What Are David Ellwood's Three Conundrums

In his piece on poor support, David Ellwood argues that clashes/tensions between American values yield three helping conundrums. We want to know, which of these conundrums is most salient today and how might policymakers work to reduce the inherent value tensions? Ellwood mentions three helping conundrums. The first one is the Security-Work Conundrum. He argues that welfare can increase the security of the poor and can also reduce their motivation and likelihood to work. On the other hand, if a person goes to work and increase the earning, welfare benefit will be reduced and make the person insecure. The second conundrum is the Assistance-Family Structure Conundrum. Welfare may change the family structure. Ellwood notices that our current system gives virtually nothing to poor single individual. It provides only slightly more to two-parent families. Yet it offers much more to single parent family. People may change their family structure in order to favor the mechanism of the system, which could be harmful. The third conundrum is the Targeting-Isolation Conundrum. Ellwood argues that the goal of the policy is to target the more people in need but people being targeted may feel isolated from the politics and economic mainstream. I think all of them are pretty salient but …show more content…
In order to solve the problem, the most important things to do is to decrease the insecurity of the welfare recipients. When the welfare programs are providing benefits to their recipients, the time constraint should still be imposed on them. This can stress them to find the job. Meanwhile, policymakers can address the issue by providing more useful skill training to the welfare recipients. The better training system can help those poor people land in a more secure and higher pay jobs. Some public private partnership can help with the training process and enhancing the cooperation can help address the problem through private