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Rating: 
Summary: Deeply flawed book.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Deeply flawed book.
Review: Deeply flawed book.
I read this book in a poly-sci class. Its thesis is simple - by trying to help people, problems can be multiplied.
The author has lots of charts and graphs to prove his point. Yet some things did not click - for example in Matusow's "The Unraveling of America", the author posits that the main beneficiary of LBJ's Great Society was the middle class - not the poor - so there appears to be a contradiction that Murray does not address.
One thing to keep in mind is that Murray appears to starts with a conclusion - welfare is bad because... - and constructs his argument from that instead of the other way around, which I find suspicious.
All his charts and graphs are meant to impress the reader but fall flat because he is neither an historian nor economist.
Instead I would read "SOME TENDENCIES OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION" by Stephen T. Ziliak, who happens to be an economist with a mind toward history so you can understand how wrong Murray's thesis is.
I quote the salient part:
"The conservative story says that the U.S. welfare state has "created" a "dependent class" by allowing poor people to stay on the rolls too long. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the recent research shows that the average length of time an immigrant stayed on welfare in the 1980s and 1990s was a little less than the average experienced by able-bodied men and women of the 1820s, 1850s, 1880s, and 1910s."
(Cato Journal (Winter 2002), Page 506).
Rating: 
Summary: Read it
Review: I am happy I read this book for two reasons.1. The wealth of stats, graphs, charts and other data that is made available within context, helping me interpret the data to arrive at conclusions that are closer to "the truth." 2. The almost insurmountable evidence showing that social systems make it a whole lot more difficult for a person to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" than we'd care to admit. The American dream is clearly NOT equally accessible to all American citizens; those "self-evident truths" are yet to be realized for a great segment of the population; and this appears to be by design, which is what really confounds the imagination. In the words of one great leader, "A check was written to all American citizens. A large segment of the population has repeatedly attempted to cash that check, only to be turned away, as though there are insufficient funds. Yet, other segments are able to draw and draw and draw more than they can ever use, while those who were turned away continue to languish." And we have the gaul to suggest that it's "just because 'they' are lazy and don't want to work." God bless America.
Rating:
Summary: Convincing
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Charles Murray's pen is liberalism's nightmare
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Charles Murray's pen is liberalism's nightmare
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Charles Murray hits the nail right on the head
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT BOOK FOR OPEN-MINDED PEOPLE
Review: Those who have a closed mind will hate it because it clearly with use of time line graphs clearly show how inefective most of governemt's programs are. In fact, the only way you can debate the book is just to say "it's nuts" or "don't confuse me with facts" or some other "argument" like that. It's lucid, well-written and I'd even go as far as calling it revolutionary in its approach to analysing statistical data. It shows you, for example, how when you look at what happened AFTER a goverment program was put in place has not changed at all the pace of changes which were already taking place. In other words, the graphs slope hasn't changed. A super exapmple of logical thinking so much needed in today's society.
Rating:
Summary: Much needed debate
Review: 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.
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