There is an interesting article on poverty in this week's NYT Magazine:


And more controversially, he vowed to raise $24 million in private donations to finance “conditional cash transfers” to give poor New Yorkers an incentive “to stay in school, stay at work and stay on track to rise out of poverty.” A mayoral aide later explained that this behaviorist approach to fighting poverty has become popular in the developing world and has had a “phenomenal” effect on school attendance in Mexico.

Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, welcomed Bloomberg’s implicit acceptance of the view that “it is the underclass poor who need to change more than society or capitalism.” At the same time, she argued that he had undermined the case for self-reliance by establishing “an expectation among the underclass that they have a right to cash for simply conforming to the norms of civil society.” Bloomberg responded by noting that if you could use a tax credit to “encourage people to do certain types of economic activity,” you could use cash just as well.

This seems completely off-base.