The Family Cycle and Income Development

IT IS, on the whole, a fact that most people who die poor were born poor. It is also a fact, t,hough partial, that poor people show typical attitudes and behavior and transmit them to their children. Human manipulation has made from these observations a non-fact or artifact: The poor move about in a self-contained aura of attitudes that are more or less independent of their life experience; the attitudes themselves produce t,heir poverty. It would be hard to imagine a more comfortable myst,ique for those who are not poor. It is less flattering and more taxing to t,he mind to grasp the play back-andforth between facts of life and attitudes towards life, between what seems practical and what one aspires to. Yet this is the task facing those who want to understand at all how an income-maintenance program may influence its beneficiaries. Some light might be shed on the mystique of the “culture of poverty” by a simple examination of the effect of poor food or poor housing on behavior. Ample evidence’ testifies to the capacit’y of such deficiencies to produce the type of attitudes associated with poor peop1e.l However, it, will serve the purpose better to take another approach, attempting to relate the stages through which a family passes over time to the develop-