Burning Bridges?

I've been thinking about Ruby Payne and her Bridges Out of Poverty program. Payne has developed a sort of manual for bootstrapping the poor. Essentially, she views poverty as a culturally-transmitted illness and has produced what social workers call a "manualized intervention," a sort of curriculum for acculturating poor people to middle class norms.
This is a particularly interesting time to consider cultural arguments about poverty, since many formerly middle class individuals and families have become the new poor. Of course, Payne might say, this will be temporary rather than generational poverty. The latter, she warns, is the especially egregious form of poverty that is rooted in and reproduces cultural deficiencies.
We don't yet know what effects the current recession will have on the structure of poverty, but we can make some guesses. Older workers who have been laid off and have lost their assets may stay poor, but their children would already have been acculturated to middle class norms, so no worries there.
Younger workers, especially those for whom their house was their chief asset, may be trapped in a lengthier episode of poverty, since their access to credit will be compromised for many years. Their children, who were formerly middle class but are now sleeping on a relative's sofa or in a homeless shelter might, in Ruby's world, be harmed by their contact with the deviant generational poor. A Bridges Out of Poverty coloring book might be useful for the younger children in these families, and might provide an additional revenue stream for Payne's growing list of enterprises.
I am not entirely unsympathetic to Payne's argument. I grew up in a neighborhood and in a home where the culture reproduced many of the negative behaviors that concern Payne. Substance abuse and violence were endemic. The woman three streets over drowned her baby while drunk and her husband subsequently commited suicide, one of many substance-related suicides and suicide attempts in the neighborhood. These dysfunctional episodes were common knowledge among the neighborhood children, who learned that some houses- and some parents- were not at all safe.
The police were called frequently. My stepfather, for example, had a habit of firing his rifle at neighboring homes when he had had one too many. Often the police arrived when a family dispute escalated into violence.
Fathers came and went. I saw mine maybe once a year, and the encounters were disastrous. The majority of adults had, at best, a weak attachment to the world of employment. In my own family, for instance, neither of my maternal my grandparents had never worked and my father and stepfather worked only sporadically, quitting whenever the job got to be too much of a hassle. This was a common pattern in the neighborhood.
Bridges Out of Poverty would have been just the thing, encouraging everyone to sober up, go to work, and learn to be "middle-class". Except that virtually everyone in the neighborhood was already rich. I grew up in a lakeside suburb where people didn't work because they didn't have to- they had trust funds. We all lived on transfer payments, but the transfers came from private rather than from public trusts. As my grandfather used to say "if you have to work, it means you're poor."
When the police came to our neighborhood, they were respectful. All the perpetrators had lawyers on retainer and some of them had law degrees. No one ever got arrested.
And everyone had great educations, which they put to little or no use. Taking account of my various parents and stepparents, none of whom ever worked steadily, unemployed members of my family had degrees from Brown, Bryn Mawr, Princeton, Wellesley and Stanford. It was the same thing for most of the neighbors- the Wharton School, Harvard, Lehigh, Bucknell and so on.
What does all this say about Ruby Payne? Well, she could learn something from the apocryphal exchange between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. When the former said "the rich are very different from you and I," the latter said "yes, they have more money."
The differences between those at the bottom and those in the middle or at the top are not cultural. They are structural.