Saving the Underclass
Murray, Ken Auletta interviews Charles
Saving the Underclass Ken Auletta interviews Charles Murray No book in recent years has prompted as much debate over the legacy of the Great Society poverty programs as Charles...
...And I'm going to make you make it, because I want you to succeed so badly...
...You're not going to have nearly as many young single'women keeping babies...
...If you have a young woman in the community who is saying, "All I want is to support my family, and all I need from the community is day care," there is going to be no shortage of local programs to provide that assistance where it's needed...
...It seems odd, but the Reagan administration is centrist...
...With one other, the ex-addicts, it was pretty much a wash...
...For instance, you bridle that your complex message has gotten lost in some of the criticisms of the book...
...A variety of educational programs either have worked or can work...
...So if you're a hardheaded liberal, don't talk to me about our incarceration rate and whether it's the highest in the world or whatever...
...But I'm getting sidetracked...
...It has become the intellectual fuel for the conservative drive to dismantle the programs and the central target for the liberal counteroffensive...
...Auletta: Let's stay with that a bit...
...I'm talking about saying "please" or "thank you ." In many cases they don't know how to use an alarm clock...
...Murray: True...
...They're gone...
...You open it up to everybody in, say, that geographic area...
...Is that what drives you here...
...That is not to say that a whole bunch of Headstart programs worked beautifully, because I'm not sure they did...
...Murray: You don't have it now...
...Murray: Remember, I said to you the first time that maybe 90 percent flunk out...
...You make the jobs open, however, not just to kids who can bring evidence that they have been a drug addict or evidence that they have been a delinquent...
...I think now a lot of people who consider themselves liberals, even "hardheaded" liberals who are willing to ask new questions, cling to some of the social programs as sort of the last evidence that they are on the side of the angels with regard to blacks...
...Murray: In this regard I think I have become radicalized since the book came out...
...If you accept the view that there was terrible access to medical care prior to Medicaid, there is certainly much better access after Medicaid, even if it's inefficient...
...Auletta: And therefore, a good card-carrying liberal understandably takes offense with your thesis...
...One thing that I have observed about the most effective people who deal with these kids is that they understand the seductions of paternalism, of patting them on the head and saying, "I'm going to help you ." Auletta: But help doesn't necessarily mean paternalism...
...That's not what I'm saying...
...Murray: It is clearly an argument in favor of tinkering with the design of the program, but I'd say that your definition of tinkering and mine are probably quite different...
...That was my job as an evaluator, and in the last chapters of a book like this I'm supposed to tell people what the solutions are...
...They tackled four different types of people, all of them hard-core...
...Do you advocate support for that person...
...Or shall we simply discount those and say, "Well, with those, there's something wrong with the numbers...
...Murray: In effect, yes...
...Has the right abused the material...
...In other cases it's because they go back into the school system and are taunted for being high achievers or acting "white" and so have to conform to the peer pressure in high school...
...But we aren't looking at black problems, we're looking at problems of poor people...
...Auletta: Did you make a mistake in the last section of Losing Ground, where you speculated on whether or not we would not be better off just getting rid of all welfare...
...I think the generational split [in the black community] has been dramatic...
...Auletta: Certainly there are figures on illegitmacy among whites...
...Auletta: You seem to be saying that the Reagan administration is in this middle consensus group, so therefore some of the things you've said threaten their kind of safe harbor...
...Then I got to the welfare system, and I could not come up with any ideas for improvements that persuaded me...
...While we agree with some of the criticism of Murray's book (see Phillip Keisling's review, December 1984), we also feel that his case is more compelling than most liberals want to concede and that his facts and arguments have been at least partly misrepresented by many of his opponents...
...But I was also extremely scared of trying to run the world that way...
...In an era when black assertiveness and confidence were soaring, and a black leader was getting the Nobel Peace prize, and black leaders occupied the high moral ground about any question, it would have been very easy to predict that in the next five or ten years we were going to see a black population, including the black poor, that would be adamant about taking what was theirs and fighting their way up and would be damned if they'd accept any favors from anybody...
...We know how to take a youngster who wants to be an electrician and teach him how to be an electrician if he is prepared to come to that training center and work his ass off, and pay attention, and go out there and stomp the streets looking for an electrician's job when he gets out...
...Think about what it would be like to live in an inner-city community where you can't move around freely and safely...
...They don't know how to deal with life...
...Why are they unemployed when they quit their last three jobs voluntarily...
...The only way you make major inroads is by some fundamental changes in the ways in which families are formed and children are raised...
...a little more sensible: "Charles be serious...
...But there is ambivalence in that last chapter, too, which I guess came from my saying to myself, "You know, people are going to think you're a kook" Auletta: Was that the only ambivalence...
...I would come up with something like a better Supported Work demonstration program, and the evaluator part of me said, "You don't really believe that it would work because you know all the ways it wouldn't work," so I would throw out that draft...
...They are the most eager, inquisitive kids you've ever dealt with...
...Murray: I hear this all the time...
...is helping also...
...I look at the those very minor results of Supported Work and say, this is not good enough...
...We've cleaned toilets already, and we are entitled to something more...
...But I would make the case that they hastened those outcomes...
...It's as if we can then snap back and talk about affirmative action, which has a couple of effects...
...Wiped them out...
...And I would generalize on that statement to a variety...
...If you say to me that, at the federal level, you should help people who are physically or mentally disabled, my answer is "yes...
...Supported Work was in many ways the apotheosis of trying to cajole people to escape dependence...
...Compare my system and the number of people who splatter against the pavement with the one we have now...
...If you had said to me a liberal must bridle with what you said, then I would argue with you...
...Because what touches people's lives can be as simple as a parent saying to a kid as he is growing up, "You have to get out there and get a job no matter what ." Getting ten million parents to say that is a hell of a lot more effective way of increasing "jobreadiness" than a Supported Work program...
...Auletta: And I'm going to help you . . . . Murray: [Pause—laughs.] Yes, except I bet that if you talk to ten teachers or ten people who have intervened in the lives of these kids and listened to the language they use, both the explicit and the tacit, I'm willing to bet that "help" is one word they avoid...
...We have just described the person who historically has been the object of the community's most tender concern...
...It would be very heartening to find that this older generation was beginning to have its way...
...Laughs.] Auletta: And that racial issue manifests itself in your position of opposing affirmative action...
...But what they real ly were, as Pat Moynihan has pointed out, was a way for white Americans to make good on their debt to black Americans...
...Second, it recasts the problem as a black problem as opposed to one of poor people...
...Murray: The increases in Social Security benefits, I think, can be credited with a large part of the reduction of poverty among the elderly...
...I know how to do that...
...Isn't it true, however, that you view liberal nostrums as the chief culprit...
...They respond to incentives beautifully...
...The question is, how do you get more of those things to happen...
...Murray: Caring, yes...
...When AFDC was started back in the New Deal, it was popular at a time when you had all sorts of opposition to welfare...
...Charles Murray: That it was written in the service of a "radical political agenda," that I selected the evidence knowingly in order to make my points...
...You do it by getting people like me [laughs] and other ordinary citizens a lot more involved, contributing money, contributing their time...
...I would also make the case that they produced, particularly regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many other, unintended spin offs...
...But there certainly is no reason why they couldn't work well...
...Not AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children], not food stamps, not law enforcement, not rent control...
...They respond to challenge beautifully...
...But what I'm asking is, do you see a solution for that group, the "underclass," who have certain habitual or behavioral problems, who are not "socialized," yet who nevertheless are the people who most frighten the citizenry and have the highest propensity for criminal acts, dependency on welfare, and antisocial behavior...
...Murray: I'm going to add a couple of statements to my last answer, then I'll come to that...
...Auletta: Just so that we're clear on this, you're saying that for the non-able-bodied there is a safety net...
...they can only get so far if they can't deal with the white world...
...Auletta: You've cited a few successes...
...But I am suggesting that it is also proper that we distinguish among certain qualities in people, that we create a society that does recognize class distinctions but not distinctions based on how much money you take in, which in many ways is the ethic I think we have bequeathed in the last couple of decades to poor people...
...You challenge him...
...Actually, I guess the most outrageous piece was Tony Brown's column, in which he said that I advocated concentration camps for blacks...
...There's a tutoring program here in Washington that selects kids based on test scores and so forth, and it goes into inner-city schools and gives them tutoring...
...I have become radicalized since the book came out...
...My hypothesis is that illegitimacy varies by economic class, and it would be a salutary thing for whites to realize that the illegitimacy rate among the poor whites is close to that of blacks...
...I finally realized that there was an answer I believed in...
...But those kids often can be reached even more easily than a lot of softer-core kids if you do provide the challenge...
...What we do not seem to be able to do is cajole people into wanting to make those initial investments...
...When [Norman] Podhoretz wrote Making It, he was so stunned by the reaction of his critics that it helped drive him further right...
...But there's another point when you ask me about this 18-year-old woman...
...With the long-term dependent women on welfare, they found a nearly 40 percent success rate...
...I argue that the next cycle you are going to have some different kinds of kids coming into the program, kids who are not going to call the instructor a motherfucker when the instructor tells them to do something because they've heard that if you do that you will get kicked out...
...We were held in slavery for all but the last 100 years of that...
...You can't simply say, "If you follow Murray's ideas you're going to have massive suffering among poor people in this country...
...I haven't...
...The argument basically goes like this, as it has been expressed very straightforwardly by some young blacks: It's okay for Vietnamese to come here and push brooms and clean toilets and so forth...
...That's not what happened...
...I'm still very scared of the transition, the amount of misery, and so forth...
...I don't want to quibble with you about words, but I think that concept is important...
...Obviously some liberals took a lot of offense at the book, and I wonder whether, from their own ideological perspective, they are not correct to take offense...
...We all sit there and agree that in poor black communities the illegitimacy rate is about 80 percent and that is terrible...
...Murray: Is "compassion" really the word we want to use...
...Suppose we really did...
...They feel crippled...
...We can quibble about the likelihood that there is going to be a place for her...
...First, list the programs in your view that have worked well...
...March 25, 1985] Murray: Yes, that's the one that hit the hardest because it was a big article in a prestigious magazine...
...We can't get rid of them...
...But I'm willing to go to the mat on affirmative action and other preferential treatment programs for blacks...
...Let's give poor parents that same kind of power of choice...
...But you also know from your own experience that very frequently the kids who are the most criminal, and the hardest to get close to, also are the brightest, most able kids...
...To me, the way you get those kinds of effective programs is not through a CETA program...
...I can't get so excited about a piece like that because it is so completely bizarre...
...For that matter I think we know how to provide better prenatal care to young single women who are pregnant, if those young single women bring to that instruction a commitment to learn more about how they can take care of their babies...
...It's what teachers have said about kids from time immemorial...
...they are evidence of the enormous problems we face...
...It provided them with training in certain kinds of job readiness skills, it provided them with counseling, it provided them with more or less guaranteed jobs for nine or 12 months...
...I am speaking as one who spent a lot of years evaluating demonstration efforts where you try one approach, then you try another approach, then you try a third approach, and you still can't get people to make that initial investment...
...For heaven's sake, one of the most fundamental functions of government is to provide physical safety...
...It was targeted at a large group of exaddicts, long-term welfare recipients, exoffenders, and delinquent youth...
...Period...
...You don't want, in any way, shape, or form, to say, "You poor thing, it's not really your fault ." You say to them, "You have it in you to make it, and I'm going to make you make it...
...The Editors Ken Auletta: What is the most outrageous thing that has been said about your book...
...There is a big difference between those people who supported these programs in the sixties and into the seventies but have been looking all the time at what is happening and getting disturbed and those who supported them in the sixties and seventies and in my view simply shut their eyes to what was going on around them...
...If you get real close to a program, you're going to see individuals whose lives were touched and changed by these programs, and you'll therefore be more likely to conclude that there are some beneficial effects...
...Fine...
...But Ken, what makes you think that you aren't going to have that, and have it in abundance, if you no longer have any of these programs coming down from above...
...Now what do you say about that group...
...Auletta: Isn't it also a question of where your bias sits...
...The contribution of Losing Ground, I hope, is to force people to ask certain kinds of questions that they have never asked...
...We clearly siphon off a great deal of our concern and commitment with the existing system...
...With that hard core, I am as pessimistic about what can be done through my approach as I am pessimistic about anyone else's...
...The more I wrote, the more I backed myself into a corner...
...And these wouldn't have had anything to do with the program, they would have had to do with things that just happened 'in life...
...So my seductions were not to make a new place for myself in the wilderness...
...Remember, you're talking to a man who spent his career trying to make social programs work...
...Whenever I have been with a roomful of liberals, we have gotten very quickly off the topics that I discussed at great length in Losing Ground and zeroed in on affirmative action...
...Murray: When you play that back to me, it does seem odd to me to say that the Reagan administration is centrist, but it is...
...People say, "You clearly aren't a racist, and you clearly do worry about welfare and poor people...
...There is no enthusiasm for striking out on new paths.' Auletta: Let me interrupt so that I can understand this...
...Auletta: "I'm going to kick your ass...
...I'm not sure...
...One of the reactions by liberals to the book that has been most difficult to pin down, and the reason why so many people have been bothered by it, is ultimately linked to the racial issue...
...If they're simply confronted with discipline and authority without some sense of—to use a dirty liberal word—compassion, or a sense of a helping hand, you may lose them even though they are good prospects...
...What are the principles you extract from these successes...
...But how do we do it...
...Often they are afraid of the white world...
...What about an 18-year-old working woman who dropped out of school to have a child and who wants to go to work but obviously doesn't have anyone to care for the child at home...
...Auletta: Charles, you know that in inner-city neighborhoods—whether it's Washington, New York, or Cleveland—you don't have that kind of infrastructure in the community...
...When I wrote it, I saw a lot of good results if there were no welfare supports for healthy working-age people...
...It's as if affirmative action was the last refuge of the lapsed liberal...
...Getting 10 million parents saying to kids, "You have to get out there and get a job no matter what," is a hell of a lot more effective in increasing job readiness than a government program.' Murray: You observed that program...
...Has anyone ever heard anybody in the administration mention Losing Ground...
...I would like to see the system joined with one in which poor people have much greater access to education and training opportunities...
...The challenge is perceived as something "in their face...
...I think it is probably too expensive to do that...
...But whatever we decide, don't compare my system with a zero-defect system...
...And I'm not sure the balance is a plus...
...Was this the mistake that gave ammunition to critics to dismiss your argument...
...If you get rid of that system, you are going to have a lot of people who have no rationalization for avoiding their commitments.' Murray: We're now talking about my world, in which there is no federal system at all, and you're saying that you have an 18-year-old woman who is ready and willing to go to work but has no access to child care at home...
...Murray: In the proposition that even if we don't know how to help the underclass, at least we can stop punishing poor people who've done everything right...
...From my own exposure to people on a community level, many, not all, perhaps not most, believe that you set certain standards, and if people don't comply, if they come late, or they don't show up, or if they're disrespectful, they get thrown out...
...Murray argues that the social programs of the past 20 years have slowed, and even reversed, earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, ignorance, and discrimination...
...It's agreed that we have black unemployment rates that are sky-high among youth...
...They come in the first week, and it's tough...
...Now we send those kids to a school that has been so busy catering to the least able, to the most recalcitrant student, that they won't get a decent education...
...Do you believe that it's an affirmative government responsiblity to provide for those who are helpless, those who are not able-bodied...
...And he responds...
...Murray: The government knows how to educate kids who are ready to study...
...And it's that kind of experience that keeps driving me back to say we aren't going to solve these problems by attacking anywhere except at the prevention level...
...In some cases it's because of the same fears of the white world you talked about...
...In some cases it's because they only speak black English...
...As I have talked with the older generation of blacks, I have heard, in much more acerbic terms than one hears from conservative whites, a description of lazy, shiftless youngsters who don't know the meaning of work and who don't know what their parents have gone through in order to get them this far...
...Auletta: No...
...What's discouraging is that these kids—who are 14 or 15 instead of 19 or 22 and have done well in school—have a very truncated future ahead of them...
...The ten percent who get [through] —a highly self-selected group—are going to be good auto mechanics, and they are going to get good jobs...
...But it doesn't bother me to have that kind of system...
...Or take law enforcement...
...Murray: Yes...
...To challenge Murray on these issues—and to give him an opportunity to respond to his critics —we turned to Ken Auletta, who writes for both The New Yorker and the New York Daily News...
...To me, those results are not evidence of success...
...Because, God knows, middle-class urban whites sure send their kids to private schools...
...But you're still back with the fundamental question: What is success...
...And how many of those analysts have been willing to go out in the street and ask why there's unemployment, particularly when there are "help wanted" signs on that street...
...I think on balance it was not...
...I want to see a social policy that lets the man who is a janitor but who has raised a family think of himself as being special by virtue of having held a job and raised a family...
...He's got to be able to think of himself that way, and a social policy that puts him back on a pedestal has done no small good...
...Stop trying to make me out to be in support of such and such a position ." Auletta: Like what...
...Murray raises important questions regarding the implicit messages of the poverty programs to those they were intended to benefit...
...With the other two [school dropouts and ex-offenders] the program clearly failed...
...You hear street talk about the ways of playing games with disability insurance...
...One thing you must communicate to that portion of the kids, if you're ever going to reach them, is not only demands and not only discipline but also love...
...And so recommendations for that are in the last chapter...
...Auletta: Are you thinking of the [Robert] Greenstein piece in The New Republic...
...I finally got to the point where I had two positive things to say...
...He's one of the good people...
...You've mentioned education and Social Security...
...Auletta: What's yours...
...Auletta: You mentioned earlier that hardheaded liberals were searching for fresh solutions...
...Murray: If you have any data on illegitimacy among poor whites, I'd love to see it because I've been looking for it...
...Leave AFDC where it is, leave food stamps where they are...
...But I feel much more strongly than I did a year ago that either we will have to go that route or else we will have to say that we will live with an underclass of the size it is now...
...But more important, there will be a simple requirement that you have to attend and you have to work hard...
...Let it be heard loud and clear, I am saying civil rights and equal access to public accommodations are things that black Americans should have...
...That's the point at which I would part company with a lot of people...
...Auletta: Would you make that case...
...I think they're pernicious and ought to be done away with...
...A program for the disabled can easily become—and, I would argue, has easily become—as much a trap for people as the welfare system has...
...And in unemployment the stereotype is "the lazy bums who are living a comfortable life on welfare rather than going out to work" These are stereotypes the right has used a lot, but I don't fault some critics for taking off from that . . . . Auletta: I want to come back later to your views on some of those things, but let me take them in some order...
...Is that a success, four out of ten...
...We agree we want programs...
...Auletta: But if we're talking about the problems of poor people with no distinctions, why is it that the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks is so much worse than for whites...
...You just rip away every kind of government support there is...
...You can't do away with all of these programs...
...They've never cashed a check in a bank...
...I think it was the two-year follow-up that showed that 42 percent of the AFDC participants were still employed...
...But if you had spent all of your time dealing with people who weren't in the program you would have seen a variety of things that touched the lives of young single women and led them to get and hold a job they had not had before, which led them to do positive things...
...This is not a route out of the morass...
...And so you provide them with those jobs...
...compassion, no...
...Auletta: Don't generalize yet, I want to go on with that in a minute...
...I see even these kids in the inner cities, at the ages of 14, 15, and 16, and I say that we've lost a lot of them already...
...Murray: I think that the Reagan people consider me to be just about as much of a loose cannon as liberals do...
...Auletta: But what about the neoliberal who then comes back and says, "But one of the things that has kept us calling ourselves liberals, even though we affix something to qualify it, is this belief in redistributing income, this belief in breaking down some of the class distinctions...
...Any time we talk about this really hard-core group,I think we have to confront one of the most unpalatable truths, which is that, by the time these kids are 19 or 22, there are very few we can get to...
...it's not even through the United Way, which I regard as just another form of corporatized charity...
...They've just gotten here...
...Then you start kicking kids out...
...Murray: Supported Work is something that I'm going to talk about at length, both because you wrote a book about it [The Underclass] and also because I spent quite a bit of time examining the technical evaluation of it...
...That is to say, roughly 40 percent of the women on welfare, who enrolled in this job program, came out, got a job, and got off of welfare...
...In his 1982 book, The Underclass, he concluded that "neither the right's desire to blame individuals nor the left's desire to blame the system" brings us any closer to understanding our responsibilty to aid those in need...
...And if I have a friend who's a hardheaded liberal, I wish he'd think real hard about a voucher system...
...We have massive suffering among poor people in this country right this minute, and it's a question of choosing the lesser evils...
...With one of those four groups, the two-year follow-up showed a success rate of 42 percent employed versus 35 percent...
...A former New York City official, Auletta is known for his firsthand reporting on society's efforts to help those at the bottom...
...Now if you ignore all sorts of reasons why that gap might be inflated, you can say that the investment in Supported Work gave you an increment of seven percentage points of women who were employed-35 percent versus 42 percent...
...Let's think about it in terms of specific youngsters that ran into that in Supported Work...
...Auletta: Caring...
...Auletta: Gut the programs...
...The reason it was popular was that it was designed to help young widows while their kids grew up...
...Let's back up for a second and look at the development of black attitudes in the sixties...
...Murray: Well, I'll tell you how I would have dealt with, say, the unemployed youth...
...A case can be made, I think, that in certain southern states the Voting Rights Act of 1965 hastened a process that was already underway...
...In most cases, I think the statement is they can work...
...Auletta: Was there a common mistake in their views...
...You use a bad back to parlay yourself into something that ends up making you dependent when you didn't have to be...
...They are embittered...
...The phrase "Tom" took on whole new ramifications during the sixties...
...You don't give an inch in terms of certain standards...
...I want you to offer a laundry list of programs that worked...
...Murray: On superficial examination, Medicaid should have improved the health of poor people...
...You want to cut unemployment among young blacks...
...But at least stop punishing the parents in the inner city who raised their kids right, who told them to study hard and do what the teacher said...
...Auletta: A lot of the kids you're talking about are 19, or let's say they're 22...
...I'm not sure what the best system would be for that...
...All I have done so far is prove the remarkable lack of curiosity that social scientists have had regarding some very obvious questions...
...A great many of the reforms of the sixties were supposed to be for poor people...
...Murray: I'm not sure it's unprovable...
...Murray: I haven't made up my mind about that...
...Let's say it's a training program as well as an employment program—we're going to train the kids to be auto mechanics...
...Let's start with the welfare mothers, an excellent example...
...It's pretty hard to find...
...I know how to do that...
...Or maybe you could say that we will put limited resources into the target group—in this case welfare mothers—that showed the most prospect for success...
...But if you generalize from an arm chair, you might come to a different conclusion...
...And if you get rid of that system you are going to have an awful lot of people who have no rationalization for avoiding their commitments...
...In a variety of ways we can quit punishing the good people in poor communities, the ones who most deserve our consideration...
...Auletta: I don't blush from using that word...
...One was that there's no reason why we can't have a terrific education system for poor people...
...Murray: Well, the way you put it is correct, if by "nostrums" you include not only legislative programs but also court decisions, and especially an intellectual mindset that governs policy in more informal ways...
...And it has gotten pretty racist too...
...Murray: What could bother me is this...
...Let's at least get the bad guys off the streets so that the good folks are safe...
...Now, I won't say that it has been an unblemished record...
...So the story of Phyllis and Harold [a hypothetical couple used to illustrate the way welfare affects poor families] comes across to many critics as being a statement that young women figure up the amount of money they can make in welfare benefits and modulate their fertility behavior according to the rise and fall of that amount of money...
...You observed real people who were clearly reacting to something good that had happened to them because of that program—and that's true...
...Murray: No, there was also an ambivalence about whether I was right...
...Murray: All whites, not poor whites...
...Auletta: What has radicalized you since the book came out...
...But that hasn't happened very often...
...So you've got an incoming class of 100 kids...
...What happens then...
...A good Headstart program can be a terrific thing for a three- or four-year-old child from a disadvantaged family...
...Murray: Should we talk about the problems of getting there or should I simply say, here's the end state I'd like to see...
...But I do fret...
...It's damned tough to do so without creating more problems than you solve, but theoretically, "yes ." Auletta: Okay, what about that able-bodied young mother...
...There have been all sorts of people who have been ready to welcome me to the ranks of the neoliberals if only I would be...
...One, it covers their credentials...
...Murray: Because I was going to suggest as a substitute, "love...
...When 42 percent versus 35 percent goes in the right direction, it's evidence of big success, but 42 percent versus 35 percent in the wrong direction is not something you need to worry about...
...So over a period of time, you're going to have honest-to-God training, not ersatz training, which is what we've had in the Job Corps so many times...
...Murray: I'm not speaking from data now...
...The job is to design them better, to become a good incrementalist ." Or, "Murray has made a real contribution in forcing us to face some hard questions if only he would understand that government is part of the solution, not part of the problem," and all that...
...I feel much more strongly than I did a year ago that we will have to [end welfare support for healthy, working age people] or live with an underclass of the size it is now.' Auletta: But is that an argument for not pursuing a change in the design of the program, or is that an argument, in fact, to change it in some ways that might make it more successful...
...But when you say "card-carrying," then you're right...
...You can come to another conclusion, following the notion of targeting...
...If you don't work hard, you're not going to be able to master the material...
...You could then ask one of two sets of questions...
...I think the government's role in enforcement of such things probably needs recasting...
...It provided them with a level of support that we cannot conceivably supply to huge numbers of people...
...You kick them out when they don't show up on time...
...The promise is, if you do all of this, you're going to walk out of here three months from now an auto mechanic, and garages all over the Washington and Virginia area are going to want to hire you...
...And they also are those who in their own, unfortunately twisted way, are very responsive to challenge...
...Saving the Underclass Ken Auletta interviews Charles Murray No book in recent years has prompted as much debate over the legacy of the Great Society poverty programs as Charles Murray's Losing Ground...
...A case can be made that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hastened a process that was already underway...
...We know how to do that...
...Anybody can sign up and get in...
...But these other folks are misusing what you said ." I'm told that the Reagan administration is using Losing Ground as justification for all sorts of social budget cuts...
...Murray: Oh, that the welfare lines are filled with people trying to exploit the system and are living high on the hog...
...We can do all sorts of things with people who have passed a critical threshold of investment—an investment of time, of commitment, of, in some cases, small amounts of money...
...Now sometimes their ways of seeing the world are so screwed up, you don't know what you can do with them...
...You could ask why it failed...
...this is from my general reading on the issue and my own view of the situation...
...I do not know that to be true...
...I'm delighted to see that they have them...
...And there are certain prerequisites —math and reading, nothing excessive, nothing more than they will need to become a good auto mechanic...
...You kick them out when they want to get into a fight with the instructor...
...It's a part of my argument that, as time goes on, you'll get a smaller and smaller percentage because they will have a better understanding of what's required...
...He's an optimist, and he says we're not going to give up...
...You take a youngster who in many ways is a tough case...
...This is most obvious when it comes to affirmative action...
...In the first cycle, you may get rid of 90 percent...
...That is to say, it's almost an unprovable argument one way or the other...
...You add those up and tell me: Shall we think about the statistics in the two groups where you had the employment gap in the wrong direction...
...They've grown up without a family in many cases—most, I daresay —and they are twisted...
...Murray: Yes...
...Auletta: Do you support the safety net, or would you scrap that...
...In the past how many analyses of black youth unemployment have we had...
...Murray: Yes, it does in a sense "give up" on the hard-core underclass...
...Therefore, Medicaid should also have improved health...
...Auletta: One of the reasons that some of the liberals reacted in a pained way to your book— although I must say I don't think you were savaged in the way George Gilder was or the way Norman Podhoretz was savaged 15 or so years ago by his former friends—is that they worry that some of the arguments you marshal will be used by forces on the right, who will be much less reasonable, much more fanatical, than Charles Murray...
...We've been waiting 300 years...
...Auletta: When you're saying it doesn't bother you, it bothers me to hear you say that...
...I have been extremely discouraged in some ways by an experience of my own...
...But I am still an agnostic inclining toward pessimism on that score, so I guess I can't include Medicaid in the list...
...Auletta: There were some Supported Work programs that followed this rigorous example, and obviously there were other training programs that did as well...
...Murray: I don't think so, because in my case the seductions have all been the other way...
...That's wrong...
...In fact, in the sixties an attitude grew that certain ways of acting were demeaning...
...Murray: Well, the critics run the whole gamut from those who say that the book is both fraudulent and incompetent to those who say, "The guy makes a lot of good points, but he's wrong about such and such ." On that spectrum, the common mistake has been to cast the argument of Losing Ground in terms of stereotypes that are often used by people who make similar points...
...He is the backbone of the country...
...You want to cut illegitimate births among poor people...
...In fact I've reread the last chapter a few times and asked myself what would I change...
...The cuts that the Reagan administration proposed recently in social programs are not draconian...
...The cuts in social programs that the administration proposed are not draconian...
...Auletta: Let's take one experiment, Supported Work...
...There is no detectable enthusiasm that I can see for striking out on new paths...
...We clearly siphon off a great deal of our concern and commitment [to the community] with the existing [welfare] system...
...One of the things I wanted to do was find out the illegitimacy rate among poor whites...
...Here are kids who are saying to the government, and anybody else who will listen, "Dammit, we want a job...
...They're sort of agreeing with me about the magnitude of those problems...
...Murray: The end state is an American society in which there are no federal income supports at all for working-age healthy people...
...Yet the common ground you outline, in effect, gives up on a segment, call it the underclass, by saying we have to concentrate on the good people who have a better shot at making it...
...it's not through a multi-billion dollar program of any sort...
...This program failed with ex-offenders and delinquent youth...
...In the control group, those who had gotten none of this assistance whatsoever, 35 percent were employed...
...Where do you think one of those hardheaded liberals or, if you will, a neoliberal, might find common ground with Losing Ground...
...I can assert with equal force that more people will be hurt by your system than helped, or I could make just the reverse argument...
...I've seen the same thing in programs for delinquents, in programs for kids in inner-city schools...
...Yet even though you take pains to say, and I quote, "no single demon is to blame" for the persistence of poverty...
...Auletta: What about the seductions from the people in the [Reagan] administration and from the right...
...And you're going to have lots of black kids who are suddenly going to find that it is not so demeaning after all to get a job sweeping floors, and they're going to keep those jobs...
...Auletta: The end state...
...Now the way they respond is often destructive...
...He challenges liberals to look with clear eyes at whether the programs are really working or whether they just make people feel virtuous for providing them...
...Murray: Yeah, but that's what it usually turns out to be...
...What you saw in those last few pages of the book was my telling you the only solution that I couldn't talk myself out of based on all the previous data in the book...
...I said that in the last chapter, too...
...I say, get rid of all the programs and you will have lots more than you have now...
...You're going to have lots of parents talking differently to daughters, and you're going to have lots of daughters talking differently to their boyfriends, and you're going to have lots of girls getting abortions and lots of babies being put up for adoption...
...I've been on radio talk shows where I've had to say to the host, "Wait a minute...
Vol. 17 • September 1985 • No. 8
