Books
The Poverty War: Great Society vs. Trickle-Down
– Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1982.Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
– (New York: Basic Books, 1984.)Summary: This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually… More
Escaping the Poverty Trap
– Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, September 10, 1984.Excerpt: Political scientist Charles Murray is probably going to be roasted as a reactionary. He’s just written a well-documented polemic arguing that government’s efforts to… More
Saving the Poor from Welfare
– Reason, December 1984.Excerpt: There is a lesson to be learned from our national experience with the Great Society programs of the 1960s and their successors in the years since. The lesson is that the kinds of… More
The Manhattan Project
– Charles Lane, The New Republic, March 25, 1985.The Battle Over ‘Losing Ground’
– Michael Barone, Washington Post, April 3, 1985.Excerpt: The debate rages over Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground.” Has he conclusively proved that Great Society programs hurt rather than helped the poor and therefore… More
Reason Interview
– Reason, May 1985.Excerpt: REASON: Your book Losing Ground is very hot right now. Why did you go into this analysis of social welfare policy? MURRAY: My professional background consisted of evaluating… More
Helping the Poor: A Few Modest Proposals
– Commentary, May 1985.Excerpt: Last fall I published a book entitled Losing Ground. It called attention to the fact that on several of the dimensions we ordinarily use to measure quality of life—unemployment,… More
Author’s Attacks On ‘Great Society’ Shift Social Debate
– Juan Williams, Washington Post, May 28, 1985.Excerpt: Early last year a little-known social-policy analyst had three minutes, as part of a White House round-table group, to tell President Reagan how to improve American society. The… More
Prepared Statement to the Joint Economic Committee
– Prepared Statement, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, June 20, 1985.Excerpt: I thank the Subcommittee for the opportunity to appear before it today, but the assignment is daunting. The last time I tried to answer the question, “Did we win or lose the… More
Charles Murray & His Critics
– Robert Royal, Crisis Magazine, July 1985.Excerpt: What is it about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984) that has evoked such violent reactions? After initial shock at its… More
The Rediscovery of Character
– James Q. Wilson, The Public Interest, Fall 1985.Excerpt: Charles Murray, whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, has done so much to focus attention on the problem of welfare, generally endorses the economic explanation for the decline of… More
The Constraints on Helping
– The Freeman, February 1986.Excerpt: Let me pose a problem in the form that Einstein used to call a “thought experiment.” Whereas Einstein used the device to imagine such things as the view from the head of a… More
White Welfare, White Families, ‘White Trash’
– National Review, March 28, 1986.Excerpt: How many dozens of article, Op-Ed columns, cover stories, talk shows, and features on the six o’clock news have by now used Bill Moyer’s documentary on the vanishing… More
Forum: What Does the Government Owe the Poor
– The Harper's Monthly, April 1986.Q&A: Charles Murray; Of Babies And Stick
– Robert Pear, New York Times, April 11, 1986.Excerpt: One of the Reagan Administration’s main sources of inspiration on social welfare policy is a book by Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist. In “Losing Ground:… More
Losing Ground Two Years Later
– Cato Journal, Spring/Summer 1986.Excerpt: Losing Ground appeared in the fall of 1984. It was an election year, and the two presidential candidates held a debate on domestic policy. The word “black” was hardly… More
The Origins of the Underclass
– Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic, June 1986.Excerpt: The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to: they make… More
No, Welfare Isn’t Really the Problem
– The Public Interest, Summer 1986.Excerpt: Ellwood and Lawrence Summers’s article “Is Welfare Really the Problem?” (Spring 1986) exemplifies a continuing problem that clouds debate about the underclass. On one side… More
Why Murray Prevailed
– Lawrence M. Mead, Academic Questions 1:2 (Spring 1988).Don’t Give Up: Poverty Programs That Work
– The Washington Monthly, June, 1988.Excerpt: What you have generously offered me is a chance to say that while I think most of the programs failed, I’m not a fanatic, and to prove it, here are some successes. And I… More
The Coming of Custodial Democracy
– Commentary, September 1988.Excerpt: It is by now taken for granted that the nation is about to turn to the Left in domestic policy. “Reaganism is finished, bankrupt, used up, over,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger,… More
Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family
– David T. Ellwood, Basic Books, 1988.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s powerful indictment of the social welfare system implicitly emphasizes these contradictions. According to Murray, the very system that was designed to help… More
Washington at Work; An Architect of the Reagan Vision Plunges Into Inquiry on Race and I.Q.
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, November 30, 1990.Excerpt: One thing Charles Murray knows how to do is generate controversy. In 1984, his book “Losing Ground” argued that social programs did more harm than good and proposed, as… More
Congress Writes a Law: Research and Welfare Reform
– Ron Haskins, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10:4 (Fall 1991).Abstract: This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on… More
Stop Favoring Unwed Mothers
– New York Times, January 16, 1993.Excerpt: The New Jersey Legislature took the plunge this week and passed a welfare package that, if signed by Gov. Jim Florio, would limit the benefits for women on welfare if they have… More
Welfare and the Family: The American Experience
– Journal of Labor Economics, January 1993.Subsidized Illegitimacy
– Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, November 19, 1993.Excerpt: In fact, the idea I proposed is not at all original. I was merely echoing Charles Murray, who in his book, “Losing Ground,” offered the cold turkey approach as a… More
Regaining Lost Ground
– City Journal, Spring 1994.Excerpt: In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13 percent of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next 12 years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled.… More
Does Welfare Bring More Babies?
– The Public Interest, Spring 1994.Excerpt: LAST OCTOBER, I published a long piece on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Coming White Underclass.” Its thesis was that white illegitimacy—22 percent… More
Talking Points: Response to Charles Murray
– Welfare Reform Working Group, William Jefferson Clinton Library, May 3, 1994.Excerpt: “He did the country a great service. I mean, he and I have often disagreed, but I think his analysis is essentially right. Now, whether his prescription is right, I… More
Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, October 9, 1994.Excerpt: Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get. It is hard to know which is more startling — that Murray would imagine before… More
What to Do about Welfare
– Commentary, December 1994.Excerpt: In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s television ad promising to “end welfare as we know it” was one of his best vote-getters, so effective that it was the first choice for a… More
Keeping Priorities Straight on Welfare Reform
– Society, August 1996.Excerpt: In April 1995 I was asked to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the welfare reform bill then under discussion. As I write (mid-November 1995), the Senate and House… More
Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics
– Steven M. Teles, University Press of Kansas, 1996.Excerpt: There is no way to overestimate the effect that Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground had on the intellectual debate on poverty. Murray’s modest proposal, the outright… More
What Government Must Do
– American Enterprise, January/February 1998.Excerpt: Years ago I worked for a research company that evaluated social programs for the federal government. One time I was heading a team assessing a program for troubled inner-city… More
And Now for the Bad News
– Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1998.Excerpt: Good news is everywhere. Crime rates are falling; welfare rolls are plunging; unemployment is at rock bottom; teenage births are down. Name an indicator, economic or social, and… More
Family Formation
– In Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins, eds., New World of Welfare Reform. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.How Think Tanks Achieve Public Policy Breakthroughs
– Lawrence Mone, Manhattan Institute, May 29, 2002.Excerpt: It was back in 1984 that we sponsored what was to become a landmark book: Losing Ground, by Charles Murray, which was published by Basic Books. Charles, at the time, was a not very… More
The Manhattan Institute at 25
– Tom Wolfe, in Brian Anderson, ed., Turning Intellect into Influence, Manhattan Institute, 2004.Excerpt: But when the smoke cleared, Losing Ground was still standing. It had proved impossible to pigeonhole it in any ideological fashion. Murray had served in the Peace Corps in Thailand… More
Research and Welfare Reform
– Lawrence M. Mead, Review of Policy Research 22:3 (May 2005).Abstract: Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes… More
Ending Welfare As We Knew It by Myron Magnet
– Myron Magnet, National Review, December 19, 2005.Excerpt: There’s no better proof of the adage that ideas have consequences than Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. The magisterial 1984 classic… More
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– (Washington: AEI Press, 2006.)Summary from Publisher: America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for… More
A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2006.Excerpt: This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and… More
Charles Murray: Abolish the Welfare State
– Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, March 29, 2006.Excerpt: Within a few years of the publication of Losing Ground, Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin began his rounds of welfare reform, replacing by-right welfare payments with work… More
The Battle of Ideas
– The Economist, May 23, 2006.Excerpt: It would be foolish to underestimate Mr Murray’s ability not just to stir debate but to steer policy: 12 years after “Losing Ground” was dismissed as the work of a… More
The Check Is In the Mail
– Lawrence M. Mead, First Things, October 2006.Excerpt: Toward the end of In Our Hands, Murray makes clear that his priority is not really to overcome the dysfunctions behind poverty. Rather, it is to restore the small-government… More
Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State
– Basic Income Studies, August 2008.Excerpt: Professor Amitai Etzioni’s policy brief presents a cogent case for a guaranteed income (GI). Like other advocates, he sees the GI as a moral imperative — in his case, it is an… More
Mind the Gap by Yuval Levin
– Yuval Levin, Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s profound and important new book has, for the most part, been received as merely the latest volley in the inequality debates. Its champions have tended to praise… More
Charles Murray on Economic and Moral Life in America
– Video, Conversations with Bill Kristol, July 13, 2013.Summary: Economic and moral well-being in America with the preeminent political scientist and author of The Bell Curve.
Essays
The Poverty War: Great Society vs. Trickle-Down
– Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1982.Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
– (New York: Basic Books, 1984.)Summary: This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually… More
Escaping the Poverty Trap
– Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, September 10, 1984.Excerpt: Political scientist Charles Murray is probably going to be roasted as a reactionary. He’s just written a well-documented polemic arguing that government’s efforts to… More
Saving the Poor from Welfare
– Reason, December 1984.Excerpt: There is a lesson to be learned from our national experience with the Great Society programs of the 1960s and their successors in the years since. The lesson is that the kinds of… More
The Manhattan Project
– Charles Lane, The New Republic, March 25, 1985.The Battle Over ‘Losing Ground’
– Michael Barone, Washington Post, April 3, 1985.Excerpt: The debate rages over Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground.” Has he conclusively proved that Great Society programs hurt rather than helped the poor and therefore… More
Reason Interview
– Reason, May 1985.Excerpt: REASON: Your book Losing Ground is very hot right now. Why did you go into this analysis of social welfare policy? MURRAY: My professional background consisted of evaluating… More
Helping the Poor: A Few Modest Proposals
– Commentary, May 1985.Excerpt: Last fall I published a book entitled Losing Ground. It called attention to the fact that on several of the dimensions we ordinarily use to measure quality of life—unemployment,… More
Author’s Attacks On ‘Great Society’ Shift Social Debate
– Juan Williams, Washington Post, May 28, 1985.Excerpt: Early last year a little-known social-policy analyst had three minutes, as part of a White House round-table group, to tell President Reagan how to improve American society. The… More
Prepared Statement to the Joint Economic Committee
– Prepared Statement, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, June 20, 1985.Excerpt: I thank the Subcommittee for the opportunity to appear before it today, but the assignment is daunting. The last time I tried to answer the question, “Did we win or lose the… More
Charles Murray & His Critics
– Robert Royal, Crisis Magazine, July 1985.Excerpt: What is it about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984) that has evoked such violent reactions? After initial shock at its… More
The Rediscovery of Character
– James Q. Wilson, The Public Interest, Fall 1985.Excerpt: Charles Murray, whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, has done so much to focus attention on the problem of welfare, generally endorses the economic explanation for the decline of… More
The Constraints on Helping
– The Freeman, February 1986.Excerpt: Let me pose a problem in the form that Einstein used to call a “thought experiment.” Whereas Einstein used the device to imagine such things as the view from the head of a… More
White Welfare, White Families, ‘White Trash’
– National Review, March 28, 1986.Excerpt: How many dozens of article, Op-Ed columns, cover stories, talk shows, and features on the six o’clock news have by now used Bill Moyer’s documentary on the vanishing… More
Forum: What Does the Government Owe the Poor
– The Harper's Monthly, April 1986.Q&A: Charles Murray; Of Babies And Stick
– Robert Pear, New York Times, April 11, 1986.Excerpt: One of the Reagan Administration’s main sources of inspiration on social welfare policy is a book by Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist. In “Losing Ground:… More
Losing Ground Two Years Later
– Cato Journal, Spring/Summer 1986.Excerpt: Losing Ground appeared in the fall of 1984. It was an election year, and the two presidential candidates held a debate on domestic policy. The word “black” was hardly… More
The Origins of the Underclass
– Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic, June 1986.Excerpt: The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to: they make… More
No, Welfare Isn’t Really the Problem
– The Public Interest, Summer 1986.Excerpt: Ellwood and Lawrence Summers’s article “Is Welfare Really the Problem?” (Spring 1986) exemplifies a continuing problem that clouds debate about the underclass. On one side… More
Why Murray Prevailed
– Lawrence M. Mead, Academic Questions 1:2 (Spring 1988).Don’t Give Up: Poverty Programs That Work
– The Washington Monthly, June, 1988.Excerpt: What you have generously offered me is a chance to say that while I think most of the programs failed, I’m not a fanatic, and to prove it, here are some successes. And I… More
The Coming of Custodial Democracy
– Commentary, September 1988.Excerpt: It is by now taken for granted that the nation is about to turn to the Left in domestic policy. “Reaganism is finished, bankrupt, used up, over,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger,… More
Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family
– David T. Ellwood, Basic Books, 1988.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s powerful indictment of the social welfare system implicitly emphasizes these contradictions. According to Murray, the very system that was designed to help… More
Washington at Work; An Architect of the Reagan Vision Plunges Into Inquiry on Race and I.Q.
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, November 30, 1990.Excerpt: One thing Charles Murray knows how to do is generate controversy. In 1984, his book “Losing Ground” argued that social programs did more harm than good and proposed, as… More
Congress Writes a Law: Research and Welfare Reform
– Ron Haskins, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10:4 (Fall 1991).Abstract: This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on… More
Stop Favoring Unwed Mothers
– New York Times, January 16, 1993.Excerpt: The New Jersey Legislature took the plunge this week and passed a welfare package that, if signed by Gov. Jim Florio, would limit the benefits for women on welfare if they have… More
Welfare and the Family: The American Experience
– Journal of Labor Economics, January 1993.Subsidized Illegitimacy
– Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, November 19, 1993.Excerpt: In fact, the idea I proposed is not at all original. I was merely echoing Charles Murray, who in his book, “Losing Ground,” offered the cold turkey approach as a… More
Regaining Lost Ground
– City Journal, Spring 1994.Excerpt: In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13 percent of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next 12 years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled.… More
Does Welfare Bring More Babies?
– The Public Interest, Spring 1994.Excerpt: LAST OCTOBER, I published a long piece on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Coming White Underclass.” Its thesis was that white illegitimacy—22 percent… More
Talking Points: Response to Charles Murray
– Welfare Reform Working Group, William Jefferson Clinton Library, May 3, 1994.Excerpt: “He did the country a great service. I mean, he and I have often disagreed, but I think his analysis is essentially right. Now, whether his prescription is right, I… More
Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, October 9, 1994.Excerpt: Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get. It is hard to know which is more startling — that Murray would imagine before… More
What to Do about Welfare
– Commentary, December 1994.Excerpt: In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s television ad promising to “end welfare as we know it” was one of his best vote-getters, so effective that it was the first choice for a… More
Keeping Priorities Straight on Welfare Reform
– Society, August 1996.Excerpt: In April 1995 I was asked to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the welfare reform bill then under discussion. As I write (mid-November 1995), the Senate and House… More
Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics
– Steven M. Teles, University Press of Kansas, 1996.Excerpt: There is no way to overestimate the effect that Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground had on the intellectual debate on poverty. Murray’s modest proposal, the outright… More
What Government Must Do
– American Enterprise, January/February 1998.Excerpt: Years ago I worked for a research company that evaluated social programs for the federal government. One time I was heading a team assessing a program for troubled inner-city… More
And Now for the Bad News
– Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1998.Excerpt: Good news is everywhere. Crime rates are falling; welfare rolls are plunging; unemployment is at rock bottom; teenage births are down. Name an indicator, economic or social, and… More
Family Formation
– In Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins, eds., New World of Welfare Reform. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.How Think Tanks Achieve Public Policy Breakthroughs
– Lawrence Mone, Manhattan Institute, May 29, 2002.Excerpt: It was back in 1984 that we sponsored what was to become a landmark book: Losing Ground, by Charles Murray, which was published by Basic Books. Charles, at the time, was a not very… More
The Manhattan Institute at 25
– Tom Wolfe, in Brian Anderson, ed., Turning Intellect into Influence, Manhattan Institute, 2004.Excerpt: But when the smoke cleared, Losing Ground was still standing. It had proved impossible to pigeonhole it in any ideological fashion. Murray had served in the Peace Corps in Thailand… More
Research and Welfare Reform
– Lawrence M. Mead, Review of Policy Research 22:3 (May 2005).Abstract: Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes… More
Ending Welfare As We Knew It by Myron Magnet
– Myron Magnet, National Review, December 19, 2005.Excerpt: There’s no better proof of the adage that ideas have consequences than Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. The magisterial 1984 classic… More
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– (Washington: AEI Press, 2006.)Summary from Publisher: America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for… More
A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2006.Excerpt: This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and… More
Charles Murray: Abolish the Welfare State
– Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, March 29, 2006.Excerpt: Within a few years of the publication of Losing Ground, Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin began his rounds of welfare reform, replacing by-right welfare payments with work… More
The Battle of Ideas
– The Economist, May 23, 2006.Excerpt: It would be foolish to underestimate Mr Murray’s ability not just to stir debate but to steer policy: 12 years after “Losing Ground” was dismissed as the work of a… More
The Check Is In the Mail
– Lawrence M. Mead, First Things, October 2006.Excerpt: Toward the end of In Our Hands, Murray makes clear that his priority is not really to overcome the dysfunctions behind poverty. Rather, it is to restore the small-government… More
Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State
– Basic Income Studies, August 2008.Excerpt: Professor Amitai Etzioni’s policy brief presents a cogent case for a guaranteed income (GI). Like other advocates, he sees the GI as a moral imperative — in his case, it is an… More
Mind the Gap by Yuval Levin
– Yuval Levin, Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s profound and important new book has, for the most part, been received as merely the latest volley in the inequality debates. Its champions have tended to praise… More
Charles Murray on Economic and Moral Life in America
– Video, Conversations with Bill Kristol, July 13, 2013.Summary: Economic and moral well-being in America with the preeminent political scientist and author of The Bell Curve.
Commentary
The Poverty War: Great Society vs. Trickle-Down
– Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1982.Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
– (New York: Basic Books, 1984.)Summary: This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually… More
Escaping the Poverty Trap
– Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, September 10, 1984.Excerpt: Political scientist Charles Murray is probably going to be roasted as a reactionary. He’s just written a well-documented polemic arguing that government’s efforts to… More
Saving the Poor from Welfare
– Reason, December 1984.Excerpt: There is a lesson to be learned from our national experience with the Great Society programs of the 1960s and their successors in the years since. The lesson is that the kinds of… More
The Manhattan Project
– Charles Lane, The New Republic, March 25, 1985.The Battle Over ‘Losing Ground’
– Michael Barone, Washington Post, April 3, 1985.Excerpt: The debate rages over Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground.” Has he conclusively proved that Great Society programs hurt rather than helped the poor and therefore… More
Reason Interview
– Reason, May 1985.Excerpt: REASON: Your book Losing Ground is very hot right now. Why did you go into this analysis of social welfare policy? MURRAY: My professional background consisted of evaluating… More
Helping the Poor: A Few Modest Proposals
– Commentary, May 1985.Excerpt: Last fall I published a book entitled Losing Ground. It called attention to the fact that on several of the dimensions we ordinarily use to measure quality of life—unemployment,… More
Author’s Attacks On ‘Great Society’ Shift Social Debate
– Juan Williams, Washington Post, May 28, 1985.Excerpt: Early last year a little-known social-policy analyst had three minutes, as part of a White House round-table group, to tell President Reagan how to improve American society. The… More
Prepared Statement to the Joint Economic Committee
– Prepared Statement, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, June 20, 1985.Excerpt: I thank the Subcommittee for the opportunity to appear before it today, but the assignment is daunting. The last time I tried to answer the question, “Did we win or lose the… More
Charles Murray & His Critics
– Robert Royal, Crisis Magazine, July 1985.Excerpt: What is it about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984) that has evoked such violent reactions? After initial shock at its… More
The Rediscovery of Character
– James Q. Wilson, The Public Interest, Fall 1985.Excerpt: Charles Murray, whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, has done so much to focus attention on the problem of welfare, generally endorses the economic explanation for the decline of… More
The Constraints on Helping
– The Freeman, February 1986.Excerpt: Let me pose a problem in the form that Einstein used to call a “thought experiment.” Whereas Einstein used the device to imagine such things as the view from the head of a… More
White Welfare, White Families, ‘White Trash’
– National Review, March 28, 1986.Excerpt: How many dozens of article, Op-Ed columns, cover stories, talk shows, and features on the six o’clock news have by now used Bill Moyer’s documentary on the vanishing… More
Forum: What Does the Government Owe the Poor
– The Harper's Monthly, April 1986.Q&A: Charles Murray; Of Babies And Stick
– Robert Pear, New York Times, April 11, 1986.Excerpt: One of the Reagan Administration’s main sources of inspiration on social welfare policy is a book by Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist. In “Losing Ground:… More
Losing Ground Two Years Later
– Cato Journal, Spring/Summer 1986.Excerpt: Losing Ground appeared in the fall of 1984. It was an election year, and the two presidential candidates held a debate on domestic policy. The word “black” was hardly… More
The Origins of the Underclass
– Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic, June 1986.Excerpt: The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to: they make… More
No, Welfare Isn’t Really the Problem
– The Public Interest, Summer 1986.Excerpt: Ellwood and Lawrence Summers’s article “Is Welfare Really the Problem?” (Spring 1986) exemplifies a continuing problem that clouds debate about the underclass. On one side… More
Why Murray Prevailed
– Lawrence M. Mead, Academic Questions 1:2 (Spring 1988).Don’t Give Up: Poverty Programs That Work
– The Washington Monthly, June, 1988.Excerpt: What you have generously offered me is a chance to say that while I think most of the programs failed, I’m not a fanatic, and to prove it, here are some successes. And I… More
The Coming of Custodial Democracy
– Commentary, September 1988.Excerpt: It is by now taken for granted that the nation is about to turn to the Left in domestic policy. “Reaganism is finished, bankrupt, used up, over,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger,… More
Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family
– David T. Ellwood, Basic Books, 1988.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s powerful indictment of the social welfare system implicitly emphasizes these contradictions. According to Murray, the very system that was designed to help… More
Washington at Work; An Architect of the Reagan Vision Plunges Into Inquiry on Race and I.Q.
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, November 30, 1990.Excerpt: One thing Charles Murray knows how to do is generate controversy. In 1984, his book “Losing Ground” argued that social programs did more harm than good and proposed, as… More
Congress Writes a Law: Research and Welfare Reform
– Ron Haskins, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10:4 (Fall 1991).Abstract: This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on… More
Stop Favoring Unwed Mothers
– New York Times, January 16, 1993.Excerpt: The New Jersey Legislature took the plunge this week and passed a welfare package that, if signed by Gov. Jim Florio, would limit the benefits for women on welfare if they have… More
Welfare and the Family: The American Experience
– Journal of Labor Economics, January 1993.Subsidized Illegitimacy
– Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, November 19, 1993.Excerpt: In fact, the idea I proposed is not at all original. I was merely echoing Charles Murray, who in his book, “Losing Ground,” offered the cold turkey approach as a… More
Regaining Lost Ground
– City Journal, Spring 1994.Excerpt: In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13 percent of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next 12 years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled.… More
Does Welfare Bring More Babies?
– The Public Interest, Spring 1994.Excerpt: LAST OCTOBER, I published a long piece on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Coming White Underclass.” Its thesis was that white illegitimacy—22 percent… More
Talking Points: Response to Charles Murray
– Welfare Reform Working Group, William Jefferson Clinton Library, May 3, 1994.Excerpt: “He did the country a great service. I mean, he and I have often disagreed, but I think his analysis is essentially right. Now, whether his prescription is right, I… More
Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, October 9, 1994.Excerpt: Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get. It is hard to know which is more startling — that Murray would imagine before… More
What to Do about Welfare
– Commentary, December 1994.Excerpt: In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s television ad promising to “end welfare as we know it” was one of his best vote-getters, so effective that it was the first choice for a… More
Keeping Priorities Straight on Welfare Reform
– Society, August 1996.Excerpt: In April 1995 I was asked to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the welfare reform bill then under discussion. As I write (mid-November 1995), the Senate and House… More
Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics
– Steven M. Teles, University Press of Kansas, 1996.Excerpt: There is no way to overestimate the effect that Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground had on the intellectual debate on poverty. Murray’s modest proposal, the outright… More
What Government Must Do
– American Enterprise, January/February 1998.Excerpt: Years ago I worked for a research company that evaluated social programs for the federal government. One time I was heading a team assessing a program for troubled inner-city… More
And Now for the Bad News
– Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1998.Excerpt: Good news is everywhere. Crime rates are falling; welfare rolls are plunging; unemployment is at rock bottom; teenage births are down. Name an indicator, economic or social, and… More
Family Formation
– In Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins, eds., New World of Welfare Reform. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.How Think Tanks Achieve Public Policy Breakthroughs
– Lawrence Mone, Manhattan Institute, May 29, 2002.Excerpt: It was back in 1984 that we sponsored what was to become a landmark book: Losing Ground, by Charles Murray, which was published by Basic Books. Charles, at the time, was a not very… More
The Manhattan Institute at 25
– Tom Wolfe, in Brian Anderson, ed., Turning Intellect into Influence, Manhattan Institute, 2004.Excerpt: But when the smoke cleared, Losing Ground was still standing. It had proved impossible to pigeonhole it in any ideological fashion. Murray had served in the Peace Corps in Thailand… More
Research and Welfare Reform
– Lawrence M. Mead, Review of Policy Research 22:3 (May 2005).Abstract: Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes… More
Ending Welfare As We Knew It by Myron Magnet
– Myron Magnet, National Review, December 19, 2005.Excerpt: There’s no better proof of the adage that ideas have consequences than Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. The magisterial 1984 classic… More
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– (Washington: AEI Press, 2006.)Summary from Publisher: America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for… More
A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2006.Excerpt: This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and… More
Charles Murray: Abolish the Welfare State
– Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, March 29, 2006.Excerpt: Within a few years of the publication of Losing Ground, Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin began his rounds of welfare reform, replacing by-right welfare payments with work… More
The Battle of Ideas
– The Economist, May 23, 2006.Excerpt: It would be foolish to underestimate Mr Murray’s ability not just to stir debate but to steer policy: 12 years after “Losing Ground” was dismissed as the work of a… More
The Check Is In the Mail
– Lawrence M. Mead, First Things, October 2006.Excerpt: Toward the end of In Our Hands, Murray makes clear that his priority is not really to overcome the dysfunctions behind poverty. Rather, it is to restore the small-government… More
Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State
– Basic Income Studies, August 2008.Excerpt: Professor Amitai Etzioni’s policy brief presents a cogent case for a guaranteed income (GI). Like other advocates, he sees the GI as a moral imperative — in his case, it is an… More
Mind the Gap by Yuval Levin
– Yuval Levin, Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s profound and important new book has, for the most part, been received as merely the latest volley in the inequality debates. Its champions have tended to praise… More
Charles Murray on Economic and Moral Life in America
– Video, Conversations with Bill Kristol, July 13, 2013.Summary: Economic and moral well-being in America with the preeminent political scientist and author of The Bell Curve.
Multimedia
The Poverty War: Great Society vs. Trickle-Down
– Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1982.Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
– (New York: Basic Books, 1984.)Summary: This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually… More
Escaping the Poverty Trap
– Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, September 10, 1984.Excerpt: Political scientist Charles Murray is probably going to be roasted as a reactionary. He’s just written a well-documented polemic arguing that government’s efforts to… More
Saving the Poor from Welfare
– Reason, December 1984.Excerpt: There is a lesson to be learned from our national experience with the Great Society programs of the 1960s and their successors in the years since. The lesson is that the kinds of… More
The Manhattan Project
– Charles Lane, The New Republic, March 25, 1985.The Battle Over ‘Losing Ground’
– Michael Barone, Washington Post, April 3, 1985.Excerpt: The debate rages over Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground.” Has he conclusively proved that Great Society programs hurt rather than helped the poor and therefore… More
Reason Interview
– Reason, May 1985.Excerpt: REASON: Your book Losing Ground is very hot right now. Why did you go into this analysis of social welfare policy? MURRAY: My professional background consisted of evaluating… More
Helping the Poor: A Few Modest Proposals
– Commentary, May 1985.Excerpt: Last fall I published a book entitled Losing Ground. It called attention to the fact that on several of the dimensions we ordinarily use to measure quality of life—unemployment,… More
Author’s Attacks On ‘Great Society’ Shift Social Debate
– Juan Williams, Washington Post, May 28, 1985.Excerpt: Early last year a little-known social-policy analyst had three minutes, as part of a White House round-table group, to tell President Reagan how to improve American society. The… More
Prepared Statement to the Joint Economic Committee
– Prepared Statement, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, June 20, 1985.Excerpt: I thank the Subcommittee for the opportunity to appear before it today, but the assignment is daunting. The last time I tried to answer the question, “Did we win or lose the… More
Charles Murray & His Critics
– Robert Royal, Crisis Magazine, July 1985.Excerpt: What is it about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984) that has evoked such violent reactions? After initial shock at its… More
The Rediscovery of Character
– James Q. Wilson, The Public Interest, Fall 1985.Excerpt: Charles Murray, whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, has done so much to focus attention on the problem of welfare, generally endorses the economic explanation for the decline of… More
The Constraints on Helping
– The Freeman, February 1986.Excerpt: Let me pose a problem in the form that Einstein used to call a “thought experiment.” Whereas Einstein used the device to imagine such things as the view from the head of a… More
White Welfare, White Families, ‘White Trash’
– National Review, March 28, 1986.Excerpt: How many dozens of article, Op-Ed columns, cover stories, talk shows, and features on the six o’clock news have by now used Bill Moyer’s documentary on the vanishing… More
Forum: What Does the Government Owe the Poor
– The Harper's Monthly, April 1986.Q&A: Charles Murray; Of Babies And Stick
– Robert Pear, New York Times, April 11, 1986.Excerpt: One of the Reagan Administration’s main sources of inspiration on social welfare policy is a book by Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist. In “Losing Ground:… More
Losing Ground Two Years Later
– Cato Journal, Spring/Summer 1986.Excerpt: Losing Ground appeared in the fall of 1984. It was an election year, and the two presidential candidates held a debate on domestic policy. The word “black” was hardly… More
The Origins of the Underclass
– Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic, June 1986.Excerpt: The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to: they make… More
No, Welfare Isn’t Really the Problem
– The Public Interest, Summer 1986.Excerpt: Ellwood and Lawrence Summers’s article “Is Welfare Really the Problem?” (Spring 1986) exemplifies a continuing problem that clouds debate about the underclass. On one side… More
Why Murray Prevailed
– Lawrence M. Mead, Academic Questions 1:2 (Spring 1988).Don’t Give Up: Poverty Programs That Work
– The Washington Monthly, June, 1988.Excerpt: What you have generously offered me is a chance to say that while I think most of the programs failed, I’m not a fanatic, and to prove it, here are some successes. And I… More
The Coming of Custodial Democracy
– Commentary, September 1988.Excerpt: It is by now taken for granted that the nation is about to turn to the Left in domestic policy. “Reaganism is finished, bankrupt, used up, over,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger,… More
Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family
– David T. Ellwood, Basic Books, 1988.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s powerful indictment of the social welfare system implicitly emphasizes these contradictions. According to Murray, the very system that was designed to help… More
Washington at Work; An Architect of the Reagan Vision Plunges Into Inquiry on Race and I.Q.
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, November 30, 1990.Excerpt: One thing Charles Murray knows how to do is generate controversy. In 1984, his book “Losing Ground” argued that social programs did more harm than good and proposed, as… More
Congress Writes a Law: Research and Welfare Reform
– Ron Haskins, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10:4 (Fall 1991).Abstract: This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on… More
Stop Favoring Unwed Mothers
– New York Times, January 16, 1993.Excerpt: The New Jersey Legislature took the plunge this week and passed a welfare package that, if signed by Gov. Jim Florio, would limit the benefits for women on welfare if they have… More
Welfare and the Family: The American Experience
– Journal of Labor Economics, January 1993.Subsidized Illegitimacy
– Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, November 19, 1993.Excerpt: In fact, the idea I proposed is not at all original. I was merely echoing Charles Murray, who in his book, “Losing Ground,” offered the cold turkey approach as a… More
Regaining Lost Ground
– City Journal, Spring 1994.Excerpt: In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13 percent of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next 12 years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled.… More
Does Welfare Bring More Babies?
– The Public Interest, Spring 1994.Excerpt: LAST OCTOBER, I published a long piece on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Coming White Underclass.” Its thesis was that white illegitimacy—22 percent… More
Talking Points: Response to Charles Murray
– Welfare Reform Working Group, William Jefferson Clinton Library, May 3, 1994.Excerpt: “He did the country a great service. I mean, he and I have often disagreed, but I think his analysis is essentially right. Now, whether his prescription is right, I… More
Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, October 9, 1994.Excerpt: Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get. It is hard to know which is more startling — that Murray would imagine before… More
What to Do about Welfare
– Commentary, December 1994.Excerpt: In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s television ad promising to “end welfare as we know it” was one of his best vote-getters, so effective that it was the first choice for a… More
Keeping Priorities Straight on Welfare Reform
– Society, August 1996.Excerpt: In April 1995 I was asked to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the welfare reform bill then under discussion. As I write (mid-November 1995), the Senate and House… More
Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics
– Steven M. Teles, University Press of Kansas, 1996.Excerpt: There is no way to overestimate the effect that Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground had on the intellectual debate on poverty. Murray’s modest proposal, the outright… More
What Government Must Do
– American Enterprise, January/February 1998.Excerpt: Years ago I worked for a research company that evaluated social programs for the federal government. One time I was heading a team assessing a program for troubled inner-city… More
And Now for the Bad News
– Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1998.Excerpt: Good news is everywhere. Crime rates are falling; welfare rolls are plunging; unemployment is at rock bottom; teenage births are down. Name an indicator, economic or social, and… More
Family Formation
– In Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins, eds., New World of Welfare Reform. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.How Think Tanks Achieve Public Policy Breakthroughs
– Lawrence Mone, Manhattan Institute, May 29, 2002.Excerpt: It was back in 1984 that we sponsored what was to become a landmark book: Losing Ground, by Charles Murray, which was published by Basic Books. Charles, at the time, was a not very… More
The Manhattan Institute at 25
– Tom Wolfe, in Brian Anderson, ed., Turning Intellect into Influence, Manhattan Institute, 2004.Excerpt: But when the smoke cleared, Losing Ground was still standing. It had proved impossible to pigeonhole it in any ideological fashion. Murray had served in the Peace Corps in Thailand… More
Research and Welfare Reform
– Lawrence M. Mead, Review of Policy Research 22:3 (May 2005).Abstract: Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes… More
Ending Welfare As We Knew It by Myron Magnet
– Myron Magnet, National Review, December 19, 2005.Excerpt: There’s no better proof of the adage that ideas have consequences than Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. The magisterial 1984 classic… More
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– (Washington: AEI Press, 2006.)Summary from Publisher: America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for… More
A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2006.Excerpt: This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and… More
Charles Murray: Abolish the Welfare State
– Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, March 29, 2006.Excerpt: Within a few years of the publication of Losing Ground, Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin began his rounds of welfare reform, replacing by-right welfare payments with work… More
The Battle of Ideas
– The Economist, May 23, 2006.Excerpt: It would be foolish to underestimate Mr Murray’s ability not just to stir debate but to steer policy: 12 years after “Losing Ground” was dismissed as the work of a… More
The Check Is In the Mail
– Lawrence M. Mead, First Things, October 2006.Excerpt: Toward the end of In Our Hands, Murray makes clear that his priority is not really to overcome the dysfunctions behind poverty. Rather, it is to restore the small-government… More
Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State
– Basic Income Studies, August 2008.Excerpt: Professor Amitai Etzioni’s policy brief presents a cogent case for a guaranteed income (GI). Like other advocates, he sees the GI as a moral imperative — in his case, it is an… More
Mind the Gap by Yuval Levin
– Yuval Levin, Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s profound and important new book has, for the most part, been received as merely the latest volley in the inequality debates. Its champions have tended to praise… More
Charles Murray on Economic and Moral Life in America
– Video, Conversations with Bill Kristol, July 13, 2013.Summary: Economic and moral well-being in America with the preeminent political scientist and author of The Bell Curve.
Teaching
The Poverty War: Great Society vs. Trickle-Down
– Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1982.Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
– (New York: Basic Books, 1984.)Summary: This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually… More
Escaping the Poverty Trap
– Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, September 10, 1984.Excerpt: Political scientist Charles Murray is probably going to be roasted as a reactionary. He’s just written a well-documented polemic arguing that government’s efforts to… More
Saving the Poor from Welfare
– Reason, December 1984.Excerpt: There is a lesson to be learned from our national experience with the Great Society programs of the 1960s and their successors in the years since. The lesson is that the kinds of… More
The Manhattan Project
– Charles Lane, The New Republic, March 25, 1985.The Battle Over ‘Losing Ground’
– Michael Barone, Washington Post, April 3, 1985.Excerpt: The debate rages over Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground.” Has he conclusively proved that Great Society programs hurt rather than helped the poor and therefore… More
Reason Interview
– Reason, May 1985.Excerpt: REASON: Your book Losing Ground is very hot right now. Why did you go into this analysis of social welfare policy? MURRAY: My professional background consisted of evaluating… More
Helping the Poor: A Few Modest Proposals
– Commentary, May 1985.Excerpt: Last fall I published a book entitled Losing Ground. It called attention to the fact that on several of the dimensions we ordinarily use to measure quality of life—unemployment,… More
Author’s Attacks On ‘Great Society’ Shift Social Debate
– Juan Williams, Washington Post, May 28, 1985.Excerpt: Early last year a little-known social-policy analyst had three minutes, as part of a White House round-table group, to tell President Reagan how to improve American society. The… More
Prepared Statement to the Joint Economic Committee
– Prepared Statement, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, June 20, 1985.Excerpt: I thank the Subcommittee for the opportunity to appear before it today, but the assignment is daunting. The last time I tried to answer the question, “Did we win or lose the… More
Charles Murray & His Critics
– Robert Royal, Crisis Magazine, July 1985.Excerpt: What is it about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984) that has evoked such violent reactions? After initial shock at its… More
The Rediscovery of Character
– James Q. Wilson, The Public Interest, Fall 1985.Excerpt: Charles Murray, whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, has done so much to focus attention on the problem of welfare, generally endorses the economic explanation for the decline of… More
The Constraints on Helping
– The Freeman, February 1986.Excerpt: Let me pose a problem in the form that Einstein used to call a “thought experiment.” Whereas Einstein used the device to imagine such things as the view from the head of a… More
White Welfare, White Families, ‘White Trash’
– National Review, March 28, 1986.Excerpt: How many dozens of article, Op-Ed columns, cover stories, talk shows, and features on the six o’clock news have by now used Bill Moyer’s documentary on the vanishing… More
Forum: What Does the Government Owe the Poor
– The Harper's Monthly, April 1986.Q&A: Charles Murray; Of Babies And Stick
– Robert Pear, New York Times, April 11, 1986.Excerpt: One of the Reagan Administration’s main sources of inspiration on social welfare policy is a book by Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist. In “Losing Ground:… More
Losing Ground Two Years Later
– Cato Journal, Spring/Summer 1986.Excerpt: Losing Ground appeared in the fall of 1984. It was an election year, and the two presidential candidates held a debate on domestic policy. The word “black” was hardly… More
The Origins of the Underclass
– Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic, June 1986.Excerpt: The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to: they make… More
No, Welfare Isn’t Really the Problem
– The Public Interest, Summer 1986.Excerpt: Ellwood and Lawrence Summers’s article “Is Welfare Really the Problem?” (Spring 1986) exemplifies a continuing problem that clouds debate about the underclass. On one side… More
Why Murray Prevailed
– Lawrence M. Mead, Academic Questions 1:2 (Spring 1988).Don’t Give Up: Poverty Programs That Work
– The Washington Monthly, June, 1988.Excerpt: What you have generously offered me is a chance to say that while I think most of the programs failed, I’m not a fanatic, and to prove it, here are some successes. And I… More
The Coming of Custodial Democracy
– Commentary, September 1988.Excerpt: It is by now taken for granted that the nation is about to turn to the Left in domestic policy. “Reaganism is finished, bankrupt, used up, over,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger,… More
Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family
– David T. Ellwood, Basic Books, 1988.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s powerful indictment of the social welfare system implicitly emphasizes these contradictions. According to Murray, the very system that was designed to help… More
Washington at Work; An Architect of the Reagan Vision Plunges Into Inquiry on Race and I.Q.
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, November 30, 1990.Excerpt: One thing Charles Murray knows how to do is generate controversy. In 1984, his book “Losing Ground” argued that social programs did more harm than good and proposed, as… More
Congress Writes a Law: Research and Welfare Reform
– Ron Haskins, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10:4 (Fall 1991).Abstract: This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on… More
Stop Favoring Unwed Mothers
– New York Times, January 16, 1993.Excerpt: The New Jersey Legislature took the plunge this week and passed a welfare package that, if signed by Gov. Jim Florio, would limit the benefits for women on welfare if they have… More
Welfare and the Family: The American Experience
– Journal of Labor Economics, January 1993.Subsidized Illegitimacy
– Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, November 19, 1993.Excerpt: In fact, the idea I proposed is not at all original. I was merely echoing Charles Murray, who in his book, “Losing Ground,” offered the cold turkey approach as a… More
Regaining Lost Ground
– City Journal, Spring 1994.Excerpt: In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13 percent of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next 12 years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled.… More
Does Welfare Bring More Babies?
– The Public Interest, Spring 1994.Excerpt: LAST OCTOBER, I published a long piece on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Coming White Underclass.” Its thesis was that white illegitimacy—22 percent… More
Talking Points: Response to Charles Murray
– Welfare Reform Working Group, William Jefferson Clinton Library, May 3, 1994.Excerpt: “He did the country a great service. I mean, he and I have often disagreed, but I think his analysis is essentially right. Now, whether his prescription is right, I… More
Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray
– Jason DeParle, New York Times, October 9, 1994.Excerpt: Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get. It is hard to know which is more startling — that Murray would imagine before… More
What to Do about Welfare
– Commentary, December 1994.Excerpt: In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s television ad promising to “end welfare as we know it” was one of his best vote-getters, so effective that it was the first choice for a… More
Keeping Priorities Straight on Welfare Reform
– Society, August 1996.Excerpt: In April 1995 I was asked to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the welfare reform bill then under discussion. As I write (mid-November 1995), the Senate and House… More
Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics
– Steven M. Teles, University Press of Kansas, 1996.Excerpt: There is no way to overestimate the effect that Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground had on the intellectual debate on poverty. Murray’s modest proposal, the outright… More
What Government Must Do
– American Enterprise, January/February 1998.Excerpt: Years ago I worked for a research company that evaluated social programs for the federal government. One time I was heading a team assessing a program for troubled inner-city… More
And Now for the Bad News
– Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1998.Excerpt: Good news is everywhere. Crime rates are falling; welfare rolls are plunging; unemployment is at rock bottom; teenage births are down. Name an indicator, economic or social, and… More
Family Formation
– In Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins, eds., New World of Welfare Reform. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.How Think Tanks Achieve Public Policy Breakthroughs
– Lawrence Mone, Manhattan Institute, May 29, 2002.Excerpt: It was back in 1984 that we sponsored what was to become a landmark book: Losing Ground, by Charles Murray, which was published by Basic Books. Charles, at the time, was a not very… More
The Manhattan Institute at 25
– Tom Wolfe, in Brian Anderson, ed., Turning Intellect into Influence, Manhattan Institute, 2004.Excerpt: But when the smoke cleared, Losing Ground was still standing. It had proved impossible to pigeonhole it in any ideological fashion. Murray had served in the Peace Corps in Thailand… More
Research and Welfare Reform
– Lawrence M. Mead, Review of Policy Research 22:3 (May 2005).Abstract: Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes… More
Ending Welfare As We Knew It by Myron Magnet
– Myron Magnet, National Review, December 19, 2005.Excerpt: There’s no better proof of the adage that ideas have consequences than Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. The magisterial 1984 classic… More
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– (Washington: AEI Press, 2006.)Summary from Publisher: America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for… More
A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
– Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2006.Excerpt: This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and… More
Charles Murray: Abolish the Welfare State
– Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, March 29, 2006.Excerpt: Within a few years of the publication of Losing Ground, Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin began his rounds of welfare reform, replacing by-right welfare payments with work… More
The Battle of Ideas
– The Economist, May 23, 2006.Excerpt: It would be foolish to underestimate Mr Murray’s ability not just to stir debate but to steer policy: 12 years after “Losing Ground” was dismissed as the work of a… More
The Check Is In the Mail
– Lawrence M. Mead, First Things, October 2006.Excerpt: Toward the end of In Our Hands, Murray makes clear that his priority is not really to overcome the dysfunctions behind poverty. Rather, it is to restore the small-government… More
Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State
– Basic Income Studies, August 2008.Excerpt: Professor Amitai Etzioni’s policy brief presents a cogent case for a guaranteed income (GI). Like other advocates, he sees the GI as a moral imperative — in his case, it is an… More
Mind the Gap by Yuval Levin
– Yuval Levin, Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012.Excerpt: Charles Murray’s profound and important new book has, for the most part, been received as merely the latest volley in the inequality debates. Its champions have tended to praise… More
Charles Murray on Economic and Moral Life in America
– Video, Conversations with Bill Kristol, July 13, 2013.Summary: Economic and moral well-being in America with the preeminent political scientist and author of The Bell Curve.