New Thinking About Poverty

When Charles Murray’s attack on the welfare system, Losing Ground, was published in 1984, it drew a great deal of attention. With the conservative Manhattan Institute bankrolling an artful public relations campaign, Murray and his ideas were soon being widely discussed on television, in newspapers and magazines, and in policy circles. The fact that there was little or no empirical evidence to support much of Murray’s argument (and a substantial body of evidence to refute it...