A Sociologist’s View of Income Maintenance Experiments

Given how much money was spent on the negative income tax experiments, what can be learned about social, as opposed to economic, behavior seems remarkably skimpy. Nevertheless, something interesting can be learned from a consideration of why the experiments tell us so little about the people who were their subjects. I may have a vested interest in making this assertion, since when the experiments were being planned I argued that such would be the result. That is, we would not be able to understand in human terms what had happened because of the narrow way in which the data collection was to be done -and now I can say, "I told you so." One might bring to bear a sociological view on the negative income tax experiments in one of two ways. The first is to ask what can be learned from the experiments that is useful in the development of substantive or theoretical sociological knowledge. The other is to ask what sociology has to contribute to policy lessons. Most of my comments are concerned with the latter, but from time to time I will take account of the reverse flow from "applied" to "basic" knowledge and puzzle over why it is so frustrating to try to learn something about social behavior from these experiments. My remarks will offer ample evidence of a distinction often drawn between economics and sociology. Economists are interested in the choices people make; sociologists are interested in the fact that people have no choice. Our model is that constraints by institutions, culture, interaction dynamics and personality determine and overdetermine behavior in ways that often leave little room for rational choice. One of the important lessons for sociology as a field from the experiments has