Hunger’s whip: why connecting US food stamps to work is outdated and ineffective | Dana Simmons

For more than 200 years, common wisdom and policymakers have assumed that to get people to work, you have to make them hungry. The new work requirements for Snap food benefits, which took effect in most of the United States on December 1, are just the latest in a long line of policies based on this idea. The new rules eliminate benefits for any non-disabled adult up to age 65 who cannot prove they work or seek work at least 80 hours per month (which includes homeless people, veterans and former foster youth). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 2.7 million people will lose their benefits.

You’ve heard this reasoning before: people are motivated to work because they and their families need to survive. If you give someone welfare – especially food aid – they become dependent and lazy. The Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative think tank that has campaigned for years to cut welfare, calls it “the dependency trap.” Starving people by taking away their food stamps is supposed to “incentivize individuals to improve themselves and move from dependence to work and self-sufficiency.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson called work requirements the “moral component” of the Republican budget: “When you get young men working, it’s good for them.” » Whenever welfare benefits or foreign aid are debated, some politicians trot out some version of this old platitude. Historian Moishe Postone has called this idea, that people must work in order to eat, “the basis of the fundamental ideology legitimizing the capitalist social formation as a whole.” But it is not true that hunger motivates people to work. This is fiction and drugs like Ozempic can prove it.

Today’s politicians and pundits are recycling a deeply ingrained notion. Hunger, wrote the eminent Anglican minister Joseph Townsend in 1786, is “the most natural motive of industry.” Hunger “teaches obedience and submission” and “tames the most ferocious animals.” Townsend, like many after him, argued that feeding the poor only made their situation worse by suppressing their desire to work and support themselves. “Only hunger can stimulate and spur [poor people] at work. » Ideas like Townsend’s justified cutting off food and aid to the unemployed and famine-stricken in England, Ireland, India, and East Africa. Hunger was the whip. And this idea was implanted in the American mind from the beginning of the republic.

For much of U.S. history, government agents applied Townsend’s prescription literally. In the 19th century, U.S. officers intentionally withheld food from natives to force them to sell their treaty lands, send their children to Native American boarding schools designed to “civilize” them, and work for wages instead of tending the land. After emancipation and the American Civil War, government agents and plantation owners withheld food supplies to force freedmen to work. As one Union army commander said, “Liberty granted [freedpeople] simply means the freedom to work, toil, or to starve.

Employers have also used this tactic. In American mines and plantations, for example, owners often disciplined workers by controlling their access to food. Employers kept workers in debt by advancing credits for food at the company store. Forced to buy from their employers and without means of clearing their accounts, sharecroppers and miners worked in a form of servitude. During the major miners’ strikes of the 1920s and 1930s, the local Red Cross and social agencies colluded with employers and refused to support protesting workers. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms improved working conditions in some sectors, but black farmworkers were excluded from these benefits. Modern plantation owners in the American South “used hunger as a weapon” at least until the 1970s, according to sociologist Monica White. Anyone who challenges its political and economic power risks finding themselves hungry.

Even today, anti-welfare politicians use hunger as a weapon against the poor and working people. When Covid struck, conservative lawmakers opposed extending food aid and welfare benefits to affected Americans, fearing “moral hazard” that could discourage them from working. During the government shutdown in November, federal authorities took hostage 42 million Americans (nearly one in eight people in the United States), who rely on Snap benefits.

But does hunger really motivate people to work?

There’s a reason why Townsend’s ideas may seem intuitively right to many of us. Utilitarian ideas like his are ingrained in the way we think about human nature.

For decades, psychologists have used the words “hunger” and “motivation” almost interchangeably. When psychologists wanted to know how learning works or how to get someone to complete a task, they conducted experiments in which they made rats hungry and dropped them into a maze of puzzles. Even today, some psychologists deprive their subjects (especially mice) of food in order to get them to carry out an experiment. If the mouse does its job, it gets peanut butter or a piece of bread. Psychologists’ assumptions about hunger and motivation have entered popular culture. I’ve heard people at my university say that students are “hungry to learn.” The artists motivate each other with the slogan “Stay Hungry”.

But hunger and motivation are not the same. Psychologists have known this for at least 75 years. The poor have always known this. In 1951, Yale physiologists Bal K Anand and John Brobeck used a thin needle to lesion specific areas at the base of rats’ brains, rendering the animals insatiable. These rats were not motivated at all. They became moody and refused to run, solve puzzles, or do experimental work. When offered food, these hungry rats simply couldn’t stop eating; some of them ate each other to death.

Around the same time, psychologist Paul Thomas Young discovered that giving animals a treat was much more likely to make them move than depriving them of food. If you want to exercise a rat, give it sugar. Hunger, especially acute hunger, often decreases motivation. Hunger saps intellectual abilities, energy and immune strength, leading to illness, exhaustion and defeat.

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound are the ultimate proof that hunger has very little to do with motivation. GLP-1 drugs are finally convincing the public that controlling hunger is not just a matter of individual willpower. Many users of these drugs had gone through diet after diet, feeling like failures because they couldn’t suppress their own hunger. For some, these medications are a miracle. We learn not to blame people for their hunger. Yet somehow it has had no impact on the way we talk about hunger and poverty.

Hunger is stimulated by an extraordinary complex of hormones and neural pathways in the mouth, gut and brain. An empty stomach sends ghrelin to increase appetite. Endocannabinoid receptors in the brain stimulate a feeling of pleasure when eating. Gut hormones signal to stop eating when the stomach is full. There are multiple flavors of hunger: wanting, wanting, loving, needing. Hunger also describes how we feel when we know we have to eat cheap snacks or skip meals because we don’t have enough money to buy nutritious foods.

For many people, hunger has little or nothing to do with individual decisions. Hunger is the result of collective policy choices regarding minimum wage, child care, food subsidies and welfare.

It’s no surprise that Snap’s work requirements don’t work. Where states have imposed work requirements to qualify for food benefits, there has been no significant increase in employment. In many places, jobs simply aren’t available. Having to prove how many hours you work is in itself a huge burden and a lot of work. The Urban Institute estimates that even before Congress created these new requirements, one in eight Snap recipients had lost some food benefits due to paperwork issues.

Instant work requirements are wrong, punitive and cruel. These rules are based on outdated moral judgments and erroneous assertions. Most Snap recipients who are able to work are already working. Snap, for many, is a supplement to poverty wages. Benefits are income-tested, and many workers are paid so little that they qualify. More than half of Snap’s non-disabled adult beneficiaries in 2015 worked. Nearly 90% of Snap recipients had a family member in the household who had worked in the two years before or after receiving benefits. The share of Snap households with some income has increased since the 1990s. Workers cannot buy enough food to survive. Most often, hunger is caused by forces beyond the individual’s control. It has nothing to do with motivation.

• Dana Simmons is a professor at the University of California, Riverside and author of On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic. The open access book can be downloaded here