In America, we often see poverty and hardship as the result of moral failure—or, more kindly, as a failure of social norms. This is why, in 1965, sociologist and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously attributed the prevalence of single-parent families in black communities to a culture of poverty and a "tangle of pathology" inherited from slavery and Jim Crow. And just last month, David Brooks re-visited the old argument in the New York Times. "It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles [that is, among the poor]," he argued, "it's norms." And he added, "The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens."
Allison J. Pugh's The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity, which will be published next month, doesn't exactly contradict that. Instead, it questions which social norms are actually most powerful and most relevant to the health of society.
[For more of this story, written by Noah Berlatsky, go to http://www.psmag.com/books-and...-warps-relationships]
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