Losing Ground opened with an interesting puzzle - why was poverty still a problem in 1980, and just as bad a problem as it had been in 1970? After all, the United States had set out to eradicate poverty in 1964 and had spent billions of dollars on anti-poverty programs in the ensuing 16 years. So what went wrong? In the 1960s, argued Murray, the federal government expanded cash and in- kind benefits for the poor. In so doing, it lowered the economic sanction for behaviors leading to poverty - unemployment, illegitimate childbirth, divorce, and dropping out of school - and reduced the relative rewards of marriage, hard work, and traditional family structures. In other words, government began subsidizing failure while doing nothing to reinforce success. Naturally, Murray argued, this produced more failure. Progress against poverty stopped after 1970 because anti-poverty programs made unemployment, idleness, and single- motherhood viable alternatives to education, employment, and marriage. In the decade since the publication of Losing Ground, Murray and his book have been the objects of intense scrutiny from an academic and media establishment unsympathetic to his arguments. And how has the book held up? Ironically, even though many of Murray's claims have fallen flat under closer investigation, the book still stands as a powerful indictment of 1960s liberalism.
In general, Murray's causal arguments have not held up well. Extensive scholarly research has shown that no more than about 15 percent of the rise in female-headed families in the past generation is attributable to welfare expansion. Related studies have shown anti-poverty programs not to have the dependency-inducing quality Murray ascribes to them. About 70 percent of individual episodes of welfare receipt end within three years; that is, 70 percent of those who go on welfare today will be off the doles within three years. Other analysts have pointed to clear successes that seem inconsistent with Murray's arguments about the counterproductivity of welfare policy; between 1964, when the anti-poverty effort came on line, and 1970, by which point it had enjoyed substantial growth, poverty fell from 19 percent to 12.6 percent. Still others have indicted Losing Ground for neglecting other demonstrably-important causes of the persisting poverty problem - a secular rise in unemployment after the late 1960s, frequent recessions between 1970 and 1980, and income and wage stagnation since 1973, especially for the less-educated.
Though no one yet has driven a stake through the heart of Losing Ground, it has suffered a sort of death of 1,000 cuts, many of them administered by competent, reasonable, qualified analysts. When Murray has responded to these critics, he has done so responsibly, not through ad hominem attacks but by questioning the data his detractors bring to bear on key questions. Ultimately, though, he has conceded an important point: Losing Ground does not prove anything. In a response to one of his critics in New Republic, he writes this: "What can fairly be said is that my theory of the causes É of the trends in employment and single- parent families has not yet been subjected to a test anywhere, including Losing Ground" (emphasis added). On this point he is right; testing a theory as sweeping as his would be no easy matter. Hundreds of scholars have tested bits and pieces of it, however, and it has not fared well.
Nonetheless, there is still a great deal about which Murray is right. For one, he is right about the mockery our social policy makes of those who make the right choices, those who deserve our support and admiration. The divorced mother, for example, who works full-time at a menial job and takes no help from the state usually has less money with which to support her children than the mother on welfare. Furthermore, she probably has no health care, while the AFDC mother and her children receive Medicaid. It is no surprise, then, that many welfare mothers who could work stay on welfare (a point about which there is no dispute). Murray says that all of this is a travesty, and he is right.
He is also right about the poor results of many Great Society and War on Poverty programs. Though "job training" has become a mantra for those who want government to help the poor help themselves, job training has proven to have very modest effects on employment and earnings. On balance those gains are not large enough to deliver program participants from poverty to economic independence. Murray naturally questions the rationale for such programs, and he is right to do so.
Finally, Murray is right about the most important point: the War on Poverty and Great Society anti-poverty initiatives failed on their own terms. It would be a simple matter to eradicate poverty tomorrow by distributing enough cash to enough people. But that is not what we set out to do in 1964. That year Lyndon Johnson said this: "Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty but to cure it - and above all, to prevent it." On that score our failure has been obvious. A staggering one quarter of the population would be poor today were it not for governmental assistance. Strangely, defenders of the welfare system cite this fact with pride. Anti-poverty programs, they argue, have made life much better for this group. While that may be true, that was not the target we set out to hit 30 years ago. The point of anti-poverty programs was to provide a hand, not a handout, and the ultimate measure of their success was to be their gradual disappearance in a society in which all but the very old, the very young, and the disabled could care for themselves.
That, unfortunately, is not what has happened. Thirty years and billions of dollars after the country declared "unconditional" war on poverty, poverty stands at roughly the same rate as it did in 1966. That fact alone says a tremendous amount about the limits of the welfare state. That we understand those limits as well as we do is in no small part due to Charles Murray and Losing Ground.