When it comes to Washington, well-meaning politicians routinely attempt to address serious problems via programs that are massively expensive. When their theories result in unintended consequences--and there are always unintended consequences--these same politicians have no interest in acknowledging their failures. Instead, they'll go to the wall to abuse their accusers. In the courtroom of public opinion facts are irrelevant.
I first became aware of the failings of President Johnson's Great Society programs in 1984 through a two issue in-depth analysis of the problems in a four square mile section of South Chicago. The big surprise was not the details unearthed in the article(s). Rather, it was the vocal outcry by black and liberal leaders against the plain facts. Statistics have shown that kids in single parent households become juvenile delinquents at a higher rate than kids in homes with two parents. To many black leaders (cited in the article), expecting a father to stay home and help raise his children was an imposition of "white values." If I remember correctly, 70% of the children in South Chicago were being raised in one-parent homes.
This is not to say that one-parent homes guarantee delinquency. It does, however, point to a problem, one of the unintended consequences of American welfare policies.
The book is Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984). It's a data-driven critique of U.S. social welfare policy, particularly the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
Murray's core thesis was that the expansion of welfare and related policies in the mid-1960s and afterward changed the incentives facing the poor in ways that increased dependency, family breakdown, crime, and related social problems—rather than reducing poverty. He contended that policymakers altered “the rules of the game” for the disadvantaged, making short-term behaviors (such as single motherhood, non-work, or crime) less costly while masking their long-term harms. In his words, efforts to provide more for the poor (in this manner) produced more poor people and built a trap instead of an escape.
Murray contrasted pre-1960s trends (when poverty declined steadily amid limited federal welfare) with post-1960s outcomes, when large increases in spending coincided with stalled or reversed progress on key indicators, especially among the black underclass and young people. [EdNote: Thomas Sowell has frequently pointed out that blacks were improving economically every decade of the 20th century until LBJ's Great Society interference.]
Key Evidence and Arguments
Poverty and spending: Official poverty rates fell sharply before the War on Poverty but stalled or worsened in some measures afterward, despite a major expansion of transfer programs (AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, etc.).
Labor force and unemployment: Participation rates and employment among young black men deteriorated relative to earlier decades and relative to whites, even as job-training and other programs expanded.
Family structure: Rising rates of out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households are linked to welfare rules that often made marriage or work financially less attractive for low-income women than remaining single and relying on benefits.
Crime and other indicators: Increases in crime, dropout from the labor force, and related problems are presented as responses to softened consequences (more lenient justice policies, reduced stigma, and subsidized alternatives to work and family).
Incentive analysis: Using data on benefit levels relative to wages, Murray showed how, in many cases, a single mother could receive more in combined benefits than by taking a low-wage job, reducing the payoff to work and marriage. [EdNote: The same thinking occurred during Covid where workers made more more for not working than working. I spoke with one woman who went back to work because she was bored to death after four months of not working.]
Murray emphasized that the poor respond rationally to the incentives they face. The policy shift, he argued, was rooted in a changed elite consensus that viewed poverty primarily as the fault of “the system” (racism, lack of opportunity) rather than individual behavior or choices, leading to programs that subsidized destructive short-term decisions.
Proposals
Murray advocated rolling back the federal welfare and income-support system for working-age adults (with limited exceptions for the truly needy), returning more responsibility to states and localities, promoting education choice (such as vouchers), and restoring emphasis on personal responsibility, work, and family. He also supported core civil rights protections from the 1964 Act but opposed later race-preferential policies.
Context and Reception
The book was influential among conservatives and helped shape debates that later contributed to 1990s welfare reform. But the critics and liberal analysts generally disputed Murray’s causal claims, data interpretations, and the extent to which welfare rules alone explain the trends, arguing that economic shifts, discrimination, and other factors were more important.
Murray’s later works--The Bell Curve and Coming Apart--developed related themes around cognitive ability, culture, and class divergence. The reaction from the Left against these books was even more shrill.
In essence, Losing Ground maintained that well-intentioned anti-poverty policies of the 1960s–1970s inadvertently worsened outcomes for the people they were meant to help by distorting incentives. The lesson for us today: Government leaders--Left and Right--often have good intentions but we need to hold them accountable for the outcomes they produce.
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