In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government/Poor Support-Poverty in the American Family:

...Still, the subject matter- how to think about the federal role in social life-is essentially the same...

...The task ix to figure out what is keeping us from doing what we already knew how to do...

...Poor Support focuses on the problem of poverty in the American family and the failure of the welfare system, particularly the AFDC program, to address it effectively...

...What emerges in the final chapter are four overall conclusions about the major causes of poverty, from which follow five policy/program prescriptions (some old, some new) that most thoughtful liberals and conservatives would probably agree represent a major improvement over our current welfare system...

...The "Reagan Revolution" notwithstanding, the clash of ideas reverberates only dully in the American political arena, muffled, as it were, by the noises of the crowd...

...By emphasizing one value over the other, Ellwood argues, recent critics of social policy have "found it possible to prescribe coherent and plausible changes in policy" (e.g., Murray, in Losing Ground, by emphasizing individual autonomy...

...What also emerges is a prescription for an expanded role tor the federal government and with it a price tag of $20 to $30 billion a year, about whose desirability most liberals and conservatives would almost certainly disagree.ld almost certainly disagree...

...We suspect that Mr...

...you must have a . plausible reason for feeling good [emphasis added]") is a particularly bumpy ride, which not even Murray's fluid prose can cushion...

...The welfare system treats the symptoms rather than the causes of poverty...

...and values that undermine its credibility and effectiveness...

...Ellwood's primary thesis is clearly stated in his introductory chapter and persuasively argued throughout...

...Designing public policies which surmount these conundrums is the essential task of social policy, according to Ellwood, and the lesson to be learned from history is that the closer we move toward a system that makes judgments about the causes of poverty, and the further away we move from pure welfare programs, the simpler this task becomes...

...The problem with such approaches, however, is that Americans would like to avoid compromising on any of these dimensions...

...Ellwood's book is narrowly confined to policies affecting families with children, while Murray is ultimately concerned with "how society is to be organized so that it best serves 'the happiness of the people...

...In doing so, it creates inevitable conflicts in incentives...

...While we too might have preferred a little less of Aristotle arid a little more acknowledgment of the forces that have moved all modem democracies in the direction of the welfare state, we think it would be a shame-yet another missed opportunity for dialogue-to dismiss this very good book in favor of one that Mr...

...It is noteworthy for its clarity and its careful integration of relevant facts and findings from other social science research, traditional policy analysis, and Ellwood's earlier insights about the role of values...

...The central role Ellwood assigns to "value" in the design and evaluation of public programs-not a common casting in most works of policy analysis by economists-differentiates this book from "liberal" analyses of similar topics...

...That conservatives are far more likely than liberals to make such efforts these days accounts in part for why there is so little real dialogue between the two...

...Murray, for example, has written a very different book from his earlier Losing Ground, hailed by conservatives as documentation of the self-defeatism of welfare policies and damned by liberals for its use (abuse) of statistical analysis...

...His arguments are often more suggestive than compelling, and there are certainly some logical nits to pick...

...pursue" rather than achieve...

...and the "targeting-isolation conundrum" (the more you target aid on the most needy, the more you tend to isolate them from the economic and political mainstream...

...the primacy of the family...

...Charles Murray In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government with alternative approaches to contemporary policy issues is a creative and laudable one...

...Thus, poverty policy inevitably confronts "conundrums": "the work-security conundrum" (when you give people money, food, or housing, you reduce pressure on them to work or care for themselves...

...Murray will be faulted by liberal critics of this book not so much for what he says-that is likely to be dismissed as nostalgia-as for what he does not: the book makes no attempt to evaluate the light that twentieth-century history and social science scholarship might shed on his philosophical premises...

...Murray explicates-but wisely makes no attempt to "prove"-his view of humanity as individually benign but collectively dangerous and proceeds (in the last part of the book) to speculate intriguingly about the consequences of his arguments for thinking about policy...

...The tone is much more "Let us speculate together" than "Let me prove to you," and the intent is much more to open the doors of conservative thought than to slam shut those of liberal thought...

...individuals" rather than groups...

...Stephanie G. Gould & John L. Palmer Here are two books that both deal, broadly speaking, with the role of the federal govern-ment in social poli-cymaking...

...and "happiness" rather than some egalitarian formulation of a public good...

...How you get from the definition of happiness as "the-good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason" in chapter one, for example, to the notion of "justified happiness" in chapter two ("in the context of this book, 'justified' with regard to happiness says that it is not enough to feel good...

...the virtue of work...

...His four conditions-material resources, safety, self-respect, and enjoyment-are consonant with the "values" identified by Ell-wood as critical to the success of any American welfare system and, indeed, up to a point (as Murray notes) his argument is compatible with either liberal or conservative policy conclusions...

...Murray didn't write...

...But bumps aside, the effort to link, in accessible language, the philosophical heritage of the Founding Fathers I am suggesting that if policy plan-nery-sticians?-are to be successful, theymust think in terms of solutions that permit a naturally robust organism to return to health Does the nation sufer from schools that don't teach...

...The fact that it is so hard to find the ground for dialogue-that, despite their manifest talents and sincerity, the two authors do not seem to be talking to each other at all-suggests a central truth of American political life: social policy advances not in dramatic response to clear-cut ideological confrontation and resolution, but, rather incrementally, as a welter of mutually inconsistent ideas percolates through, and is transmuted by, the body politic...

...Murray spends the first half of the book lodging the notion of happiness in the Western philosophic tradition and laying out, in Abraham Maslow's terms, "enabling conditions" for its pursuit...

...The remainder, and vast bulk, of the book contains a largely descriptive analysis of the recent transformation of American families and poverty among two-parent and single-parent families, in general, and among ghetto families, in particular...

...Yet it is possible in these books to see some evolution of the two poles of thought...

...Thus we should not expect either of these books to stimulate a radical reorientation of American social policy...

...the "assistance-family-structure conundrum" (giving greater aid to single-parent families encourages families to split up and unmarried women to have babies...

...The task is not to figure out better teaching techniques, we've blown haw ta leach children far millennia...

...Knowing the past work of both authors and their professional homes (Murray at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and Ellwood at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government), the reader might expect to find in these two books ground for dialogue between the conservative and liberal poles of thought...

...Only by replacing welfare with policies which focus explicitly on the root causes of poverty-lack of a job, too low wages, single-parenthood, or more immediate personal crises-can we avoid the difficult dilemmas which plague our current welfare system and thereby place government in its proper role of reinforcing deeply held societal values and facilitating self-support...

...David Ellwood's book, Poor Support, will undoubtedly engender less controversy, both because it is an exemplary product of a more familiar genre, policy analysis, and because it represents a kind of liberal/conservative consensus view of the evils of the current welfare system...

...What determines where you come down on policy questions, on how to realize the "enabling conditions," depends on your view of human nature-a topic Ellwood explicitly declines to take up...

...POOR SUPPORT: POVERTY IN THE AMERICAN FAMILY David T. Ellwood Basic Books, $19.95, 243 pp...

...Ellwood postulates four basic tenets of American belief that policy analysts and policy makers ignore at their peril: the autonomy of the individual...

...Both are good books: thoughtful and well-written...

...He contends that we have been seduced away from this original formulation of our governmental purpose in part by the power of the social sciences to measure and results: "happiness" being the elusive notion it is, we have chosen to do, in the policy arena, what lends itself best to quantified certification as success or failure and ignored the not-readily-quan-tifiable side-effects of policies that might actually be destructive of human happiness, His choice of words throughout this discussion is self-consciously conservative: "enable" rather than ensure...

...That is, one might expect to find responsible position statements which could serve to identify opposing premises, conflicting assumptions, disputes over evidence- argument over which could serve to move the dialogue along...

...Murray argues that we will formulate much more creative and fruitful social policies if we conceive of the role of the federal government as "enabling individuals to pursue happiness," rather than as some more instrumentally defined goal (such as reducing poverty, increasing housing supply, or whatever...

...In In Put-suit, Murray eschews elaborate policy analysis (though not his earlier conclusions based on such analysis) in favor of philosophy...

...and the desire for and sense of community...