Losing ground
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 is a 1984 book about the effectiveness of welfare state policies in the United States between 1950 and 1980 by the political scientist Charles Murray. Both its policy proposals and its methodology have attracted significant controversy.
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- > they don't want to accidentally fund something that benefits the poor.
Welfare policies have been shown at multiple times to actually harm the poor in the long run, not benefit them. There are entire books written on that topic. Check out Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 from Charles Murray.
- Haha, I always like the allergic reaction where one guy pulls a strawman. By the way, you ought to read Losing Ground on the negative effects of the Welfare system. ANd this came from a guy who wanted to sum up the positive effects of it in the first place, who ended up being shocked by the data he gathered.
http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-Social-1950-198...
Come back after reading.
- Many years ago, long before "The Bell Curve", I spent way, way too much time reading Murray's book "Losing Ground" (1984) and going to the library to read the papers he referenced and reading the papers those papers referenced and then the papers those papers referenced. My conclusion was that his book is junk. My second conclusion was that citations are like a game of telephone and every time someone cites something, it changes slightly, so don't trust anything until you get to a primary source, and maybe don't even trust that. (This second conclusion applies in general, not just to Murray.) My third conclusion was that arguing online is a waste of time and approximately nobody cares about actual facts.
- Abominable as it is, my views are not just based on the Bell Curve's race-IQ discussion.
* In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be restricted because Black people are having too many kids. His book had a great deal of influence on the "welfare reform" instituted in the mid-1990s in the US.
* In In Our Hands, Murray proposes replacing all government assistance with "an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older". Not only is this eugenics because everyone, abled or not, with medical needs or not, must be able to survive on $10,000 a year; but note the absence of a UBI for kids: the proposal would punish poorer people--who are disproportionately Black for historical reasons rooted in racist institutions like slavery, redlining and the War on Drugs--for having too many kids.
All of this is pretty textbook social Darwinist white supremacism--all of these views are regularly espoused at Stormfront and other such places.
Charles Murray is quite clearly a white supremacist, and the race-IQ stuff is only a small part of the case for it.
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Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: I didn't know about Nathan Cofnas so I googled him and he appears to be standard-issue IDW: writes for Quillette, defends bigots like Kathleen Stock, etc. Any blowback they got is well-deserved.
From https://quillette.com/2021/01/14/philosophers-smear-one-of-t...:
> Stock argues that, for example, it is okay for cis women to object to a lesbian with a penis—what in ye olden days of 2014 was known as a heterosexual man
This is of course a complete lie: trans people have been recognized and understood across many cultures for thousands of years, sometimes as a third gender but usually not as the gender they were assigned at birth. This is both ignorant and hateful. Cofnas deserves to be "cancelled", as does anyone else who writes for Quillette to be frank (for the same guilt-by-association reason, which remains just as valid for Quillette as it is for Murray).
- Charles Murray, author of
* Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
* Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
* Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality
* Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
Oh, and The Bell Jar, although that doesn't somehow imply that 1950 was the peak of White Culture.
- Are we talking about this Charles Murray?
"A huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.” —regarding his book, Losing Ground, quoted in “Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?: Charles Murray,” The New York Times Magazine, 1994
“The professional consensus is that the United States has experienced dysgenic pressures throughout either most of the century (the optimists) or all of the century (the pessimists). Women of all races and ethnic groups follow this pattern in similar fashion. There is some evidence that blacks and Latinos are experiencing even more severe dysgenic pressures than whites, which could lead to further divergence between whites and other groups in future generations.” —The Bell Curve, 1994
