Anti-social work

Most social workers remain genuinely devoted to helping their clients operate in the world as it is. But plenty with equally good intentions, especially among the thought and institutional leadership, subordinate concrete practice of empowering individual households and neighborhoods to hazier abstractions of advancing the collective.

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However beautiful the dream, it’s hurting people: shortchanging the downtrodden of real incentives to strive in favor of a technocratic salvation that will never come. But from high places, with human beings but statistics and talking points, instilling helplessness and enabling dysfunction seem small price for the eventual payoff of a centrally managed society.

Even as legit practitioners try their best, it’s an ever more uphill battle—pitted not just against deepening social challenges but also idealistic and/or opportunistic academics, bureaucrats and political appointees for whom worse is often better so long as it leads to more authority and funding. Priorities and supposed best practices (not to mention promotions and raises) are increasingly defined by those with grander ambitions than helping empower their clientele.

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