Forget income inequality. A real challenge for American public policy reformers involves economic mobility. That’s the argument from Yuval Levin in the latest cover story for Commentary magazine. Among his recommendations for improving mobility is a new approach to “the curse of entrenched poverty.”

This would involve the next stage of welfare reform, and it’s the arena where a conservative approach to problem solving can do the most good.

The overwhelming fact about our half century of intense and costly efforts to combat entrenched poverty is that they have not worked. Very little we have done has proven consistently effective in helping people in the worst circumstances to rise up and succeed, and a fair amount of what we have done has made things worse. That means we do not have an answer that can be put into effect using the resources and power of the government. Rather, those resources and that power can enable experimentation with different approaches by different public and private providers of services and aid throughout the country.

This was the essence of Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty proposal last year. Ryan would let states choose to replace the full amount of money they now receive to administer means-tested federal welfare programs (such as food stamps, housing assistance, utilities subsidies, and others) with a single, consolidated “opportunity grant.” They could then develop their own approaches to spending the money to help their poor residents rise, provided that these approaches involve programs that require work, emphasize reaching self-sufficiency, and prove their effectiveness over time. And states would have to provide each service through at least two competing providers, only one of which can be a state agency.

Liberals tend to see proposals like this as embodiments of some kind of fetish to privatize. But in fact, they are expressions of humility. Experimentation is what you do when you do not know the answer. The challenge facing welfare reformers is daunting: They have to find ways to help people who lack not only money but often also stable families, functional communities, and decent schools. They have to encourage work and responsibility while offering aid, and they often have to help people break bad habits or confront addiction or abuse while also respecting their dignity and independence. This can’t be done by a government check. Welfare often works best when it is accompanied by advice, by obligations, and by evident compassion at a personal level. Using public resources to let different institutions—from state social agencies to local civic groups to churches and nonprofits—try different ways of meeting this daunting challenge in different circumstances is not market idolatry; it is what you do when you haven’t found the right solution and when it isn’t clear that any one solution will suffice.

A conservative mobility agenda will therefore need to transform the federal welfare apparatus into a means for enabling robust experimentation with different local approaches to helping the poor rise. The same spirit should also inform an education policy geared to the nation’s poorest children—they and their families should have options to choose from and the resources to make their choices matter, since education is a crucial tool for rising from the bottom.