Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

Two timely and important social-policy books support this idea: Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America (Columbia University Press) by Mark Robert Rank and Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Macmillan) by Linda Gordon.

Both books are intended as antidotes to the mean-spirited politics now in vogue--reviling the poor and driving them deeper into despair. Both authors make a plea to their readers' (and policy-makers') better natures, to try to imagine a more rational and humane welfare system.

Before he wrote Living on the Edge, Rank spent ten years conducting interviews and sociological research. The stories of the people he interviews are heartbreaking: Joyce Mills, whose ex-husband is in prison for sexually assaulting the children, Mike Abbot, who got a serious back injury on the job and whose family is now on food stamps.

The way their lives revolve around money is particularly depressing. Over and over, the characters in the book describe their view that life is a competition to survive. Social policy aimed at the poor reinforces this view. According to the current welfare-reform rhetoric, staying home with your baby is a sign of laziness and shiftlessness. Dedicating yourself to the rat-race at a low-wage job is a sign of morality and health. Current reform proposals set out to use Government assistance to influence poor people's decisions about marriage, having children, and almost everything else.

Rank himself uses the alienating term "human capital" throughout his book. Yet in his methodical way, he comes to some humanitarian conclusions.

It's a sad commentary, actually, that it requires as much data as it does for Rank to reach the point, at the end of the book, where he can say of the poor with scientific certainty, "they're people like us." The fruit of his labor is the carefully argued thesis that people on welfare are not so much morally or mentally defective as they are just plain poor.

Rank makes no specific policy proposals. Instead, he ends his book by posing a moral question: "What ethical obligation do we as individuals and as a society have to attempt to alleviate such suffering and misery?"

In Pitied But Not Entitled, Linda Gordon takes things...