Michael Katz began work on social welfare during the late 1970s with a project entitled “The Casualties of Industrialization.” That project led to a series of essays, Poverty and Policy in American History (Katz Reference Katz1983), and a few years later to In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (Katz Reference Katz1986). His reading in twentieth-century literature for Shadow—and the ideological and policy nostrums of the Reagan administration—allowed Katz to pivot to two books that frame contemporary welfare debates in their historical context—The Undeserving Poor in Reference Katz1989 and The Price of Citizenship in Reference Katz2001, as well as a set of essays Improving Poor People (Katz Reference Katz1995) that he published between the two.

One might look at Michael's welfare writings and draw a straight line between them and his earlier work on education. In both areas, Michael broke with the existing conventional wisdom, typically a narrow institutional focus often written by scholars who worked in education and social work schools. Instead, Michael began outside these institutions and viewed them critically. In the process, he laid out fields of study to which other scholars have contributed.

Despite the apparent connections between Katz's education and social welfare writing, the story is a bit more complicated. Michael came to his social welfare work after a decade of work in quantitative social and family history. Most of this time was devoted to the Hamilton project, an intensive examination of that Canadian city during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. That project produced two books, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Katz Reference Katz1975) and The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Katz et al. Reference Katz, Doucet and Stern1982). In particular, during the Hamilton project, Michael shifted his attention from the gap between the claims of reformers and social reality to the complex set of decisions that ordinary people made about their personal life within the constraints imposed by existing social conditions.

In the last stages of the Hamilton project in the mid-1970s, Michael focused on three sets of family processes: structure, strategy, and economy. The basic analytical framework was that families used a variety of mechanisms (strategy) involving shifting household membership (structure) to achieve a balance of their consumption and resources (economy). In The People of Hamilton, Katz found evidence of significant changes in the life course of the city's residents at midcentury. Most importantly, he pointed to the importance of a stage of semiautonomy of youth during which young people in their late teens and early twenties frequently lived as boarders or relatives outside their parents’ household. In The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism, Katz and colleagues use ratios of work/consumption and wage/consumption as a way to characterize the family economy. The idea of a work/consumption index had its origins in the work of a Soviet agrarian economist, A.V. Chayanov, who developed it to make sense of the peasant economy (Chayanov Reference Chayanov1966).

We expected to find that as families’ consumption needs increased with the birth of children that they would use a variety of strategies to expand their resources. However, we discovered this didn't happen. For a number of reasons—limits on physical space, the rigidity of labor markets, the attenuation of kin relations—most families faced a predictable life-cycle squeeze in which poverty was more or less inevitable. How was it that a condition that a majority of North Americans faced—an extended period of life-cycle poverty—seemed to escape the understanding of the privileged few who wrote about poverty and ran charity organizations? It is this question that Michael takes up in the introduction to Poverty and Policy and ran through that book and In the Shadow of the Poorhouse.

A second aspect of Katz's social welfare work related to his intellectual style. Michael delighted in turning the conventional wisdom on its head. Irony, contradictions, and the gap between what people said and what they did were his stock in trade. In particular, he was suspicious of reformers. Well before conservatives used welfare “reform” and Social Security “reform” as cover for attacks on those programs, Katz suggested that the motives of social welfare reformers deserved the same level of scrutiny.

Before Katz published In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, the main actors of social welfare for progressive historians were the “reformers” who founded charity organizations and did most of the writing. Instead of nineteenth-century welfare being a story of white Protestants working their way toward Progressivism, Michael told a story in which public welfare officials, the Catholic Church, and machine politicians were central innovators, while the reformers were often using lofty rhetoric to hide a narrower set of motives. The most dramatic example of this was the story of the cutoff of outdoor relief in Brooklyn during the 1870s, a story first uncovered by Susan Davis, then a graduate student at Penn, and that Michael tells in both Poverty and Policy and Shadow. In Brooklyn, the reformers—represented most clearly by Seth Low, who would go on to be one of the first mayors of the consolidated City of New York—used claims about the corrupting influence of outdoor relief to cover up their efforts to break the power of the Democrats who used relief to secure the loyalty of their working-class constituents.

The tension between structure and agency runs through Katz's work. The Hamilton project for the most part tilted toward structure, and that tendency carried over to his early work on social welfare. Social welfare ideas and policy were often anchored in class structure, family structure, and the physical structure of cities. Ideas often surface as smoke screens that the respectable classes used to cover up their own interests or as blinkered ignorance of the poverty and desperation around them.

In his later work, the balance shifted from structure to agency and choice and led to a distinctive change in Katz's voice. In several tributes to Michael since his death, people pointed to Michael's moral compass as a trademark of his later scholarship. In place of the debunker's pleasure in skewering Charles Hoyt's deliberate manipulation of data in his 1870s survey of the residents of New York state's poorhouses (Katz Reference Katz1983) or Buffalo, New York's Charity Organization Society founder Stephen Gurteen's maudlin stories of poor families’ depravity (Katz Reference Katz1986), we find an effort to craft a positive response to the war on dependence, devolution, and market models. This task took on a particular urgency because of the accusation leveled at Michael and other “revisionists” that their critique of state action had provided some legitimacy for conservative attacks on public education and the welfare state (e.g., Ravitch Reference Ravitch1978).Footnote ¹ The Undeserving Poor and The Price of Citizenship are remembered as much for Michael's unapologetic defense of our moral obligation to one another as for his reading of the contemporary literature.

So, in a way, Michael circled back to his work on education. In Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (Katz Reference Katz1971), Michael argues that there were a series of concrete alternatives to the emergence of bureaucratic public education systems, and the idea that we always have alternatives and that we always must choose runs through much of that writing.

In Poverty and Policy, Michael argues that the 1980s were a great deal like the 1870s. He writes (Katz Reference Katz1983: 1):

By the end of Michael's life, many of the ideas that had dominated public policy and to which he mounted a forceful critique were in retreat. Liberals and progressives no longer trim their sails against the headwind of market fundamentalism. Instead, the Democrats are debating what parts of democratic socialism should be included in the party's creed. I suspect we're entering a period in which ideas about reducing inequality and reanimating public institutions will play a larger role in the national conversation. It's a pity that Michael won't be here to enjoy and contribute to that conversation.