The Murray Imbroglio

...in the late 1960s-they will exert a decisive impact on the most vulnerable populations, such as the teenaged poor...

...Conservative Joseph Piccone presented the case for such allowances in a monograph available from the Free Congress Foundation...

...Many of these people are virtually illiterate...

...In this effort, everyone in government should begin by reading Murray's superb book...

...in the developed world, 37 percent ahead of the second place Arab Israelis...

...In states where benefits are low, particularly in the South, the increasing availability and renown of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies and the increasing outreach efforts of the welfare state-as well as the attractiveness of the benefit package relative to the lower pay in available Southern jobs-overwhelmed the lesser AFDC payments themselves as an incentive...

...Murray would cast them all out into the market place to fend for themselves, begging for assistance from private foundations and charities or angling for MacArthur fellowships...

...A further American perplexity is why so many church leaders have abandoned their role giving moral and spiritual guidance to the poor and instead have become shills for the demoralizing materialism of the welfare state...

...With the almost total dissolution of family responsibilities among the new generation of the black poor, one might expect some of the architects and advocates of the Great Society to rethink their positions...

...Why, if a welfare state must create an underclass, doesn't every industrial nation have the same sad story that Murray tells about ours...

...a cost-benefit calculus...

...But such a system, which exists in most other industrial nations, from Canada to Japan, would go far toward reversing the mistakes of the 1960s...

...Many critics charged Murray with using a concept of homo economicus, the notion that most human behavior is rigidly governed by 2To be reviewed in TAS by Thomas Main...

...economy...

...The easy answer is that conservatives never imagined or claimed that such incentives were always dominant...

...welfare state without mentioning that this white-middle-class haven now boasts not only the world's lowest marriage and birth rates but also the world's highest illegitimacy rate, some 40 percent of all live births according to UN...

...It is a way of distracting attention from a national tragedy in order to comfort and shield its ideological instigators...

...Low birth weight is also associated with the age of the mother...

...Although Murray errs by paying too much attention to the ridiculous charade of "poverty lines," he does show that the payments simultaneously increase "latent poverty" and all the cultural problems associated with dependency...

...can escape such a plight by cutting marginal tax rates, retrenching today's governmental excesses, and reorienting its welfare state toward supporting families with children...

...For only if the illusions of the past are firmly rejected can we move effectively toward sound social and economic policies...

...From this perspective, some of the anomalies that perplex Lemann can be understood...

...If Murray's work is implicitly confirmed by the fecklessness of most of his critics, he also should be proud of prompting liberal Nicholas Lemann to do a critique in the New Republic that can stand as one of the most subtle and sophisticated articles ever to appear in that magazine...

...welfare state is its patronizing focus on the qualified or qualifiable poor...

...It is this interplay of taxes and benefits that mostly explains the rush of mothers into the work force, the outbreaks of illegitimacy and divorce, and the decline in fertility among all women outside the embrace of the welfare state...

...some are lawyers or even socialists...

...He even goes to the extreme of proposing that these victims of society- with educations consisting mostly of a few Marxist phrases, a few static regression formulas, and an unintelligible jargon-go to work for a living...

...In previous eras, Murray would presumably have been hanged for his heresies, or burned at the stake, or at least flogged and pilloried in a public worst effects in the 1970s...

...But Kuttner does understand that the crucial problem of the U.S...

...Like Edward Banfield before him, Murray foundered on the question of just why these ghetto youths lack the long-term visions that sustain middle-class society...

...This surprising achievement by Lemann, a writer addled by liberal cliches on most issues, is probably attributable to his extensive direct research in the ghetto, interviewing widely among welfare families for an excellent series in the Washington Post (which received less attention than Janet Cooke's more imaginative work...

...Europe is now suffering from a final crisis of the welfare state, its skies dark with crisscrossing transfer payments and its economies schlerotic with union rules and government subsidies...

...American black teenagers in 1980, in fact, had the highest fertility rate among thirty-two populations surveyed by the U.N...

...Pangloss to a welfare wasteland where virtually no families are formed or perpetuated...

...Thus he, like Banfield, left himself open to the charge that these black men, indeed all of the underclass, are constitutionally governed by immediate incentives and temptations...

...Similarly, the endless leftist citations of "welfare for rich corporations"-which indeed impose a greater economic burden than AFDC-are irrelevant to the personal impact of welfare on the lives and prospects of poor people...

...Sweden swamps its own program with massive contrary incentives for sexual liberation...

...Numbers, however, are not the key problem...

...His critics can downplay the divorces, separations, and out-of-wedlock births in part because Murray fails to stress the cen-trality of family breakdown in causing all the other pathologies of the ghetto, from the ravages of crime and addiction to the spread of indolence and unemployment among the youth...

...The United States competes with Sweden for the title of the world's most destructive welfare state because both countries, in a fever of unisex fantasies and anti-family subsidies, deny the sex roles and financial provisions on which families depend...

...many are handicapped by crippling mental disorders...

...Danziger blithely concedes that the programs dispensing the existing funds "all had documented negative side effects in terms of reducing incentives to work and keep the family together...

...Malcolm Klein, a psychologist at the Manhattan Institute conclave, even saw benefits in the black plague of family disorders...

...We all know that the worst damage to children comes when fractious families are kept together...

...For without a strong religious culture, a secular bureaucracy, with its rationalizing ethic, erodes the very foundations of family life and thus creates the very moral chaos it ostensibly combats...

...Meanwhile, as Murray stresses, the conditions for granting aid were dramatically loosened...

...broken families, who wander from job to job, woman to woman, without long-term goals or visions until they marry and settle down providing for a family...

...She also points out, irrelevantly, that childbearing among teenagers has declined since a peak in the late 1950s, But it is only childbearing out of wedlock that qualifies the mother instantly for welfare...

...George Gilder THE MURRAY IMBROGLIO Charles Murray's inexcusable good deeds...

...The female-headed units that remain are first of all incapable of lifting anyone from poverty...

...The problem here is that the level of AFDC benefits alone is a relatively unimportant cause of the welfare pathology...

...Very often they are countervailed by cultural or religious influences...

...As Murray writes: When we speak of single teenagers with babies, we are speaking of young women who are experiencing all the problems that go with adolescence in late twentieth-century America...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an eloquent supporter of child allowances before he entered the apparently stultifying precincts of the U.S...

...data...

...It is no panacea...

...The lives of their children are affected as decisively-not just because of the stigma that continues to attach to illegitimacy, but because poor, uneducated, single teenaged mothers are in a bad position to raise children, however much they may love them...

...Just as important, it will be crucial for church officials to read Murray...

...Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, Basic Books, $23.95...

...Kuttner also acclaims the social successes of Sweden's 'To be reviewed next month in TAS by Stephen Chapman...

...On every page it reeks of a callous and unconscionable lack of compassion for the poor and afflicted men and women of America who have devoted their entire lives to the welfare state and derive their self-image and meager status almost entirely from it...

...Farm payments entice Iowans to become farmers and unemployment insurance supports a whole community of aspiring actors in New York-why hasn't broad social decay afflicted those subcultures...

...faces such serious social problems compared to the French, Germans, and Japanese, is the absence of child allowance or other support for child-raising families, while the welfare state offers a bonanza of benefits for all forms of fatherlessness...

...Thus changes in incentives, however ineffectual in any particular case, will generate important effects on the most impressionable margins of society...

...Like Banfield before him, Murray at the Manhattan Institute conference foundered on the question of just why these ghetto youths lack the long-term visions that sustain middle-class society...

...This is the final law of net harm in the welfare state...

...I In the U.S., all the net income tax increases since the Second World War have fallen on families with children...

...Not only does she distort the data, which shows that by any measure poverty rose, but at best she resorts to tautology, claiming that welfare payments reduce poverty defined by income (i.e., chiefly welfare payments...

...Senate...

...The long rising rate of illegitimacy and family disorder in the upper classes is a minuscule problem compared to the plague in the ghetto...

...and the benefits of the welfare state, rising some twentyfold, have gone to broken families, to two-income households, and to individuals without children...

...The lives of such young women are irretrievably changed by the fact of their single motherhood-education, access to a job ladder, and simple freedom to mature without the pressures of raising a child are made extraordinarily more difficult...

...Sheldon Danziger, a leading economist at Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty-a fount of data on which Murray often relies-remains totally unrepentant...

...Kuttner's book itself is full of economic illusions...

...The reader therefore will be delighted to learn of the fiendishly appropriate penalty he is now suffering...

...These and other of Lemann's questions bespeak an understandable anxiety about the implications of some of Murray's analysis...

...Allen goes on to argue that after the surge in the caseload of the late 1960s, the numbers stopped growing, in general merely "bobbing up and down with the business cycle...

...The next step," he writes, "is to question the immutability of the law of incentives, and there is much evidence with which to do so...

...The U.S...

...In the face of a 55-percent illegitimacy rate among American blacks in 1980- and a rate near 100 percent in the welfare culture-it is difficult to imagine how the situation could be worse...

...But in a statement that should gain for him an eminence in the catalogue of callousness next to Marie Antoinette, Danziger declared: "My feeling is that it was worth it...

...During the same period the white percentage of low birth weight newborns dropped from 7.2 to 5.7...

...The problem is that the programs Murray so brilliantly attacks were worse than he thought because by obviating or destroying an entire generation of ghetto families, they destroyed the preconditions of success for his own decentralized solutions...

...Meanwhile, the cost of raising children has soared well ahead of inflation...

...The man-in-the-house rule was abandoned, AFDC was granted to poor families with an employed father, state residency requirements were struck down, work by recipients was permitted under the "thirty and a third provision," and unannounced eligibility investigations were restricted...

...In any case, the entire attempt to deny the significance of the welfare children of black and white single teenagers reveals a truly incredible blindness on the part of leading welfare experts...

...Michael Harrington, still babbling Marxist inanities, thinks all would have been well if the War on Poverty had had an additional $40 billion or so to spend...

...But incredibly enough, most of the leading experts can look on the wreckage their programs have wrought and call for more...

...Low birth weight (less than 5 pounds) is a predictor of a wide variety of health problems in infants, including many permanent physical and mental handicaps...

...If the problem of the welfare state could be reduced to a simple matter of economic, educational, and legal incentives, the situation could indeed be readily rectified in the ways that neoconservative critics such as James Q. Wilson and Lawrence Mead suggest: work requirements, child support garnishes, police crackdowns, and back-to-basics educational reforms...

...After an incisive exposition of Murray's arguments-and a trenchant critique of Michael Harrington's The New...

...The radical change in the composition of the childbearing population among blacks may have contributed to an increase from 10.4 to 11.5 percent in the proportion of low birth weight newborns from 1950 to 1980, despite great progress in the technology of prenatal and infant care-dur-ing the intervening years...

...These families are providing the very foundation for the future of the U.S...

...George Gilder is the author of Wealth and Poverty (Basic Books) and The Spirit of Enterprise (Simon and Schuster...

...This destructive shift in the burdens of government stems from the effective dissolution of the value of the child On both the right and the left and within the Reagan White House, students of the problem are moving toward a reasonable remedy: the creation of a program of child allowances, in one form or another-usually a monthly payment-for all families with children...

...What Kuttner fails to understand, however, is that the European social democracies, distributing bounties for nearly everyone with a pain or a problem, have massively multiplied both pains and problems...

...The fact is, however, that nearly all men gain their links to the future, their long-term rationality, through connections with specific children, and those children, particularly the boys, gain their links to adult civilization through the examples and disciplines of responsible fathers...

...In fact, they did go up...

...Thus he brings to bear the perspective of a suburban Dr...

...Murray's cruelty to some of the most intellectually debilitated of Americans-many of them Ivy League graduates without so much as a belief in God or a glint of practical understanding of their fellow man to sustain them-is deeply reprehensible and he should be punished for it...

...But just because these liberal activists and teachers of social work and editorial writers and professors of urban affairs and poverty professionals and leftist clerics and researchers in women's studies possess advanced degrees, we should not imagine that they are capable of making a complicated sandwich, or handling dangerous chemicals in a dry-cleaning shop, or parking a truck in the garment district, or cooking a hamburger medium rare, or making beds at a motel under pressure from new arrivals, among the jobs to which Murray's outlandish ideas would abandon them...

...For the problems of the American poor are most fundamentally moral and spiritual...

...Since a point of saturation has been reached, particularly among blacks, this proportion is no longer rising among blacks as fast as among whites who have had less previous exposure to welfare rules and incentives...

...These problems all remained at the intolerable levels fostered by the explosion of social spending under the Great Society...

...In addition, surging increases in food stamps and other programs meant that the decline in real benefits in the 1970s was insignificant...

...But when such incentives are massively changed-as they were in the US...

...In addition, they most commonly have little money, little educa-tion, no job, and no permanent partner to help make up for the financial and psychological deficits...

...Now Robert Kuttner, one of the brightest of the left-wing diehards and strongest of Murray's critics, has published a book, The Economic Illusion,3 that also sings the virtues of this approach to social policy...

...American Poverty2-Lemann points to a more promising line of liberal analysis...

...This kind of response, however, illustrates the one significant flaw in Murray's work...

...Although Murray repeatedly denies it in his book, he leaves open the possibility that the poor are different from us and inevitably in need of special treatment...

...But they also inevitably fail in disciplining their male offspring and serve to cut off an entire generation of older black men from the familial continuities of civilized life...

...The reason the U.S...

...many are culturally deprived...

...Allen's point about the decline of poverty as welfare rose is also irrelevant...

...As Murray points out, there was a drastic drop in fertility between 1965 and 1970 in nearly every American age group except single black and white teenagers...

...The European Economic Community, in a veritable fever of government "job-creation" and technology promotion, has created virtually no net new jobs in a decade and has fallen ever farther behind the United States in the very high technologies most favored by their industrial policies...

...For example, he repeatedly celebrates the performance of the Austrian economy during the 1970s, and attacks supply-side tax cuts, without once mentioning that in the mid-1970s Austria enacted the world's most aggressive recent supply-side program, reducing personal tax rates by one-third in two years...

...Allen also argues that recent studies show no relation between the level of welfare benefits and the incidence of fatherless families...

...The problem is the dreadful pathology of the ghetto- crime, youth unemployment, illegitimacy, fatherless families...

...As Margaret Mead has insisted, stable families-with long-time horizons and a resistance to the buffeting of life's inevitable troubles- ultimately depend, in all societies, on the reinforcement of religious beliefs and ceremonies...

...The chief effect of War on Poverty and Great Society programs, after all, was to homogenize and nationalize the welfare state This change was more dramatic in the South than in liberal Northern states...

...David Stockman was a powerful advocate of this policy while he served in Congress, and several other White House officials, including the President, have expressed interest in the idea...

...Illegitimacy has continued to climb, to the point that nearly all births in the welfare culture are now out of wedlock...

...In this respect, the poor are no different from the offspring of upper-class deduction, which would be worth $6,000 today if it had risen apace with inflation and incomes since the early 1950s...

...The welfare state does not cause the kind of pathologies we see in the American ghetto except to the extent it destroys the fabric of families by penalizing their formation or by presuming the incapacity of poor men to support them...

...In an interview with the Boston Globe's estimable David Warsh-and at a two-day conference held by the Manhattan Institute-he maintained that the problem with the Great Society was inadequate funds for the poor...