Beyond entitlement: the social obligations of citizenship.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter

Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship.

Lawrence M. Mead. The Free Press, $19.95. Worrying about poverty in the midst of plenty has become about as fashionable as campaigning for unilateral disarmament. The new orthodoxy seems to be that the poor will always be with us (often the same welfare families to the nth generation), so let's turn our attention to more fashionable topics like missing children and date rape. The lingering sense of moral indignation among the press has been directed primarily at one small subgroup of the poor-the highly visible homeless. Even here, the villain is often identified as the liberals themselves, who foisted deinstitutionalization on the mentally ill who were patently unable to fend for themselves. Liberals continue to fight some noble rear-guard battles on behalf of the poor--most notably the successful effort by House Democrats to shield the remnants of the social safety net from the strictures of Gramm-Rudman. But most liberal thinking about the causes and cures of poverty has been limited to trying to invent new metaphors with which to decry the latest round of Reagan budget cuts. Oddly enough, for the first time in more than a half century, the most adventurous thinking about poverty is coming from a handful of conservatives, who have been profoundly influenced by the critical uproar surrounding the publication of Charles Murray's Losing Ground.

Lawrence Mead is clearly an exemplar of this new breed of neocompassionate conservatives: Beyond Entitlement was launched with an upscale luncheon at the New York Athletic Club, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute and moderated by Murray himself. But despite its pedigree and provocative title, Beyond Entitlement is far too narrow and academic a work to help policymakers devise workable poverty programs for the 1990s.

Mead's thesis is simple: welfare programs have failed largely because they have been unwilling and unable to require that recipients modify their conduct in order to receive benefits. The prime example for Mead is the abysmal failure of the work requirements that theoretically have accompanied Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) since the early 1970s. To Mead, work is the most tangible of the social obligations of citizenship. And he argues, "If society seriously wants more of the disadvantaged to work regularly, to achieve goals like integration, then it must require them to . . .. Work must be treated as a public...