Losing Ground

Interesting facts a little boring to read

This is two books in one. First, it is perhaps the best book ever written on why the War on Poverty in America failed. Second, it is a tedious libertarian screed on policy. The defects in the second book blind too many people to the excellence of the first book. The first part of the book is an absolute classic. Murray examines a mystery. Wh is it that, at exactly the same time that America first devoted huge government resources to fighting poverty, the poverty rate -- which had been falling quickly -- stopped falling, crime went up and society, in some many ways, started to fall apart? Everyone has heard part of Murray's argument, that the expansion of welfare encouraged dependence. There are other parts of the argument that are less well known. He argues that social controls, in general, were systematically dismantled during this period, with disasterous results for the poor. His analysis is dead on, and none of it has been damaged in the years since. The second part of the book is a tedious snore. Murray gives a moral argument that the government ought not to be fighting poverty. He assumes that the only way to fight poverty is to hand out government money, which he argues is seldom a good idea. His own analysis of the problem, however, is light years ahead of his policy ideas. He showed how poverty is largely caused by govenment attacks on social order. It does not occur to him that restoring order might reverse the problem.

It is not often that you read a perfectly convincing argument, but this book did it for me. The charts alone tell the whole story: increased spending on welfare while poverty is decreasing, coupled with higher crime, illegitimacy, unemployment, low birth weight all beginning within the years 1964-68. I've never cried at a movie, but if any book deserved a few tears, this would be it. Apart from the increase in birth rates, which Murray tries but fails to explain as a function of rational choices (can it ever?), every other statistic is shown by Murray to be the indirect result of well-intentioned and perfectly disastrous policies. Beginning with the indifference to poverty in 1954, to the modest programs under Kennedy, to the whole-hearted expansion under Johnson, to the institution of a permanent minimum income under Nixon, the war on poverty was lost within three years without anyone bothering to call off the troops. Murray makes the point that any slight "variance" in the statistics, even if only a tenth of a percent, is considered significant, but illegitimacy among poor blacks, for instance, drops from 80% to 40% in a matter of a few years. How human behavior, perfectly stable for decades, can change in a matter of a few years is, in fact, shocking, and Murray engages in a little detective work that is entirely convincing. The reason is in fact no mystery: if you pay people to stay unmarried, live apart, and not work, they will do precisely that. If, on top of that, you stop jailing criminals and seal their juvenile records, crime will also go up. That the Watts riots occured just two weeks after the 1964 civil rights legislation, and the new welfare poliicies were instituted the same year, is no accident either. Murray is perhaps so hard for liberals to swallow because he fingers precisely their liberal guilt and its attendant policies for the subsequent underclass epidemic. When the lawyers and social workers start justifying handouts and remove the stigma from welfare, the poor are made to feel that only chumps work for a living, and that feeling can only be exacerbated by what they see of white wealth on tv. (No one is more attuned in America to the magical power of brand names than the poor). Which brings up my only criticism of Murray: just because rational choices can explain the entirety of a behavior does not mean they are the sole cause. As Magnet argues in "The Dream and the Nightmare," part of the reason for the wholesale breakdown of the poor black family has to be pinned on the "counterculture" and its disparagement of work, thrift, etc., but as for what he does try to show, Murray gets everything but a confession.

This is an important book that explains an incredibletransformation in American social policy. Sometime around themid-1960s, a new code of private values and government policies pushed their way into mainstream society. This vision and its consequences were a radical departure from our nation's past. From 1950 to 1965, an economy founded on free market principles, nurtured on minimal government regulation, and protected from large welfare programs, had slashed the poverty rate from one third of the population to just over one-tenth. Eliminating poverty seemed like a real possibility to Americans as long as the wheels of capitalism continued to spin unhindered. From 1950 to 1965, African-Americans won court battles giving them the human rights guaranteed to every citizen. These belated changes were cemented by the hallmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and accompanied by a remarkable surge in African-American incomes. This fifteen-year period was an era of immense progress. Not only were the classes and races coming together but crime was remarkably low, families exceptionally resilient, and drug use almost non-existent. Then around 1965 something happened. All of a sudden the capitalist economy that made Old World immigrants into middle-class, suburban home-owners was described as a guilty, imperialist system that exploited the poor and the weak. Government planners in Washington got right to solving this "problem." From now on, people could expect a guaranteed income for an unlimited period of time, without regard to personal behavior or the ability to work. To show what a compassionate society we are, we would destroy the work ethic that was the bedrock of Western civilization. But that wasn't the best part. After 1965, the principle of equal opportunity for all races that Martin Luther King martyred himself for was also described as a "guilty" system that kept blacks and women oppressed. Suddenly, it wasn't only white supremacists who claimed that blacks couldn't thrive in American society. It was the very black leaders themselves. They claimed that affirmative action programs were needed to keep African-Americans functional. Too bad if it destroyed the American ideal of merit and equal opportunity. Tough luck if it strained relations between whites and blacks. Those claiming that racial preferences were unjust could be dismissed as closet racists. Only a decade later, the consequences of this change in values and government policy were beyond dispute. Destroying merit and the work ethic did not create a "Great Society." Rather, it helped create a large underclass imprisoned by poverty. Crime rates tripled, illegitimate births exploded, and drug use surged. The trends have leveled off since the late 1970s but the consequences of this values shift remain with us today. Opponents of racial quotas are still lampooned as closet racists. Reformers of the welfare state are dismissed as "uncompassionate." What is really racist and uncom

Mr. Murray's analysis of government social programs in the past half century was an eye-opener for a born-and-raised liberal Democrat like myself. It is difficult to disagree with his overall conclusion that these programs have generally been failures, and in many cases did more harm than good. This is not easy to swallow if you were raised with the firmly entrenched (and deeply righteous) belief that people who "really care" always support well-intentioned government programs that aim to solve social problems. It has always been an assumption in my thinking that those who opposed virtually any new government agency or social program lacked compassion, or worse. But, as Mr. Murray points out, these programs, including welfare, housing projects, medicaid, and other twentieth century experiments, must be judged as objectively as possible based on results. And the results are not impressive.

While the President and the Congress debate the levels of funding for the welfare state in the coming century, Charles Murray makes a very convincing arguement for why it should be done away with altogether. Replete with statistical analysis (including the raw data from federal government sources), Murray argues that should an outside observer review the statistics on the economic progress of blacks and the poor from about 1963 onward, without any social context, they would have to conclude that a systematic effort was afoot to ensnare a large group of people in perpetual poverty. Murray explains the dynamics behind the failure of welfare policy and argues a more generic case as to why nearly all government efforts to induce behavioral change in the population are doomed to failure. Murray's account is well supported, crystal clear, and highly thought-provoking. Recommended for all who wish to be involved in welfare policy or its debate for the coming century.