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The Two Wars Against Poverty: Economic Growth and the Great Society
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10065 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
4,873 Words |
| Author
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Charles A. Murray
Charles A. Murray is senior research fellow at the Manhattan
Institute for Policy Research and the author of Losing Ground:
American Social Policy 1950-1980. |
Most people, including most scholars, think the War on Poverty began with a formal declaration by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In a sense this is true, for there was in fact no formal governmental decree before that time. Academic researchers have chosen to conduct their statistical analyses of poverty within this narrow time frame, producing books with titles like A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs (Published in 1977), or Progress Against poverty: A Review of the 1964-1974 Decade. And so persuasive has this scholarly conception of recent history been that public debate over the Reagan administration's domestic agenda has been based on the widespread assumption that only beginning in 1964 were great strides made toward the elimination, or at least the alleviation, of poverty in America.
But in another sense this view is profoundly misleading. One cannot make a thoroughgoing statistical analysis of the War on Poverty--specifically, of the Great Society's efforts to eliminate it--if one does not examine the statistics on poverty before the Great Society. Only by doing this can we begin to understand both the effects of the War on Poverty and our present situation.
The data for such an analysis are readily available. As we look back, the figures, unless otherwise noted, will be drawn from the standard publications of the Bureau of the Census: the annual statistical Abstracts of the United States, Historical Statistics of the United States, and the decennial census reports.
The purpose here is not gain converts to one interpretation of recent social history, but to bring to the surface some of the empirical reasons for questioning whether
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