Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980

Charles Murray, in a remarkable examination of American social policy since 1950, arrives at some unconventional conclusions about the potential of social transfer programs to reduce poverty. The conclusions of Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 are unconventional from the perspective of the vast array of academic scholars and social science researchers who have sought solutions over the past decades for poverty and inequality. Murray’s story is quite simple. The post-1960s era saw an explosion of federal social transfer programs. Expenditures on welfare, crime, housing, and education reached unimaginable heights by the 1970s. Although aimed at the poor, the programs and expenditures resulted in unconscionable costs for the very people they were intended to help. The upshot of the social transfer ideology was that the deserving poor were hurt at the expense ostensibly of helping the un-deserving poor.