The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society.

• Author: Browning, Edgar K.

Michael Tanner, the director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, has aptly titled his new book The End of Welfare. He is not alluding to President Clinton's pledge to 'end welfare as we known it" but to his own preferred solution to the welfare mess: end all government welfare programs and rely on private charities. As recently as ten or fifteen years ago, few if any serious scholars would have had the audacity to offer such a radical proposal in print. It is a testament to the influence of Charles Murray's work and growing evidence of the defects of existing welfare programs that this proposal for seemingly draconian reform no longer seems unthinkable.

Tanner develops his argument in seven information-packed chapters as well as a brief concluding chapter. These chapters cover a lot of territory and are buttressed with an impressive 570 footnotes in only 183 pages of text (plus another 79 for the appendix, which gives brief descriptions of 71 [!] different welfare programs that compose the bulk of our welfare "system"). Although the book falls short of informing the reader of "everything you always wanted to know about welfare," the footnotes provide references to a large body of related literature.

The first three chapters provide background information concerning the current welfare system. Chapter 1, "Poverty in America," covers the definition and measurement of poverty, demographic characteristics of the poverty population, trends over time, the causes of poverty, and general economic inequality. With regard to the causes of poverty, Tanner emphasizes inadequate schooling, having children outside marriage, and not working: "It has been said that the surest ways to stay out of poverty are to (1) finish school; (2) not get pregnant outside marriage; and (3) get a job, any job, and stick with it" (p. 17). The emphasis on these factors, especially illegitimacy, is well placed, but I would like to have seen it acknowledged that even if everyone plays by these "rules," some people will still be poor. One doesn't have to accept everything in The Bell Curve to know that chance, whether of nature or nurture, gives some people insufficient abilities to earn an adequate income. In fact, it is precisely because of the suspicion that many people are poor "through no fault of their own" that we feel compassionate toward the poor.

In chapter 2, "The Rise of the Welfare State," Tanner discusses the early history of welfare in America...