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Republican Rep. Paul Ryan answers constituents questions during a listening session at the Snap-on Headquarters in Kenosha, Wis. (AP Photo/Kenosha News, Kevin Poirier)




Alleviating stubborn poverty is difficult and expensive. Direct government aid -- money, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and the like -- is not enough. Poor people need employment that offers a brighter future for themselves and their children. Which means they need job skills. Which means they need education. Which means they need good schools and safe streets.

The list of needs is dauntingly long, and it's hard to know where to start. It's much easier to say that culture is ultimately to blame. But since there's no step-by-step procedure for changing a culture, we end up not doing anything.



What exactly does he mean by culture? In the context of "our inner cities," Ryan can't be talking about rap music and baggy pants. If so, he ought to visit any high school in any affluent suburb, where he will find kids listening to the same music and wearing the same clothes -- kids who will grow up to be doctors and lawyers.

Is he talking about the breakdown of family structure? To me, that's looking suspiciously more like effect than cause. As President Barack Obama has noted, the rise in out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households seen years ago among African-Americans is now being seen among whites, especially in communities hit hard by economic dislocation.

Ryan refers specifically to "the value and the culture of work," and he may be on to something -- almost. His description of "just generations of men not even thinking about working" is ridiculous. In depressed urban and rural communities, there is an acute shortage of meaningful work. There was a time when young men who didn't plan to go to college could anticipate finding blue-collar work at "the plant" nearby -- maybe a steel mill, maybe an assembly line. There they could have job security, enough income to keep a roof over a family's head, a pension when they retired. Their children, who would go to college, could expect lives of greater accomplishment and affluence.


Confronting the devastation suffered by what used to be working-class communities is hard; adjusting to post-globalization economic realities is harder. Say the word culture and you sound erudite and concerned, especially if you drop the name of the late Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, who described world affairs as a clash of civilizations with different cultural values.

My problem is that when you identify something so amorphous as culture as the fundamental issue, you excuse yourself from proposing concrete solutions.

As you might have gathered, I'm suspicious of the cultural hypothesis. I believe outcomes mostly depend on opportunities, and that people are much less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior if they see opportunities that make sense to them.

If we had universal pre-kindergarten that fed all children into high-quality schools, if we had affordable higher education, if we incentivized industry to invest in troubled communities -- if people had options for which they were prepared -- culture would take care of itself.


Eugene Robinson is a syndicated columnist.