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

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 one step further.

"Let politicians and the press refer to Social Security, home mortgage deductions, schools and parks, garbage disposal, and corporate tax breaks as welfare," she writes.

Her thesis is that what we call welfare--aid to women and children--is arbitrarily seen as charity, something needed but not necessarily deserved. Other forms of social spending that primarily benefit men and the already well-off are seen as entitlements, to which the recipient has a right.

"Imagine if states tried to rid themselves of elderly residents by lowering Social Security old-age pensions," she suggests.

Welfare, says Gordon, is a feminist invention. Women's-rights activists in the Nineteenth Century first proposed and lobbied for "mothers' aid," along with reproductive freedom and laws against child labor. Because female heads of household were regarded with suspicion, "punitive and/or rehabilitative" measures were part of government aid programs that served them from the beginning. Still, Gordon views the establishment of welfare as a feminist victory. We need to recreate the system, she argues, so that it takes into account modern social and economic realities.

"Who in 1910 imagined a world in which half the children live with single mothers, most mothers are employed full-time, and mothering is no longer viewed as the appropriate life's work for women?"

In particular, a rational modern welfare system should focus on "helping mothers to be wage earners and to meet domestic labor obligations," including good wages, day care, medical insurance, and parental leave, since "welfare and jobs policies are inextricably connected."

In the current political climate, this doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

But we need the courage and optimism to make a start.