The following dialogue brings together two social scientists from diverse political perspectives who reflect upon social responsibility -- its meaning historically and in the present day. The discussion mirrors the healthy debate under way in U.S. society. Journal editors Michael J. Bandler and William Peters are the conversation's moderators.

SKOCPOL: I'm Theda Skocpol. I'm professor of government and sociology at Harvard University.

KUO: My name is David Kuo, and I'm the executive director of an organization known as The American Compass, the goal of which is to try and reinvigorate the private sector to mobilize and care for the needy. We are a group of conservatives who got tired of talking about changing the welfare state and wanted to roll up our sleeves and get involved.

BANDLER: I d like to begin our dialogue by exploring the roots of social responsibility in the United States -- American compassion, so to speak.

SKOCPOL: Having studied the history of American social policy from the 19th century up to the present, I think we can trace a couple of different roots for American compassion. Some people might say, let's go back and look at what Americans have been doing since colonial times for the poor. That tradition of local responsibility has existed for a long time, sometimes directly -- one family caring for another -- and at a later time, the establishment of local poorhouses. The New Deal in the 1930s changed that somewhat, although I think not as much as many people believe.

But I want to put into the beginning of the discussion a much larger meaning of American compassion. I think you can see from the beginning a tradition of citizens saying that every individual is responsible for contributing to the community and the nation, and the nation and community in turn can appropriately give back to that individual and that individual's family aid that enables them to meet their responsibility as citizens. So I don't think we should just talk about relief for the poor. We should talk about the full range of what American citizens have expected from one another and have been prepared to do to provide community support to one another.

KUO: I would find very little to disagree with in that. One of the things that I tend to be frustrated with in the current debate about welfare -- especially among conservatives -- is this uninformed idea about the nature of the private sector, this unsubstantiated belief, I think, that government has somehow completely usurped the role of the private sector. So I would like to raise something I've wrestled with. To what degree did American government usurp the role of the private sector, versus, to what degree did the private sector really abdicate its role, or not find itself capable to meet an unprecedented great need in American life.

SKOCPOL: I'm sure you would agree that the private sector includes both private charities -- often religious groups -- and businesses. They're both part of what we often mean by the private sector.

KUO: Yes, absolutely.

SKOCPOL: I think there was a crisis, and not just during the Great Depression of the 1930s. During every big economic downturn in American history, you see private charities and businesses saying to government, either at the local or at the national level, please do more to help, because we can't handle the overwhelming need in this period. Still, I would argue that even the much-enhanced role of the federal government in the New Deal period, for the Social Security Act and the various welfare programs that were put into place, never pushed the private sector out altogether. In many ways, we see a partnership with private charities like the Salvation Army or the Catholic Charities, or various other religious groups.

KUO: A number of those organizations founded around the late 1800s and early 1900s shared several core principles on how they would operate. Among them was the idea that they would be challenging -- that moral demands would be made both on giver and recipient. The second was that they would be personal -- that people would have one-on-one, intimate interactions with each other. This was not an arms' length relationship in terms of caring for those in need. It really embodied the true meaning of compassion, which I believe is `suffering with. Another is that they were spiritual -- fundamentally faith-based. They obviously came from a variety of denominational differences, but they never really lost sight of the primacy of a spiritual component.

I can't point to the moment when it occurred, but over time, those principles -- especially as embodied by those organizations that were founded within ten years of each other -- the Red Cross, Salvation Army, YMCA [Young Men's Christian Association] -- have been lost. The groups, in many ways, have taken on a governmental approach, becoming much more hierarchical, with Industrial Age models in terms of their delivery systems. Now to a certain degree, there is this sense that we need to return to an older model of compassion. How should government position itself in this coming age to return to a different notion of compassion? And how should these organizations that have been around for a hundred years, that now receive anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of their money from government, rediscover their first mission?

SKOCPOL: I think those are fair questions. I think we could definitely point to a professionalization and a bureaucratization of many private and charitable organizations in this country. It's probably become most apparent in the last thirty or forty years -- more slightly apparent, I think, from the turn of the 20th century on. Of course, we need to remember that the personal approach to compassion may have been modified because it was not adequate to the scale of the problems. As I've said, some of the very local and personal and religious organizations that were so active before the New Deal were in the forefront of asking for more help from government when the scale of the problem became too great for them. I also think there were serious problems of inequity and racial exclusion that became unconscionable in this country, starting in the Sixties and Seventies.

KUO: Yes. Absolutely.

BANDLER: Sixty or more years ago, when the problems became too great, Americans turned to the government for help in what became known as the New Deal. What happened from that point on? How did the reliance on government expand to the extent that it became, for many, a crisis needing rectification?

SKOCPOL: I think we need to look at the major social programs that came out of the New Deal which embody that other tradition of American compassion. If you look at Social Security, for example, our major program of social protection for the retired elderly, it rose up as part of a long tradition of American compassion that takes into account the fact that people are going to contribute all of their working life -- by work as well as by payroll contributions. Then, at the end of their life, they or their survivors will be entitled to a certain amount of support, a basic level of support, through a public program. That really is the biggest thing the New Deal put in place, and it remains the biggest thing by far. At the same time, it provided subsidies to state and local governments to provide a little more consistent and slightly more generous help to the very, very poor. That's what we call welfare.

It's interesting to me that the smaller part of this, both in terms of the number of people reached and the amount of money spent, has become so much more controversial. I think it's because we have changing ideas about the appropriateness of mothers staying home with their children. Back in the New Deal era, we thought they needed to stay home, and that that was work. Now we think mothers need to be in the workforce. Also, the racial composition of the people being helped has changed, startlingly. Many more are not white people. So the rise of the controversy about welfare seems to me to be very closely linked to those major social changes and not simply to the amount of money we're spending.

KUO: I would say, vis-a-vis social security, that it is hard to look at the Social Security Act and say that the federal government did not do something revolutionarily good in terms of caring for the elderly in America. But if you look at the number of elderly poor over the last sixty, seventy years, you will see a marked downturn.

SKOCPOL: Right.

KUO: That is the reality. I think people tend to overlook that, and say, well, of course that makes sense. Well, it makes sense, but it's an example of a government program that made sense, that worked, that had a desired outcome. Now we re moving slowly in the direction of talking about that whole panoply of programs called welfare. AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children], as originally intended, was a program to help widows of war dead and other widows, and divorced mothers whose husbands had left them. Like many programs in its early years, it was very small, and it was successful. Now you jump ahead twenty or thirty years, to the mid-1960s, and to the current day, and what you see, in reality -- though conservatives tend to ignore it -- is that the Great Society modifications to AFDC were relatively minor. They weren't vast sweeping changes that were invented overnight and adopted wholesale, and were immediately detrimental to society. Instead, I think, what you see are programs undergoing relatively small changes. But the biggest change comes in the broader cultural mores and in the responses of people to those programs.

SKOCPOL: I think that makes sense. Also, more people ended up depending on them than probably was ever imagined.

KUO: Absolutely. And again, I don't know the degree to which this occurred, but I think almost inarguably, many of the programs that were intended to be safety nets in many ways became programs that had perverse incentives.

SKOCPOL: Yes, especially as the role of women and men in the family and in the workforce changed. I think that welfare seemed to be subsidizing people to not work, as the definition of what counts as a mother's work changed. And of course it has changed.

KUO: In February of 1968, in a speech, Robert Kennedy pointed out that critics of welfare have long said that welfare is degrading to the recipient, that it discourages work, that it discourages family formation, that it encourages family breakups, and that we in our effort to help often ignore the criticisms. He added his belief that American society had to realize that the criticism had more than a grain of truth. He went on to quote the head of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] and others who said the program, even at that point, needed major changes, because it was just not having desired outcomes.

BANDLER: What you both seem to be saying is that the there wasn't anything necessarily wrong with the program or the way it was modified but there were changes in society and attitudes.

SKOCPOL: Well, I would say that there were some things wrong with the program. Aid to Families with Dependent Children goes all the way back to the 1910s, when most states started something called "mothers' pensions." They weren't for war widows, actually, because there was another program in place for that. But they were for widowed mothers. I think that program worked somewhat; it never worked terribly well. For many decades we could assume that most women who were mothers would have husbands -- there would just be a few who wouldn't -- and that they would be able to live through the incomes that their husbands were making in the workforce. Society did change. We have many more single-parent families -- many of whom, I have to point out, are not on welfare and never have been.

KUO: Isn't it true that the majority are not?

SKOCPOL: I think that's right. So there's been a huge change in the behavior of Americans about marriage and having children that is sometimes blamed on welfare, but I think it would be more appropriate to say that those larger social changes overwhelmed a welfare program that was based on different premises when it was started.

KUO: This is fundamentally a chicken-and-egg question, but I don't think there can be much doubt that the welfare program helped increase the "underclass," that is, had an especially detrimental effect.

SKOCPOL: Well, it probably is true that it didn't solve any problems. I don't believe the research shows it caused these problems, but we don't need to argue about that, I don't think.

KUO: I'm not saying that it caused them, but I think it helped the downturn.

SKOCPOL: I want to direct our attention to what's been missing in American compassion either through the private or the public sector in the last several decades, because I think we sometimes focus on what's there and what it isn't accomplishing. We need to ask ourselves why we Americans haven't done more to ensure that everyone who wants to work is able to work, and have not done more to support fathers and mothers in combining work and child-rearing in this society. We have a lot of problems that are faced by working poor people, and sometimes I think we respond to those problems by just saying to more poor people, you need to go to work under circumstances where you may not be able to earn enough to live on or get the health care benefits you need to take your child to the doctor. I don't know how realistic that is. Most other industrial democracies place the emphasis on rewarding work and responsible parenting, and I think that's what we ought to be doing in America, rather than tinkering with welfare.

KUO: I don't think there are going to be many people who disagree with that. How do you go about implementing it?

SKOCPOL: Well, I think there are a lot of people who disagree with that, actually, if it means you need to involve government.

KUO: So how would you advocate doing it?

SKOCPOL: I would advocate extending social security to working- age adults, make sure they're working, but giving them some help to train themselves to prepare for work. I d also want to make sure that families can afford to have one-and-a-half adults in the workplace and still take care of their children, either by placing them in child care if they choose to do so, or by allowing one parent to stay home for part or all of the time, if they would like to.

KUO: This is where the debate really takes off. How do we as a society foster these changes? How do we bring about these desired outcomes? Many -- most -- of the people in the conservative camp are going to say, show me government programs of the past thirty years that really have been extraordinarily successful in meeting their desired outcomes.

SKOCPOL: I would say, look at Social Security, which is America's most effective anti-poverty program, as you yourself pointed out.

KUO: I don't disagree. I think the sort of absolutist anti- government position is untenable, especially in terms of blindly saying, all we have to do is reconfigure the marketplace, lower taxes and everybody will be fine.

SKOCPOL: It sounds like you and I agree about a lot more than we might.

KUO: Maybe you can make the criticism for the "liberal" position.

SKOCPOL: Well, there are various liberal positions, just as there are various conservative positions. There are certainly some on the left of the spectrum who believe that we should just go back to spending more on AFDC and other welfare programs that do not require people to work. Many on the left are very nervous about raising questions about parental responsibility, about saying things like `it's better for parents to be married. I don't agree with those positions. We can still do things to help a mother who ends up alone with her children, but we don't need to pretend that that's the ideal situation.

KUO: How do we get programs in place to help those people who need the help, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in a position where without help they will be in dire straits -- without having people look at the program and say, `okay, I need more money, so I am going to do X because the program rewards X ?.

SKOCPOL: That's an excellent question. That's the fix we've gotten ourselves into in this society. Over the past forty years, we've been saying to people with few skills and not such great prospects on the labor market, if you stay home and apply for welfare, you can get a Medicaid card and take your kid to the doctor, but if you are working long hours at the minimum wage, you're probably going to be in a job that doesn t provide health insurance. There's something very wrong with that; we ought to be concentrating on putting in place the basic supports for everyone that enable people to work and care for their families and get by. They may not get rich, or even reach middle class. But if we did that, then I don't think we would have the moral problem you're describing.

KUO: But again, that's fine in theory, but how does it look in practice? My wife, who taught in Washington, D.C. schools for six years, was literally able to point to the women who were going to become pregnant again because of various changes in the system that they well knew.

SKOCPOL: Well, the number of poor people having children out of wedlock is actually going down. I know it doesn't necessarily look that way from one vantage point, but it is going down.

BANDLER: Let me shift directions a bit. Can we focus on the specific areas of child care, housing and health care? Can you frame the nature of the current debate on these subjects? KUO: I'll shape it from the conservative side. The conservative argument -- one I have a lot of sympathy for, obviously -- is that government programs have done more harm than good. With the exception of Social Security, it is almost impossible to point to a major government social program of the last thirty years that has had the desired consequences. The principal problem, I believe, is not in terms of dollars and cents. The principal problem is in terms of the balance sheet of human lives. The greatest cost of these programs has been their detrimental effect on people, intended and principally unintended. So as you talk about all of these things, what is it that makes us believe that a new governmental approach is going to be any more successful than old governmental approaches that have failed?

SKOCPOL: I think we have to look at different kinds of government approaches. I get very discouraged at times in the debate -- certainly not with you, David, but in the overall debate -- which seems to be very crude in saying it's government versus the market.

KUO: Absolutely.

SKOCPOL: That's so naive. The question is, what kinds of government efforts are we talking about, and how do they mesh with what people in society and the market are doing. We have a splendid history of success in America, dating back to the founding of public schools in the 19th century through the expansion of Civil War pensions, programs to aid mothers and children -- not just welfare programs, but others in the early 20th century -- and the creation of social security. Then, in the last thirty years, there certainly is the addition of Medicare. Whatever its problems, which I think are tied up with the overall health care system, it has had splendid impact on the health of the elderly in this country. So we have had major government successes. The question is, how do they work compared to the failures? If we as a society had made the decision we should have made long ago to find some way to ensure that every job carried with it a basic level of health benefits for the worker and the family of the worker, that alone would have made an enormous difference in our welfare problem. The rules of the game would be set by the government -- so that there would be no such thing as people working in jobs without health insurance. That alone would have made it less likely that large numbers of people would have gone onto welfare.

KUO: It is impossible to point to a major government social welfare program since World War II that is not today at least 25 percent "privatized." You look at every major program, and you will see at least 25 percent of it run by the private sector. So you can't say that all government programs are bad or all private sector programs are good.

SKOCPOL: And you have to realize that there can be combinations of private and government activity that don't work.

KUO: I think one of the things that would be instructive would be to see whether it was possible for government to change its focus on how it runs its programs. For instance, instead of issuing a work order that says a program needs to be run by X number of Ph.Ds and Y number of social workers in Z type of facilities, we d cut to the bottom line here. We want a program or a work plan that will produce an efficacy rate of Q. We want demonstrable success rates in drug treatment, in job training, in whatever type of program. We don't particularly care what means you use. You can use private secular means, you can use private religious means, you can use anything in between.

SKOCPOL: I think there's a consensus developing on that point. I believe there is a certain amount of change going on now and we're placing more emphasis on results rather than the means. There were historical reasons why we focused on the means. We were trying to establish something of a skilled civil service in this society, and there was some value in that. But maybe that's not the value that we need to be fighting for now.

KUO: I think the new battle is over results. There you see an enormous advantage for the government, because government programs are monitored. We know that government programs don't work in part because we have seen the results of their own self- examination. You don't see the same thing in the private sector.

SKOCPOL: There are lots of private programs that don't work.

KUO: Oh, absolutely.

BANDLER: We've been talking about government in general terms. There appears to be strong support for the idea of shifting responsibility for these programs from the federal, or national, level to the state and local level.

SKOCPOL: I think you're talking about something that really is happening in the area of programs for the poor. I don't yet see any societal consensus -- nor do I really expect one to emerge -- that we're going to take things like social security and Medicare and hand them off to the states and localities. I'll let David comment, but I think the positive side of more responsibility for state and local government is that it might help with this results-oriented approach. And you might get people to take responsibility for dealing with the actual problems their communities and their states are facing. The downside is that it can create a competition to do less and less for a constituency that is problematic, that isn't politically powerful -- namely poor people.

KUO: I don't think that state governments necessarily are less bureaucratic and more efficient, more intelligent, than the federal government. But there is the chance that by returning programs to states and localities, these jurisdictions will be able to tailor the programs to meet their needs. That's the hopeful part.

BANDLER: But isn t there great concern among many on the lower levels of government as to whether benefits will accrue to them with this shift?

SKOCPOL: We often imagine in this country that we could return to a situation where there are a few poor families in the community and the community pitches in to give them some tough love -- give them a little bit of help, get them on their feet, and everything will be fine. I don't want to disparage that model. It's a very wonderful model, and I think we should do our best to achieve elements of it. But we need to face the fact that very poor people, especially very poor people of color, are often concentrated in certain rural areas or certain big cities in overwhelming numbers. And of course the mayors and the local authorities and even the congressional representatives from those areas are very concerned that they'll be left holding the bag and that others will just wash their hands of the responsibility.

KUO: Let me describe my hope for the future. I don't tend to engage in utopian ideals all that often, even though it's going to come close to sounding like that. It is that Americans will see that a clear and present danger to the nation is the continued deterioration of the underclass, be it in terms of crime, be it in terms of social costs. I don't care what measure you want to choose. Americans need to see that as a reality. And then I believe that citizens must mobilize to meet those needs. That means sacrificial giving of time and resources, financial and material. I don't know how that happens. I don't know that needs to happen without a role for government. I think that there is such a role. Whether it's through tax credits or through vouchers, there needs to be a system whereby government can bring to bear that which it does best: collecting and distributing money, monitoring, doing things along those lines, but to this other end. And then we need a massive campaign to convince Americans that they need to mobilize, to go into the inner cities, to go into the rural areas, and to give -- to practice these principles of what we can call effective compassion.

BANDLER: But isn t it common for people who are concerned about various social problems -- as they may exist nationally -- to turn to government and say, `do something about it, you're responsible for this ?

SKOCPOL: Well, the government is us, and I think we have to realize that ultimately. I'm very discouraged about the rhetoric, because I think it's just promoting the idea that the government is somebody else. I like David Kuo's vision. I'm worried about one aspect of all this, though. The underclass -- that is, the extremely poor who live disorganized lives, and whose children are in jeopardy of not being able to have even a whiff of the American dream, are really only about ten percent of the poor in this country. Part of the problem we have is that the ranks of those who are poor or near-poor have been growing. So that creates a situation in which there's compassion fatigue, because there are more and more families with both a mom and dad working long hours, worried about what's happening to themselves and their children, or mothers alone who can barely keep their heads above water. But it also means that there's a larger issue to address here that may go beyond either government programs for the welfare poor or charity for the very poor. We might need to think about what we want to do as a society to make sure that the rising tide lifts all boats.

KUO: But how do we do that? I think one of the encouraging things -- to point to a specific piece of legislation -- that came out of the welfare bill was the provision put in by Senator Ashcroft called the charitable choice provision. It allows states to use federal block-granted funds to contract with private and religious charitable organizations to deliver those services without requiring those organizations -- especially the religious ones -- to lose their fundamental religious conviction. There are strict prohibitions against proselytization, but it really does try and level the playing field and encourage the participation of those private and religious groups, the small ones that really are doing a marvelous job of transforming people's lives but that are now cut out of the mainstream of social welfare funding.

SKOCPOL: Well, I'd like to look at the details of that, but I certainly agree that we can be more realistic about the strengths of religious groups. This isn't anything new; many government programs at all levels are already implemented by religious groups and have been for a long time. KUO: The difference here is that under this provision, those groups don't have to change their fundamental religious character. They don't have to remove crosses from walls. They don't have to lose their fundamental religious grounding.

SKOCPOL: Well, if it's about symbolism, I think that may be a good thing, as long as we're careful that it isn't done in a discriminatory way. But there have been other conservative proposals, for example, to hand public money for social spending on the poor over to private charities on a one-on-one basis. I think that would produce a disaster.

What I often say when I am in discussions with conservatives is that sometimes, a properly designed government program that simply gets the service or the money to those who need it most with the minimum of overhead is the way to go. And it isn't a zero-sum game, because we could imagine the religious groups and other private groups that are trying to provide much more personally-tailored direct aid to people in desperate circumstances of various kinds doing a better job if they can rely on certain basics being in place.

I come back to the health care example. We, as a society, have debated this, and have taken a very harmful turn. If we could count on some bare-bones health care to be there always, then it would be easier to add on programs run by private groups and local groups in many cases that did the little extra to both demand responsible behavior of poor people and deliver the aid to them.

PETERS: I've had a view of this that our conversation has strengthened to some degree. There is a current of thought that the U.S. social responsibility structure that we've had for the last sixty years was particularly a response to the Depression, sort of an economic aberration. I'm wondering if there isn't an element of the changing way in which people lived that drove that as much as anything else. There's the shift from a largely agrarian society to one that is much more urban. Families became generationally divided. Didn't the world change in some ways? Isn't there an element of that happening that drove the need for different kinds of responses in terms of social responsibility?

SKOCPOL: I think there's more continuity than some people who say the New Deal was an aberration. But I would point to the changes in family structures, and in what the economy has been doing for families without a lot of skills in the labor market in the last thirty years. There are very big transformations that have reverberated through our private and public system of social compassion and in some cases overwhelmed it. I also think there are continuities in the American tradition of compassion that were there from the beginning and were not fundamentally transformed by the New Deal -- and are still with us. I think Americans want to help people to help themselves. That's a theme that runs through, and they're prepared to do quite a lot, including through taxes and government, as long as they're convinced that the programs are going to reward individual responsibility and contributions to the community rather than replacing it.

KUO: They don't want to see their hard-earned money or their hard-earned time wasted. Their spirit is good, but they also have a measure of demanding that these things work.

SKOCPOL: And actually, the poor in America have always been part of that consensus. If you go and talk to poor people -- at least at the level of the values they will articulate -- they will say the same thing.

BANDLER: Given what you both agree is the link between compassion and a responsible citizenry, do you think the Administration and the Congress are heading in the right direction?

KUO: I am highly critical of Republicans in general for how they talk about these issues. I think it is just politically stupid, and morally questionable, to talk about the problems we face -- especially vis-à-vis the poor -- in terms of how much money it costs in budgetary terms, A, because it is so remarkably small, and B, because the real question is not how much this costs. America has a long history of not being terribly concerned how much it spends to try and tackle crises. The fundamental question is, what sort of an outcome have these programs produced or helped to produce in the very people that they're trying to help. That's the question that needs to be answered. It's not the costs, it's the impact -- and what can we do to enhance or expand the impact.

BANDLER: In other words, if the programs work, the money has been well spent. If they haven't, it hasn't.

KUO: That's exactly it.

SKOCPOL: And that's what most Americans believe. I agree with what David said. However, I'm a little worried. I believe that both parties are obsessed with budget-balancing, and in practice, it turns out to be easier to extract resources from the poor than from anyone else. I'm not terribly optimistic about how things have turned out over the last few years, or how they're going to turn out in the immediate future.

KUO: I think there are very few people on either side of the aisle who deserve a lot of credit for having talked about these things.

BANDLER: So there's a vital need to get the debate off the fiscal questions and onto the essence of it: what programs will work, how they will work, what the moral responsibilities are.

SKOCPOL: And what kind of partnerships between groups in society, including government at all levels, we really want to have.

BANDLER: Is social responsibility a partisan issue?

SKOCPOL: It is, in practice. Of course it is.

KUO: It shouldn't be.

SKOCPOL: We're saying it maybe shouldn't be, but it is.

KUO: I think decidedly it shouldn't be, but it is. The question about how well we deal with it in the future is going to be the degree to which we're able to change that dynamic.