Renewing American Civilization

Class Nine Replacing A Culture Of Poverty And Violence With A Culture Of Productivity And Safety

March 4, 1995

Reinhardt College

>>The following is a special program produced by RCTV, Reinhardt College
>>Television, in Waleska, Georgia.

>From Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia, this is "Renewing American
Civilization." In this, the ninth of 10 class presentations, Congressman
Newt Gingrich, an adjunct professor at Reinhardt College, will continue his
course, which presents the foundational principles necessary to the renewal
of American Civilization.  This week's lesson, Replacing the Culture of
Poverty and Violence, focuses on replacing the culture of poverty and
violence with a culture of productivity and safety.

>>Let me welcome everyone this morning, and in particular, welcome the
>>students of Mind Extension University who are joining us by television.


The five pillars of American Civilization are, first, the Historic Lessons
of American Civilization.  Second, Personal Strength.  Third,
Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise.  Fourth, the Spirit of Invention and
Discovery.  And, fifth, Quality as described by Edwards Deming.

And we are applying these five pillars to four areas: the Third Wave and
American Civilization.  How will the information age affect us?  Second,
creating jobs, American jobs, in the world market.  Third, replacing the
culture of violence and poverty with a culture of productivity and safety.
And, fourth, citizenship and community in 21st century America.

Now, today's topic is actually the third of those four topical areas,
Replacing The Culture Of Poverty And Violence With A Culture Of
Productivity And Safety.  And if you'll notice, we've described this in a
very specific way, which I'll come back to.  But that is a replacement of a
culture with another culture.  So it's not just helping the poor or
focusing on the inner cities or anything narrow.

But this is literally a discussion about two cultures.  We start this
analysis with a belief that the current welfare system has failed.  And
this is at the heart of it.  That the system we're currently paying tax
money to pay for has simply not achieved the results we want.  In fact, I
would assert that no civilization can survive with 12-year-olds having
babies, 15-year- olds killing each other, 17-year-olds dying of aids, and
18-year- olds getting diplomas they can't read.

And these are not just apocryphal sort of things, but if you watch your
local evening news, you know that every one of these tragedies is happening
in America today.  This particular session is based on the premise that
efforts to repair or improve the current welfare system are doomed to fail
because they misunderstand the holistic nature of the problem.

Now, holistic's an important word for -I'm going to take just a second.  In
a holistic model, everything inside the model has to be taken into account.
Whereas in a reductionist model, you can break it down into a series of
building blocks, and you can say, okay, which of these do we want to deal
with first? It's a very big difference between the two.

In this model, the holistic model, every piece depends on the other pieces.
And so if you don't deal with the totality, it doesn't work.  In this
model, the pieces can be fixed independently of each other.

Now, we're going to come back to this in a minute, but I want to start with
the notion that the very first problem is that it is the system and the
culture which are the problems.  And that piecemeal efforts to repair the
system and its culture of poverty and violence are, therefore, irrelevant
and doomed to fail.  So that every time we say, "well, let's do a specific
small piece, because at least we will make progress," no, the answer is
you'll have no impact at all, or virtually no impact.

Because let's say we'll go in and we'll say, okay, "we're going to really
work on 4-year-olds in Headstart." That's fine.  When they are 8-year-olds
in the same culture of poverty and violence that they were in back when
they were 4-year-olds, but now they're outside of the environment of
Headstart, they start to revert very rapidly.  Not because Headstart wears
off, which is what people said at one time.  But because the power of a
culture to attract you, to say, this is - what cultures do is they tell
you, this is the right behavior.

This is the thing you'll be rewarded for.  This is the thing people will
praise you for.  And so what happens is the culture of poverty and violence
is so powerful that if all you do is try to change one piece of it, the
whole rest of it will come back in.  We say, why don't you go to work? And
you say, "fine," and so we create up here the work program.

What we don't do is check and find out that if you go to work, you lose
Medicaid.  So the minute you go to work, you lose Medicaid.  One of your
children gets sick, you promptly lose all the money you just worked for,
all of your neighbors then laugh at you.  You got -- you were a sucker.
Why did you go do that?

If you just sat -- you know, if you just stay at home, don't worry about
it, why do you keep listening to all these people who try to improve you?
So what you have is an interlocking system in which both the structure of
rewards and by the system, part of this is, what is it that actually
happens when you engage in behavior?  You go tell the police something.
Are you better off, or are you more likely then to be shot or beaten up or
killed for having squealed?  Are the police capable of protecting of your
house, or are the police incapable of protecting it?  Are you better off to
keep your mouth shut and not be a target?

We had a girl in Washington, D. C. , who dropped out of school because she
witnessed a stabbing.  And the girls who participated in the stabbing were
saying they would kill her if she talked to the police, so she's
cross-pressured between the police and her parents saying, "gee, why don't
you do the honest thing," and her immediate peers saying, "why don't we
just kill you if you do the honest thing"?

Now, to change any one piece of this without thinking through the change of
the whole piece doesn't get you anywhere.  So we have to start, I think, by
looking at four key realities which define any solution to the problems of
violence and poverty.  Reality one is that when individuals are caught
within a dysfunctional culture, they must transfer their loyalties,
beliefs, and behaviors to another culture to truly change their behavior.
This is why if you look at Al-Anon or Alcoholics Anonymous or any of those
programs, they are a conversion experience.  They say, yesterday I was an
active alcoholic.  Today I am a recovering alcoholic.  Yesterday when I
felt anxiety-ridden, I took a drink.  Today when I feel anxiety- ridden, I
go to my AA's meeting and talk to my friends, or I pray or I -- but there's
a conscious effort to rebuild the entire person and to recognize that the
transition from this system to another system is a decisive moment.

And if you don't have a support structure, if you don't have something
which helps you when you start to slide back, you're going to break down.
The folks at Covenant House, which is the leading Catholic program for
girls who have run away or who are pregnant, teenagers who need help, they
have arule that you have to work from day one.

They also talk about the inevitable Tuesday Syndrome, and they say what
happens to every person is there comes the Tuesday morning they don't want
to go to work.  Either they got in an argument with their boss or they
don't feel very good or they're just depressed or whatever.  That they
really need a hand that reaches out at that point and talks to them and
nurtures them and carries them across their depression.  Or they break down
and they leave.  And that that's the crisis.  They say that it's absolutely
inevitable, and almost always occurs on Tuesdays.  That they make it
through Monday on willpower, they've had the weekend off, but then Tuesday
morning, they just say, "I can't do it."

So what you're trying to do -- and I'll use this as -- the symbols mean
nothing.  I'm using a circle here.  I'll use a square here.  Okay -- is you
are literally saying to people, we want you to go from this holistic model
to this one.  Different culture and system in the two models.  In this one,
working is dumb.  In this one, working is good.  In this one, going to work
means you lose economically.  In this one, going to work means you win
economically.  Different culture, a different system.

To show you an example of that culture, Samuel Golden wrote a book about
growing up on the East Side.  And I just want to -- in terms of everything
you've heard about poor neighbors, poor problems, people who have
difficulties, this is his description of the turn of the century in New
York city in the poorest neighborhood.  Quote -- now, I want you to just
listen to the optimistic, positive tone of his description of exactly the
same neighborhood.  These both can occur at exactly the same income level.
Not a change in money.  Being without money and being poor are two
different things.  This is the core problem we're faced with because we
don't -- we have messed up these two distinctions.  This is what Samuel
Golden wrote about his childhood, "where else on earth among the poorest
people did you see in every home a blue and white box where you were
supposed to drop your pennies?  "once a week, an old woman would come
around and empty it, and off it would go somewhere overseas.  "the poorest
of the poor helping still poorer ones across the Atlantic somewhere.
"hundreds of sweat shop employees, men and women who sat at machines for
nine and 10 hours a day, came home, washed up, had supper, and went to the
lodge hall or settlement houses to learn English or to listen to a fellow
read poetry to them.  "paid readers of poetry.  "I saw it.  "I saw
gangsters and bums, but I also saw poets, settlement workers, welfare
workers, scribes, teachers, philosophers, all hoping and striving for one
goal, to break away.  "and they did too.  "America gave them all hope in
life, and they repaid America.  "there has never been a more even trade."

Now, he was talking about the same level of despair, the same level of
poverty, the same level of hopelessness, the same level of confusion, but
because it was optimistically oriented towards a better future, it changed.
He's talking about people who worked all day and then took a couple of
pennies, maybe an hour's work, to go and pay the poet reader to the
community center to take -- to give them part of their soul as well as
food.

This was the real world.  This is not mythical.  This is not some theory.
This was America at the turn of the century.  And I want to thank Kathleen
Minnix for finding that, because I really think it begins to make vivid the
healthy world of being without money which led to two generations of
strength, versus the unhealthy world of being without money which has led
to two generations of disaster.

But part of the reason I think that it's hard for us to really change
things is that we underestimate the second reality, cultural change is very
hard.  It requires tremendous persistence over time, and can often only be
achieved one person at a time.  I think part of what happens to us is we
say, "okay, I'm willing to do this for, like, up to a year and a half."
Well, at a year -- it's a little bit like a farmer who says, "I'll grow
corn as long as it makes it in three weeks.  "doesn't make it in three
weeks, I'm throwing that sucker out and replanting."

You know, the fact is, breaking through in a culture and getting people to
start dramatically changing their behavior and then getting to enough
individuals, because first what happens is you find one, and then two and
then three, and then they find one, and then gradually you begin to peel
away the whole culture.

The greatest study of this is the rise of the Wesleyan movement in Britain
in the 18th century, which changed the entire habit of the industrial poor.
And probably is the major reason Britain did not have a political
revolution in the 18th century.

But if you go back and look at the chapel movement of John Wesley and how
Methodism, as it was called, impacted on the English working poor, it is
astonishing, but it starts small, it's very frustrating, and it doesn't fit
either the news media or the government's need for instant gratification.
It's just very hard, very difficult work.

The third reality is that this kind of cultural change is best done outside
government.  And I would argue that with the exception of the military's
ability to have boot camp, there is virtually no government program that
gets the level of cultural change you need inside government for the very
reason that governments are very bad agencies of acculturation.

I mean, all of you would be furious if you had some bureaucrat trying to
acculturate you.  You'd say, wait a second, I pay taxes.  Who are you to
tell me whether I ought to be in the circle or the square?  Are you nuts?
You work for me.  I don't work for you.  And so you'd have a very hard time
ever getting an agreement for this kind of cultural change delivered by
government, and this kind of change requires missionaries.

This requires the person who sits there at 3:00 o'clock in the morning
holding the hand of the person who is about to commit suicide.  By
definition, I mean, you find wonderful government employees.  You find
people who are individually fabulous, but you can't recruit to a
bureaucracy on the premise you'll stay there as long as they need you.  You
can recruit to a volunteer organization on that premise.  Very different
models.

And so we sometimes get mad at the bureaucracy, because we ask it to do
things it can't do, instead of being more careful about what government can
do and what other sections can do.  I would argue that government and
politicians have found the first three realities unacceptable.  They have,
therefore, tried to find piecemeal short-term improvements that at least
meet their political needs and the public's desire to get something done.

So what you've had is, for 30 years now, a series of underfinanced,
short-sighted, small efforts to get one thing or another to work, when, in
fact, this requires a big effort.  You know, if you think back to our --
looking at the Normandy Invasion, 74 small invasions would not have added
up to Normandy.  Normandy required that you consolidate all the effort into
one massive, all-out effort.  This is the same way.  Having 74 different
tiny programs just means you've thrown the money away.  Doesn't mean you
can break through.  And what you have to have -- you can have a tiny
program, but the tiny program's goal has to be changing the whole thing.
It has to be to move people out of this culture and system into this one.

Which is the fourth reality, that the cultural change must be from one way
of life to another.  Individual changes within the old culture are often
overwhelmed by other aspects of the culture.  Now, this also means we're
saying something that would have been vehemently rejected 20 years ago.
We're saying, basically, that the culture of poverty and violence isn't
acceptable.  There are millions of Americans who live in that culture right
now, and what we're saying to them is, look, it is better to work than to
be dependent.  It is better to be safe than to be in danger.

Now, the word "better" is very argumentative.  I mean, who are we to start
imposing these what would once have been called middle class, bourgeois
virtues?  And the only good answer is, we have tried a technique of
allowing this to grow, and we can't stand what we see on television.  We
can't stand the pain we're inflicting on the children.  We can't stand the
4-year-old being thrown off the tenement house balcony.  And we just know
that's not right.  And so we have to reluctantly come back to finding some
way of saying, looking, there has to be an improvement.

Now, the encouraging thing, and this is -- this will surprise people who
are very tired of this, including people, frankly, who have what I would
call compassion exhaustion.  You know, people who have spent 20 years
trying to help, it's never quite worked, they're terribly disappointed.
They ought to be optimistic, and the reason is in America, very powerful
reform movements can emerge very quickly and have very powerful impact.

You can go from the Montgomery boycott of buses in 1955 to the civil rights
acts of 1964 and 1965 in 10 years and you get to a catalytic moment, you
suddenly begin to have real change real fast.  And you see this by looking
just back at the American history.  Great American reform movements
starting with the great awakening of the 1730s, which was a religious
revival, the revolutionary generation, the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians,
the abolitionists and the founding of the Republican Party, the progressive
movement, almost every one of those was a 5- to 10- year cycle of beginning
to speed up and consolidate.

In the more modern era, you had the New Deal, which did most of its best
work in about five years.  The civil rights movement, the Goldwater- Reagan
conservatism, and now, we would argue, Renewing American Civilization.
That each of these are belief systems that emerge, they codify, people say,
"yeah, that's right," and with amazing speed, the country changes itself.

If you look at the rise of the Abolitionist movement and the Republican
Party, it literally goes from being a sort of fringe idea in the late 1840s
to a major idea by the early 1850s to this best-selling novel of the 19th
century, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," in the 1850s, which also then becomes a
widely seen play to the breakdown of the Whig Party, the creation of the
Republican Party, and the election of the first Republican president in a
six-year period.

That's how fast things can change when, in fact, you have people beginning
to make their minds up.  The way that has to happen, I think, at an
intellectual level, is you've got to go back to the model we've used before
of vision, strategies, projects, and tactics in order to replace the
culture of poverty and violence with a culture of productivity and safety.


Now, that is, you've got to think through, what's our vision of
replacement, what are our strategies for replacement, what are the projects
we think will work for replacement, and then what do we do every day to
make that happen.  However, when you think you know what you're doing and
you think you have thought this through, then you have to go out and
practice listen, learn, help, and lead in order to check out the ideas.

I mean, just because you think it's smart doesn't mean it's smart.  It
means you think it's smart.  Now, you've got to go test it out with lots of
other human beings.  And in particular, I would argue we should listen to
experts, experienced practitioners, and the poor themselves in order to
test out the ideas of replacement.  And I would argue this process should
be ongoing and should lead to Deming's concept of continuous improvement.
That every day we ought to be trying to do slightly better.

Now, notice the three groups I listed, experts, that is, people who study
it; experienced practitioners, that is, people who are living it.  So at
one level, you say, who are the best five college professors in America who
study missionary efforts among the poor?  But then it's pretty useful to go
out and findfive or 10 people who are missionary efforts among the poor.
Because it may well be as you listen to the actual practitioner, that their
experience is more complicated and more human and has a different quality
to it.

It's like talking to a football quarterback versus reading the "Sports
Illustrated" version.  Or talking to a gourmet chef and reading a good
cookbook.  Then, frankly, you need to sit down and listen to the poor for a
while.  Now, the poor are not definitive by definition, because the poor
are trapped in this culture.  And you're trying to describe a culture they,
by definition, don't -aren't in.  So they can't by themselves tell you
that's right or wrong, but they can raise a ton of questions and they can
tell you what doesn't seem right about it.  And they can force you to keep
thinking through your model.

Because remember, you're outside this world by definition.  Now, one or two
of you may have grown up in it and may well have grown out of it, in which
case you have a very useful ability to help, although even there you've got
to be very cautious, because sometimes the person who had the unique
personal strength to rise doesn't quite understand why their brothers and
sisters and cousins didn't make it.

So there's no -- this is not a simple thing.  I'm going back to what I said
a while ago, this is very hard.  We have failed at it because we keep
trying to reduce it to a level of simplicity that will make it easy.  It
isn't, and it won't be.
>>and on that note, how come the former poor aren't listed in that list of
>>people that we should listen to, people that have actually climbed out of
>>the system?

>>For the very reason I was giving, because unless they are in some way
>>actively engaged in helping the poor, they may have learned exactly the
>>wrong lessons, because they're learning lessons about very strong
>>personalities.   When you talk, for example, to somebody who says, "well,
>>I used to be an alcoholic but I woke up one morning, I quit." Any of you
>>who have ever been smokers who talked to somebody who said, "well, I just
>>quit"?  That person has a unique useful experience, but it may not be
>>very relevant to a more normal person for whom -- you know, for whom
>>breaking an addiction or breaking alcoholism or breaking the habits of
>>poverty and violence is a more formidable and more frightening challenge.
>>So they're useful to listen to.

>>I would argue that the unique experience is that of the person who broke
>>out, who's made good, who has developed a whole new set of --


>>Maybe.  I'm just saying to you that person may be helpful.  I'm not
>>against talking to them.  I would suggest to you that they probably come
>>under practitioners, because they've actually made it out.  But I
>>wouldn't automatically accept their view, because they may have such
>>unique personal strengths.  It's worth listening to them and it's worth
>>saying, now, how did it happen to you?  And what did you do?

And I'm all -- I'm for that.  I work with a lot of people who fit that
category, but I wouldn't just accept them, because they very often are very
strong personalities.  They're very smart.  They have a lot -- they may
have had the one unique relative who helped them, okay?  What you're trying
to also figure out is, what about the ones who aren't as smart or they
don't have strong habits or they didn't have an aunt who raised them?
>>I think Arnold Schwarzenegger can literally do anything in the world that
>>he -- that he -- I mean, he has an amazing power of concentration.  That
>>doesn't mean everybody can come over from Austria, win a physique
>>contest, and take over Hollywood, right?

>>But I would argue that -- I would argue that not all people that climb
>>out of poverty have those unique traits.  Sometimes all it takes is just
>>integrity.  I mean --

>>no.

>>-- it doesn't take anything --

>>No, no.  Okay, I can't argue with you for very long, but individuals can
>>go from here to here because they're individuals.  And America's a
>>country where this happens every morning.  And by the way, it also goes
>>the reverse.  I mean, one of the things that's fascinating to study in
>>America is people slide out of success into having no money on a regular
>>basis.

I mean, this is a country where people go bankrupt routinely, so you have
people - in any generation, you have some people who rise and some people
who fall and so forth.  That's -- what you're trying to do here, though, is
walk into a community and take 20,000 people in downtown Atlanta and figure
out, under what circumstances will we help them one by one move?

Now, it's useful to talk to people who have done it, and I think it's also
particularly useful to bring them back here.  I mean, one of the great
tragedies, frankly, is that when very successful people leave the inner
city, they won't go back.  It's a very real problem of getting them to come
back in and having them be witnesses who say, look, I made it.  You can
make it, too.  That's helpful.  But they may not fully understand the
complexity of helping a person who is weaker than they are, has less will
power than they do, and isn't just purely as intelligent.

In terms of making -- it wouldn't hurt to add them in here, but don't
overstate the ability of somebody like that in and of themselves to do it.
They're very helpful as witnesses more than they are, I think,
automatically as analysts.  Let me also suggest to you that the vision that
we want to establish is that every American is endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.  So it will seem obvious to you until you take
seriously every American.

But if we actually mean that sentence as our vision, it then has a second
sentence, we owe it to every American citizen to involve in a culture and a
system which ensures their god-given rights and responsibilities as full
citizens.

Now, again, the key here is "every American." We all sort of say it, well,
of course that's true.  Ah, but are we determined to -- are we really
determined to live it out?  Are we really determined to say every child
born in 1995 should absolutely grow up in that kind of framework?  That's a
big order.

Now, I think it leads you to three really simple principles that are the
visionary principles, every citizen is an American, every neighborhood is
part of America, and every child is an American child.  But the minute you
accept that, then you have to say to yourself, wow, this is a big
challenge.  And you can't avoid it.  Because every time a child dies for
lack of prenatal care or a child gets killed in a drive-by shooting or a
child ends up in a room where they're not going to learn anything, we have
failed in our vision-level commitment that every American has the right to
pursue happiness.
>>so what you're saying, in essence, the difference between one culture --
>>I mean, one culture together is more responsibilities.  Over here you're
>>giving them their rights to have those, but over here --

>>No, not just responsibility.  What we have done is we have basically cut
>>a deal with the poor.  We said, starting in the late 1960s, we'll
>>maintain you.  We'll send you money.  Now, being selfish middle-class
>>people, we never sent enough money, but the theory was, we'll send money.
>>We won't demand you change your behavior.  You want to have your kids
>>born in total ignorance?  Hey, it would be inappropriate for us to
>>interfere.  You want to go to a local school that doesn't work?  Well, at
>>least it's not a school we send our kids to.

So we'll give lip service to changing it, but the truth is, we won't change
it.  We'll just have study commissions that will say, yes, they should do
better.  And the result is what you have allowed to happen over a 30 --
what we have all allowed to happen over a 30-year period, is these people
don't have -- they do not have what the declaration of independence
guarantees them.

Now, to do that, you've got to, for example, reestablish safety.  Any
American who's physically threatened is being cheated of the constitutional
provision to provide for the common security.  Because danger can be
domestic as well as foreign.  I mean, I swear to uphold the constitution
against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  Well, if it's a person walking
into your room to kill you, whether that person's wearing a foreign uniform
or blue jeans, your rights as an American are about to be exterminated.

So you have to start with the idea, are we prepared to protect you
physically?  How much are we prepared to protect you physically?  When
you're born, do we want to encourage a system where you actually have --
where your mother has a sense of responsibility?  There you're right; there
you start getting into responsibility.  But do we also want to figure out
some way to make sure that health care is nearby if your mother's willing
to be responsible?  When you show up for school the first time, should it
actually be a room where you might learn?  Does that matter?

I mean, these are -- by the time you start thinking through how the system
works and how today we coerce people into monopolies that fail, you will
live in public housing, you will go to the public school, you will be on
streets that are unsafe.  Gee we're really sorry, but after all, life's
hard.  You know, there's a huge, huge change from here to here.

This is, again, one of the things we keep kidding ourselves about.  If you
truly want healthy inner cities, if you truly want healthy Indian
reservations and you truly want healthy West Virginia Appalachian poor
neighborhoods, you're talking about a big change.  This is not a small
change.  This is one of the largest changes in American history.  And we
just don't take it seriously.  We pay lip service to it, and then we say
-then we walk off and then the kid gets killed and then we say, "gee,
that's sad."

And what I'm suggesting is, if we take that child seriously as an American
and we take the declaration seriously as a document and the constitution
and then we decide in our generation we're fed up with it and we're going
to actually shoulder the responsibility as a country, all of us, including
the poor, of making the transition, we're taking on a big challenge.  Maybe
in some ways as big as the Cold War.  It's not going to be a small thing
and it's not going to happen overnight.

Now, I think that to understand our strategies of replacement, we must
revisit the five pillars of American Civilization.  We have to look at the
historic lessons of American Civilization.  We have to look at personal
strength, at entrepreneurial free enterprise, at the spirit of invention
and discovery, and at quality as defined by Edwards Deming.

Now, I can give this lecture this time totally different, or not --
dramatically different.  I won't say totally, I'll say 60% different than a
year ago because of the help of several people, and the first one I want to
thank is Marvin Olasky.  This is "the Tragedy of American Compassion." It
is the book which, frankly, for me, unlocked the key to how to do this, and
I think it is one of the most extraordinary books written in our
generation.  Olasky went back, and you'll understand my bias in a second, I
mean -- and by the way, I want to thank Marvin Olasky, because he helped
write this -- today's session and was very generous in giving his time and
outlining how he would approach it.  What he did -- and this fits my bias
as a history teacher -- he went back and looked at 350 years of how
Americans dealt with poverty, tragedy, and addiction with much greater
success than the current welfare state.

When you begin to read his book, those of you who are not used to reading
lots of history, you're going, why does he have me in the founding of the
colonies?  And why does he start here at the very beginning with Jamestown
and with the early American model of compassion?  Now, when he says early
American model on page 6, he's talking about Plymouth in 1620.  I mean,
he's really gone back and you're kind of going, why am I reading this?  He
talks about Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1673.  But what he shows you chapter
by chapter is a consistency about how Americans thought about poverty and
how they thought about helping the poor that is astonishing.  What the
traditional reformers warned against is precisely what the welfare state
did, and when you read Olasky, you realize that based on American history,
the welfare state is virtually a design for guaranteed failure.

I mean, I found -- I read this over Christmas at my mother-in-law's, and I
found myself so startled by the warnings.  Let me give you an example,
"Mary Richmond of the Baltimore charity organizing society summed up in
1897 the wisdom of a century of work, quote - - and I want you to think
about this in terms of the system your taxes pay for today.  Quote, relief
given without reference to friends and neighbors is accompanied by moral
loss.  Poor neighborhoods are doomed to grow poorer whenever the natural
ties of neighborliness are weakened by well meant, but unintelligent
interference.  Let me go back to the key sentence, "relief given without
reference to friends and neighbors is accompanied by moral loss."

Now, what is the very definition of AFDC, food stamps, et cetera?  An
anonymous person walks into an anonymous office to deal with an anonymous
bureaucrat to have an anonymous transaction.
>>faceless bureaucratic --

>>right?  You have the faceless poor and the faceless bureaucrat engaged in
>>a faceless interaction.  By con --

>>there's also a lack of accountability on their part, because --

>>Right, totally.  But it also leads to a depersonalization that's
>>devastating.  Here's what the magazine "American Hebrew" in 1898 wrote
>>about how one man was sunk into dependency, but a volunteer, quote, with
>>great patience, convinced him that he must earn his living.  Soon he did
>>and regained the respect of his family and community.  A woman who had
>>become demoralized but, quote, for months she was worked with.  Now
>>through kindness, again through discipline, until finally she began to
>>show a desire to help herself, close quote.

I mean, imagine the average caseworker with 200 families on their caseload
trying to deal in this kind of intense relationship.  It states further,
quote, intelligent giving -- this is the New Orleans charity organization
society of 1899 -intelligent giving and intelligent withholding are alike
true charity.  Now, imagine saying to your local welfare office,
intelligent giving and intelligent withholding are alike true charity.  Or
saying at the same time, quote, if drink has made a man poor, money will
feed not him, but his drunkenness.  We send supplemental security -- just
think about it.  We send supplemental security insurance checks to
alcoholics and addicts.  Let me repeat the quote from the new Orleans
charity organization, 18 -- if drunk -- if drink has made a man poor, money
will feed not him but his drunkenness.  Poverty fighters a century ago
trained volunteers to leave behind, quote, a conventional attitude toward
the poor, seeing them through the comfortable haze of our own intentions.

I mean, one of the things that comes through the Olasky book again and
again is there are many poor people who will game the system.  When you let
them game the system, you are helping them destroy themselves.  You have an
obligation to love them enough to be firm with them, not just to love them
enough to give.

Barriers against fraud were important not only to prevent waste, but to
preserve morale among those who were working hard to remain independent.
And I want you to think about this quote and what happened to poor
Americans in the last 30 years.  Quote, nothing is more demoralizing to the
struggling poor than the successes of the indolent.  In other words, if
you're a working poor and you get up every day and you go to a job that
isn't all that much fun and you're out there trying very hard to make a
decent living and your cousin is sitting at home doing nothing, drinking
every night, and getting as much money as you are, the moral devastation as
you try to teach your children to follow your path of sobriety and hard
work while your cousin makes fun of you every day for being stupid, when you
could be gaming the system.

Okay?  Saying -- it was an important quote, and I want you to listen to
this.  This is a very harsh quote, and I want you to think about all the
nice people you know who have automatically given money to the homeless.
It was important to, quote, reform those mild, well-meaning,
tender-hearted, sweet-voiced criminals who insist upon indulging in
indiscriminate charity.

This was a reformer of the late 19th century.  New York charity leader
Josephine Lowell said, quote, the problem before those who would be
charitable is not how to deal with a given number of the poor.  It is how
to help those who are poor without adding to their numbers and constantly
increasing the evils they seek to cure.  And what the modern welfare said
is, we're not going to worry about that.  Anybody who shows up, take care
of them, here's the money, and the result was a system which has been, in
human terms, devastating.

And again, Olasky's "he Tragedy of American Compassion" is far and away the
best single statement of this I've read and is -- I think a work of epoch.
I mean, it will change the whole way we think about this.  Now, for 350
years, reformers had a remarkably similar set of requirements and judgments
about how to help the poor and the addicted and what would actually hurt
rather than help, and it's very important to look at the lessons they set
up and the codification, which we'll come back to, which Olasky made of
them.

The lessons of American history are, one, we should expect the welfare
state to fail.  Two, there is an historically proven model of American
success with which we can replace the current failure.

Now, let's move then -begin to look at that, and if you'd look at pillar
two, which is personal strength, we're going to come right back to Olasky.
There are three key aspects of personal strength in replacing the culture
of poverty and violence.  One, there are seven characteristics of personal
strength the traditional reformers understood and applied.  This is the
Olasky model.  Two, personal strength is ultimately spiritual, and
therefore private rather than governmental.  And, three, compassion
requires your personal strength more than your money.  And I'm going to
come back to that one, because it will put a little burden on all of us.

Interestingly, Olasky said that the seven characteristics the 19th century
reformers put together were from "a" to "g," and that they codified them
that way.  They said that you can literally set up a list of steps from "a"
to "g" in how you think about helping the poor.  "a" is for affiliation.
Who is there out there who knows something about this person?  Who can you
-- do they have a friend?  Do they have a family?  Do they have a neighbor?
Who can rebond with them as a human being, which is what "b" is.

"b" is for bonding.  That if you decide you have to help this person
because nobody they're affiliated with is helping them, then you need to
have one person who truly gets to know them.  And according to Olasky, in
the 19th century, we averaged one volunteer for every two poor people.  We
didn't just take your tax money and say, "stay home, the welfare worker
will take care of them." We said -- and I'm going to come back to this --
"if you truly care, find somebody and help them," and the result was the
average poor person knew a middle-class person.  There was a relationship.
We broke down the barriers.

"c" is for categorization, things like using work tests and background
checks to distinguish.  For example, they routinely required everybody to
work before they got fed.  If you were homeless and you showed up at the
door, you had to cut wood, and you usually cut wood both for yourself and
you cut wood for a widow woman, because you ought to have dignity.  If you
were a woman and you showed up, they often had a sewing room very often
next to a nursery area so there was a place where you could watch your
children while you did work.  But their principle was if you're not
prepared to do some work, you're a bum.  Why are we feeding you?

Now, a bum, I realize, is a politically incorrect term that will soon rival
giraffe and other things, but I want you to think about it.  I mean, you go
through Olasky's book and over and over, they're prepared to categorize
people, and they say to them, you want to help yourself, we'll be partners.
You don't want to help yourself, I owe you nothing.  And again, I mean,
try sometime walking through a major city and every homeless person that
walks up to them and say, "I will give you $20 if you'll work for me for
one hour" and just see what their reaction is.  Say, "I'm glad your here.
"I have a job right this minute.  "let's go.  "I'll pay you 20 bucks." Now,
if they won't do it, why are you giving them a penny?  What is your
obligation to subsidize their addiction?  And in fact, isn't that the least
caring thing you could do?  Let me get you off my mind.  I'll feel better,
you'll get -- you'll get whatever drug you use.  The fact that you may die
isn't my problem.  I did my thing.  I gave you money.  I'm a good person.

And the reformers of the 19th century drove at that attitude very hard and
said, that is false charity.  That makes you feel good.  It does not help
the person.  It's what Morris schechtman describes in "working without a
net" as caretaking rather than caring.  The caretakers feel kind, fine
about themselves.  I did a good thing.  The person they supposedly cared
for may die.  It's not my fault.
>>but you may die in the process, too, because, I mean, there's been so
>>many incidents of taking poor people, knocking on your door, asking for
>>work, and then the next thing they do is kill you and rob you.

>>they have some instances of that, but I would argue for most of us, we
>>could find ways to help the poor that don't run that risk. I didn't
>>suggest you take them home necessarily.

>>well, no, they knock on your door all the time, but, you know, you're
>>hesitant to let them in because of personal safety and the safety of your
>>family.

>>yeah.  There's some of that.

>>that's not the only element that we see in the inner city, and the
>>question is this, because what we're talking about's great in theory, but
>>because we're an incentive, motivated civilization --

>>why don't you let me finish?

>>I'm sorry.

>>Yeah, that's right.  "d" is for discernment, and discernment is learning
>>how to say "no" in the short run so as to produce better results.  It's
>>literally saying there are times you deliberately turn people down
>>because you're trying to get a lesson across, you're trying to show them
>>a different way of thinking.

"e" is for employment.  They required work from every able-bodied person,
period.  They thought it was inherent in being a human being.

"f" is for freedom.  In their mind, once you got into government programs,
you were enslaved.  And so they worked very, very hard to help people
remain free in a way that was powerful and effective.

And finally, "g" is for God.  That all of these -- all of the systems
emphasized the spiritual, not just the material and said, you know, I mean,
if you have no relationship -- if you have no spiritual -- they didn't
necessarily emphasize a particular sect, but they said, if you don't pray,
you have no spiritual life, you have no sense of a larger being than
yourself, why shouldn't you be an addict?

I mean, look how bleak your world is.  And so there was a constant -- so if
you take those seven, and let me just reread them for one second, because I
do think they're useful just as a set, affiliation, bonding,
categorization, discernment, employment, freedom, and god were the core of
this.  Now, compare the Olasky seven with the principles of the welfare
state: affiliation versus isolated individualism.  Bonding versus
impersonal bureaucracy.  Categorization versus automatic maintenance.  Just
look at those to start with.  In the 19th century, we said, who are you
related to?  In the 20th century, you say, oh, that would be an
inappropriate question.  After all, it's not the bureaucracy's business.
Do you need a check or not?  In the 19th century, we would have said, we
are going to have a personal relationship, and we are going to try to help
you and we're going to get to know each other.  In the 20th century, the
bureaucrat has 200 families.  They can't possibly get to know people
individually.  In the 19th century, there was a very deliberate
categorization, are you really capable of working?  Should you really be
helped?  What kind of help should you get?  How can we get you back on your
feet?  In the 20th century, you deserve AFDC, you deserve food stamps.  Who
are we to interfere?  And again, the government can't interfere at this
level, because you'd have to be setting up virtually a dictatorship.

There are other standards.  Look at discernment versus automatic sympathy,
or employment versus no work requirement.  Freedom versus dependence, or
god versus indifference at best, or hostility at worst, to religion and
spirituality.  I mean, this gets so bad, Olasky tells a story of spending
some time in Washington as a homeless person and ending up in a church
basement at a breakfast looking like a homeless person; he'd spent three or
four days on the street.  And he mumbled to the young lady who was serving
breakfast could he have a bible?  And she said, "do you want a bagel?  "we
have a bagel." He said, "no, no." He said, "I want a bible." And she said,
"we don't have any bibles here." This was in the basement of a church.

But he said in the entire time he was homeless in Washington, there were
plenty of places to sleep, plenty of places to eat, plenty of clothing.  He
did not once have a person talk to him about his spiritual life, about the
need to somehow be saved from what he was going through, or about the
notion that god mattered.  Even though a great deal of the time he was in
religious institutions, but they thought -- they had broken down so far
from their traditional mission that they thought as long as they fed you,
it didn't matter.

Now, just take those differences and then -- and then recognize that we're
talking about two very different systems.  The one system says, you're an
isolated individual.  We will pay for an impersonal bureaucracy.  It will
automatically maintain you.  If you have a good sob story, we'll
automatically sympathize with you.  We would never dream of requiring you
to work.  We expect you to become dependent.  And your spiritual life is
your own problem, and of course, we're not going to talk to you about it.

The other model says, we believe you're part of some kind of extended
affiliation with other human beings.  We want to bond with you as a human
being.  We want to understand your problems enough to help you solve your
unique problems.  We're prepared to be very tough-minded with you, because
we actually like you enough to say "no" to you.  We're going to require
that you work so you have a sense of dignity.  We're going to emphasize the
importance of your remaining free and not becoming dependent.  And we
believe that your spiritual life is as important as your physical life.

Now, it's -- what I said earlier about holistic, it's pretty hard to get a
broader gap in the two models at the core of the two cultures.  And then,
of course, you start building a system that reflects the cultural values.
So we've built a government structure that punishes work, that gives away
money automatically in an anonymous manner.

But if you're going to change the values, then you've got to shift the
whole structure.  Because one of the arguments of the reformers is if you
create an anonymous way for people to maintain themselves as they decay, a
significant number of people will do just that.  Because to be changed is
hard.  And again, I can't overstate this.  None of the reformers believed
this was easy.  And they all said, if you create in here a center of public
support that makes it easy to avoid change, people will simply destroy
themselves.  They won't automatically change.  People only change when, in
fact, they have very few choices.  And so you've got to decide whether or
not you're willing to toleratethe cost of allowing people to continue to
decay.

The essence of the Olasky model is that personal strength is inherently
spiritual and explains why private charities rather than governments must
be the primary helpers of the poor.  That if, in fact, you're really going
to have the level of personal involvement we're talking about, first of
all, you could never hire enough bureaucrats to do it.  You have to have
volunteers.  Second, you have to have a voluntary relationship, because the
government represents power on such a scale that if you gave the government
this kind of power, you'd be creating a potential dictatorship.

So you can't afford to have a government that can interfere in your private
life on this scale.  It would be intolerable.  So if you're going to have
people who are actually out here being that detailed in their interest in
your life, it had better be private sector and you'd better have the option
to say "no." Now, when you say "no," there's a consequence.  They don't
have to give you food.  They don't have to nurture you.  You'd better go
find somebody else to play your game with.  But it's a very, very different
model.

Lastly, what it says in terms of you as a healthy person with a pretty good
life, your personal strength is more important than your money.  That what
the system really needs is not another $100 billion, it needs about 50
million Americans who are willing to do something as a human being.  But
that enough -- enough Americans who are healthy, who are work-oriented, who
do have pretty good habits, enough Americans willing to reach out and just
help one person.

Don't try to save Atlanta or don't try to save Washington or don't try to
save Waleska.  Try to save one person.  That the difference you can make in
that process is enormous.  Now, if you save one person, then hopefully,
you'll go on to another person, and you'll challenge the one you saved when
they're on their feet that they'll help somebody, too.  Because what you
began to build was an extended chain of goodwill, where people felt, look,
people helped me when I was young.  I'd better help somebody else.  I will
repay.

Remember the way Golden described it.  He said, "America gave them all hope
and life, and they repaid America.  "there has never been a more even
trade." And so in a sense, if everybody who is well -- doing well would
then say, "I'll help somebody, but then when I help you, you help
somebody," you create a gradually -- a pretty rapidly expanding cavalcade
of people helping each other.  Okay?  Comments, questions.
>>okay, well, let's go back to this one.  If we are incentive- based, what
>>is the possible incentive for these inner city kids to lay down their
>>guns and their drugs for the money that they're making?  I mean, here
>>we're going to go and offer them an eight- hour-a-day job where they can
>>make three times as much --

>> sure.

>>-- selling horse on the concord.

>>a, they won't die.  B, shame beats cash.

>>we don't --

>>No, but that's the point.  That's why you make the transition.  I mean,
>>read the life of Malcolm X.  I mean, it's -- one morning people say -- I
>>mean, this is what Adam Smith meant when he talked about the man in the
>>mirror in the theory of moral sentiments.  Inside all of us, except the
>>most psychotic -- I mean, there are some people who are psychotics.
>>Those people you frankly just lock up for life.  That's the lesson of
>>"the Silence of the Lambs," is that the doctor who ate people should not
>>have been let out.  It was a bad decision.  Okay?  Hannibal Lechter,
>>right?  And, yes, it is true, I am for the death penalty for Hannibal
>>Lechter, if they ever capture him.

The point here is, one, most human beings have an internal compass.  What
Smith said was the man in the mirror, the woman in the mirror.  When you
look in the mirror, are you really happy being that person?  Two, you want
to raise the disincentive for illegal behavior.  You want to make it
dramatically harder to sell drugs and to get away with those kind of
things.  But, three, most -- I mean, mostgirls don't turn to prostitution
even though it pays.  Most kids -- most young men don't turn to
drug-running even though it pays.

Even in the poorest neighborhoods in America, there is a minority doing bad
things.  In the poorest neighborhood, the vast majority of people are
decent people, who want a chance to earn a living, who want self-respect,
and who want to live as a neighborhood, and so what you've got to do is
reestablish the legitimacy and the authenticity.  And what somebody said
the other day is "reestablishing shame." I mean, you can turn to somebody
who is staggering down the street as a drunk and say, that is shameful.
You shouldn't let your children see you like that.  You've begun to make
the transition from this to this, and in a sense, at one level, I
deliberately used a square, because, of course, this was a joke in the '50s
and early '60s to be square, and what turned out to not be square may mean
doing other things that hurt.  But we'll be back in about 10 minutes, I
reckon.  I'm told we have to take a break or they'll yell at us.
>>We're going to pick back up now with how you replace the culture of
>>poverty and violence with a culture of prosperity and safety.  And
>>working our way through the five pillars that are at the heart of
>>American Civilization, we're on pillar three, which is entrepreneurial
>>free enterprise.

And again, if you think about everything we talked about when we spent two
hours on entrepreneurial free enterprise, it won't surprise you that almost
by definition, a decentralized, entrepreneurial system will be inherently
more effective than a centralized government bureaucracy.  Now, on the
surface, people will read that and they'll say, "well, yeah, we know that's
true."  That if you have lots of small units each operating on their own,
if they have entrepreneurial incentives and if they have entrepreneurial
leaders who are out there trying to get the job done, it will do better
than a large bureaucratic structure managed by 9:00 to 5:00 bureaucrats.

People say, "yeah, that's true," and then you say, "okay, so what are we
going to do now? " And the answer is, well, build a bigger bureaucracy, and
there is a huge -- it's called cognitive dissonance.  There is a breakdown
where everything says we ought to go over and do this, but we find
ourselves going over here, and so it's a major problem in, how do you break
down.

And it's very -- I find it -- if it weren't so tragic and if it wasn't
costing human beings their lives and if it wasn't allowing people literally
to be betrayed and left behind unnecessarily, I think it would be
hysterically funny.

Now, again, the example I'm going to give you is one we've talked about for
two years.  It absolutely works.  We all know it works.  It actually
changes peoples lives, it actually saves the taxpayer money, and it is
almost impossible to get the government to be willing to use it, because it
eliminates one of the government's functions.  And this is a
private-sector, entrepreneurial model of helping the poor developed by two
former social workers who decided that the social work system they were
engaged in was doomed to fail, and they wanted to design a model to
actually transform people.  This is not a theory.  This is a real program.
It's in New York.  Its called "America Works," and I want you to take a
couple minutes and just take a look at "America Works."
>>Peter Cove: Peter Cove is a veteran of urban poverty programs.  His wife,
>>Lee Bowes, is a sociologist with 15 years' experience working with
>>welfare mothers.  They have created a successful business putting people
>>on welfare to work.  For Stephanie Bradley, it meant a job in a big ad
>>agency.  For Evelyn Santiago, her first job ever, and she's been there
>>for a year.

>>Lee Bowes: we become the network, or the old girls' network, for people
>>who don't have access in.

>>their company is called "America Works."  It operates in New York and
>>Connecticut.

>>I work with a no-fee staffing service in the city.  We provide employees --

>>it's essentially a job placement company, but they're placing people most employment agencies wouldn't touch.

>>more properly called welfare.

>>the women who come here average five or six years on welfare.  This woman
>>has been on for 14 years.

>>okay, if you don't get that first job, that's fine.

>>they're placed in jobs where they're on probation for four months.

>>the key here is to sound responsible.

>>about a third of them don't make it.  Too unmotivated or too disorganized
>>to make the adjustment.  But for those who do make it, the success is
>>real.

>>keep on going.  Keep your eyes on the prize.

>>"America Works" places about 1,000 people a year in jobs, real jobs.  A
>>new York state survey found that 85% of them were still working a year
>>after they started.

>>main reasons why people lose their jobs in this type of placement process
>>is because they have not handled their child care.

>>for those who have never worked, this is a kind of dress rehearsal for
>>the real world.

>>I am a mother of eight children.  I'm 33 years old.  I went to school to
>>the sixth grade.  But now I see that school is very important, because I
>>am a person that have very low self-esteem, for the simple fact that I
>>can't read too good.

>>for many, the support of others who are in the same boat is what pulls
>>them through.  Once they get jobs, they get a more practical kind of
>>help.

>>Lee Bowes: if you've got a sick child, we'll go and pick the child up.
>>If you're having a problem with your day care provider, we'll find you a
>>new one.  If you need a new apartment, we'll find you a new apartment.
>>We'll do these things in the evenings and on the weekends so you can stay
>>working.

>>working at jobs that average $14,000 a year plus benefits, and they're
>>often jobs like Stephanie Bradley's, jobs with a future.

>>Nancy Smith: Stephanie is a model employee.  She really is setting all
>>kinds of records.  She's already been promoted twice since she's been
>>here.

>>but this is more than a new life for Stephanie Bradley and others like
>>her.  It's a new deal for the taxpayers.  The workers are on probation
>>for the first four months on the job.  Once they land the job, and only
>>then, the state pays "America Works" $5300.  Since it would cost about
>>$23,000 a year to keep someone like Stephanie on welfare, the state saves
>>money.

>>Peter Cove: for the taxpayer, this is absolutely the way government
>>should do business.  For the first time, government is saying to a
>>company, ours, "America Works," that, "we will pay you for delivery.  "we
>>won't pay you for a nice program that you run that feels good to
>>everybody.  "we're going to pay you if you get someone off of welfare."

>>the taxpayer saves, "America Works" makes a profit, everybody wins.  But
>>most of all, a woman like Evelyn Santiago with a ninth- grade education,
>>on welfare for 17 years, most of all, she wins.

>>Evelyn Santiago: it's been such a change, I feel so good, and I just want
>>to keep going.  I want to do more for myself.  It's good to have a bank
>>account.  I've never had a bank account, and now I have a little bit.  I
>>have my own that's mine so that I can say it's mine.  It feels good.  I
>>can go to the stores if I want to.  I feel like I can do anything now.
>>I'm moving on, and I can continue to move.

>>Notice the emphasis on freedom.  She has her bank account.  Even if it's
>>not much, it's hers.  Notice the emphasis on employment.  Notice the
>>emphasis on discernment.  You've got to go in there -you go through a
>>training program with them.  You don't make it through the training
>>program, they don't try to place you.  Notice the bonding.  "we will help
>>you find a place for your child.  "we'll help you find a better
>>apartment.  "we'll work with you."  A lot of things that work there.
>>Notice also, it's a model that not only could be applied across the
>>country to work, but what about addiction?  What if we said to addiction
>>programs, "we'll pay you based on how many are still free a year later"?
>>"we won't pay you for effort.  "we'll pay you for achievement."

The whole -what about if you said that to schools?  I recently suggested
that all the remedial work in college ought to be charged to the public
school system that failed to do it.  I mean, why are we paying on
achievement?

>>are you suggesting that we provide some incentive for the government to
>>become effective, right?

>>Yeah, I'm suggesting that incentive -- in fact, it's a very simple
>>phrase, to go back to something you'd asked about earlier.  I'm
>>suggesting that incentives work.  And we think that incentives, in fact
>>-- but incentives at every level and again, you've got to think this
>>through.  This is why it is a cultural change.  Okay?  The people who
>>found "America Works," if they can franchise and they can grow and if
>>they put 10,000 people a year at work instead of a thousand, guess what's
>>going to happen to the two founders?

>>They're going to be rich, which means, of course, they'll be
>>inappropriate.  You know, they're not being good social workers.  Good
>>social workers are grateful for their underpaid job and would not dream
>>of being entrepreneurially responsible.  So when they drive in their
>>Mercedes or their Lexus back to see their friends on their way to their
>>place up in the Adirondacks, they will be socially deviant, because
>>they'll be running a business.  But if that business actually saves the
>>people that this system has simply maintained in decay, which is a better
>>human program?  It takes a whole different mind set.

Notice also who takes the risk.  They keep the person on their payroll the
first four months.  So they're going to a business and saying, you get to
try this person out for four months.  You pay us.  You don't have to fire
this person.  You don't get any lawsuit.  This is designed to get around
lawsuits.  If you don't like this person on Thursday afternoon, they will
not show up on Friday morning, because they stay on our payroll.  So they
can go to the business.  They have lowered the risk of hiring the
marginally unemployed.  They're now walking in and saying, "hi."  Remember
the ladies you're talking about here.  15 years on welfare.  Now she's
going to go for first time and show up and work?  You're the average
employer?  This person has not been at work in 15 years, in fact, since
ninth grade, so she may never have been at work.  She's now showing up at,
you know, 32, 33 years of age saying, "hi, I'm ready"?

Well, what "America Works" does is they internalize to them the risk of
putting this lady at work.  So the business has a much lower threshold of
risk so it can gamble bigger, but they've thought through an entire system,
which fits this model.

And the thing I've been fascinated by is, it has not led 50 states and the
district of Columbia to automatically set up a similar incentive program.
They just don't get it.  I mean, they say, "well, I understand all that,
but here's how we operate."  It's just astonishing to me.  And that's why I
say generically, incentives work in America.  And if you don't -- if you
see a program that doesn't have an incentive, you ought to ask yourself why
it thinks it's working, and then you ought to check to see if it is.  And
what you'll find is it's usually very inefficient, it usually achieves far
below what it claims, because this is a society drawn forward by
incentives.

One of the projects we developed in order to test out this theory was a
program called Earning by Learning.  It's a project we designed to
implement a strategy to fulfill a vision.  Our vision is that every child
should know about free enterprise, should have a chance to earn a living,
and should know about reading and writing.  We wanted to set up a strategy
of saying, let's move towards an inventive-based model that combines free
enterprise and education in the same model, and the specific project we
designed was what's called Earning by Learning.

Earning by Learning is a model where we go into public housing projects or
public schools and we say to second and third graders who are likely not to
learn how to read, "we'll pay you $2. 00 a book for every book you read in
the summertime."  We just announced it, in fact, this week at Moten Middle
School in Washington, D. C. , where we're going to be doing it.  We use
adult volunteers, so there's no bureaucracy.  We use public library books
or public school books, so there's no capital investment.  The only money
that goes in is to the kids.  We use a room which is made free either by
the school or by the housing project.

And one of the reasons I became, frankly, a revolutionary was we went into
Douglas county and we went to a public housing project, and 8-year- old
kids said to us, "you're going to cheat us."  And we said, "what? " Just
regular old kids.  They said, "you're going to get us to read all summer,
and then you won't pay us."  Now, two things happened.  The first was I
decided if we're losing them at 8, if they're already so cynical at 8 they
just assume we're lying to them, we're in big trouble.  This is a huge
cultural crisis and requires a revolutionary response.  It requires a
replacement response, not, let's have a smaller circle or a slightly
different circle.  Let's get rid of this culture of poverty and violence
and get to one you can trust and that is decent.

But second, in Douglas county, we said, "fine.  "we won't ask you to trust
us.  "we'll pay you every week."  And what happened was every week, they
increased the number of kids who were reading.  Because when the ice cream
truck arrived, the kids who had money to buy ice cream were standing there,
their friends would come over and say, "how come you have money? " They go,
"well, I read, you know."

Now, I want you to think about the health of a notion that says, you should
be proud of yourself and you have some little cash in your pocket because
you're a reader, versus this system where there's no incentive, no sense of
dignity, no sense of resources, no chance to become a customer.

We also found, a little bit to our surprise, that these are actually pretty
smart kids.  When they'd earn 30 or $40, they'd mostly buy clothing.  The
number one expenditure was back-to-school clothing.
>>on the other hand, how did you confirm that they were reading to teach them --
>>You had adult volunteers who went in who made them answer questions about
>>their books.  Now, Moten middle school has gone a stage beyond me.
>>They're tied into a program from Indianapolis which is a computer reading
>>program where the computer asks you the questions and you actually take a
>>computerized test, and the computer's programmed to ask questions about
>>7,000 different titles.  It's pretty amazing.

I watched a couple kids taking the test.  And so the kid gets this sense
of, hey, they're just like all those fancy middle-class kids because
they're sitting right here at their computer in their school and they're
working on a computer, and you have to be able to read to use the computer.
And the computer's asking them whether or not they took the -- whether or
not they read the book, so they've got to get five questions right about
the book in order to pass the test.

>>they're getting several layers of lessons there.

>>Right, and they're being taught free enterprise.  It's okay to work.
>>It's okay to make money.  It's okay to do it honestly.  You actually
>>improve yourself while you're working.  Because you can become more
>>literate.  And we give them a big incentive.  I mean, if you read at $2.
>>00 a book, our top reader read 83 books and earned $166.  She was an
>>8-year-old girl in villa Rica, Georgia.  Her dad took a day off of work
>>just to protect her, because we paid her on graduation day, and, I mean,
>>she got $166 in cash as an 8-year-old.

It's just -- but I'm trying to give you just a sense of a different -- a
totally different model.  The principles of Earning by Learning are, first,
that incentives work.  Second, that poor children are smart in practical
ways.  You've got to let them grow.  You've got to give them a chance.
And, third, that money is a powerful incentive.  Now, this, by the way -- I
get in amazing arguments with people who are more traditional folks who
say, "oh, gee, isn't it sad you have to give them an incentive."  And then
I say, "well, now, if you're middle class, did your child have any
incentive if they got straight A's?  "did you reward them in any way if
they did really well? " "oh, yeah, of course I did, yeah."

What's the difference?  It's okay -- but they don't get the idea that if
you -- that if you have in this model of the welfare state no incentives,
why would you expect people to behave in positive ways?  In addition, the
principles of Earning by Learning include that a social good, learning, can
be reinforced by a personal good, earning, and that people given a good
idea will voluntarily follow up on their own, but can be held by a
supportive rather than controlling structure.

In other words, that you can get into an approach where you help people
learn how to do it, you give them good tips, you encourage them, but you
don't have a bureaucracy that micromanages and has reports and tries to
look over their shoulder.  The central theory is that efficiency in a
democracy is very hard, but effectiveness is pretty easy.  And I'm going to
draw that distinction for a second.  And, frankly, persistence,
persistence, persistence.

Let me draw a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness.  I don't
know an efficient way to arouse 35 million volunteers.  But I know if we
could inefficiently get 35 million volunteers helping the poor, we'd begin
to mop up the problem.  Because even though they would individually be
inefficient, the collective weight of that many people helping on the
weekend, helping in the evenings, talking about it in their church or
synagogue, talking about it over lunch at work, the sheer human energy
involved would mop up the problem, even though it would be very
inefficient.

And I would argue that's how democracies work.  They're not necessarily
efficient.  Dictatorships are more efficient.  They're just not very
effective.  But what democracies do, they mobilize so much energy, they
arouse so much excitement, that they are able to overcome their
inefficiency by their enthusiasm.  And again, that it takes tremendous
persistence.  None of this is going to happen without a level of
persistence that it's hard to normally get, and that's why when you --
remember I listed the reform movements?

What happens is in a period of a reform movement, you have an explosion of
energy, a sense that you've got to change things, a tremendous commitment
to do something, the invention of a whole new series of structures and
systems and habits.  They change things dramatically, and then they leave
behind at the end of the decade systems that are new and more effective
than the ones that they replaced.  You see this happen again and again in
American society over the last 300 years.

Earning by Learning, for example, just out of our speeches and things, is
now in 17 states.  It originally started with Dr.  Mel Steely at West
Georgia college and myself, and we ran the entire project, with Mel getting
a very tiny amount of money, working part-time out of his home, and I'd
wander around the country and make speeches, and people would call them and
he'd then send them a package of material, and they would then say "well,
this is all exciting," and it works.  It's a remarkable system.

Now, we have a foundation, and Don Jones of Wisconsin is organizing it,
working with the Library of Congress.  It's the Earning by Learning
foundation, and it's easy to call.  People can call 1-800-214-earn.

And for example, Governor Roehmer's wife in Denver is now going to be
actively leading an Earning by Learning program this summer.  He's a
Democratic governor of Colorado.  In Cabrini Green, one of the biggest
housing projects in America in Chicago, they're going to have an Earning by
Learning program this summer.  As I said, at Moten Middle school in
Washington, they're going to have Earning by Learning, so this is an idea
that we're continuing to push, to evolve, to grow.

Take a look at, for a minute, at "earn to learn," which is one of the
particular TV coverages of this concept
>>the earn to learn program provides students with an incentive to read.
>>Second and third graders read a book and write star reports.  Then give
>>an oral report to dealership employees.  Students and volunteers discuss
>>the book title, author, central theme, characters, and favorite passages.
>>The volunteer then signs the student's reading record, entitling second
>>graders to earn 25 cents per book and third graders, 50 cents per book.

Texas Commerce Bank provided, free of charge, savings accounts for all
students participating in the earn to learn program.  Account books are
kept at school, and each child is responsible for recording deposits and
maintaining their account balance.  The result is a program that teaches
the students a connection between learning and earning, a tangible reality
in our adult world.
>>and so far, I have read about between 20 and 30 books for the earn to
>>learn program.

>>Mike Smith and C.  W.  Kahn of Kahn's appliances, the school's business
>>in education partner, presented the program to Betty Cooper, Lucas
>>Elementary School principal.

>>Betty Cooper: and it sound like a good idea, but we didn't know it was so
>>much work involved, getting the bank statements set up and all the things
>>that we had to do.  We got permission from our school district, and
>>everything went well.  And I guess the best part about all of this was
>>when Mr..  Smith said that he would, in turn, give us the tools for the
>>program so that we wouldn't have to take any of the teachers or
>>volunteers from any other program to do this.

>>Mike Smith committed to the earn to learn program even before he had a
>>chance to talk to his employees about it, but the worthiness of the
>>program was plain to see, and since October, more than 80% of the
>>employees at Mike Smith auto plaza have volunteered to participate in
>>earn to learn.

>>Betty Cooper: we have approximately eight to nine tutors per Tuesday to
>>come out and listen to the children read, and the kids have really
>>enjoyed it.

>>well, I think they do it because they love children and they want us to
>>learn.

>>I leave here every time I come with such a peaceful feeling, and can't
>>wait to come back the next time.

>>George Mulkey: when we first started this program, Mike set it up where
>>we come mainly every six to seven weeks, and I find myself coming every
>>week now because I've gotten so close to the children.  I see the
>>benefits in the future of the children by watching them grow week in and
>>week out as they learn to read better and write better.  I see children
>>going farther in life.

>>what I like about this earn to learn thing mostly is that I get to read
>>more books than I usually do.

>>why do you say that?

>>because I like to read a lot, and I like to read all kinds of books.

>>Betty Cooper: academically, these kids have just improved tremendously.
>>The math has gone up, the reading skills, the writing skills.  They're
>>communicating better.  Their vocabulary has broadened, and we must
>>remember, these are at-risk kids, and the big picture is that these kids
>>later will be productive, contributing citizens to our community.

>>I'm going to be a good student whenever I grow up.  Because I'm going to
>>try to be the best that I can be.

>>Now, notice over here in this model if you read, you may get beaten up.
>>In this model if your choice is to read or practice basketball, there's
>>no question which is the higher value.  In this model, not only is it
>>good to read, not only do you get prestige out of reading, but in the
>>Earning by Learning version, you get money.

So you take the number of hours you want to go and read, and you suddenly
-- and part of what we do, by impacting on a particular housing project, is
you suddenly have 60 or 70 or 80% of the second and third graders carrying
books around, so it suddenly becomes okay to carry a book.  And why are you
carrying a book?  Because you're going to be able to be part of what works
in the free enterprise system.

And so suddenly, the kids who are the smartest kids aren't the kids who can
beat each other up, they aren't the kids who might belong to a local youth
gang.  They're the kids who are going to have the most money at the end of
the summer, and you begin to change the whole psychology.  But it's got to
be seen as an entire system.

Now let's look at another area which has been just tragically not used
effectively, and that's pillar four, the spirit of invention and discovery.
I happened yesterday to meet with the Federal Aviation Administration, and
you remember last week I think I showed you, this is the M. I. T card, the
little dot that's dark, actually has 70 electric engines on it.  The sign
of micro- miniaturization.

Now, as an example of why governments find it very hard to use new
technologies, we are the largest purchaser of vacuum tubes left in the
world.  This is a vacuum tube currently used when you fly in an airplane.
This is part of the air traffic control system you're flying in.  In fact,
I think a large number of them are now made in Poland, because we're
running out of places to make vacuum tubes in the united states.  Now, this
is a vacuum tube, and again, I want you to think about the notion, these
are 70 electric motors.

Well, the same mind set which has made our -- and this is not the fault of
the FAA.  This is the fault of a federal government procurement policy of
incredible density and lack of rationality.  But the same pattern that
makes us obsolescent here also means we don't think about how to help the
poor.

I -- you see revolutions around you.  The fact is, if you look at Terry
Terrell, who's a student in this class, all of you now, I think, have your
copy of the student guide for the class which he put together.  This is
laptop publishing.  This is an entrepreneurial -- but the point is, we live
in an age where there's no reason every public housing project in America
can't have its own newspaper, can't have its own way of communicating with
itself for almost no money, but we don't think about how to create
technological breakthroughs.

I got laughed at a few weeks ago because I went to the Ways and Means
Committee and I said, "at least at the vision level, we ought to be
thinking about how do we get a laptop computer to every poor child in
America."  People said, "well, they don't need laptops."  Well, you're
right.  If they're in this model, they don't need laptops.  But if you're
in this model and you want them to participate in the 21st century, they
need laptops as much as anybody does, because you want to think about
wiring the poor neighborhoods.

You can't just have a country where the only people who get wired are upper
middle class, and then we say, "now, time to go look for a job.  "everybody
who gets to go look for a job "has to be able to use a computer.  "raise
your hand."  Nobody in this group has a clue.  Furthermore, if they know
they don't have a clue, they have a lower incentive in learning how to
read.  Because we're asking them to go back to a Second Wave industrial
model of learning, and we're saying to them, all the really clever people
who are going to be successful in America, they're down here now.

They're already doing Third Wave information-age stuff, but, of course, we
don't expect anybody who's poor to participate.  But you ought to work as
hard as these people, because you ought to at least pretend you're going to
participate.  And then you'll have self-esteem.

And so I would argue just the opposite.  That part of going to this new
culture of productivity and safety has to include wiring the poor and
thinking it through in a very specific way.  What do we want to do to
ensure that fiber optic is available?  What do we want to ensure that dish
satellites -- I talked to a corporation which is probably going to announce
in the near future that they're going to take a public housing project in
Washington and they're going to put a dish receiver in every house -- in
every apartment.  And they're going to do it as a pilot project to bring
500 channels to the poor, including educational channels, job seeking
channels, learning channels, just to say, all right, I mean, let's have an
explosion of knowledge.  It doesn't cost much.  And if in the process 24
hours a day, seven days a week, the poorest child in America has access in
their living room to the world and they begin to think, "wow, I can be
somebody, because I have the same access as anybody else does," you change
things.

But it's deeper than that.  We need to be thinking about safety in the
information age.  And about health care in poor neighborhoods in the
information age.  I'll give you just two quick -- two or three quick
examples.  If you know there are some neighborhoods that are very, very
unsafe, one of the things you do is you put cameras up.  You find ways to
have the kind of surveillance you need to provide real protection.  Another
step you do is you begin to provide some kind of call device, and you get
volunteers and you get lots of volunteers.  And you see something
suspicious, call the cops.  It's better to have the police arrive early,
it's better to have the police arrive early and see what's going on than it
is to have them arrive after the crime.

Most of the time today, police are crime reaction rather than crime
prevention units, because you have to integrate them into the neighborhood
and have anonymous people who can just call and say, "I think there's a
teen gang at the corner and I think somebody's going to get hurt in the
next half hour."  The police then drive by.

That -- again, you could literally give away devices to call in to create a
network of information.  It ain't that hard to computerize databases.  It
should be relatively easy to track who are the teen gangs to simply know
who's who.  To go to thumbprints for a whole range of things, including
food stamps and other things.

And I'm totally in favor of instant identity for buying guns.  I mean, we
ought to know if somebody who has been in a mental institution or is a
convicted felon shows up and they want to buy a gun, I'd like to know that
while they're standing there, and I'd like to have policemen visit with
them while they're still in the store and say, "hi, you know, we probably
want to take you away for a long time."

And I would say it ought to be illegal for a felon to try to buy a gun.  I
mean, I put a very high stake -- I mean, we're told 70,000 felons showed up
and got -- you know, were trying to buy guns.  Why are they trying to buy
guns?  Why don't we drum into their heads it is illegal.  We will not
tolerate you buying guns.
>>isn't it already illegal?

>>It's illegal to have bought it, but we just warn them away without saying
>>to ourselves, let's make a note here.  This is the third time Freebie's
>>tried to buy a gun.  I mean, at some point you begin to think there might
>>be a pattern here.  Maybe if something happens in Freddie's neighborhood.
>>

And again, when you're out on parole, we could easily have you wearing an
ankle bracelet that was connected by satellite that tracked you precisely
the way we track, for example, large mammals in endangered species.  And
while you're on parole, if you happen to be at the local 7-eleven at the
exact second it's being robbed, we might say to ourselves -- we know that
up to 84% in some of the cases are going to be recidivists, and yet we do
nothing to track them.  I mean, these things are all -- the technology
exists today for a revolution in public safety.

Similarly, you can set up very inexpensive neighborhood clinics connected
electronically to the best hospitals, the best doctors in the world.  And
you can have very inexpensive people who are trained to screen up to a
point where we then call in the doctor.  What we have today is a model that
says, if you can't afford to set up a full clinic with full standing
doctors, meeting every possible requirement of a nice upper-middle-class
neighborhood, we really shouldn't provide any health care at all.

And it's not that hard to build a series of things.  We're doing it in the
military now, where we're going to be able to go from a field unit that has
a person who has just been wounded directly by satellite to the best doctor
for that kind of wound in the world and get them help immediately.  You
could do the same thing for the poor at not much money, and you could
actually guarantee screening for things and you could guarantee prenatal
care and you could do things dramatically less expensive than the current
model.

Beyond the information age, pillar five is Deming and Quality.  And the
first point I'd make, if you look at the Deming model and you think at a
systems level, the first point I'd make is, we are looking at a system of
failure.  Very important principle.  That it is the system which has
failed, not just individual cases.  That's why I talk about a replacement
of a culture and replacement of a system.
What we want to do is build a system of success with continuous
improvement, teamwork, customer orientation, and continuous measurement.

So we're constantly finding out are, in fact -- when we're told, well, this
school didn't succeed very well, and so 70% of the kids aren't learning how
to read, so we'll now have a study plan, and maybe a year from now we'll
have a new proposal.  In the intervening year, of course, 70% of the kids
won't learn how to read, and then maybe we'll start seeing whether or not
there's some improvement, that's crazy.  If you have a school that you find
out this morning you know has 70% of the kids not learning how to read, the
crisis meeting ought to be at lunch.  The first new plan ought to be
Monday.  You ought to be measuring whether or not you're changing behavior
by Friday.  You ought to be working every day to change things.

And yet you've got unionized work rules, you've got tenure, you've got all
the impediments to rational behavior, and again, it fits the difference in
these two cultures.  In this culture, you change every day, where you have
the red bead experiment every day.  You work very hard at finding how to do
things better.  And you're very flexible and creative.

In this culture, you fill out the paperwork and it ain't your fault.  You
did what the bureaucracy told you.  Why should they blame you?  Why pick on
you?  Totally different models.  In this culture, you have only one
ultimate test, are the kids taken care of?  Are they safe?  Are they
learning?  Do we have a community doing the right things?  In this model,
you have only one test, did I fill out the paperwork so they can't fire me?
Totally different models.

And if you take Deming's vision of how quality works and you apply it to
the current bureaucracies, it just makes you want to cry, and that's why I
don't think you can reinvent them.  I think you've got to basically
transform the system to a dramatically more decentralized, less government
system.  In a sense, I guess I would suggest that we really do have two
visions.  The welfare state versus what I would call an opportunity
society.

Now, if you accept the systemic difference, what I would like to suggest to
you is that there are seven strategies for implementing the opportunity
society.  First, holism.  And I'm going to walk through all these.  Second,
individual and community responsibility and involvement.  Third,
productivity and safety.  Fourth, putting children first.  Fifth, creating
diverse communities, de-ghetto-izing poverty.  Sixth, real compassion and
volunteerism.  And, seventh, an effective and appropriate role for
government.

And again, you have to think of these as seven integrated strategies.  All
seven of them have to fit together into a coherent whole.  Doesn't do you
good to do four of them.  You need to do all seven.  Strategy one is
holism.  And this essentially goes back to my earlier point, that we have
to approach the total change of the culture and system.  But if you're not
looking at the totality of it, if you're not taking a person from here all
the way down to here, you're not getting anything.

Having an indolent drunk who no longer drinks but hasn't changed any other
behavior, a, means that within a year, they're probably going to start
drinking again, and, b, you still haven't solved the rest of their
problems.  They still are illiterate, they still don't go to work, they
still don't know how to be independent.  So to change them from who they
are today to the person we hope they'll be in a year is a holistic, it is a
total, a transformational change.

It's like going from water to ice, which is the best example I can give you
of a holistic transformation.  You know, water is liquid, ice is solid.
They are different.  And you want to make that big a change in the way
people live and in the way they spend their lives.
>>that was the thawing portion that we were talking about a couple of weeks
>>ago.

>>yeah, yeah.  So if you think about it, what we're saying is we want these
>>people to take -- to thaw out from this version and then to refreeze into
>>this version.  The transformation is the thawing phase, but they're
>>literally different shapes.

>>morphing.

>>Yeah, in a sense, I mean, morphing, to use the modern computer term,
>>would be an example.  But you do become different.  An antelope is not
>>just a short-necked giraffe.  You know, and a lion isn't just a giraffe
>>that eats meat.  They're different.  Well, a productive citizen in a
>>healthy family living in a safe neighborhood with their children going to
>>schools that work and with all of them having an expectation of having a
>>better future through having good jobs is totally different from being
>>trapped in a neighborhood of violence with a system that won't let you go
>>to work, being dependent on a bureaucrat who doesn't have a clue what
>>your name is or who your family is, and having to send your kids to a
>>monopoly that will destroy them.  I mean, they're different structures,
>>different behaviors.

Strategy number two is that to get to here, you have to have individual and
community responsibility and involvement.  This cannot just be imposed from
the out.  People who are in here have to be recruited, attracted, drawn to
wanting to do this.  They have to have both involvement and responsibility.
They are changing their lives.

We're not magically intervening and giving them good citizen shots.  I
mean, they're full- grown -- you know, a lot of them are full- grown human
beings.  They've got to reach the decision inside themselves that the time
has come to change their lives.  The time has come to do something
different.

I should say in terms of developing these new ideas, I want to mention that
Jane Fortson, who's here today, is a senior fellow at the Progress and
Freedom Foundation, and that she and Marvin Olasky, who's also a senior
fellow there, have been enormously helpful, and that Victoria
Durant-Gonzalez, who's with the Atlanta project, has been an advisor and
critic and debater, and in many, many different ways has helped us think
about all these things over the last two weeks, and the Atlanta Project is
a good example of what we're talking about.

The Atlanta Project is an effort which I think is halfway between these
two.  I think it's the largest effort in a comprehensive way heavily using
volunteers to try to impact on helping the poor transform themselves.  And
I think to the degree it will succeed, it's going to succeed because it has
some of this in it.  To the degree it's not succeeding right now, it's
because it's not radical enough.  It's got to go one more layer of being
clear with itself about how big the change is.

But the Atlanta project is a very heroic effort which was launched by
president Carter, when, frankly, he could very easily have done nothing.
And I have often said I think he has been the most influential of our
former presidents in modern times, because he has stayed active, he's
stayed involved, and he's done things.  And I'd like you to take just a
minute and look at the Atlanta project and what it's trying to accomplish.

>>Jimmy Carter: we felt that somewhere in god's world, there needed to be
>>some proof that in a major metropolitan area, something could be done
>>about human deprivation and suffering.

>>Maynard Jackson: so lo and behold, here comes the most active
>>ex-president in the history of America, who says that he's going to bring
>>his vast resources to bear on the problem of fighting poverty in this
>>city, in Atlanta.

>>Johnetta B.  Cole: this notion that each of us has the ability to make
>>life better not only for ourselves but for others is, I think, at the
>>base of the Atlanta Project.  I think we are going to see an absolutely
>>amazing outpour of volunteers, folk who honest to goodness believe that
>>they can create a better Atlanta.

>>Ted Renner: when Bill and Richard Marriott were approached by President
>>Carter, it didn't take much of anything to get them really turned on and
>>committed to this particular endeavor.

>> Dan Sweat: the C. E. O.  Said, we not only will give you half a million
>>dollars or a million dollars, but we want to be personally involved, and
>>we want our corporations involved and our employees involved in a real
>>meaningful way.

>>Ken Lewis: we believe as our communities thrive, we thrive.  We also
>>believe that we're only as strong as our weakest link.  So as we
>>strengthen that link, we all benefit.

>>Jane Fortson: Jimmy Carter has brought a dream and a vision not only to
>>Atlanta, but I believe ultimately to the country.  It's, to me, his
>>greatest quality, is his ability to dream and his ability to articulate a
>>vision and to gather people around that vision.

>> Andrew Young: I think what the Carter project does is give us a time and
>>say, wait a minute.  We've gone as far as we can go alone.  We've got to
>>reach down and take the rest of god's children with us.

>>Joe Martin: if the Atlanta Project can help to take these huge problems
>>and break them down into pieces so that individuals can say, well, if I
>>work on this piece, I'll have some confidence that somebody else will be
>>working on that piece, and together, we can make a difference.

>>Jane Fortson: we'll make a difference, because people are going to deal
>>with people.  Regular people, black and white, rich and poor, young and
>>old, will come together to solve the problems.

>>Johnetta B.  Cole: you know, you can't help but remember, when we won the
>>Olympics, folk really didn't shout and scream, "I am an African-American,
>>and I am proud that we have the Olympics."  Folk didn't say, "I am from
>>the poor of Atlanta, and we got the Olympics."  People said, "I am from
>>Atlanta, and this is what we won."  My hope is that something called the
>>Atlanta Project will, in fact, as best as any action can do, erase those
>>lines, sometimes terribly deep, between and among our communities.

>>The Atlanta Project, by trying to bring together government, business,
>>private volunteerism in a collaborative effort with the community, I
>>think is a very, very important experiment in the right direction.  And
>>we do a number of things to try to work with them, and I think that to
>>the degree it's got a problem, it's because it's only a piece of this.

Jane Fortson really developed the seven strategies, and as you go through
all of them, you begin to realize, okay, community and individual
responsibility and participation is important, but there are a bunch more,
and you've got to have all seven working simultaneously in order for us to
have even a chance at winning.  Strategy number three, in that sense, is
productivity and safety.  We listed them together for this reason, they're
about reality.  The reality is you either have a way of making businesses
that are profitable and that survive, or you don't.  The reality is you're
either physically safe or you're not.  Now, if you're not safe, it's a lot
harder to create businesses.  If you can't create businesses, it's a lot
harder to convince people that they ought to follow a path of non-crime.

So they're linked together, but they're about genuinely having to solve
problems in this system that you can't just kid yourself about.  Doesn't do
you a lot of good to put money in here if when the money's gone, there's no
business there.  So you've got to start asking yourself, under what
circumstances can we make businesses succeed?  How -- what changes in tax
law do you need?  What changes in the regulation do you need?  How can we
make it profitable to have a business that is permanently in the inner city
because it makes money being there?

Which, by the way, means at least intellectually, if you want to help the
poor, you have to worry about helping the businesses that help the poor.
And you cannot love those who get -- create jobs, but hate those who create
jobs.  You've got to decide -- we have a schizophrenia in America today,
and we've got to say, "okay, I want 100,000 jobs for poor people, and if I
could find 100 people each of whom would create a thousand jobs, that would
be a good thing."  Well, then, you may have to change the law to encourage
those hundred people to do it.  But if you do that, then you get into the
whole question of, but what if they get more money out of getting more
money?

Because it just -- should the fact of creating a thousand jobs be a good
thing or a bad thing?  Should we reward it, back to incentives, or should
we punish it?  Similarly, you can't tolerate violence, because if you have
violence, when you start creating the jobs, they'll leave.

Jobs will -- it's very hard to create an economic incentive worth getting
killed over.  And so people will be very risk averse, so you have to make a
neighborhood safe, you have to make it desirable in tax and regulatory
terms for jobs to go in there, and then you have to go back and reach out a
helping hand so that the local person in that neighborhood can get the job,
because otherwise, what you'll do is you'll just crowd out the poor.

They'll sit across the street from the employment office, but they won't be
employable, and therefore, even though you now brought a thousand jobs into
the community, you still haven't solved it.

Now, the person who is really doing pioneering work on the question of how
do we create a productive inner city is Michael Porter at Harvard Business
School, the author of "the Competitive Advantage of Nations."  He says the
following, I quote, "we believe a sustainable economic base in inner cities
will only come about through private, for-profit initiatives and investment
based on economic self-interest and true competitive advantage, not through
artificial inducements, charity, or government mandates.  "the central
task, then, is to identify the unique existing and potential competitive
advantages of inner cities, which can translate into genuinely profitable
businesses that have the potential not only to serve the local community,
but also to export outside it.  "the inner city must become an integral
part of the regional and national economy, rather than an island surrounded
by it.  "unless we start with the premise that inner city businesses should
be genuinely profitable in position to compete on a regional, national, and
even international scale, they will forever be relegated to second-class
economic citizenship.  "economic development policies and programs must not
fall into the trap of only redistributing wealth, but focus instead on how
to create it."

Very important distinction.  Here the focus is, let's take the existing
wealth and redistribute it.  Let's take from the rich and give to the poor.
Here the focus is, let's make everybody richer.  Totally different models.


This, by the way, was the dominant model of the united states until 1965.
I mean, there was no question about it.  I mean, even Franklin Roosevelt or
John F. Kennedy would have argued this.  It's John F.  Kennedy who said, "a
rising tide lifts all boats," because he argued for a giant tax cut so that
everybody had a better chance.  But these are very different psychological
and family models.

Strategy four is to put children first.  Partially for the reason that you
see in the beginning of "Boys Town," where Father Flanagan goes into his
settlement house and realizes that he can't -- that he can't save
40-year-old alcoholics.  But he has an obligation to try to save 9-year-old
kids.  And if we simply had a very effective program of measuring backward
from the children safety, learning, jobs, income, making sure that their
lives have a chance to work.

Now, to do that, you've got to help their parents.  Remember, it's not
reductionist, we'll take care of the kids.  Tough luck, mom.  Can't just
be, we'll take care of the children in their box.  But it has to be in
order to re -- to transform this into this, the children are the perfect
bridge where you can focus your energy and focus your test.

Obviously, for the children to be in a better housing project, you have to
have a better housing project for everybody else.  For the children to be
in a safer neighborhood, it's going to be a safer neighborhood for
everybody else.  But by starting the focus on the children, I think we can
have a very powerful model.  It's also, quite frankly, the place we have
the greatest moral imperative.

I don't believe any American can be comfortable with what happens to the
poorest children in America today.  I just don't think anybody's
comfortable.  So I think if you start with the moral imperative, "yes,
we're going to organize ourselves as a country and we're going to make this
change happen, and if we fail to do so, here is what it means for the
children," gives us, frankly, the greatest moral power to make the change.


Strategy number five is to create diverse communities, in a sense, to
de-ghetto-ize poverty.  This, by the way, also applies to the American
Indian reservations and to Appalachia, and is one of the ways in which some
of it could be done electronically.  I mean, there's no reason you can't
have telephone friends.  You don't have to physically drive somewhere.
There's no reason you can't do a lot of things that work for everybody else
in America.

But again, I mean, how many of you call your best friend more often than
you see them face to face?  Raise your hand.  Okay.  Over half of you.  I
mean, so you can have a big brother-big sister program that has a lot of
impact, you know, that has a lot of continuity, that's not just getting
together on Saturday morning, but it's also chatting in the evenings, it's
also doing a lot of things that are electronic hand-holding and electronic
reinforcement and electronic communications.

But it's more than that.  One of the tragedies of this model is that we've
basically ended up tying the poor up in big centers of poverty so that they
don't see anybody go to work.  One of the virtues of Earning by Learning is
you begin to get healthy adults coming out of this society sitting down
with a child so that the child begins to relate to somebody who's orderly,
disciplined, has a sense of values that are appropriate to an information
age, and you want to do everything you can to begin to break down the
isolation of the poor and to begin to link them in with people who are in
the habit of having and leading healthy lives.

It's an enormous difference, and one where, frankly, I think the policy of
concentrating the poor ultimately has been tragic for the poor.  Strategy
six has to be real compassion and volunteerism.  And again, real compassion
includes the willingness to say "no," it includes tough love, it includes a
kind of volunteerism which tries to bond you directly to the people you're
trying to help, and which emphasizes the principles that Olasky outlined
earlier, that we used earlier today.

But I don't think you can succeed without that.  I think if all you do is
the government stuff and if all you do is the private business stuff and
you have not made the transition here with volunteers holding hands,
remember what I said earlier about covenant house on Tuesday mornings?  You
have to have somebody you know who talks to you who you trust, who carries
you across there.

I mean, how many of you at some point in your life learned something where
if you did not have another human being holding your hand and helping you,
you would just not have done it?  Okay.  Most of -- overwhelming, right?
And so it's that process of volunteerism which I think is an integral
building block.

Finally, strategy seven is an effective and appropriate role for government.
 We are not ever in this course talking about weak government.  We're
talking about limited, effective government.  I mean, if government,
frankly, could just provide public safety and have a tax code that
encouraged job creation and minimized the bureaucratic destruction of jobs
and be in a position to ensure that public learning took place whether it
was in a public bureaucracy or not, government would have done all it needs
to do in the inner city.   If then that was interfaced with the private
sector creating jobs and that was interfaced with voluntary associations
helping make the transition, you'd begin to have a team, if you will.

Think of it as a -- a box, which we'll talk about next week, where you have
up here the basic values of your civilization that have to be repeated over
and over again, because that's how values are transmitted.  You send them
over and over again.  Then you have to have the voluntary associations,
what we think of as freedom, what de Tocqueville described, whether it's
Kiwanis or business and professional women or Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts or
churches and synagogues.

Then you have private business.  In this model, which Gordon Woods helped
me understand and is derived from Jefferson, here you have limited,
effective government.  But it is the last and least of -- in a free
society.  It's very important in wartime.  And it has to be effective.  But
notice the way it's only a piece of the whole pattern.

Now, if we could get this to all work, I think within a decade, we can have
made a dramatic reduction, maybe as much as 70%, in poverty in America.
But I can't overstate, this is very hard work and will take a tremendous
effort.

Next week we're going to keep picking up on this, because we're going to
talk next week about citizenship and community in 21st century America, and
that will give us a chance to come right back at these same topics and how
we organize ourselves as a free people.  Next week's reading is Don
Eberly's "Building a Community of Citizens," the introduction, and then
chapters 1, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23.  And at that time, we will take up
further on how we get America to work.

Last Updated 3/15/95
[HTML revised 2004-03-28 by Terrence Berres]

Renewing American Civilization Table of Contents