C H A R L E S    M U R R A Y    G E T S    T R A P P E D    I N    T H E    G H E T T O


 









Psychoanalyzing technolibertarians, while an enjoyable pastime, does not refute their arguments. When country-club Republicans expound on Adam Smith at their lily-white leisure, one is justified in viewing their credo as a fig leaf covering self-interest. Libertarians aren't quite so easy to dismiss out of hand. Regardless of what motivates one to become a libertarian, he or she presumably believes that a world without government regulation would produce a better world than the one we now live in. (As for those cold-blooded, or honest, enough to acknowledge that they simply don't care whether it would improve things for the mass of mankind, we leave them with a shudder to rejoice in their essential superiority.) In order to make their case, they must make a compelling argument that governmental interventions have resulted in worse outcomes than would have occurred "naturally." The burden of proof is on them -- after all, they are calling for a radical alteration of society -- but their arguments must be addressed. 

The issue we choose to examine is arguably the most important and contested social-science issue of our time: the effects of welfare on the black poor. It is an appropriate topic, for one of the authors under discussion, Charles Murray, not only made his reputation writing about it, the conclusions he drew inform his libertarianism. If those conclusions are rejected, the libertarian assault on the welfare state loses one of its most potent buttresses.

Murray's "Losing Ground" (1984) is one of the most important and influential works of social policy written in the last 20 years. It has influenced several Republican administrations and helped frame the terms of the welfare debate, with consequences being played out today. Murray set out to make sense of an apparently contradictory fact: At precisely the time when Great Society social welfare programs aimed specifically at them were implemented, the plight of inner-city blacks, far from improving, dramatically worsened.  How could this be? Murray argues that welfare programs like AFDC, instead of providing a helping hand for those in temporary need, actually created the problem. By making it more economically feasible for single mothers to remain unmarried, he argues, welfare increased the incidence of out-of-wedlock births, thus hastening the decline of black communities and creating a parasitic underclass, whose values and goals are antithetical to those of the majority of Americans. By their patronizing, "it's not your fault" attitude, white Americans sent the wrong message to blacks, failing to cheer on those who did make their way out of poverty and failing to stigmatize those who remained wards of the state.

Murray draws several larger conclusions from his study. All transfer programs (programs that take money from one group and give it to another) are "treacherous" and must be used with extreme care. Their flaws -- principally that they inadvertently reward the very behavior they are trying to change -- do not vary from case to case, but are inherent.

Murray's arguments are powerful, and supported by a damning array of statistics. William Julius Wilson, in "The Truly Disadvantaged" (1987), attempts to rebut Murray, pointing out that Murray fails to address the fact, contradictory for his thesis, that welfare became less advantageous in comparison to work after 1970, yet female-headed households continued to increase and black employment to decline. Wilson lays the principal blame on the loss of jobs that followed the nation's structural economic shift from manufacturing to service work, and calls for a series of ambitious new race-neutral measures, including job-creating policies, child care and job training.

Wilson doesn't succeed in entirely refuting Murray's diagnosis, but he doesn't need to: His explanation is more comprehensive. Murray's common-sense claim that welfare will always dissuade some people from working -- and  that it contributed to a decline in social stability in the inner city-- can be true without challenging Wilson's structural analysis, which recognizes that for an uneducated welfare mother without child care or good transportation, a $5-an-hour job 10 miles away might as well be on the moon. 

Murray avoids dealing with these real-life issues, choosing instead to float about in the stratosphere of social-science statistics while insinuating that welfare exacerbated a pathological "culture of poverty." The problem is that he cannot acknowledge his adherence to this race-oriented, culture-of-poverty approach, because he wants to argue that welfare has the same pernicious effects on whites as it does on blacks. Since he can't show this (long-term welfare recipients are disproportionately black), his larger argument about the demoralizing effects of welfare collapses. 

Murray's arguments about how welfare played a part in creating inner-city pathologies remain potent -- which is why "Losing Ground" cannot be simply dismissed. Ironically, however, he paints such a bleak view of the underclass's prospects that he ends up making a case against laissez-faire. It is difficult to escape Wilson's conclusion (as we shall see, Murray himself comes around to it) that the peculiarly intractable problems of the black underclass, which are bound up with a complex of factors that include the effects of historical racism, a demoralized and dysfunctional subculture, worldwide pressures leading to a declining U.S. job market and the flight of the black middle class, demand truly structural reform -- the kind that can only be enacted by governmental action on a WPA scale.

Murray himself must have recognized that "Losing Ground" was really about blacks, not welfare. Why else would he have obsessively embarked upon one of the most unpleasant intellectual odysseys in recent memory -- his demonstration, with the late Richard Herrnstein, that blacks as a group are somewhat less adept at taking intelligence tests than whites? And the same recognition may have led him to recant his most strident anti-redistributionist claims. Lost in the uproar over "The Bell Curve" (1994) is the fact that the authors, having made a case that less intelligent and lower-class people are increasingly being left behind in a high-tech age of "cognitive elites" (what a revelation!), meekly accept income redistribution. "As America enters the twenty-first century, it is inconceivable that it will return to a laissez-faire system regarding income," they write. "Some sort of redistribution is here to stay. The question is how to redistribute in ways that increase the chances for the people at the bottom of society to take control of their lives ..." Ironically, the bleak vision of "The Bell Curve" undercuts libertarianism's habitual sunny optimism -- and opens the door to governmental intervention. It is not necessary to accept Murray's racial essentialism  to accept his policy prescription.

It is a peculiar progression: "Losing Ground" pretends that underclass blacks are the same as most whites and calls for an end to government aid; "The Bell Curve" asserts that underclass blacks are inferior to most whites and calls for government aid. Logically, there's nothing to prevent one from combining his conclusions differently: Blacks are the same as whites and government aid is needed. 

A realistic appraisal, neither resentful in the right-wing mode nor sentimental in the liberal one, is that America's underclass situation is a tragic mess -- one that government may indeed be partially responsible for,  but that it can also help to improve. Not through indiscriminate War on Poverty programs, which were basically band-aids on a deep wound, but from the ground up, as Wilson suggests -- better schools, recreation facilities, economic policy to create good jobs, an expanded earned income tax credit (which Murray and Herrnstein accept as creating incentives to work), child care and other measures. No one imagines this task will be easy -- and no one should imagine the government can ultimately do the work for the members of the underclass. But neither should anyone pretend that any group outside the government, with its capacity to marshall enormous resources and  appeal to the national conscience, is going to attempt it on the scale it requires. 
 







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