Search

Indonesia's conditional cash transfer program serves only the "objectively perceivable" poor—those who fit its parameters of eligibility and appear in the official poverty data. It creates two populations of poor people: the legible and eligible, or user poor, and the illegible and ineligible, or nonuser poor. In Surabaya the nonuser poor—who constitute half of all poor people—benefit from a de facto distribution of cash transfers that operates in the low-income neighborhoods (kampungs) through a figuration of people that is made up of cash transfer users, nonusers, providers, and brokers. It reveals actually existing welfare at work in the blind spots of objectively targeted welfare. Actually existing welfare cannot be understood as a set of official policies, roles, or technological interfaces but as a set of locally embedded relationships that bring welfare subjects into existence. Without understanding these relationships that form on the edge of welfare, it is not possible to understand the labor involved in producing the poor in targeted schemes like Indonesia's conditional cash transfer program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The income maintenance experiments have received renewed attention due to growing international interest in a basic income. Proponents of a negative income tax (NIT) viewed it as a replacement for traditional welfare with stronger work incentives. However, existing labor supply estimates for single mothers (those eligible for welfare) are uniformly negative. We reassess the experimental evidence and find randomization failure in two NITs (Gary and Seattle). In Denver and Manitoba, we find positive labor supply responses for those on welfare before random assignment. Our results provide strong evidence that an NIT can increase work activity among single mothers on welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides a list of new and upcoming titles of interest to social work and social welfare scholars. The titles cover a wide range of topics, including Asian Americans in an anti-Black world, the experiences of Black children with incarcerated parents, gendered racism and queer life, and the legacy of poverty in America. The books explore issues such as mental health, immigration, education, and racial justice. The list includes titles from various publishers and offers diverse perspectives on social issues. [Extracted from the article]

This document provides a list of new and upcoming titles that may be of interest to social work and social welfare scholars. The titles cover a range of topics including misogyny, racial justice, mental illness, immigration, and social movements. The books are written by various authors and published by different university presses. The document includes information on the publication dates, page numbers, and prices of each book. [Extracted from the article]

This document provides a list of new and upcoming titles of interest to social work and social welfare scholars. The titles cover a wide range of topics, including disability, aging, race, LGBTQ+ issues, incarceration, mental health, and public policy. The books offer diverse perspectives and aim to challenge existing norms and promote social justice. The summaries include information about the authors, publishers, page counts, and prices of each book. [Extracted from the article]

Focusing on welfare challenges and crises encountered by women in contemporary Vietnam, this article examines the gendering of morality and the ways in which a feminized ethics of care is entangled with women's practice of the social capacity tình cảm (sentiments/feelings/emotions). Drawing on data from the Industrial Zones of northern Vietnam, the article highlights how low-income workers are rendered precarious in the Vietnamese semi-privatized welfare sector. The article shows how an inadequate public welfare system not only relies on, but even capitalizes on, a feminized ethics of care provided by women for kin and relatives in need of everyday support. Thus, shaped as an essentializing morality-defined female capacity, tình cảm is imposing pressure upon girls and women while also facilitating the building of social resilience with which they can mitigate and cope with care expectations, challenges, and crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality. b By Céline Bessière and Sibylle Golac, translated by Juliette Rogers. B The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health. b By Katherine Mason. B Social Work during COVID-19: Glocal Perspectives and Implications for the Future of Social Work. b Edited by Timo Harrikari, Joseph Mooney, Malathi Adusumalli, Paula McFadden, and Tuomas Leppiaho. B The Myth of the Community Fix: Inequality and the Politics of Youth Punishment. b By Sarah D. Cate. [Extracted from the article]

Research characterizes public assistance programs as stigmatizing and stressful (e.g., psychological costs) but obscures differences across programs or the features of policy design that contribute to varied bureaucratic encounters. Using 83 interviews with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Medicaid beneficiaries, and 60 interviews with staff from those programs, we examine how people differentiate their experiences across programs. We find that WIC staff members describe the program as facilitating, rather than constraining, personal interactions with clients. In contrast, SNAP and Medicaid workers report pressure to process clients expeditiously and accurately, leading several caseworkers to express frustration and suspicion of the information provided by recipients. WIC participants in all three programs described positive, supportive interactions with WIC staff and viewed the program as a source of social support. In contrast, participants reported stigmatizing encounters with SNAP and Medicaid staff and inaccessible caseworkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Inequality across State Lines: How Policymakers Have Failed Domestic Violence Victims in the United States. b By Kaitlin Sidorsky and Wendy J. Schiller. B Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy. b By Sigal R. Ben-Porath. B Applied Arts and Health: Building Bridges across Art, Therapy, Health, Education, and Community. b Edited by Ross W. Prior, Mitchell Kossak, and Teresa A. Fisher. B A Genealogy of the Good and Critique of Hubris: A History of the Discourse on Social Welfare in the United States. b By Phillip Dybicz. [Extracted from the article]

The ten empirical chapters and conclusion provide a fine-grained account of China's changing class structure with the focus on the old proletariat: that is, state-sector workers who enjoyed urban citizenship. In the decade before the early 2000s, some 60 million state and collective enterprise workers were dismissed amid massive enterprise restructuring in China. [Extracted from the article]

B The Challenge of Right-Wing Nationalist Populism for Social Work: A Human Rights Approach. b Edited by Carolyn Noble and Goetz Ottmann. B The Commercial Determinants of Health. b Edited by Nason Maani, Mark Petticrew, and Sandro Galea. B Allies and Obstacles: Disability Activism and Parents of Children with Disabilities. b By Alison C. Carey, Pamela Block, and Richard K. Scotch. B All Health Politics Is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health. b By Merlin Chowkwanyun. [Extracted from the article]

Long held as a critique of postwar consumption, Claes Oldenburg's The Store (1961) took place in a storefront on the Lower East Side, an area at the center of federal intervention into Black and Puerto Rican poverty. This article reinterprets The Store through comparison to Mobilization for Youth (MFY), an anti-poverty organization that operated next door. Both shared an environmental "method": the operational use of the storefront. MFY revolutionized the practice of social welfare by opening "storefront centers" that integrated its programs into resident's daily lives by placing its clinics next to neighborhood shops. Using the storefront as a gallery and performance venue, The Store similarly repurposed its space. By aligning Oldenburg and MFY, the article proposes that the transformation of labor circa 1961—when automation began to displace the former industrial workers targeted by MFY—has been overlooked as constitutive to The Store 's meaning. Moreover, the article argues that the politics of The Store 's heralded return to realism are productively described by MFY's postwar practice of liberal reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Social Work Education in Europe: Traditions and Transformations. b By Marion Laging and Nino Zganec. B Losing Sleep: Risk, Responsibility, and Infant Sleep Safety. b By Laura Harrison. B Rethinking Feminist Theories for Social Work Practice. b By Christine Crocker and Trish Hafford-Letchfield. B Work Matters: How Parents' Jobs Shape Children's Well-Being. b By Maureen Perry-Jenkins. [Extracted from the article]

Research has shown that conservatives tend to oppose the distribution of welfare to other people. However, are conservatives less likely than liberals to accept welfare for themselves? We find that the difference in liberals' and conservatives' welfare enrollment depends on whether the welfare program has a work requirement policy. A natural field experiment shows that when the supplemental nutritional program (SNAP) had a work requirement, liberals and conservatives were equally likely to enroll in this program. In the absence of a work requirement, conservatives were less likely than liberals to enroll in it. Follow-up experiments replicate this result and demonstrate the underlying mechanism: conservatives' adherence to binding moral values (loyalty, authority, and purity; Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009) makes them hesitant to accept welfare without a work requirement. Policy makers can deploy marketing messages to mitigate this effect and boost conservatives' enrollment in such welfare programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effect of welfare reform on intergenerational welfare participation, using mother-daughter pairs in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that a mother's Aid to Families with Dependent Children/Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (AFDC/TANF) participation increased her daughter's odds of adult participation in that program by roughly 25 percentage points or more, but that welfare reform attenuated this transmission by at least 50%. However, there is no diminution of transmission after welfare reform when we consider the wider safety net or other outcomes. Daughters who grew up with mothers on AFDC/TANF were no better off after reform, with substitution toward other welfare programs over generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before being locked up, incarcerated women are more marginalized, have higher rates of mental illness and substance misuse, and have more often experienced physical or sexual victimization than incarcerated men. Women experience prison differently. However, much of what we know about women's experiences comes from research in the United States and the United Kingdom, providing little insight into women prisoners' experiences elsewhere. This is unfortunate for many reasons; policy makers wishing to develop evidence-based initiatives, for example, cannot know whether what seems to work in one place is appropriate in another. Case studies from Canada, Norway, and Mexico reveal similarities and substantial differences in women's experiences. Incarcerated women in all three places have histories of victimization and identify their children as their primary motivator to desist from crime and drug use. However, how they relate to programming, prison work, accommodation, and prison food varies greatly. How women in these three different countries experience imprisonment is related to conditions of their lives outside of prison and to the nature, extent, and quality of available social welfare services. Researchers need to pay much closer attention to geographical and contextual differences when assessing the conditions, challenges, and prospects of women in prisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of families receiving public cash assistance has decreased since welfare reform and the establishment of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996, with only a few short-lived increases. The early decline was related to caseload exits; the recent decline is attributed to fewer eligible families participating. Using New Jersey TANF data from 2018, we conduct an equity analysis of TANF applications, denials, and the reasons for such denials. Multilevel and multinomial models examine risk factors that may impede access by identity or geography. Findings reveal statistically significant relationships between household characteristics and application outcomes, but no county-level variables were significant. Applicants with prior TANF receipt were less likely to be denied. Noncitizens, applicants with prior sanctions, and those over the TANF time limit were more likely to be denied. We discuss differences in access by race and ethnicity, along with policy implications, in the context of need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe, new welfare programs exemplify attempts to govern through community. This article asks how such governing through community is done in practice. Drawing on comparative insights from fieldwork with parenting support professionals and volunteers in Amsterdam, Milan, and Paris, we document not only how governing through community is actually done but also what new forms of entanglements and unruly effects such governing creates. We argue that intimate welfare landscapes organized at the scale of the neighborhood (1) entangle welfare actors in neighborhood-focused networked relationships; (2) tend to bridge, obfuscate, and dissolve boundaries between state agent and citizen and between state and society; and (3) rely heavily on affective labor and personalized relationships. We show that the reorganization of governance through neighborhood-based networks produces an unwieldy quagmire of networks and partnerships. Moreover, rather than creating self-caring communities, new welfare programs primarily draw increasing numbers into governmental roles. Finally, instead of being released from its welfare and social responsibilities, locally embedded professionals turn out to be particularly effective at bringing the welfare state back in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrolled 2.5 million young men, putting them to work on public lands in relief projects meant to combat the economic and social devastation of the Great Depression. African Americans accounted for roughly 10 percent of these enrollees; however, their experiences were often defined by discrimination in selection and segregation throughout their service. Nevertheless, Black enrollees continuously looked for ways to gain more than the food, lodging, and dollar a day in salary that the corps offered to recruits. A crucial means to this end was the educational program in the camps. One of few facets of the corps in which African Americans had the chance to lead, the educational programs in segregated CCC camps were shaped by Black educational advisers who worked with their enrollees to build programs that reflected a commitment to racial pride and uplift. This article draws on federal records, camp newspapers, photographs, and personal correspondence to elucidate the educational impact of the CCC on Black Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life. b By Steven Epstein. B The Walls Around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education. b By Gary Orfield. B The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today. b By Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder. B The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City. b By Christopher Bonastia. [Extracted from the article]

B Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State. b By Calla Hummel. B Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb. b By Sean J. Drake. B Chicago's Reckoning: Racism, Politics, and the Deep History of Policing in an American City. b By John Hagan, Bill McCarthy, and Daniel Herda. B Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada. b Edited by Kelly Fritsch, Jeffrey Monaghan, and Emily van der Meulen. [Extracted from the article]

B The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath. b By Paige Sweet. B Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. b By Mark R. Warren. The New Politics of Insecurity. b Edited by Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Margaret Weir. B Counterrevolution: The Crusade to Roll Back the Gains of the Civil Rights Movement. b By Stephen Steinberg. [Extracted from the article]

Given the concurrent phenomena of mass incarceration and neoliberal evolutions in the welfare state, it is inevitable that criminalized women will encounter social workers in their everyday lives. Under the conceptual lens of governmentality, social workers play a central role in reinforcing and interrupting processes of criminalization. This critical discourse analysis examines knowledge production in social work as an important site of engagement with criminalized women. Findings indicate that social work privileges a psychological discourse and that the logic of risk has supplanted holistic approaches to understanding criminalized women. This, I conclude, reflects a neoliberal political climate and aligns social work with carceral institutions in troubling ways. Although the discourse of risk seems firmly entrenched in the contemporary social work lexicon, it should not be treated as infallible or inevitable. This analysis propels a shift in emphasis toward discourses that invite political and ethical engagement with the carceral state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing public cash assistance as a time-limited benefit was a key and controversial feature of the 1996 welfare reform legislation. Many advocates and practitioners consider the formalization of program flexibility through time-limit exemptions and extensions to be critical in helping the most vulnerable families. Despite these options, including states' ability to exempt up to 20 percent of their caseloads due to hardships without penalty from the federal government, uptake varies considerably over time and across states. Using multiple data sources, including federal caseload data and the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, we examine time-limit extensions and exemptions in the 50 US states from fiscal years 2002–16. Fixed-effects, negative binomial models test four theoretical models: state need and capacity, state politics, policy implementation strategies, and federal incentives. Findings indicate that states strategically respond to federal incentives and that implementation strategies matter, particularly for time-limit extensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the influence of dominant thinkers, social welfare leaders, and popular authors who asserted that public aid stimulates recipients' biological reproduction. This idea was first systematized by political economist Thomas Robert Malthus during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most notably in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthusian ideas on public aid and reproduction then influenced policy in the United States in the late nineteenth century. The ideas also provided a rationale for attacks on public aid programs in the mid-twentieth century and throughout the era of so-called welfare reform, typified by policies such as the family cap and other provisions initiated to regulate welfare recipients' reproduction. These measures were influenced substantially by the work of political scientist Charles Murray. After presenting this history, the article explores implications of these ideas for current and future policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, a contentious debate has ensued in the Democratic Party, and in the U.S. left more generally, about whether Trump's victory was the result of racist and white nationalist appeals or was powered by an economically anxious and forgotten white working class left behind by globalization. From a Latin American perspective, this U.S. debate about the relative salience of race and class is strikingly familiar. After decades of denying the existence of racism, Latin America experienced a historic expansion of rights for black and indigenous peoples during a "left turn" that coincided with the expansion of social welfare policies, quickly followed by a "right turn" fueled by racist backlash. Thus, taking a hemispheric vantage point reveals that it would be a mistake to believe that class appeals alone are sufficient to counter the current politics of right-wing racist backlash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macro-level policy changes in the US welfare system can shift the boundaries of existing organizational welfare service funding arrangements. This in-depth archival case study examines the organizational boundary work of philanthropic actors at the United Foundation of Detroit during the War on Poverty era (1964–74). The study finds that the United Foundation responded to social and welfare changes by protecting and expanding its power and authority in its welfare organizational ecosystem. It used specific mechanisms, including managerial tools and ideologies, to exert greater control over nonprofit funding and service provision in this ecosystem, which altered the power dynamics and relationships between funding and nonprofit service organizations. Applying a boundary work lens to this historical period can assist social workers in building more equitable relationships with funders in the dynamic, frequently market-driven welfare system of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Artificial Intelligence and Social Work. b Edited by Milind Tambe and Eric Rice. B The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments. b By Gary Alan Fine. B The Trump Paradox: Migration, Trade, and Racial Politics in US-Mexico Integration. b By Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda and Edward Telles. [Extracted from the article]

Objective: Smoking is widely acknowledged as a high-risk behavior associated with poor physical health outcomes. We use Add Health Wave I and Wave IV data (N = 15,701) to explore whether childhood welfare participation predicts smoking behaviors in adulthood. Method: We conducted propensity score matching and dosage analysis of welfare participation to explore whether childhood welfare participation had different effects on smoking behaviors in adulthood. We used 3 approaches for dealing with the survey weight and propensity score weights for post-matching regression analyses. Results: Adults who as children lived in families that participated in welfare programs were more likely to smoke when compared to young adults whose families did not participate in welfare programs. Being from a smoking household, having smoked before adulthood, having peer smokers, and race/ethnicity increased the risk for smoking. Protective factors associated with decreased smoking behaviors included being female, higher parental education, and being older. Conclusions: Risk related to cigarette use in adulthood varies based on welfare dosage in childhood. The development and implementation of interventions specific to subpopulations among welfare recipient families may make programs more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workfare, the conditioning of public assistance on work, was first institutionalized into US policy via refugee resettlement policy, thus arguably laying the groundwork for the 1996 welfare reforms. Refugee scholars have examined how implementing agents respond to the mandates of workfare as well as other delimitations of policy structures, but the ensuing influence on refugees is less examined. Drawing from 40 interviews and four focus groups with organizational leaders and worker-volunteers of a refugee community as a case study, this article examines how self-sufficiency as a resettlement policy goal manifests at the end of the policy line. We argue that diminution of self-sufficiency into job placement reflects a work-first, time-limited focus, while deindividualization conveys neglect for individual circumstances. We also argue that the implementation of self-sufficiency as a policy goal, even as it is diminished and deindividualized, manifests with valuation, denoting how acts of implementation carry value-laden expressions that idealize the refugee-worker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of aging in capitalist West Germany and Communist East Germany in the 1950s. It explores the relationship of the history of aging with broader histories of political economy, welfare and citizenship. The creation of a new policy environment for older people between 1956 and 1958 is explored. Also discussed is the connection between German modernization and the exclusion and isolation of the elderly.

This special issue of Social Service Review acknowledges the 100th anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the National Conference of Social Work in 1917 by inviting scholars to reflect on the state of scholarship, and the profession itself, in the core areas of social work—social welfare policy development and analysis; administration of social services; community organization; and direct practice with individuals, families, and groups. To frame that discussion, this introduction describes the symposium that initiated work on these articles, identifies themes emerging from the special issue, and highlights the need for additional research on the state of the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration. b By Aya Gruber. B State-Sanctioned Violence: Advancing a Social Work Social Justice Agenda. b By Melvin Delgado. B Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century. b By A. Naomi Paik. [Extracted from the article]

We analyze how insurance arrangements, labor supply, moral hazard, and outright cheating are affected by social norms. One question is under what conditions norms may improve social welfare. Another is under what conditions people should be allowed to opt out of social insurance. We introduce an informal production sector to analyze the consequences of alternative assumptions about the information available to norm enforcers. This highlights one important aspect of norms, namely, that they may compensate for the insurer’s limited information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural service providers often struggle to meet the needs of low- income residents, given the constraints of geography and facets of local culture that stigmatize seeking and receiving help. Although the challenges faced by low-income, rural families are well studied, less is known about how service providers structure programs to serve rural residents. Here, we use qualitative data from two rural New England counties to explore how characteristics of specific communities shape the challenges of their social service systems and the strategies employed to overcome them. We find many common challenges across place and time, including distrust of outsiders and insufficient program funds. However, in the more remote county of the two, service providers have developed synergistic relationships to support vulnerable residents, whereas in the other, politics and town boundaries have impeded this collective approach. We conclude with a review of service delivery strategies, acknowledging the heterogeneity of rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies predict that climate change will lead to a redistribution of population across the United States, as people choose to locate in regions less susceptible to extreme climate. However, these studies ignore the fact that migration will be dampened by changes in wage rates and housing prices as a result of migration. In this study, we apply a novel approach of linking a residential sorting model to an interregional computable general equilibrium model of the United States to capture wage and housing price feedbacks to assess the economic impacts of climate-change-induced migration. We find that endogenizing wages significantly dampens migration patterns. However, there are significant positive impacts on gross regional product and consumption in the Northeast,West, and California at the expense of the South and Midwest. In addition, wage effects are found to dominate housing price and climate effects, which results in larger welfare changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a dynamic spatial growth theory with realistic geography. We characterize the model and its balanced-growth path and propose a methodology to analyze equilibria with different levels of migration frictions. Different migration scenarios change local market size, innovation incentives, and the evolution of technology. We bring the model to the data for the whole world economy at a 1° × 1° geographic resolution. We then use the model to quantify the gains from relaxing migration restrictions. Our results indicate that fully liberalizing migration would increase welfare about threefold and would significantly affect the evolution of particular regions of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern-day conceptions of American childhood and family situate children, and the labor required to rear them, outside of the wage labor market. This ethnographic study of a foster care adoption program shows how board payments elicit commodification anxiety at this local site, and in American culture more broadly. In using board payments as a litmus test to weed out parents with profiteering motives, workers inadvertently play into a model that devalues care work- which is disproportionately done by women and minorities. This study places everyday casework into the context of welfare state history and the history of foster care, and describes troubling similarities between the profiteering parent of foster care and the stereotype of the welfare queen used to garner public support for the 1996 welfare reforms. I argue that a socially just approach to caregiving must abandon the fiction that sentiments and markets operate in separate spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentralized safety net programs provide much of the social provision in the US, yet the consequences for social provision have received remarkably limited attention. In this article, we examine cross-state inequality in social safety net provision from 1994 to 2014. We ask whether programs that are more decentralized in terms of policy design are more variable across states in terms of the generosity of benefits and inclusiveness of receipt and whether there has been convergence or divergence in programs affected by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) as well as in those that were not. We find substantial cross-state inequality in provision, with greater cross-state inequality in programs with more state discretion. In examining change over time, we find remarkable consistency in the levels of cross-state inequality; however, we also find that the devolution of authority under PRWORA increased cross-state inequality in programs affected by this legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invariabilism is the view that the same theory of welfare is true of every welfare subject. Variabilism is the view that invariabilism is false. In light of how many welfare subjects there are and how greatly they differ in their natures and capacities, it is natural to suppose that variabilism is true. I argue that these considerations do not support variabilism and, indeed, that we should accept invariabilism. This has important implications: it eliminates many of the going theories of welfare while making some of the remaining ones more attractive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family support obligations (termed responsible relative laws) were employed by states to control escalating costs in public assistance programs in the post-World War II era. California's pension movement, organized to benefit Old Age Security (OAS) recipients, fueled some of the most generous benefits in the country, but efforts to repeal relatives' support obligations were largely futile until 1975. This article argues that debates surrounding responsible relative laws in California centered on fiscal conservatism as well as whether the family or the state should provide support for the needy. Both opponents and proponents of support obligations invoked the need to limit the role of government, either for taxpayers who funded OAS or for recipients who resented an intrusive public assistance bureaucracy. These debates focused on the intersection between the goal of security for the elderly, benefiting the aged recipient and her or his adult children, and fiscal responsibility, which protected the taxpayer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on papers in political economics published by the "Journal of Political Economy." These papers include "On the Rationale of Group Decision-Making," by Duncan Black in 1948, "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare," by Kenneth Arrow in 1950 and "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal," by Amartya Sen in 1970.

This paper re-creates three of the samples from LaLonde's famous 1986 paper that began the literature on "within-study designs" that uses experiments as benchmarks against which to assess the performance of nonexperimental identification strategies. In particular, we recreate the experimental data for the target group of women on welfare from the National Supported Work (NSW) Demonstration and two of the corresponding comparison groups drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The loss of these data resulted in the (sizable) subsequent literature devoting its attention solely to the NSW men. In addition to repeating LaLonde's analyses on our recreations of his files for the AFDC women, we apply (many of) the estimators from later papers by Dehejia and Wahba and by Smith and Todd to these data. Our findings support the general view in the literature that women on welfare pose a less difficult selection problem when evaluating employment and training programs. They also call into question the generalizability of some of the broad conclusions that Dehejia and Wahba and Smith and Todd draw from their analyses of the NSW men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present new calculations of cumulative marginal tax rates (MTRs) facing lowincome families participating in multiple welfare programs over the period 1997-2007, the period after 1996 welfare reform but before the program expansions of the Great Recession. Our calculations are for nondisabled, nonelderly families who pay federal and state income taxes and the payroll tax but receive benefits from up to four different transfer programs--Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The results show enormous variation in MTRs across families who participate in different combinations of welfare programs, who have different family structures, and who have earnings in different ranges. For families who participate in either no or fewer than two welfare programs, which constitutes the large majority of lowincome families, MTRs are either negative or positive but modest in magnitude. But families participating in two or more programs, while still facing negative or modest positive rates at low earnings, usually face considerably higher MTRs at higher earnings ranges, often up to 80% and even occasionally over 100%. While the fraction of families in this category is not large, they constitute about onefifth of singleparent families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Western countries have introduced welfare reforms that limit public assistance for the long-term unemployed and that spur rapid movement into the labor market. The work-first nature of these new policies means that the success of welfare recipients depends greatly on demand-side constraints, more particularly on local labor market conditions. Based on longitudinal administrative data of all single mothers who received cash benefits when the Israeli welfare reform was implemented (N = 45,000), this study focuses on the role of the local labor market in explaining single mothers' long-term employment and earnings patterns. The results indicate notable diversity in employment and earnings patterns. Some mothers showed stable or improved attachment to the labor force, while others showed a much less stable pattern and about a quarter had a very weak attachment to paid employment. Local labor market conditions and their change over time play an important part in explaining these various patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the increased use of choice-based management strategies in social services influence the behavior of street-level workers? In this article, we provide an analytical framework for understanding street-level logic in choicebased environments. We then turn to the case of home-nursing care in Israel to examine how choice plays out in street-level workers' day-to-day practices. By relying on 34 interviews with social workers working in home-care agencies, we illustrate how street-level workers' jobs have expanded beyond implementing public policy to include the "new job" of recruiting and retaining clients. The article shows how a choice-based environment gives higher priority to clients' preferences, while at the same time these preferences are subordinated to the economic interest of the providers. It also demonstrates how market pressures may push street-level workers to develop new practices and coping strategies that go beyond, but often also counter to, formal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces that the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago has awarded the 2019 Frank R. Breul Memorial Prize to Sarah K. Bruch, Marcia K. Meyers and Janet C. Gornick for their article "The Consequences of Decentralization: Inequality in Safety Net Provision in the Post-Welfare Reform Era."

Much attention has been given to the large increases in safety net spending during the Great Recession. We examine the relationship between poverty, the safety net, and business cycles historically and test whether there has been a significant change in this relationship. We find that post-welfare reform, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families did not respond during the Great Recession and extreme poverty is more cyclical than in prior recessions. Food Stamps and Unemployment Insurance are providing more protection-or no less protection-in the Great Recession, and there is some evidence of less cyclicality for 100% poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]