Saving the underclass.

• Author: Auletta, Ken
• Position: Includes article on California welfare system reform

Ken Auletta: What is the most outrageous thing that has been said about your book?

Charles Murray: That it was written in the service of a "radical political agenda," that I selected the evidence knowingly in order to make my points.

Auletta: Are you thinking of the [Robert] Greenstein piece in The New Republic? [March 25, 1985]

Murray: Yes, that's the one that hit the hardest because it was a big article in a prestigious magazine. Actually, I guess the most outrageous piece was Tony Brown's column, in which he said that I advocated concentration camps for blacks. I can't get so excited about a piece like that because it is so completely bizarre.

Auletta: Was there a common mistake in their views?

Murray: Well, the critics run the whole gamut from those who say that the book is both fraudulent and incompetent to those who say, "The guy makes a lot of good points, but he's wrong about such and such." On that spectrum, the common mistake has been to cast the argument of Losing Ground in terms of stereotypes that are often used by people who make similar points.

So the story of Phyllis and Harold [a hypothetical couple used to illustrate the way welfare affects poor families] comes across to many critics as being a statement that young women figure up the amount of money they can make in welfare benefits and modulate their fertility behavior according to the rise and fall of that amount of money. And in unemployment the stereotype is "the lazy bums who are living a comfortable life on welfare rather than going out to work."

These are stereotypes the right has used a lot, but I don't fault some critics for taking off from that....

Auletta: I want to come back later to your views on some of those things, but let me take them in some order. Obviously some liberals took a lot of offense at the book, and I wonder whether, from their own ideological perspective, they are not correct to take offense. For instance, you bridle that your complex message has gotten lost in some of the criticisms of the book. Yet even though you take pains to say, and I quote, "no single demon is to blame" for the persistence of poverty. Not AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children[, not food stamps, not law enforcement, not rent control. Isn't it true, however, that you view liberal nostrums as the chief culprit?

Murray: Well, the way you put it is correct, if by "nostrums" you include not only legislative programs but also court decisions, and especially an intellectual mindset that governs policy in more informal ways.

Auletta: And therefore, a good card-carrying liberal understandably takes offense with your thesis.

Murray: Yes. If you had said to me a liberal must bridle with what you said, then I would argue with you. But when you say "card-carrying," then you're right. There is a big difference between those people who supported these programs in the sixties and into the seventies but have been looking all the time at what is happening and getting disturbed and those who supported them in the sixties and seventies and in my view simply shut their eyes to what was going on around them.

Auletta: Let's stay with that a bit. First, list the programs in your view that have worked well.

Murray: The increases in Social Security benefits, I think, can be credited with a large part of the reduction of poverty among the elderly. A variety of educational programs either have worked or can work. In most cases, I think the statement is they can work. A good Headstart program can be a terrific thing for a three- or four-year-old child from a disadvantaged family. That is not to say that a whole bunch of Headstart programs worked beautifully, because I'm not sure they did. But there certainly is no reason why they couldn't work well. And I would generalize on that statement to a variety....

Auletta: Don't generalize yet, I want to go on with that in a minute. I want you to offer a laundry list of programs that worked. You've mentioned education and Social Security....

Murray: On superficial examination, Medicaid should have improved the health of poor people. If you accept the view that there was terrible access to medical care prior to Medicaid, there is certainly much better access after Medicaid, even if it's inefficient. Therefore, Medicaid should also have improved health. But I am still an agnostic inclining toward pessimism on that score, so I guess I can't include Medicaid in the list. A case can be made, I think, that in certain southern states the Voting Rights Act of 1965 hastened a process that was already underway. A case can be made that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hastened a process that was already underway.

Auletta: Would you make that case?

Murray: I'm not speaking from data now; this is from my general reading on the issue and my own view of the situation. But I would make the case that they hastened those outcomes. I would also make the case that they produced, particularly regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many other, unintended spinoffs. And I'm not sure the balance is a plus. Let it be heard loud and clear, I am saying civil rights and equal access to public accommodations are things that black Americans should have. I'm delighted to see that they have them. I think the government's role in enforcement of such things probably needs recasting.

Auletta: You've cited a few successes. What are the principles you extract from these successes?

Murray: The government knows how to educate kids who are ready to study. We know how to take a youngster who wants to be an electrician and teach him how to be an electrician if he is prepared to come to that training center and work his ass off, and pay attention, and go out there and stomp the streets looking for an electrician's job when he gets out. For that matter I think we know how to provide better prenatal care to young single women who are pregnant, if those young single women bring to that instruction a commitment to learn more about how they can take care of their babies. We can do all sorts of things with people who have passed a critical threshold of investment--an investment of time, of commitment, of, in some cases, small amounts of money. What we do not seem to be able to do is cajole people into wanting to make those initial investments.

I am speaking as one who spent a lot of years evaluating demonstration efforts where you try one approach, then you try another approach, then you try a third approach, and you still can't get people to make that initial investment.

Auletta: Let's take one experiment, Supported Work. It was targeted at a large group of ex-addicts, long-term welfare recipients, ex-offenders, and delinquent youth. With the long-term dependent women on welfare, they found a nearly 40 percent success rate. That is to say, roughly 40 percent of the women on welfare, who enrolled in this job program, came out, got a job, and got off of welfare. Is that a success, four out of ten?

Murray: Supported Work is something that I'm going to talk about at length, both because you wrote a book about it [The Underclass] and also because I spent quite a bit of time examining the technical evaluation of it.

Let's start with the welfare mothers, an excellent example, I think it was the two-year follow-up that showed that 42 percent of the AFDC participants were still employed. In the control group, those who had gotten none of this assistance whatsoever, 35 percent were employed. Now if you ignore all sorts of reasons why that gap might be inflated, you can say that the investment in Supported Work gave you an increment of seven percentage points of women who were employed--35 percent versus 42 percent.

To me, those results are not evidence of success; they are evidence of the enormous problems we face. Supported Work was in many ways the apotheosis of trying to cajole people to escape dependence. It provided them with...