{"id":42088,"date":"2014-02-26T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42088"},"modified":"2014-02-26T06:03:10","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T12:03:10","slug":"the-war-we-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42088","title":{"rendered":"The War We Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the “War on Poverty” – the only “war” at which the United States has ever been comprehensively defeated unto humiliation – John C. Goodman analyzes the results<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, avoiding poverty – or rising out of it, with time and hard work – is at least conceptually fairly simple (although obviously requires work, patience and perseverence):<\/p>\n

We now know a lot about how behavior affects poverty. In fact, if you do these four things, it\u2019s almost impossible to remain poor:<\/p>\n

1. Finish high school,<\/p>\n

2. Get a job,<\/p>\n

3. Get married, and<\/p>\n

4. Don\u2019t have children until you get married.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Simple – right?<\/p>\n

But throughout the “War on Poverty”, we’ve been disincenting <\/em>those exact behaviors:<\/p>\n

So how does welfare affect behavior? In the late 1960s the federal government sought to find that out in what Charles Murray calls \u201cthe most ambitious social science experiment in history.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experiments were all conducted by social scientists who believed in the welfare state and had no doubt about its capacity to be successful…Randomly selected people were assigned to a \u201ccontrol group\u201d and an \u201cexperimental group.\u201d The latter received a guaranteed income, and the program even used Milton Friedman\u2019s term for it: a negative income tax. The largest, longest and best-evaluated of these experiments was SIME\/DIME (Seattle Income Maintenance Experiment\/Denver Income Maintenance Experiment) in Seattle and Denver. And the results were not pretty. To the dismay of the researchers, they largely confirmed what conventional wisdom had thought all along. As I reported in \u201cPrivatizing the Welfare State<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n