“Genius”: Makers vs. Takers Isn’t Very Smart

That’s the headline and the message from a piece up on Bloomberg Businessweek featuring Maurice Lim Miller. As we mentioned a few weeks back, Mr. Miller just won a MacArthur “Genius” Award for his innovative work on the Family Independence Initiative. The Bloomberg piece outlines some of the key innovations in the FII approach:

His group doesn’t give them social services or tell them what to do. Instead, he asks them to report what they’re doing to get out of poverty and pays them a modest amount, about $160 per month, for documenting how they’ve met their goals. They could choose to focus on improving a child’s grades or paying down credit-card debt. Miller wants to find out what people do to help themselves when they’re not being steered in certain directions. It turns out a lot of them start businesses…

The piece offers a good summary, and it is important to note the reality of the lives of hard-working families, this idea that folks that might get help putting food on the table are just “takers” is horribly flawed and destructive. People aren’t working expressly to become “less dependent” upon “welfare,” they’re working hard to make their lives better, and the key FII innovation is recognizing that they have their own ideas about how to do that, and some support in that effort might be a better approach than forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Reid Cramer sat down with Mr. Miller last year (before he was a “Genius” we just thought he was a genius) and discussed the FII approach. This video is five minutes that can really help explain what FII does, why conceptions about low-income people are often wrong, and how this model might influence policy.