Two years ago, the writer and broadcaster Gavin Esler produced a quietly informative book, Lessons From the Top, chronicling how some of the biggest names in politics and showbiz built their careers on the crafting of stories. Bill Clinton’s story was that he was “the boy from Hope”, and thus a small-town boy from Arkansas. In fact, he spent almost as much time “in the flashier surroundings of the spa and gambling town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and had studied at some of the best universities in the world”. George W Bush spun a tale depicting himself as an average boy who grew up in an average family, when, as we know, he had all the privileges available to a son whose father was a Republican grandee and would-be president. Neither yarn was completely wrong but neither was quite true.

We cannot know if Iain Duncan Smith has read Esler’s book, but he seems as adept as anyone mentioned there at constructing a questionable narrative to advance political objectives. His story about a society beset by jobless layabouts who opt for unemployment as a lifestyle choice doesn’t just seek to describe a problem, it lays the moral foundations for a whole raft of policies demonising the most vulnerable sections of already deprived communities. So much rests on the veracity of the tale constructed. But according to new research the government’s narrative exactly fits the profile of the stories spun by the likes of Clinton and Bush; helpful to the teller, but not quite true.

The academics went in search of this Benefits Street-style culture of joblessness, in which generations of families were said to have never worked. But after eight months of interviews in Teeside and Glasgow, areas chosen because they have high rates of unemployment, they failed to unearth any of the “benefit ghettos”, where joblessness was a lifestyle choice. “We could find families where there was lots of unemployment, and several members affected by it,” said Robert MacDonald, professor of sociology at Teesside University. “But equally, they’d talk about other family members or friends in jobs.” They found people in and out of low-paid jobs. During an extensive study of 10 families from each area – 47 people in total - they found evidence of problems with drink or drugs. But they did not find generations where no one had worked. And they did not find any prevailing aversion or reluctance to work.

They found parents who wished much better for their children than a life on benefits and children determined not to fall into that trap. This was just a snapshot. It is undeniable that many people are not making the contribution to wider society that we would like. But the new research does suggest that the reasons for long-term endemic joblessness are much more complicated than the story crafted by government and eagerly gobbled up by irresponsible programme makers and scrounger-seeking tabloids.

Duncan Smith’s brutalist approach enjoys the benefit of simplicity. The problem is not circumstance, it is fecklessness, open and endemic. Tough love in the form of his welfare to work programme will make the work-shy snap out of their indolence and transport them into the workplace. But it is also a strategy that takes account of the landscape as shaped by the coalition since its election in 2010. Attention to the multiple causes of long-term joblessness would require well-funded, well-staffed social services, a focus on problems such as alcohol abuse in deprived communities and resources to fight the ravages of drug addiction in poor areas. But these are the very services that feel the full effect of the government’s cuts in local-authority funding and its wider objective to shrink the state.

This is waste of potential on a grand scale, ruining lives, and damaging to the economy. But in the absence of any strategy to deal with the problem at its most complex, we are offered a narrative to define it at its most superficial. Four years in, subjected to scrutiny, that approach may at last be starting to unravel.