by Charles Murray
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Product Description
This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the1960s and 1970s actually made matters worse for its supposed beneficiaries, the poor and minorities. Charles Murray startled readers by recommending that we abolish welfare reform, but his position launched a debate culminating in President Clinton’s proposal “to end welfare as we know it.”
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Average Customer Review:
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 This book is not about race..., 2007-08-27
Losing ground uses the coincidence of the post segregation poverty of African Americans to demonstrate the devastating effects social welfare programs have on the futures of poor youth (off all races). It is an empirical buttress to Milton Friedman's paraphrased quote, "If you pay people to be poor you will get more poor people". Losing ground provides statistical proof of this truism.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Fabulous analysis combined with lousy policy ideas, 2007-02-15
This is two books in one. First, it is perhaps the best book ever written on why the War on Poverty in America failed. Second, it is a tedious libertarian screed on policy. The defects in the second book blind too many people to the excellence of the first book.
The first part of the book is an absolute classic. Murray examines a mystery. Wh is it that, at exactly the same time that America first devoted huge government resources to fighting poverty, the poverty rate -- which had been falling quickly -- stopped falling, crime went up and society, in some many ways, started to fall apart? Everyone has heard part of Murray's argument, that the expansion of welfare encouraged dependence. There are other parts of the argument that are less well known. He argues that social controls, in general, were systematically dismantled during this period, with disasterous results for the poor. His analysis is dead on, and none of it has been damaged in the years since.
The second part of the book is a tedious snore. Murray gives a moral argument that the government ought not to be fighting poverty. He assumes that the only way to fight poverty is to hand out government money, which he argues is seldom a good idea. His own analysis of the problem, however, is light years ahead of his policy ideas. He showed how poverty is largely caused by govenment attacks on social order. It does not occur to him that restoring order might reverse the problem.
2 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
 Interesting read, 2007-02-06
Murray's claims have been discredited since the 1984 publication of this book. However, it is interesting to look into how Murray perceived the welfare issue 20 years ago.
1 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
 An example of political and racist "science", 2007-01-15
Murray's book is good for those racist republican white men, who don't understand the underlying socio-cultural-historical patterns, that makes the socioeconomic status of the blacks so diffrent from the whites.
24 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
Psuedo social science junk, 2005-07-11
This book by Murray is little more than pompous propaganda--albeit effective politics for the right-wing. His pseudo social scientific analyses fail to hold water when backed up by more than 100 real social-scientific studies published in numerous peer-reviewed journals. As a social scientist trained in sociology and economics, I find this book offensive for its lack of objectivity, sloppy research and unsubstantiated claims. Published and marketed by wealthy corporate donors whose objectives in the 1980's were to slash social and economic safety nets from the beginning, Murray attempts to posit the work as rigorly objective, academic research. Murray argues that government aid to the poor and working class left them only deeper in poverty and because of this, the government ought to slash social spending for the good of the poor themselves and the rest of society. He ignores most of the real causes of poverty--the de-industrialization and de-unionization of much of the country along with massive federal cutbacks in housing, income, education and health assistance. Murray's book brings out the worst in society as he attempts to legitimate the lack of concern, contempt and ignorance by priviledged citizens for the underpriveledged for political gain. This book truly deserves the dust bin.
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