Good News: Some Things Work : Poverty: Can nothing break the cycle of disadvantage? There are widely endorsed approaches that offer promise.

Most Americans react with a sense of sheer helplessness to the rising tide of violence in our cities, the ever-increasing number of children born out of wedlock and the declining job skills of our young. The attitude is understandable. It is also unwarranted.

It is not surprising that middle- and working-class Americans, despairing of solutions, should be running out of compassion. The average incomes of young working families have dipped sharply over the past 20 years; they feel themselves less fortunate and therefore less inclined to tolerate “handouts” for the even more unfortunate. The commonplace among Americans struggling to maintain their own foothold on the economic ladder is that many of the poor prefer welfare to work and idleness to self-improvement. This conventional wisdom also holds that the poor wouldn’t be poor if they didn’t scorn education, effort and self-discipline.

Reinforcing the general sense of futility is the prevalent view that “hard-core” poverty has become so intractable and self-perpetuating as to defy any outside effort to ameliorate it. Persistent poverty, inner-city violence, drug addiction and child abuse and neglect are seen to be merging into a pattern not susceptible to society’s intervention, because the root causes are seen as essentially personal, embedded entirely within the individual or family.

Confidence in government’s ability to apply the tax money of working Americans to achieve any social objective, even if we all agreed on the objective, is probably at an all-time low. Government is perceived as able to mobilize resources to fight a successful foreign war but unable to effectively battle social ills at home.

Welfare programs are seen as not only unproductive, but counterproductive--appearing to offer rewards for remaining dependent and undermining incentives to work. This reasoning extends beyond income-support payments and results in reluctance to fund education, health, housing and social services for the poor, without consideration of how such services and supports could be organized to reinforce, rather than undermine, self-sufficiency, self-respect and parental authority.

Add to this the campaigning politicians’ hymn, that the government they ostensibly aspire to lead is part of the problem, not part of the solution--and that because of staggering budget deficits, there is no money, even if anyone knew of programs that would work.

These attitudes and beliefs paralyze any public impulse to deal with social problems. Why try anything, since nothing works? The dead end we seem to have reached was summed up by columnist William Raspberry: “You don’t have to be mean-spirited to walk away from social problems. All it takes is the certainty that nothing can be done to solve them.”

This abdication of responsibility for the poor works to create an ever more polarized America. The haves flee from the city and build higher walls to keep out the have-nots. Millions are spent on private security as protection from public insecurity. But as desperation on the streets increases, so does violence among those with a sense of nothing to lose.

The middle class can hide but it cannot escape the human devastation. The cost of building and operating prisons drains state coffers. We are in the midst of an epidemic of child neglect that Carnegie Corp. President David Hamburg says is putting the future of our society in jeopardy.

It would be folly to ignore the beliefs that have turned such large numbers of Americans against public action. But many of these beliefs fly in the face of new evidence that shows there are ways to intervene effectively.

The elements of these effective programs could be embraced by many of those who are today most skeptical of social remedies.

The key is to turn from gloomy, unproductive preoccupation with the ultimate causes of poverty and other social ills, and start looking at what works.

Those who believe that the high rate of single-parent families is the result of failed values or welfare lures can join with those who point to the decline in manufacturing and the plummeting demand for unskilled labor. Those who believe that the epidemic of wanton urban violence is the result of failed churches and neglectful parents can join with those who believe it is produced by economically weakened families interacting with the steady availability of drugs and the lack of opportunities in the legitimate economy.

All Americans can unite around these four propositions:

-- People who work shouldn’t be poor.

-- Investments in improving the chances of those most at risk are cost-effective, and are most cost-effective when they are focused on children.

-- Family and neighborhood are central to the healthy development of children, and families and neighborhoods can be strengthened from outside through well-designed social policies.

-- School success is central to adult self-sufficiency, and the chances of school success can be increased by intentional social action.

These propositions can become the basis of a new, non-ideological approach to breaking the cycle of disadvantage.

Next: The twin paths to more effective social action.