"Dependency arguments often come from elites - either aid agencies or governments - and say something about attitudes to poor people"
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“Dependency” is one of those charges that pretends to be about the poor while really being about the speaker. Harvey’s line pins the rhetoric where it belongs: in the mouths of institutions with power - “aid agencies or governments” - that feel compelled to manage not just resources but narratives about deservingness. The target isn’t simply a policy outcome; it’s the moral imagination of the public.
The intent is to flip the usual framing. Instead of treating dependency as a neutral diagnosis (as if it’s an objective side effect you can measure with a clipboard), Harvey reads it as a social attitude: a suspicion that poor people, given help, will choose inertia. That suspicion is rarely applied upward. Corporate bailouts, tax shelters, agricultural subsidies: those are dependency, too, but they don’t trigger the same sermonizing. “Dependency” becomes a class-coded word - less about economics than about disciplining behavior.
The subtext is also a warning about paternalism in humanitarian and state projects. When elites argue that assistance will “spoil” recipients, they cast poor people as impressionable, morally precarious, and in need of supervision. It’s a worldview that protects elite authority: if poverty is partly the result of bad choices enabled by aid, then structural inequality stays conveniently off the hook.
Contextually, Harvey is speaking from a late-20th-century media landscape where welfare debates and international development were increasingly filtered through efficiency metrics and moral panic. His sentence works because it redirects scrutiny: not “Will aid create dependency?” but “Why are elites so invested in believing it will?”
The intent is to flip the usual framing. Instead of treating dependency as a neutral diagnosis (as if it’s an objective side effect you can measure with a clipboard), Harvey reads it as a social attitude: a suspicion that poor people, given help, will choose inertia. That suspicion is rarely applied upward. Corporate bailouts, tax shelters, agricultural subsidies: those are dependency, too, but they don’t trigger the same sermonizing. “Dependency” becomes a class-coded word - less about economics than about disciplining behavior.
The subtext is also a warning about paternalism in humanitarian and state projects. When elites argue that assistance will “spoil” recipients, they cast poor people as impressionable, morally precarious, and in need of supervision. It’s a worldview that protects elite authority: if poverty is partly the result of bad choices enabled by aid, then structural inequality stays conveniently off the hook.
Contextually, Harvey is speaking from a late-20th-century media landscape where welfare debates and international development were increasingly filtered through efficiency metrics and moral panic. His sentence works because it redirects scrutiny: not “Will aid create dependency?” but “Why are elites so invested in believing it will?”
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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