re machines that do what we’re told, but that if, for instance, an alien were observing earthlings, it might not be able to understand very much by looking at individual explanations for our behavior.

Consider the so-called ‘war on drugs.’ Is it simply the law enforcement response to people making ‘bad choices?’ And since more African Americans are arrested and incarcerated for drug use, they make more bad choices? But if African Americans make up 13% of the population, and only 13% of crack users (for instance), but 90% of people serving prison time for crack convictions, there’s something else going on. Maybe police target minority communities. Maybe some departments reward officers for making arrests (and low-risk arrests of petty users are the easiest). Maybe minority communities and neighborhoods are economically depressed, with fewer employment options, and an illicit drug economy is one response to that. None of those are things that would really change much depending on the individuals involved–they’re more structural.

An important point here is that structures persist. A building has a structure, one that is hard to change without considerable effort, and which influences the behavior of the people inside it. Poverty is a ‘good’ example of structure. The number of people defined as poor has changed little since 1960 in the U.S., even though the U.S. economy has tripled in size during that time. Yes, the percent is less because our population has increased. But there are still 45-50 million people defined as poor, and most scholars believe that the definition currently in use vastly undercounts the real levels of struggle and poverty. Often times you’ll hear in the media people talking about how good the poor have it, laying around collecting welfare checks. How many poor people choose poverty over affluence because it means they don’t have to work? Poverty is often times daily struggle, and receiving welfare benefits has become hard work. So who benefits from the notion that poor people just need to get married and get jobs? Might low wage employers be near the top of the list of recipients? Would they have money to influence Congress on legislation ranging from minimum wage laws to ‘pension reform?’ When the federal budget gets cut, who takes the hit? The military? Defense contractors? Or the ‘undeserving poor‘ who by golly just need to go out there and get jobs?

Why does it matter?

The way social problems get defined, for instance as either structural or individual problems, affects how we look to solve them. Should the government be involved in reducing poverty, or should it stay out of it and let employers and employees negotiate wages? What if the wages being offered are insufficient to pull a family out of poverty? What if the education system isn’t serving the poorest Americans, because their schools are grossly underfunded?

A good way to figure out if you’re getting this is to try to come up with your own examples of structural and individual explanations of social problems. Crime is a good one. Or divorce, a little more complicated to wrap your mind around (Divorce has become much more commonplace in society over the last four decades, but how does that help understand the actual reasons why a couple might seek a divorce?). Discrimination (by race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, etc.). Homelessness.

• Who / what causes social problems?
• Who benefits from social problems (keep in mind, if no one benefited, they would likely be addressed and go away, wouldn’t they)?
• Who has the power to define them, to influence public opinion, and how?
• Who should do something about them? (or what can be done about them?)

Yes, we must understand the problem first . . . But whose version of the problem and what’s causing it? And which of these versions are news outlets more likely to cover and report on, and why? In case you haven’t figured it out yet, portraying a social problem as complex, with multiple points of view and structural dimensions, may be what citizens in a democracy need to grasp to try to understand the world around them. But it doesn’t make for a tidy 3-minute news segment sandwiched between commercials for pharmaceuticals or financial consultants.

And in terms of structure, those reporters no doubt realize that providing ‘infotainment’ rather than ratings poison isn’t sound journalism, but they’ve got jobs, mortgages, kids in school, and likely an appreciation of the structural limits that make a truly free press unprofitable, and as a result unlikely.

If you’re still having a hard time wrapping your mind around this structure-agency discussion, consider reading this short story, which alludes to what happens when those regular expectations in a society (structure, those things that persist even when the individuals come and go) go awry.