Poverty & The Moynihan Report

During the Presidency of, first John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was employed as the Assistant Secretary For Labor charged with developing policy for the "war on poverty." At the time, as it is today, poverty was a national problem, but also a particular problem for blacks. Fifty years ago this month, Moynihan issued a report, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. For the temerity of saying that the problems of black poverty were cultural and systemic, Moynihan was savaged as a racist by the many on the left and his report ignored.

Fifty years later, many of the problems identified Moynihan do not merely remain, they've gotten worse. The attempt to solve the problem of poverty without addressing squarely the systemic problems underlying poverty has failed, and not just for blacks, though they were Moynihan's focus. In virtually all cases, the systemic problems are the same -- a breakdown in two parent families.

Several good columns and articles look back on the report today. First, there is Nicholas Kristof writing at the NYT, When Liberals Blew It:

Fifty years ago this month, Democrats made a historic mistake.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time a federal official, wrote a famous report in March 1965 on family breakdown among African-Americans. He argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single-parent households would make poverty more intractable.

“The fundamental problem,” Moynihan wrote, is family breakdown. In a follow-up, he explained: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families ... never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist. He himself had grown up in a single-mother household and worked as a shoeshine boy at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street in Manhattan, yet he was accused of being aloof and patronizing, and of “blaming the victim.” . . .

From George Will, The Prescience of Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

. . . The broken correlation of improvements in unemployment and decreased welfare dependency shattered confidence in social salvation through economic growth and reduced barriers to individual striving. Perhaps the decisive factors in combating poverty and enabling upward mobility were not economic but cultural — the habits, mores and dispositions that equip individuals to take advantage of opportunities.

This was dismaying because governments know how to alter incentives and remove barriers but not how to manipulate culture. The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions improve was to be refuted by a deepened understanding of the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment. Family structure is the primary predictor of social outcomes, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew in 1965.

Fifty years ago this month, Moynihan, then a 37-year-old social scientist working in the Labor Department, wrote a report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," that was leaked in July. The crisis he discerned was that 23.6 percent of African-American births were to unmarried women. Among the "tangle" of pathologies he associated with the absence of fathers was a continually renewed cohort of inadequately socialized adolescent males. This meant dangerous neighborhoods and schools where disciplining displaced teaching. He would later write: "A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority ... that community asks for and gets chaos." . . .

From City Journal, The Black Family: 40 Years Of Lies (reposted from 2005)

. . . By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty. . . .

Fifty years on it's time to admit that the attempt to solve the problem of poverty largely through welfare has failed. While the welfare system has provided a necessary safety net, it has not broken the cycle of poverty that effects far too many in our nation. That is going to require a new effort. And that effort should begin with dusting off the Moynihan report. Tweet

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Academia, Left-Wing Bias & The Newest Victim Class

John Tierney, writing in the Science section of the NYT, has made a discovery of immense proportions. The newest left-wing victim class among card carrying social scientists is . . . . conservatives. Heh. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to play my victim card to cut short the next leftie diatribe. "Hey, Jesse Jackson, shut up you hate spewing conservativphobe!!!"

This from Mr. Tierney at the NYT:

Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. . . .

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Tierney points out that the left vastly outnumber conservaives throughout much of academia - "six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences." In the social sciences though, those numbers become exponentially more lopsided. So how did this come about and what is the net effect:

In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. . . .

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. . . . . After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” . . .

So what is the perscription of Dr. Haidt to solving this conundrum: Step one, all social psychologists should start reading the National Review and Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.” Fair enough, I concur. Step two, "a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020." Lolll. Spare me. At this point, I doubt that "affirmative action" is an effective way to cure anything. The real cures are, one, to punish those in the community that try to silence alternative thought, as happened with Larry Summers or Patrick Moynihan, by playing the victim card. Two is to require researchers to look below the numbers to see if there is actual '-ism' at work in any numerical disparities. The rest will take care of itself, particularly as the "race card" loses all of its legitimacy in America - and that is what I believe is happening.

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