Losing Ground

Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 by Charles Murray, Basic Books, 1984. 

The War on Poverty

Charles Murray describes how American President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s failed to decrease poverty, and instead had negative, unintended consequences. 

In 1965, there was a loosening of restrictions on giving government aid to poor families. Welfare benefits provided families with about the same or somewhat greater income as working for a living. This created a disincentive to work. Even people of good moral character, not suffering from cultural pathologies, would be tempted to chose welfare over work. Welfare damaged the family by making fathers unnecessary. 

Welfare as a Right

Community activists promoted the idea that welfare is a right, not charity. The political left also abolished the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, promoting the idea that they were morally equivalent, and equally deserving of help. 

Reversing the Decline of Poverty

The poverty rate had been decreasing steadily for decades when the War on Poverty began, but, in the early 1970s, as the funding for the welfare programs became substantial, the poverty rate stopped declining and leveled off.  Illegitimate births increased substantially after 1965. Violent crime in the U.S. was low and steady from 1950 to 1965, but increased substantially afterwards.  

Intellectual Integrity

Murray believes that the problem is not that conservative Americans don’t care about poor people, but rather that liberal Americans are not willing to admit to themselves that their policies do not work. The issue is not compassion, but rather intellectual integrity.