💰 Benefits remove the need to work
If a person can live on benefits, the New Right argue, they have less reason to look for a job, train or move to find work.
Reducing Inequality » Has It Worked? New Right Views and the Culture of Poverty
What you'll learn this session
Study time: 30 minutes
Cambridge spec: 3.2.4
- What the New Right believe and why they criticise the welfare state
- What Murray means by the underclass and the dependency culture
- What Lewis means by the culture of poverty
- How to evaluate these views in the exam
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Unlock This CourseHas it worked? Two very different answers
A job centre queue like this sparks a big debate: has the welfare state reduced inequality, or created new problems?
In the last three lessons you saw how governments and NGOs try to reduce inequality: laws, taxes, welfare states and charities. Now we ask a harder question: has it worked? Sociologists do not agree. Some say the help has not gone far enough. Others say the help itself has made things worse. This lesson looks at the second group.
Key terms:
- New Right: a set of political and sociological views that favour a small state, low taxes, a free market and personal responsibility, and that criticise heavy government spending on welfare.
- Underclass: a group at the bottom of society, below the working class, whose members are long-term unemployed and live mainly on benefits.
- Dependency culture: a set of attitudes in which relying on benefits from the state becomes normal and people stop trying to support themselves.
- Culture of poverty: a set of values and attitudes, such as fatalism, that poor people develop to cope with poverty and pass on to their children, which then keeps them poor.
New Right criticisms of the welfare state
The New Right believe that people do best when they take responsibility for their own lives. They think the state should do much less. In their view, a generous welfare state does not solve poverty. It creates problems of its own.
📈 High taxes harm everyone
Welfare is paid for by taxes. The New Right say high taxes reduce the money that businesses and workers have to spend and invest, which holds back jobs.
The New Right also say that the state is wasteful and takes away people's independence. They would prefer families, charities and the market to provide more of the help.
Murray and the underclass
The best-known New Right sociologist on this topic is Charles Murray, an American. He argued that generous welfare benefits help to create an underclass. Murray said the underclass is not just a group with low incomes. It is defined by its behaviour and attitudes.
- Members of the underclass are long-term unemployed and depend on benefits.
- Murray said they develop a different set of values from the rest of society and no longer see work as the normal way to live.
- Children grow up seeing adults who do not work, so they copy this and become dependent too.
This is the dependency culture. Murray's solution was to make benefits harder to claim and less generous, so that working is always the better choice. The New Right also support time limits on benefits and requiring people to look for work.
Lewis and the culture of poverty
Lewis argued that families in long-term poverty develop a culture of poverty, a way of life passed down to cope with hardship
Oscar Lewis was an anthropologist who studied poor communities in countries such as Mexico. He argued that people who live in long-term poverty develop a way of life, or culture, to cope with it. He called this the culture of poverty.
Lewis said this culture includes fatalism (the belief that you cannot change your life), living for today rather than planning for the future, and little saving. Children are socialised into these values, so each generation stays poor.
Lewis and Murray compared
Similar: both say the poor have different values and attitudes, and that these are passed from parents to children. Different: Lewis said the values were a way of coping with poverty. Murray said generous benefits create the dependency.
Evaluating these views
✅ Strengths
- It explains why some families seem to be out of work for several generations.
- It points out that benefits can reduce the reward for working, especially if low-paid work pays little more.
- It sees that attitudes passed on in the family can shape life chances.
❌ Limitations
- It blames poor people, not the structure of society, such as unemployment, low pay or discrimination.
- Many people on benefits want to work, and many claim only for a short time.
- Poor people often share mainstream values but lack the opportunities to act on them.
- Cutting benefits could push more people into deeper poverty.
Critics often say these views are a form of victim blaming: they put the cause of poverty on the poor instead of on the way society is organised. Marxists and others offer a different view. You will study their criticisms in the next lesson, Has It Worked? Marxist, Feminist and NGO Criticisms.
Worked example
A question asks you to evaluate the New Right view. A good paragraph: "The New Right argue that generous benefits create a dependency culture, as children who see adults living on benefits may copy them. However, critics say many unemployed people want work and cannot find any. Poverty may be caused by a lack of jobs, not by attitudes."
Common mistakes
Saying the New Right want to help the poor with more benefits (they want fewer). Mixing up Lewis and Murray: Lewis wrote about the culture of poverty, Murray about the underclass and dependency. Saying all poor people are in the underclass. Writing only description and never giving a criticism.
Exam-style question
(a) Define the term dependency culture. [2 marks]
(d) Explain three reasons why some sociologists criticise the New Right view of the underclass. [6 marks]
Model answer
(a) A set of attitudes where relying on state benefits is seen as normal (1), so people do not try to support themselves through work (1).
(d) First, it blames the poor for their own situation, when the cause may be a lack of jobs or low pay (1). Second, many people on benefits want to work and many claim only for a short time, so there is little evidence of a dependency culture (1). Third, cutting benefits as the New Right suggest could push families into deeper poverty and make inequality worse (1). Each point developed with a reason earns the further marks (3).
Exam tip
For "explain three" questions, give three separate points and add a reason to each, using words like "because" and "so".