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Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition

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Author: Charles Murray
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$25.00~~
Buy Used: $5.99
You Save: $19.01 (76%)

New (10) Used (25) from $5.99

Media: Paperback
Edition: 10 Anv
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.8

ISBN: 0465042333
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.896073
EAN: 9780465042333
ASIN: 0465042333

Publication Date: January 1, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Book and pages are in very good condition except for cover and first few pages which have a small rip/tear. Book is a good reading copy though. ~Items Are USED, But All Are Complete And In Good Condition. All Hardcover Books Include Dust Covers, Unless Otherwise Noted~

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
With a new introduction by the author, this tenth anniversary edition of the classic book argues that the ambitious social programs of the Great Society designed to help the poor and disadvantaged often made things worse.

Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

NEARLY 60 PAGES OF DATA December 29, 2008
Many of the haters call this book "poorly researched" and "pseudo-scholarship" and a "hateful rant". Murray, of course, is actually one of the most measured and reasonable people one will encounter in public life, and his book is loaded with an appendix full of tables, charts, notes, and figures, taken from legitimate sources like the Census Bureau, the famous Negative Income Tax experiments, and the Coleman Report. The people who are claiming that his scholarship is flawed and the data is fixed are simply lying. Either that, or they feel the only source of "real" data to be Mother Jones magazine or perhaps even the People's Weekly World.br /br /An astute observer will note that the reviews are concentrated at the extremes, perhaps in what Murray would call, a "U" curve. This is often the case when partisanship fuels the debate. It becomes a battle of numbers between supporters and haters. The good thing is that I don't have to take such things into consideration when reviewing this book. It is an excellent, well-argued, lucidly written, exhaustively and meticulously researched account of the American Welfare project and the "War On Poverty". Murray is measured and reasonable; however, he is no moderate. Take that for what it's worth. While his is fair-minded and not dogmatic, his opinions are not in the general stream of contemporary American politics. Of course, if you want mainstream opinion, listen to whatever talk-radio host you agree with 99% of the time. If you think "mainstream opinion" is a lot of inane, predigested codswallop and would prefer a factual and thorough account of things that cuts through the gibberish and the BS, read Charles Murray.

5 out of 5 stars

This book is not about race... August 27, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

Fabulous analysis combined with lousy policy ideas February 15, 2007
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

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.br /br /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.br /br /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.

1 out of 5 stars

Interesting read February 6, 2007
3 out of 32 found this review helpful

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.

2 out of 5 stars

An example of political and racist "science" January 15, 2007
1 out of 34 found this review helpful

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.

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