Skip to main content
Categories
News

The Destructive Legacy of the Great Society

{snip}

Liberals view a larger welfare state as an unalloyed good, but what’s the track record? Entitlement programs were dramatically expanded in the 1960s in the service of a war on poverty, yet poverty fell at a slower rate after the Great Society initiatives were implemented, and overall dependency on the government for food, shelter and other basic necessities increased. According to Howard Husock, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a coming book on housing policy, “The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It,” the median time a family spends in New York City public housing today is 19 years. And 10% of public housing residents in the city have been there for more than 40 years. {snip}

{snip}

Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North. No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of black advancement, which predates affirmative action programs that often receive credit for creating the black middle class. Moreover, what we experienced in the wake of the Great Society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression. Black labor-force participation rates fell, black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. In 1960 fewer than 25% of black children were being raised by a single mother; within four decades, it was more than half.

Antisocial behavior is closely associated with family breakdown, so it’s no surprise that more fatherless homes led to higher violent crime rates. The criminologist Barry Latzer has noted that black male homicide rates had been falling in the 1940s (by 18%) and in the 1950s (by 22%), yet this trend would reverse itself beginning in the late 1960s and continue to worsen for nearly three decades. The political left likes to cite the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. But what about the legacy of the massive welfare-state interventions in the 1960s?

{snip}