Choose Truth and Hope over Dogma and Doom

"when you hold the definition of poverty constant, the rate fell from about 22% before the Great Society to about 2-3% today ... Giving poor people food and medical care really does make them less poor — as does giving them housing vouchers and cash subsidies like the EITC. The welfare state does what we created it to do."

Noah Smith: Progressives need to learn to take the W

Outrage is only one motivation for change, and it comes with a cost. 

excerpts:

[I]f we want to measure the impact of welfare programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the EITC, we can’t just update our standards in order to cancel out the effect of these programs, and then conclude that America hasn’t done anything to reduce poverty!  ...

My hypothesis is that some progressives don’t want to acknowledge the success of the War on Poverty — and of subsequent welfare programs like the EITC and Child Tax Credit — because they’re afraid that acknowledging past successes might reduce outrage, and thus reduce momentum for further reform. ...

[M]any progressives seem not to know how to acknowledge their own victories. They’re so dependent on outrage as their motivating force that they recoil against any positivity that might sap that wellspring of anger.

This ends up hurting progressive causes, for a number of reasons. Most obviously, it leads progressives to incorrect conclusions about which tools are effective for achieving their goals. If you insist on telling yourself — and the world — that poverty in America hasn’t fallen, you’ll discount the power of the welfare state. That will also play into conservative hands, since the idea that welfare programs are ineffective is central to the arguments against them.

Another reason progressives shouldn’t rely exclusively on outrage is that it’s probably a lot more powerful in the short term than in the long term. Organizational behavior researchers and management experts will generally tell you that flagellating your employees can motivate them to greater efforts for a while, but will eventually lead to burnout and cognitive exhaustion. Theories of long-term motivation, like the broaden-and-build theory and self-determination theory, emphasize harnessing positive emotions of hopefulness and growth.

...activists are finding themselves unable to sustain their energy. Protests against abortion bans have been fairly anemic. And it’s not hard to see why — rates of depression among young progressives have soared. There’s a fair amount of research suggesting that political negativity is being “internalized”

After decades of progress against poverty, racism, and sexism, the progressive culture of the 2010s told young Americans that everything in their country was horrible and that they needed to revolt against it. ...

Again, this is not to say that outrage is never appropriate, or that it’s never effective. Sometimes it is. But it’s suboptimal to have it be the one and only motivating force behind all pressure for social change. You need positive motivations too — hope, including rational hope based on past successes, is important.