What is it about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984) that has evoked such violent reactions? After initial shock at its publication last September, liberals have countered with a cataract of criticism. Socialist Michael Harrington denigrates Murray’s use of statistics as “shoddy scholarship.” Archbishop Rembert Weakland, chairman of the committee currently drafting the bishops’ pastoral letter on the U.S. economy, dismisses Murray’s social analysis as a “Malthusian” solution to the problem of poverty. Robert Kuttner, a contributing editor of The New Republic and author of a book that reaches conclusions opposed to Murray’s, best captures the growing reaction in other quarters: “It’s one of the few times liberals have successfully ganged up on a conservative… Here is somebody who was set up real big and shot down real big. You don’t get that every day…. Now it’s ‘Hold him so I can hit him again.’ ”
Charles Murray brings out the bully in normally tolerant and liberal magazine editors, as well he might, since his ideas have virtually monopolized Washington domestic policy debates. Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield was moved to complain that even casual arguments for modest governmental welfare efforts this legislative season were likely to result in the advocate being “Charles Murrayed:” “The simple invocation of the book’s existence will be taken as an answer to the question, even as an implied ‘policy choice.’ ”
Probably no book of its kind in years has received so widespread media coverage. But that coverage has been a mixed blessing for Murray. Media attention does not necessarily mean accurate reporting, even for fairly simple issues. Murray’s book is a sophisticated statistical and social analysis of a complex and controversial subject: the negative effects of changing social mores and of federal welfare programs on the poor. As a result, many people who think they know Murray’s argument only know misreadings, oversimplifications, or partisan reactions to it.
The partisan reactions were probably predictable. Conservatives finally feel vindicated, but only rarely feel moved to look carefully at Murray’s analysis and to consider how it might be used to help the poor. Liberals show an equal lacking of curiosity about the details of Losing Ground or its implications. But why have so many people found it necessary to pay attention to Murray’s arguments? After all, Murray has merely buttressed an argument that many other conservatives and liberals have made for years: indulgent attitudes in the 1960s and the disincentives of several federal social programs have harmed the very poor they were supposed to help.
Even Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his Godkin Lectures at Harvard this year thought the first order of business was to dispose of Murray by cutting him down to size:
There are welfare effects. Social Security probably reduces saving somewhat; unemployment insurance probably lengthens periods of unemployment somewhat; AFDC probably leads to more single parent households somewhat. But the main lesson of enquiry is that behavior is hard to explain and harder yet to modify. In this sense, Losing Ground is not at all a break with the past. It merely continues the practice in Washington of making large assertions with no foundations.
Moynihan then goes on to make some large assertions of his own in a creditable attempt to defend the family. Conceding for the moment that this is a fair appraisal of Charles Murray, then how did his work ever rise to notoriety in the first place?
The primary reasons are the sheer quality and urbane sensitivity of Losing Ground. The more frenetic critics seem puzzled. It is bad enough when a former grade-B movie actor or some right-wing ideologue bring criticisms of liberal programs to Washington. But Charles Murray went to Harvard, worked in Thailand for the Peace Corps and in Washington as an evaluator of federal poverty programs. He is also a sophisticated social scientist who seems genuinely concerned about the poor. Many supporters of the welfare state must have shook when they read: “Let me be quite clear: I am not suggesting that we dismantle income supports for the working-aged to balance the budget or punish welfare cheats. I am hypothesizing, with the advantage of powerful collateral evidence, that the lives of large numbers of poor people would be radically changed for the better.” That final note of concerning the poor themselves along with the sophisticated approach have made Losing Ground like a fishbone in the throat for some—they cannot swallow it, but they cannot cough it out either. Murray is not easily dismissed as part of America’s “new spirit of selfishness.”
Furthermore, unlike many critics of the welfare system who run for cover when their data are questioned, Murray really knows the numbers. He has provided plausible answers to all criticisms to date. The next issue of the Political Science Quarterly will carry Murray’s “A Response to the ‘Responses to Losing Ground,” a sober, categorical breakdown and reply to the various objections that have been raised to the book. In spite of the multiple critiques aimed at him, Murray believes that the critics have yet to lay a glove on the substance of the book. “In five or ten years after the brouhaha has died down, Losing Ground will be used as a textbook in statistics courses. We were that careful with the data,” Murray told an interviewer recently.
Does a note of hubris enter here? No one knows for sure if he has gotten all the data right or even gotten all the data he needs. But the reply probably comes close to reflecting what both Murray and his critics sense to be the magnitude of the achievement of Losing Ground.
Perhaps the most striking part of the book is the opening section on the history of American sentiment about programs for the poor. Until the middle 1960s, Murray reminds us, there was a near unbroken consensus in the United States that you should not give federal welfare monies to able-bodied adults. The potential demoralization of those on the margins of the economy had already been keenly debated in 19th-century England. In America the fear of such demoralization remained strong. John Kennedy continued in this tradition, characterizing his anti-poverty efforts with the slogan “a hand not a handout,” a saying which resurfaced briefly at last year’s Democratic National Convention. In 1963, reports Murray, even the editorial pages of the New York Times agreed:
President Kennedy’s welfare message to Congress yesterday stems from a recognition that no lasting solution to the problem can be bought with a welfare check. The initial cost will actually be higher than the mere continuation of handouts. The dividends will come in the restoration of individual dignity and in the long-term reduction of the need for government help.
The following year Lyndon Johnson went even further. As he signed into law some of the initial antipoverty legislation, he made sure to portray it as an end, not a beginning. “The days of the dole in this country are numbered,” opined LBJ.
In hindsight, it is easy to smile at the characteristically American optimism of the Great Society programs. But we are a people who have made great strides by believing that pragmatic steps can solve any problem and Americans had never grappled with an almost intractable problem like poverty before. Understandable optimism soon gave way to pessimism. It is important to keep in mind the professed moral views of the proponents of these early programs; because these early hopes made the failures all the more bitter. The early idealism was soon to be overwhelmed by a large shift in American self-perception.
Both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War tarnished America’s opinion of itself in the 1960s. That America was morally like other nations may have been taken for granted in theory, but in practice these two historical events had profound effects on American social’ morale. Because America was forced to admit it had some serious flaws, suddenly she was regarded as a desperately unjust society. Individuals, especially those at the bottom of the society and the economy, were repeatedly told that they had little responsibility for their plight. Society was to blame, not only for racial discrimination, but also for poverty, poor education, criminal behavior, illegitimacy, and a host of other ills.
Large educational programs were initiated to redress the imbalances in black and other poor schools. But they were more than mere sources of funding, they changed the. very nature of many schools. The result, as anyone who was teaching in the late sixties and early seventies can testify, was a drop-off in academic and behavioral standards. If bad behavior or low initial cultural levels were society’s fault, you could not hold disadvantaged students up to the same standards as others. In situations where poor or black students had to compete with those who were neither, the old standards would perpetuate oppression. Standards had to be lowered, a phenomenon which extended from the earliest grades to Ivy League universities.
By the late seventies many people realized what had happened and the excellence in education movement slowly grew in size and momentum. But the damage had been done. Many students who would have been at the margins of the work force without the changes, left school with even worse skills and less discipline than before. A corresponding drop in job performance was only to be expected.
It is interesting to note that Murray’s answer to this ongoing educational problem is some sort of voucher system. Such a system would enable the parents of poor students who care about education—one of the surest ways out of poverty—to fight back. Murray writes feelingly:
Such parents have been fighting one of the saddest battles of the poor—doing everything they can within the home environment only to see their influence systematically undermined as soon as their children get out the door…. I suggest that when we give such parents vouchers, we will observe substantial convergence of black and white test scores in a single generation. All that such parents have ever needed is an educational system that operates on the same principles they do.
Crime over the same period increased rapidly, arguably, says Murray, because the same kinds of attitudes came into play. Though much of America drew the line at race riots and looting, the view about crime that gained the most ground over the same period was that crime was not the fault of the individual, but of society. Plea bargaining became common, a myriad of programs for offenders, especially young offenders, were set up. Jail became thought of more as a remedial school than a place of punishment or exclusion from society. Crime rates subsequently soared.
Both of these points have often been made. But as Murray rightly adds, the greatest losers in this whole attitudinal shift were not the middle classes. Though middle class students lost some ground due to the decline in educational standards and middle class adults certainly felt some effects of the increase in the crime rate, by far the greatest burden of these changes fell on the poor themselves. Permissiveness in poor schools had devastating effects on the poor children who wanted to learn, but were prevented from doing so by disruptions or lack of academic demands. The victims of crime, especially violent crime, were most frequently the poor, especially poor blacks. The middle classes paid in taxes and in other ways for the new programs and attitudes, but those who paid most dearly by far were those large numbers of poor people struggling to remain responsible and to retain self-respect.
This is the large moral matrix in which Murray comes to the discussion of more strictly economic factors: the effects of welfare programs on employment, poverty, illegitimacy, and families. In what follows, it will be important to keep constantly in mind that Murray is arguing that not only the actual programs, but also the social mores described above, led to the results he analyzes. The shifts in attitudes would have had negative effects without the programs. The financial assistance merely enabled some of the negative effects to emerge more widely.
Losing Ground contends that the plight of the poor began to worsen in the late 1960s as the Great Society programs grew. If we take into account the nature of the economy, changes in industry, and other relevant factors during this time, claims Murray, we must find an explanation for a clear trend:
The most compelling explanation for the marked shift in the fortunes of the poor is that they continued to respond, as they always had, to the world as they found it, but that we—meaning the not-poor and the un-disadvantaged—had changed the rules of their world…. The first effect of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to mask these long-term losses—to subsidize irretrievable mistakes.
Virtually every element in this argument, including the factual determination of whether the condition of the poor actually declined in the late sixties, has been under attack.
Murray extrapolates primarily from data on poor young blacks, a procedure that has caused many to accuse him of making sweeping assertions on the basis of the worst-off group in America. But he has argued in return that whenever comparable non-black groups can be statistically compared with their black counterparts, similar effects are seen. William Wilson, a black sociologist, has examined the evidence and concluded that the low educational achievement of all the poor seems to account for the low job achievement. Effects may thus be much more a matter of class than of race.
In order to get at the heart of Losing Ground, it is useful to focus on the crucial period of Murray’s argument, 1965-1973, the years from the beginning of the Great Society until the oil crunch. During those years the U.S. economy had been generally dynamic. In spite of the baby boom, jobs were being created faster than the baby boomers could fill them. Increased expenditures on social programs and economic growth could normally be expected to produce decreases in the poverty rate, especially since several key poverty indicators had shown steady declines since 1950 for both whites and blacks. If there are strong negative side-effects to social programs, they should be observable during these eight years.
Poverty continued to decline overall through 1973, something that Robert Greenstein, writing in The New Republic, offered as a refutation of Murray’s thesis. Others followed suit. A writer in the Washington Post as late as May 1985 used this statistic to conclude flatly of Murray: “The numbers do not bear him out.”
But Murray was as well aware of this data as his critics. His argument in Losing Ground was that by 1970, five years after the inauguration of the poverty programs, the decline in the rate of poverty for working-age adults had ceased. This qualifier is extremely important because it focuses on the group most likely to show the effects of disincentives, assuming there are any to be found. Most other analysts of the data had failed to notice that while expanded Social Security benefits continued to lessen poverty among the elderly, and certain other programs aided those who are not part of the potential workforce, the able-bodied of working age were no longer entering the economy in increasing percentages as they had for several years previously.
These negative effects, were particularly strong among young blacks. During the early 1960s, the ratio of young blacks unemployed to their white counterparts was about 1.9 to 1. By 1973, the ratio had risen to 2.4 to 1. (It is worth repeating here that statistics for poor blacks may plausibly be extrapolated to other non-blacks of the same social class.) Why should this figure have risen so much?
Many critics of Losing Ground attribute the shift to the loss of farm labor jobs owing to mechanization in the South and the loss of urban minimum wage jobs to the new competition from baby-boomers and women in the North. But neither of these explanations seems to account for much. Murray examines the data carefully to show that while the sharpest decline in farm jobs occurred during the 1950s, black teenage participation in the labor force during those years did not lose ground compared to whites. As the decline lessened in the 1960s, blacks suddenly seem to be participating in labor at lower rates. Murray poses a question: “Why should a weakening ’cause’ suddenly produce a new and very strong ‘effect’?”
Similarly, black non-farm jobs do not seem to have been much affected by the women and others who entered the labor market in the 1960s. The low-skill, low-paying jobs that are traditionally the entry point for young blacks were simply not the kinds of jobs that the newer groups generally sought. Murray’s tentative conclusion is that “young blacks changed their posture” toward such jobs. To explain this shift and some other changes in social life among the poor more concretely, it is useful to recur to Murray’s now famous fictional couple, Harold and Phyllis.
Losing Ground proposes as a “thought experiment” that we try to imagine the options of a poor, average, inner-city-educated couple in 1960 and again in 1970 (after the social programs were in full swing). This is one of the most heatedly debated parts of Murray’s argument because it seeks to integrate all the previously mentioned potential causes into one snapshot view of life for those at the margins.
Harold and Phyllis have no marked skills or ambition. They dated in high school and just after graduation Phyllis finds herself pregnant. In 1960, though there are a certain percentage of common law marriages that produce technically “illegitimate” children, the moral consensus in the community is still fairly strong. Furthermore, hard work and self-respect are still largely intact values, even in the poorest communities.
Harold may or may not accept his responsibility toward Phyllis, but either way there are strict financial limits on their choices. In 1960 Phyllis will be eligible for $63 (1980 dollars used for all these calculations) per week in Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) if Harold does not live with her. For his part, Harold cannot benefit from Phyllis and can only find minimum wage work at $111 per week. He may not particularly like the dull hard work and low pay, but for him and for many like him hard work at such a job is the only way to move slowly up the economic ladder out of poverty. If they decide to live together, married or unmarried, they lose the AFDC payment, and only Harold’s salary will be available to them, though Phyllis can also work full or part-time. Clearly in 1960 the incentives for Phyllis not to marry (or live with) Harold and to choose AFDC are not very great.
By 1970 Phyllis faces a far different financial picture. AFDC, Food Stamps and Medicaid benefits now add up to about $134 per week. If she takes advantage of housing subsidies her prospects are even better. Assuming that she receives nothing from Harold or any other source, she is already $23 better off per week than she would have been in 1960 trying to live on Harold’s salary. In the meantime, the Supreme Court has also ruled that the presence of a man in the house of an unmarried women cannot be used as a reason to deny her benefits. Harold may now take a minimum-wage job or part-time employment and enjoy part of the total welfare package as long as he is not legally responsible for the child. The potential contribution of these changes to illegitimacy rates is obvious. Furthermore, community values have now also changed, making illegitimacy and dependency on welfare less of a stigma.
In fact, illegitimacy rates have been rising steadily since the 1970s. For black families in the nation, the rate is currently 55 percent and most analysts believe that it is somewhere near 100 percent in selected inner-city ghettoes. Murray characterizes the changes as follows:
There is no “breakdown of the work ethic” in this account of rational choices among alternatives. There is no shiftless responsibility. It makes no difference whether Harold is white or black. There is no need to invoke the spectres of cultural pathologies or inferior upbringing. The choices may be seen much more simply, much more naturally, as the behavior of people responding to the reality of the world around them and making the decisions—the legal, approved, and even encouraged decisions—that maximize their quality of life.
One of the standard refutations of this explanation is that increased welfare benefits do not seem to affect illegitimacy rates directly. A 1984 Harvard study by David T. Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane found a correlation between the size of AFDC payments and living arrangements, but not between AFDC and rates of illegitimacy. Others have argued that since 1970 the value of AFDC benefits in constant dollars has dropped, yet the numbers of people receiving AFDC have grown slowly while the rates of illegitimate births have exploded. Again, there seems to be no casual relation between the payments and illegitimacy.
Murray himself reported in Losing Ground that the AFDC caseload increase during the 1950s was only 7 percent and from 1960 to 1965 only 24 percent, in the first five Great Society years it increased 125 percent (those crucial years), 29 percent in the first half of the seventies and only 3 percent in the second half.
But all these arguments miss the point. Murray has not argued that there is a direct ratio between benefits and deleterious social effects. Rather, his point is that there is a threshold at which percentage variations in the value of the total AFDC package do not significantly affect the decision to remain unmarried and go on AFDC, especially when doing so is an already established practice in an area.
Harold and Phyllis were located tentatively in Pennsylvania. Critics rightly pointed out that certain benefits in that state were far above those in many states around the nation and that Murray was making the decision to go on AFDC appear more attractive than it actually was in most places. But this too seems to miss the main thrust of Murray’s argument. It cannot be denied that the availability of a substantial chunk of money under the circumstances outlined above will have effects on many at the margins. In 1978, for example, the General Accounting Office found that in New Orleans, a low benefit area, the monthly welfare package with housing benefits was worth $654, in San Francisco, a high area, $867. Clearly, the difference in the figures will make a difference in behavior for some, but such differences will not show an absolute statistical correlation, especially where a strong shift in attitude about welfare dependency has already occurred.
The shift in attitude about welfare dependency is also a highly disputed question The most widely used study on welfare dependency, Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty: The Changing Economic Fortunes of American Workers and Families, done at the University of Michigan, reported that only 2 percent of Americans are “persistently dependent” on welfare. The U.S. Catholic bishops, for example, have used this study to object that
One much-discussed condition that does not appear to be either a cause or a cure of poverty is personal motivation. Some claim that the poor are poor because they do not try hard enough to find a job, do not work hard enough when they have one and generally do not try to get ahead. In fact, one of the most detailed studies ever done on poverty in this country showed that initial attitudes were not an important predictor of later income. Indeed, some of those who worked the longest hours remained poor because of low wages. Until there is real evidence that motivation significantly contributes to poverty, this kind of argument should be abandoned. It is not only unsupported but is insulting to the poor. (Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, para. 193.)
Doubtless, there is some truth to this contention and the poor should not unnecessarily be stigmatized. But the bishops and the study have to account for some other factors before reaching the conclusion they do.
To begin with, the 2 percent persistent dependency found by the study group has been characterized by Murray as a “definitional artifact.” A family is classified as dependent only if it receives more than 50 percent of its income from welfare (even this excludes housing subsidies, Medicaid, child nutrition assistance, and other potential sources of income). All a family must do to fall outside this category is to earn more than the Food Stamp allowance. Persistent dependency means that a family met these specifications for eight of the ten years over which the study was conducted. Clearly, it would not take much for many families to fall outside the definition of persistent dependency while by any reasonable definition being persistently dependent. Murray points out that since 1970 at any given time a million and a half families, or about five million people, are suffering a prolonged period of at least eight years on welfare.
Part of the explanation for this problem seems to lie in the discouragement that welfare benefits give to those who can only stay out of poverty by hard work at the margins. A strawman often set up to be knocked down is that work obviously pays more than welfare and thus incentives are greater for working. Surveys of the poor show that they say they prefer work to welfare. But the subtle effects of the welfare payments may produce odd results nonetheless. Since the changes as documented above discouraged poor youth from persisting or even obtaining low-paying jobs by making temporary periods of unemployment less burdensome, they fed into the simultaneous shifts in educational and criminal policy that produced young adults less disciplined and less prepared to become steady and reliable members of the work force, arguably with the effects on poverty, crime, and family life that have been observed.
Those who do not accept this explanation of disincentives to work, like the bishops, generally’ end up advocating more of the same programs to help the poor. To ameliorate these problems Murray advocates a drastic step:
Scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-aged persons, including AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Worker’s Compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance, and the rest. It would leave the working-aged persons with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded services. It is the Alexandrian solution: cut the knot, for there is no way to untie it.
Few may be willing to go this far with him. However it is important to note that the above paragraph specifically addresses itself to the working aged. Murray immediately adds that Unemployment Insurance properly run could perhaps be brought back. He also admits that his drastic solution has no political viability, even with Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Consequently, his only reason for making the proposal at all is to underscore that eliminating federal welfare would not merely throw the poor to the wolves. It would restore positive incentives on the one hand, and on the other it would stimulate the growth of private relief institutions that have been demoralized by governmental entry into their sphere. It might also help communities virtually obliterated by the breakdown in work and family customs to rejuvenate themselves.
One of the great advantages of taking necessary relief programs out of the hands of the federal agencies and placing them in the hands of local institutions of different kinds is that it permits a flexible response to conditions. Murray may be wrong that the disincentives he identifies apply to certain communities. But he is certainly right that guidelines that must be applicable to the entire nation will never be able to take local variants into account.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Carter Administration and currently a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, recently wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “Public assistance alone, leaving people in the same defeatist environment may reinforce the status quo…. The welfare program—a brilliant New Deal invention now stretched to respond to a range of problems never envisioned for it—often deepens dependence and lowers self-esteem. Although welfare enjoys little support anywhere along the political spectrum, it continues for lack of alternatives.” Professor Norton differs greatly from Charles Murray in her approach to problems, especially those of the black family. It is significant, however, that even she sees the need for drastic changes in our attempt to help the poor. For blacks, she particularly underscores the responsibility that middle class blacks have to blacks in the ghetto—a variation of Murray’s emphasis on local self-help
Many who will not be ready to accept Murray’s prescriptions, like Norton, will nevertheless be ready to admit the urgency of the problem. It will be too bad if the wealth of data and the social analysis that Murray has done falls prey to partisan squabbling as is often the case in Washington. Murray has not tried to close the case once and for all, but rather to open up debate on matters that have long lain unexamined. Furthermore, he is not alone in his analyses. Credible work along similar lines has been done by George Gilder, Ken Auletta, Douglas Glasgow, John Langston Gwaitney, and others. Liberal commentator Nicholas Lemann, while by no means accepting everything Murray has to say, justly summed up the current situation in his remark that Murray’s is “a vision that coheres, as the left’s on this subject doesn’t anymore.”
Given the nature of the case, it is probably impossible to prove in quasi-scientific fashion that Murray is right—or wrong. A human being behaves in odd ways and for motives that are obscure even to himself, let alone to the social scientists. Integrating such psychological quirks with the complex changes that occur in a society over a particularly unstable period like the past twenty years may well require something approaching omniscience. Murray’s partly justified confidence in his numerical analysis notwithstanding, more persuasive accounts of the same two decades may lie just over the horizon.
If nothing else, however, Losing Ground has made a strong plea that we take the negative effects of our good intentions seriously, not merely dismiss such effects as inevitable by-products of large scale solutions. These byproducts are crucial to the moral health and very lives of a significant segment of the American people. After Losing Ground, warnings about the moral costs of social programs can no longer be ignored as a manifestation of lack of concern for the poor. Charles Murray may or may not be right that we have lost ground since 1965, but he is certainly right that we must think with more care and with greater imagination if we wish to gain ground in the future.