A Poverty of Imagination: Bootstrap Capitalism, Sequel to Welfare Reform. - Review - book review

Progressive, The, August, 2001 by Marya Sosulski

A Poverty of Imagination: Bootstrap Capitalism, Sequel to Welfare Reform By David Stoesz University of Wisconsin. 256 pages. $19.95 (paper).

David Stoesz's A Poverty of Imagination constitutes an unfortunate and fairly unimaginative suggestion to remedy poverty and America's distaste for welfare. Stoesz is an ex-welfare caseworker, a commentator on social welfare policy, and the author of a textbook for social work students. The lesson this time, however, may be that recycling some social theories, including "bootstrap capitalism," is no solution at all.

His suggestions for eliminating poverty through capitalism using wage supplements, asset building, and community capitalism don't ring true. They're not necessarily bad ideas, but they are every bit as unrealistic as he claims the idea of a social safety net to be. He neglects to demonstrate where the money to pay for his scheme will come from, and he fails to provide a convincing argument for why big business would allow this kind of competition to succeed when it has muscled small business out of the picture at every other conceivable point. Using elements of the system to subvert it and help the underclass is terribly appealing, but it is not the solution to poverty that Stoesz claims.

Stoesz is unconvincing that "bootstrap capitalism" will work, or even should be attempted, but it's an increasingly popular idea. The message is that the system works for people who want to work, but that has been shown to be false in some of the very studies that Stoesz cites in his argument. He exploits the words and images of welfare recipients to give credence to his ideas, but only tells part of their stories. And he calls up the old cliche of immigrants pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, which is no more persuasive now than it ever was.