On his book Overthrowing the Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare in America
Cover Interview of August 05, 2020
Lastly
The primary goal of this book is to challenge the
stereotypical stories about welfare and its recipients and offer more accurate,
fair, and nuanced stories from aid recipients themselves. More than that,
however, the book offers strategies to readers for challenging these
stereotypes in their own stories and their own lives.
Economists and policy wonks can develop strategies, policies,
and plans, but without the will of politicians and the public, the best laid
plans will suffer the fate of the tree that falls in the woods with no one to
hear it. If a politician believes the poor are lazy cheats, she will likely not
vote to fund job training or childcare vouchers. One way to change these
perceptions is through stories.
We can start by de-stigmatizing poverty and welfare and by tackling
the stories about welfare with an understanding of just how powerful stories
can be. Not only are stories crucial to how we perceive and construct our world—they
are enduring. As Chip and Dan Heath argue in their New York Times bestselling
book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, stories are
sticky; with their concrete details and remarkable plots, stories are eminently
memorable. Unlike statistics and arguments, stories are remembered more clearly
and more often than information conveyed in more abstract ways.
Stories are also entertaining. We tell stories for amusement
and sociability, not just as proof for some point we want to make. In this way,
stories can operate like epidemics: spreading virally from one person to
another. A single story of welfare fraud told a hundred times can start to feel
like a hundred cases of welfare fraud. Further, stories can encode deep-seated
beliefs that we may be unwilling to share so explicitly and boldly. Our stories
betray our fears and desires in ways our direct speech does not.
But just as stories can perpetuate stereotypes, they can
also dismantle them. Social science research provides the blueprint for
advocacy through storytelling. Empathy, familiarity, and internal and external
coherence are particularly powerful rhetorical elements of persuasive
narratives. Reframing narratives already in the oral tradition is particularly
effective in identifying stories told by aid recipients that are most likely to
change people’s hearts and minds.
Overthrowing the Queen does not cherry-pick the
stories told about welfare in the U.S. All the stories, true, false, and
everywhere in between are included. But analysis of these stories offers
readers the opportunity to learn and retell stories from people with firsthand
experience relying on aid to survive. Further, the final chapter of the book
suggests strategies for highlighting authentic narratives with the best chances
of being heard.
In this way, the book operates as a corrective. With fraud
rates in aid programs such as Food Stamps well below 2%, we would need to tell
50-75 stories of people working hard to make ends meet for every one story of
fraud. In the interest of fairness, we have a long way to go.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
The primary goal of this book is to challenge the stereotypical stories about welfare and its recipients and offer more accurate, fair, and nuanced stories from aid recipients themselves. More than that, however, the book offers strategies to readers for challenging these stereotypes in their own stories and their own lives.
Economists and policy wonks can develop strategies, policies, and plans, but without the will of politicians and the public, the best laid plans will suffer the fate of the tree that falls in the woods with no one to hear it. If a politician believes the poor are lazy cheats, she will likely not vote to fund job training or childcare vouchers. One way to change these perceptions is through stories.
We can start by de-stigmatizing poverty and welfare and by tackling the stories about welfare with an understanding of just how powerful stories can be. Not only are stories crucial to how we perceive and construct our world—they are enduring. As Chip and Dan Heath argue in their New York Times bestselling book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, stories are sticky; with their concrete details and remarkable plots, stories are eminently memorable. Unlike statistics and arguments, stories are remembered more clearly and more often than information conveyed in more abstract ways.
Stories are also entertaining. We tell stories for amusement and sociability, not just as proof for some point we want to make. In this way, stories can operate like epidemics: spreading virally from one person to another. A single story of welfare fraud told a hundred times can start to feel like a hundred cases of welfare fraud. Further, stories can encode deep-seated beliefs that we may be unwilling to share so explicitly and boldly. Our stories betray our fears and desires in ways our direct speech does not.
But just as stories can perpetuate stereotypes, they can also dismantle them. Social science research provides the blueprint for advocacy through storytelling. Empathy, familiarity, and internal and external coherence are particularly powerful rhetorical elements of persuasive narratives. Reframing narratives already in the oral tradition is particularly effective in identifying stories told by aid recipients that are most likely to change people’s hearts and minds.
Overthrowing the Queen does not cherry-pick the stories told about welfare in the U.S. All the stories, true, false, and everywhere in between are included. But analysis of these stories offers readers the opportunity to learn and retell stories from people with firsthand experience relying on aid to survive. Further, the final chapter of the book suggests strategies for highlighting authentic narratives with the best chances of being heard.
In this way, the book operates as a corrective. With fraud rates in aid programs such as Food Stamps well below 2%, we would need to tell 50-75 stories of people working hard to make ends meet for every one story of fraud. In the interest of fairness, we have a long way to go.