The Causes of Poverty Cultural vs . Structural : Can There Be a Synthesis ?

There are many competing theories about the causes of poverty in the United States with mountains of empirical evidence to justify support for each. The debate among theorists and policymakers is primarily divided between advocates who support cultural/behavioral arguments and those who support structural/economic arguments. This debate tends to manifest itself across political party lines with republicans supporting the cultural/behavioral thesis and democrats looking more to structural causes. The passage of the "behavioral" focused Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) and its possible strengthening by the Bush Administration and its congressional allies calls for further examination of the relationship between cultural/behavioral and structural causes of poverty. This paper will briefly examine the theoretical arguments behind these competing views followed by an analysis to determine the empirical relevancy of each. It should be noted that the exploration of this topic began with the intention of making an argument for the fusion of these perspectives into a single empirically validated theory; one that would build upon Orlando Patterson's (2000) theoretical model on the interaction between cultural models, structural environments and behavioral outcomes. In close similarity to Patterson (2000), my thesis is that cultural and/or behavioral variables are only relevant to the degree that historical structural factors condition the environment in which groups of varying economic and social advantage operate in and react to. More specifically, behavioral variables (e.g., teen pregnancy, divorce, crime) should not merely be viewed as static behavioral dysfunctions exclusive to certain groups, but as proxies for cultural mechanisms that are always at play in all social groups and in all contexts. These two perspectives should not be viewed as dichotomous, but interrelated and more or less relatively valid depending on the context. While Patterson argues for a dynamic integration of variables (a position I agree with), the ordinary least squares (OLS) analyses can at best reveal the relative relationships of the various independent variables to poverty; the results of which may provide a useful framework for a truly integrated and multiplicative model or perhaps a two-stage model with structural level variables conditioning the environment in which cultural/behavioral adaptations develop. However, the empirical tests that will be reviewed shortly demonstrate little support for the inclusion of cultural/behavioral variable into a larger structural model, but this failure is not without caveats. Based on several time series regression models using aggregated national level data for the years 1947 through 2002, an integrated model could not be constructed using The Causes of Poverty Cultural vs. Structural: Can There Be a Synthesis?