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Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition

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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.

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 uncompassionate is defending the government policies that created this wretched condition. We made this happen. And we can unmake it. The power, as always, is ours.

Losing ground uses the coincidence of the post segregation poverty of African Americans to demonstrate the devastating effects social welfare programs have on the futures of poor youth (off all races). It is an empirical buttress to Milton Friedman's paraphrased quote, "If you pay people to be poor you will get more poor people". Losing ground provides statistical proof of this truism.

Reading Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion prodded me to read a book I've seen cited for ten years, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, by Charles Murray (New York: HarperCollins, c. 1984). The author is a social scientist who assembles data designed to show the massive federal assault on poverty and racial discrimination has miserably misfired. For example, in 1968 some 13 percent of the nation was poor; 12 years later, after funding multiplied poverty programs, spending 20 times as much in constant dollars, 13 percent was still poor.
Before the great "war on poverty," during the 1950's, however, conditions had steadily improved in various sectors. The surprising reversal of this trend line, Murray believes, illustrates an eminently understandable change in attitude among the poor themselves. Welfare suddenly makes it profitable, for a while at least, to stay poor! When government programs reduced incentives to escape poverty, many folks understandably opted to enjoy the proffered benefits. "We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. "We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap" (p. 9).
Those programs came like a flood in the 1960's, orchestrated by Lyndon Baines Johnson. New Deal programs, such as Social Security, were not massive endeavors. A constellation of factors converged to launch the "Great Society." In Murray's judgment, "In only three years, from 1964 to the end of 1967--what I shall refer to as the 'reform period'--social policy went from the dream of ending the dole to the institution of permanent income transfers that embraced not only the recipients of the dole but large new segments of the American population. It went from the ideal of a color-blind society to the reinstallation of legalized discrimination. They were polar changes that were barely recognized as such while they were happening" (pp. 24-25). As a result of this upheaval, a decade later "Hardly anyone argued that it was fundamentally wrong to take tax dollars from one worker whose paycheck, the government had decided, was too large, and give them to another worker whose paycheck, the government had decided, was too small. Ten years earlier, hardly anyone would have argued that it was right" (p. 46).
Murray scans employment statistics, showing that during the 1950's the government did nothing to subsidize job training. During the 1970's, it expended $76 billion, enrolling 32 million persons, specifically designed to help disadvantaged young people. Amazingly, the 1970's were worse than the 1950's for the unemployed!
Similar trends characterize other social realms such as education, crime, family stability. The more government spends the worse things seem to get! The grand designs of the Great Society, elim¬inating racism and poverty, have not been achieved. It's time, Murray insisted (10 years ago), to re-think what we're doing. "Why pay for welfare? Why pay for Food Stamps? Why pay for scholarships for poor students? Most answers are not so much reasons as affirmations of faith" (p. 196).
Why should we design income transfers, "robbing Peter to pay Paul," since Peter is only modestly better off than Paul? Murray says "social policy after the mid-1960's demanded an extraordinary range of transfers from the most capable poor to the least capable, from the most law-abiding to the least law-abiding, and from the most responsible to the least responsible" (p. 201).
Murray's work, I think, statistical supports Olasky's more recent analysis. What Murray lacks is the call to Christian compassion. Murray's essentially libertarian approach effectively questions the premises and promises of the welfare state. What it lacks is a moral appeal to men and women of good will who want to help the poor.

Many of the haters call this book "poorly researched" and "pseudo-scholarship" and a "hateful rant". Murray, of course, is actually one of the most measured and reasonable people one will encounter in public life, and his book is loaded with an appendix full of tables, charts, notes, and figures, taken from legitimate sources like the Census Bureau, the famous Negative Income Tax experiments, and the Coleman Report. The people who are claiming that his scholarship is flawed and the data is fixed are simply lying. Either that, or they feel the only source of "real" data to be Mother Jones magazine or perhaps even the People's Weekly World.

An astute observer will note that the reviews are concentrated at the extremes, perhaps in what Murray would call, a "U" curve. This is often the case when partisanship fuels the debate. It becomes a battle of numbers between supporters and haters. The good thing is that I don't have to take such things into consideration when reviewing this book. It is an excellent, well-argued, lucidly written, exhaustively and meticulously researched account of the American Welfare project and the "War On Poverty". Murray is measured and reasonable; however, he is no moderate. Take that for what it's worth. While his is fair-minded and not dogmatic, his opinions are not in the general stream of contemporary American politics. Of course, if you want mainstream opinion, listen to whatever talk-radio host you agree with 99% of the time. If you think "mainstream opinion" is a lot of inane, predigested codswallop and would prefer a factual and thorough account of things that cuts through the gibberish and the BS, read Charles Murray.

Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" is not only an authoritative account of the American welfare system from 1950-80 but also a major work of social science, which explains why welfare systems in general cannot work as planned. The first section is a history of the period in the 1960's in which the welfare state came into being. The elites wanted to help the poor and the programs they set up were well intended and well funded. These included AFDC, Food Stamps, subsidized housing, jobs programs, and unemployment insurance. The result of these policies are discussed in the second section, which includes data on poverty rates, crime, education, income, employment, and marriage rates. The trend for nearly all of these indices are the same: A steady rate from 1950-65, and then an explosion in these indices beginning in the mid-60's and continuing to rise before finally leveling off around 1980. Part Three, "Interpreting the Data," explains why all this occurred. Put simply, the various welfare programs made all the problems they were trying to fix worse. Welfare discourages people from working, by making unemployment acceptable financially and socially. Furthermore, AFDC paid more money to unwed mothers, encouraging more children to be born out of wedlock. At the same time, crime increased and education worsened, compounding the problems. The fourth and final section "Rethinking Social Policy," makes this book not only relevant to the current era, but to any era. Murray creates general rules about social programs than go across time and space. The most important of these is what Murray calls "The Law of Unintended Rewards," in which the undesired behavior is made more desirable by giving social transfers that reward that behavior. By giving money to the unemployed, we make unemployment attractive, more so than working, since you are paid to do nothing. By giving money to unwed mothers, you reward being unmarried. Welfare is thus a trap that society unwittingly creates for the very people it is trying to help. Furthermore, Murray states that the more engrained the behavior is, the more likely is it that trying to change it will do harm. To change it programs can only apply carrots and not sticks. This will make that behavior hard to change, and will in the end encourage people who are not in that condition to do so in order to gain the carrots. By creating massive jobs programs for the unemployed loaded with rewards to stay in the program, you will encourage others to quit their jobs. Finally, Murray puts his theory to practice, and deals with policy. His suggestion for improving the life of the poor, decreasing crime, increasing employment, and a host of other problems is the same: To eliminate all the welfare programs which he says hold back and trap poor people. By doing this we will force them to work, marry, and learn. Government cannot create any program to help the poor through social transfers. Indeed doing so only hurts them. Many will, and have, find this answer unsettling. But social policy should be based on scientific data and findings, not emotion. When our emotions are separated and the scientific facts remain, there is no doubting the fact that the best way to help the poor is to make them stand on their own. There is, however, one critique of Murray that I have found valid. By focusing on eliminating welfare, we can expect the poor to achieve the levels they were at before the mid-1960's. This would certainly be a great improvement over the current situation, but the situation prior to the welfare reforms was not particularly good, or else no reforms would have been needed. Murray thus does not answer how to make the lives of the poor better than before welfare. Indeed, he suggests there is no way to do so. Perhaps he is right, but at least he could address this issue and tell is if the poor will always be numerous or if we can do anything to help them. By focusing on welfare, Murray has done a great service in explaining that systems failure, but he doesnt really have anything to offer in its place.

This is an important book that explains an incredible transformation in American social policy. Sometime around the mid-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 uncompassionate is defending the government policies that created this wretched condition. We made this happen. And we can unmake it. The power, as always, is ours.

I found his work to correlate completely with our longitudinal studies regarding social classification at UCLA. Mr.Murray was educated at Harvard and earned a PhD at MIT, yet there are many people that consider his work to be ungrounded and of a racist nature. I would ignore the naysayers here as they are obviously agenda driven. The big boys are taking their factories and wealth and heading to Asia and India to play capitalism; this means we have to find a new game to run the USA and I am sure that freeloading will not be part of it. LBJ is long dead thank god.