ABSTRACT
Critics have usually tried to show either that the behavior of poor people is not a manifestation of a genuine culture or that their tendency to work less is a function of some aspect of the larger socioeconomic structure: racial discrimination, for example, or job scarcity. While there is merit in these arguments, they tacitly concede two crucial assumptions: first, that the values of this culture are more likely to be found among the poor; second, that the poor do indeed work less than the nonpoor. Lewis exacerbated the problem by confusing poverty with cultural traits he believed were associated with it—although he sometimes distinguished between them, as when he estimated that no more than one-third of the American poor belonged to the culture of poverty. The political use that is made of the image of the shiftless poor is illustrated in an incident that occurred during a vice-presidential visit to Houston in December of 1975.
