Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass

In an appeal for clearer thinking on social issues, Christopher Jencks re-examines the way Americans think about race, poverty, crime, heredity, welfare and the underclass. Arguing that neither liberal nor conservative ideas about these issues withstand close scrutiny, he calls for less emphasis on political principles and more attention to specific programmes. Jencks describes how welfare policy was dominated in the early 1980s by conservatives who promoted ideas that justified cutting back sharply on the social programmes of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. They believed that a period of sustained economic growth, with low taxes and free markets, would do more to help poor people than coddling them with government assistance. Despite the economic expansion of the later Reagan years, however, the problems of persistent poverty grew even more serious. The liberals took the intiative in the late 1980s, but their proposals failed to win broad popular support. Jencks analyzes influential books on such subjects as affirmative action (Thomas Sowell), the safety net (Charles Murray), the effects of heredity on learning and propensity to commit crime (James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein), ghetto culture and the underclass (William J. Wilson). His intention throughout is to force us (readers and policymakers) to look at the way various remedial plans actually succeed or fail. For example, he believes that until we transform AFDC so that it reinforces rather than subverts American ideals about work and marriage, efforts to build a humane welfare state will never succeed. Christopher Jencks is the author of Inequality and Who Gets Ahead .