Category: Losing Ground

62/365 Investigating Chs. 14-17 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

This week’s reading takes us back to Losing Ground by Charles Murray. While the opening chapters bordered on the ridiculous in their cherry picking of facts, avoidance of sources and generally fallacious arguments, these final chapters were particularly frustrating. Surely conservative thinkers have a stronger argument to make than Murray’s. Rather than devote any more posts to this book, I’ve decided to sum up the last three chapters here.

Murray’s argument completes its break from reality. “Part of the genius of the system in the United States,” he writes, “is that status is not immutable. Those on the bottom at any given time can see themselves as just passing through on the way up…” (p. 179). Given Murray’s earlier refusal to see poverty as a systemic problem, his belief in the upward mobility possible for anyone willing to do the work should not be surprising. It leads one to question why more people haven’t decided to muster the willpower and grit to leave poverty behind. Murray’s answer, of course, is that the federal government has made poverty too enticing and comfortable. Beginning with Harold and Phyllis, Murray implies welfare payments, food stamps, etc. provide recipients with a standard of living too resplendent to inspire anyone to want or try for better.

Not only is such a living attractive, but government programs have worked to bring a sense of pride to being poor and eliminated any stratification that may have existed among the poor as well, according to Murray who offers no empirical evidence of his claims. Leading to his proposal for what is to be done, Murray’s argument rests on the following premises:

  • Poverty was institutionalized by federal fiat in the mid-to-late 60s (and had not been systemic previously).
  • Federal programs to remove the stigma of receiving welfare benefits homogenized the culture of poverty ( and other socio-economic statues were not similarly affected).
  • This homogenization destroyed the differentiation between those who could be poor and proud and those who should be poor and ashamed.

Moving into his conclusion, Murray focuses on transfers and finds them, on the whole, lacking in logic. He returns to education and gives us the example of the good student who must make a transfer to the disinterested student by means of a diminished school experience when both students are placed in the same classroom. This example, and the theory in general, strikes me as inconsistent with Murray’s larger belief that poor people can lift themselves out of poverty if policymakers would get out of the way. It is unclear why the presence of a less dedicated student should prevent the good student from reaching his bootstraps. Another alternative is that Murray is arguing the good student will still improve his status but not as much as he would without the disinterested distraction. If this is true, Murray fails to make this point clearly or to outline why some factors are insurmountable in escaping poverty, but others can be overcome through sheer hard work.

As Murray concludes the text by outlining a proposal for the dismantling of all welfare programs, this is the question that sticks in my mind. People in poverty would prefer not to be poor, he argues, and they were making progress toward that goal prior to the instatement of federal welfare policies. What though, is it about poverty with these policies (government-made poverty) that is impossible to overcome in Murray’s eyes? Assuming this is answered, what is it about natural poverty that makes it easier to overcome than a federal policy? Where is the line of poverty that can be escaped and poverty that is inescapable? I’m not certain Murray has the answer or is aware he’s inspired such a question.

61/365 Investigating Ch. 13 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

This week’s reading takes us back to Losing Ground by Charles Murray. While the opening chapters bordered on the ridiculous in their cherry picking of facts, avoidance of sources and generally fallacious arguments, these final chapters were particularly frustrating. Surely conservative thinkers have a stronger argument to make than Murray’s. I’ve decided to think of this series of posts as “Reading, so you don’t have to.”

Graph 1It is unlikely one will find a graph axis label that gives the appearance of saying much while, in reality, saying so little as the vertical label Murray includes on page 168, “Odds of Going Unarrested for 5 Crimes.” It acts as a suitable metaphor for the contents of the chapter.

Graph 2

The second graph on page 169 presents readers with an even more confusing story. Within the text, Murray points to the span between 1961 and 1969 as particularly unsettling because the number of incarcerated citizens fell so sharply. He fails to mention or find any problem with the soaring incarceration rates beginning in the early 70s.[1]

Murray implies throughout the opening of this chapter that police stopped arresting criminals and that crime rates were skyrocketing. In looking closely, his only mention of actual crime rates comes not from national statistics, but within Cook County, IL. Even then, Murray is making mention not of an actual increase in number of crimes, but concerns himself with juvenile crime (in this one county) “entering its highest rate of increase” (p.170). His conclusion that no reason existed not to commit delinquent acts in the 1970s is a strange one. Murray needed only look at his own graph to see the youth he mentions standing on the street corner had a fairly likely chance of knowing someone who had been arrested and imprisoned for committing a crime.

When turning his attention to education, Murray continues his focus on punishments and sanctions. His description of the frustrations inherent in working in schools with students from varied backgrounds was not incorrect. Students with little support from home present special challenges for learning. These are challenges that often require new approaches to teaching. Murray, once again assumes an external locus of control. This is not surprising, considering his application of such a theory to people living in poverty, those considering criminal activity, and Harold & Phyllis’ decision of whether or not to go on welfare. Children, like the adults Murray considers, are to be considered as driven solely by external forces.

Suspensions and expulsions, Murray reasons were key tools in helping students learn. Those who found themselves suspended had made their choice, and rejected the opportunity to learn. In defending these tools, Murray again ignores race and shows no signs of awareness of or interest in the school-to-prison pipeline[2] that was developing in America at the time. Further, in his dismissal of African American efforts to shift schooling for their children, Murray shows an ahistorical understanding of the goals and work of those schools as we discussed in class.

Murray’s main argument about education (that the inclusion of disinterested students who would otherwise have found themselves suspended or expelled destroyed the learning of interested students and lowered the standards of teachers) comes not surprisingly without evidence to support his claims. More frustrating is Murray’s lack of interest in changing what was going on inside of schools rather than kicking students out of them. He appears to be making a “business as usual” argument that education would have been fine if we could have kept the bad kids out. Again, this shows a lack of consideration of the ways in which the world was changing during the 60s and 70s. Murray would have done well to consider the idea that the misalignment of the world within the classroom with the world outside the classroom might have had more to do with a lack of student interest than the removal of the “bad” students.

One final note about this chapter, on page 177, Murray writes, “For blacks, the uncertainty and distance of the incentive have been compounded by discrimination that makes it harder to get and hold jobs.” Here, the emotional baggage of race in America moves to support his purpose and is picked up again. It raises the question of whether Murray ignored race in the previous chapter because it could muddy the clarity he found in his argument about welfare incentives.

[1] This is to say nothing of the abhorrent design of the graph.

[2] As documented by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana – http://jjpl.org/suspensions-matter/

60/365 Investigating Ch. 12 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

This week’s reading takes us back to Losing Ground by Charles Murray. While the opening chapters bordered on the ridiculous in their cherry picking of facts, avoidance of sources and generally fallacious arguments, these final chapters were particularly frustrating. Surely conservative thinkers have a stronger argument to make than Murray’s.

In chapters 12, Murray continues to use an interesting approach to analyzing changes in American poverty beginning in the early-to-mid 1960s and using the 1950s as a basis of comparison. He decides not to look at the whole history. In the opening to Ch. 12, Murray writes, “It is not necessary to invoke the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, or changes in the work ethic, or racial differences, or the complexities of postindustrial economies, in order to explain increasing unemployment among the young, increased dropout from the labor force, or higher rates of illegitimacy and welfare dependency“ (p. 154). Here, as in earlier chapters, Murray is discounting the importance of other forces that may have been at work in shifting poverty rates and one of his main premises – that America started thinking differently about what it means to be poor.

While I understand the careless and ambiguous approach to data, charts, graphs, etc. could be particularly pernicious, this declaration of consideration of only pieces of the culture and society he’s decided to include undermines his entire argument. What’s more, Murray furthers his myopic analysis on the next page, writing, “Let us drop the racial baggage that goes with the American context and make the point first in a less emotional setting”  (p. 155). He then presents an example set in a developing nation as though his invocation of race in would not be in his readers’ minds. It is akin to telling someone not to picture an elephant. While this may be as easy for Murray as putting the sentence to the page, for those he writes about, separating race from any aspect of the American experience is not nearly so easy. It can be taken as more evidence to support the claim stated in last week’s class that Murray’s argument is meant more as permission for those feeling white guilt to let those feelings go. “It’s not about race, “ he writes in one form or another throughout the text. Yet, to deny race or drop the emotional baggage it includes only works to highlight Murray’s ignorance (fabricated or authentic) of the multitude of factors involved in poverty and class in America.

The crux of his argument in Ch. 12, though, is the story of Harold and Phyllis and Murray’s explanation of how these two might navigate having a child together in 1960 versus 1970 and their options in attempting to make ends meet. In presenting these characters, Murray takes great pains to work against the stereotype of a welfare recipient his target readership would likely hold. Through all of his detail, Murray’s subtext seems to be shouting, “No, they’re white, so you wouldn’t expect them to be on welfare.” This fact aside, Murray’s stated purpose is to have us ask, “[W]hat course of action makes sense?” (p. 157). Here, he asks us not only to strip away the cultural factors that might play a role in Harold and Phyllis’ decisions, but to strip away aspects of their humanity as well.[1] They will be driven by the logic of the math. Aside from removing any intrinsic will to work a job, Murray returns to his old tricks involving explaining the math of the situation. The explanation of Harold and Phyllis’ options in 1970 is particularly slippery, moving back and forth between the real amounts in 1970 and their 1980 equivalents. A reader could easily lose their way through the description to walk away with the idea that Harold and Phyllis were receiving a few hundred dollars per week through welfare benefits.

Murray’s prejudice is further displayed in his explanation of Phyllis’ decision to keep the baby. He removes all sense of agency and independence from his subject when he implies her two choices for “economic insurance” are either the government support her baby elicits or the support of a husband. It’s a disturbing image that also works against the bootstrap endgame Murray has been working toward throughout the book. Evidently, only men can pick themselves up out of poverty, and women can pick themselves up by latching on to a man on his way up.

In the end, it is not inconceivable that a couple who found themselves in the shoes of 1970 Harold and Phyllis could approach their situation in the calculated mathematical manner Murray describes. That this would be the case for all is not only unlikely, but highly insulting as well.

[1] This is to say nothing of the normalized assumptions about the benefits of the couple living together, which is presented devoid of any nuance of analysis of whether the economic best choice is also best for the socio-emotional needs of all three.

58/365 Investigating Ch. 7 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

Murray sets his sights on education in Ch. 7 and gives it a treatment no different than the previous three chapters.

Murray’s main point about education in the mid-to-late 60s is that minority populations, namely African Americans, were making progress at closing the gap with their white peers and that social welfare policies and moves to bring equity to the system messed that up.

At the outcomes end of the argument, he points to the findings of A Nation at Risk to show somewhere between the incremental gains in test scores in the 50s and the dire story told by Risk, we started charting the wrong course as a country. While I’d agree with his course contestation, Murray and I diverge when he points to federal programs aimed at equity as causing the widening of educational gaps.

In fact, Murray appears to ignore the unrest and riots of the late 60s in African American neighborhoods when groups of citizens saw violent riots as the means left to them following legislation and judicial decree’s failure to bring the equity of opportunity the country had promised. As I was reading, I found myself wanting to put my arm around Murray and say, “Don’t you think riots (understandable or not) finding their epicenters in the middle of African American communities might have done something to scar communities and detract from whatever education was happening in classrooms?” This is to say nothing of political scandal and a series of military actions that called a disproportionate  number of unfortunate sons from the African American community? While I don’t know enough and there might not be the kind of data we need to know whether the policies Murray cites had a negative causal relationship with minority academic achievement between 1964 and the release of A Nation at Risk, I don’t believe the numbers are there to support the kind of sweeping claims he’s making.

One final piece about this chapter. Of Risk, Murray writes:

Only scattered, limited criticisms of the report were voiced, despite the harsh language that the commission used. Few were prepared to defend the state of American education.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (Kindle Locations 1243-1244). Kindle Edition.

While I have many possible arguments as to why this was true, the one that sticks in my mind the most was Murray’s own from Ch. 3. Perhaps defending American education was out of fashion. With the ascendance of President Reagan and the shifting of American politics to a more conservative favor, was this yet another conversation we failed to have as country because the conservative elite, led by Secretary Bell had picked up another trend of demonizing public education and deficit modeling that’s remained the model ever since.

Just maybe.

 

57/365 Investigating Ch. 3 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

In Ch. 3, Murray walks readers through the shift in thinking from the intelligentsia of the mid-to-late 60s. Before digging in to the one sentence that made it incredibly difficult for me to continue reading this chapter, let me outline some of the common cause I was able to muster from these pages.

Murray outlines what he describes as a certain way of thinking becoming unfashionable during the time period. Pre-1964 thinking was that those unhappy with their jobs should take matters into their own hands to change their position and, recognizing the difficulties inherent in that premise, the system was doing all it could to help them. Murray’s argument here was 1964 exposed the faulty nature of the second premise and thereby the impossibility of the first.

Where we find common ground is in his conversation of how the shift took place and the lack of conversation or dialogue – the lack of a difficult conversation – about what should be done and what was right.

There was no great debate in the interim, no moment at which the nation could observe itself changing its national policy. The change happened unannounced.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 45). Kindle Edition.

Somewhere in the last few years, the sentiment above shifted to reflect the lack of conversation or debate in how we set the fashionable education reforms that are currently en vogue.

Where Murray lost me, was with the following sentence:

Before 1964, blacks were unique. They constituted the only group suffering discrimination so pervasive and so persistent that laws for that group were broadly accepted as necessary.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 43). Kindle Edition.

I don’t know what to say about that belief or to that belief, so I’m going to let it sit in my brain for a while.

57/365 Investigating Ch. 2 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

It’s difficult to believe the idea of systemic and structural oppression, racism and classism would be difficult to see for someone who is looking as closely at history and how society functions as Murray is. Yet, in Ch. 2, “This System is to Blame,” that’s the impression I was left with.

While Murray appeared to be holding back or at least surreptitiously making his case against federal programs that might help assuage the ill-effects of societal neglect of the impoverished and minority ethnicities, he’s out in the open from the start of this chapter, stating:

For one thing-and the importance of this must not be forgotten during the ensuing discussion-an accident of history brought a master legislator to the presidency at a moment when the other forces were converging. The antipoverty bills, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, public housing programs, manpower training, expansions of entitlements, all followed pellmell. It was a legislative blitzkrieg, not the implementation of a master plan.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 24). Kindle Edition.

While I understand the allure of a master plan Murray argues was lacking, it strikes me as possible the “pellmell” approach to instituting these policies was driven by the urge to institute changes that could start to rectify centuries of oppression brought on by a civil movement that brought voice to the oppressed and made that voice next to impossible to ignore.

Strangely, Murray chooses to believe in the idea that people sort of just noticed poverty in the mid-sixties and chose to do something about it because they thought the economy was too big to fail. It reads as though the nation had some extra walking around money and decided to try their hands at social reform.

While Murray never outright states a disbelief in “structural poverty,” it’s jumping out from between the lines as is his frustration that the country turned to the idea that perhaps poor people weren’t staying poor just because they were lazy but that other interests might be vested in them remaining so.

Murray concludes the chapter with a brief discussion of the federal reports and offices that bloomed as the government attempted to attack systemic poverty. He is almost incredulous at the idea that these reports and studies found small success in their first years and that we didn’t quite know how to solve a problem that had been so long in the making.

The trouble I found here was the same trouble I found in my study of the after effects of Brown v. Board a few weeks ago. The movement to re-design social systems away from institutional poverty had momentum in the 1960s. As Murray pointed out, those idealists attacking the problems felt this was something they could not imagine failing at. Rarely do such resources, good will, and brainpower find one another in history. Looking at the problem with the benefit of contemporary perspective, these were problems that would take more time to solve, systems that would take longer to reboot than many were likely to believe.

No one says, “I want to change the world – incrementally.” But that was and remains the lot of those working against injustice. The small gains Murray outlines at the end of the chapter were not the big win researchers and policymakers were hoping for, but they should not be discounted as wins given the long line of losses in the years prior.

56/365 Investigating Ch. 1 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

Murray opens Losing Ground by first describing America’s general blindness to poverty leading up to to the 1960s, referencing few mentions of impoverished Americans in periodicals and research of the day. It was a problem (45 million or 30 percent of America’s population) but not one garnering much attention. I can’t help reading thinking perhaps Murray’s looking to Life magazine as the barometer of knowledge and awareness of poverty as perhaps coming short. Surely, those 45 million were aware of their poverty. Perhaps they too were surprised that one of the nation’s most widely circulated magazines wasn’t mentioning the failure of America’s post-war boom to help everyone attain prosperity. Then again, given our more contemporary willful blindness to poverty, maybe no one was surprised.

The meat of Murray’s first chapter, though, has to do with President Kennedy’s departure from tradition in suggesting the federal government put institutions in place that transferred welfare from “a hand” to “a hand up” and President Johnson’s subsequent expansion of this principal.

Murray closes the first chapter with this:

Johnson lost no time in implementing the Kennedy rhetoric. The initial antipoverty bill was written, debated, passed, and signed-in August 1964 -within Johnson’s first nine months in office. The bill was a faithful attempt to follow the “hand, not a handout” script. It provided for job training, part-time jobs for teenagers and college students, community antipoverty projects, loans to low-income farmers and businessmen, and the establishment of VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps. There was not a handout in the lot. Johnson was careful to point this out at the signing ceremony, incorporating into his remarks the cheerful prediction that “the days of the dole in this country are numbered.”14

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (Kindle Locations 406-409). Kindle Edition.

My note in the margin here is more about what Murray’s not saying than the argument he’s explicitly making. Textually, he’s reporting what happened. In the subtext, he feels to be coughing under his breath saying, “And that’s when it all started to go to hell.”

It was difficult to align this subtext with my personal experience working alongside the modern-day equivalents of these programs and seeing the good they’ve done in communities and the capacity they have built in their participants.

More on Ch. 2 soon.