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April 23, 2007
The Great Society Revisited
It's axiomatic among conservatives that Lyndon Johnson's tenure was a historic failure, while Ronald Reagan's was a remarkable success. But for whom? For all the talk of the Great Society's failures, it's striking how much poverty actually did decrease, and how many of the period's programs remain in vibrant operation today. This graph, from a recent TAP article by William Spriggs, is particularly illuminative:
At the start of Johnson's tenure, two-thirds of America's African-American children were impoverished. By the end of his term, that number had plummeted by 25%, to 39%. This is what Reagan was talking about when he said, "The federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won." What he didn't mention was that it was grievously wounded.
By contrast, in 1980, 42.1 percent of black children lived below the poverty line. By 1988, Reagan had reduced that share to...42.8 percent. Some record.
Or there's this: "In 1962, on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice in 1963, the median income of black men was below the poverty threshold for a family of three, but by 1967 it was above that level (not until 1995 did it get above the poverty level for a family of four)." But we've become fairly uninterested in helping the poor. It's disheartening, for instance, that Social Security has grown along with the economy over the past few decades, while welfare benefits have contracted.
Those are our priorities. Not to mention war, tax cuts, corporate breaks, and all the rest. It's irrelevant to wonder whether poverty won; the real issue is that we've ceased fighting it.
April 23, 2007 in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Excellent post.
Posted by: davidmizner | Apr 23, 2007 5:15:19 PM
The most crackpot government stat must be the federal poverty line: calculated at three times the price of an emergency food budget (cannot buy a can of beans; only dried beans). If you go by the poverty line suggested in the book "Raise the Floor" the line should be twice as high -- potentially leading to a poverty rating of 25% instead of 12.5% -- 40 years after L.B.J. declared the war on poverty -- double the average income since.
What a shockwave that would make on the national economic discussion.
If conservatives want to claim that food stamps and other help are not counted in the income: fine; I'll take 25% would live below poverty w/o food stamps, etc.
The liberal media which will push, push, push on its social agenda -- but somehow feels constrained not to go "too far" pushing the economic truth that is so critical to the average person -- even when it is undeniable to anyone who can do eighth grade arithmetic.
Posted by: Denis Drew | Apr 23, 2007 5:31:23 PM
Did it occur to you that Reagan - like many Americans - did not believe that it's the president's job to "fight poverty".
Posted by: Stuart Browning | Apr 23, 2007 5:40:19 PM
"Did it occur to you that Reagan - like many Americans - did not believe that it's the president's job to "fight poverty"."
Well, it occurs to me, since "promoting the general welfare" is in the preamble to the document Reagan and his vast ilk have nothing but contempt for.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Apr 23, 2007 5:55:40 PM
"As William Spriggs writes, "Yes, poverty won." Reagan never fought it."
That would appear to be the explicit premise of that statement, no?
Posted by: Ezra | Apr 23, 2007 6:00:11 PM
Funny Bob - you're reinterpreting the constitution to justify the welfare state.
Sorry - the founding fathers had something quite different in mind by the phrase "general welfare". They meant that citizens should be free from the threat of physical force and the confiscation of the fruits of their labor - the exact aim of young collectivist Klein and his merry band of statists here.
Posted by: Stuart Browning | Apr 23, 2007 6:01:42 PM
Stuart, can you please refrain from acting as though your libertarian beliefs are in any way considered mainstream? I mean, I appreciate the fact that you believe that the constitution doesn't justify the welfare state, but I simply think your view is considered a fringe belief.
The Social Security graph makes that pretty clear that the issue is which welfare benefits we're willing to support, not the issue of whether the idea is supportable in the first place. The latter is already established as true, and if you don't accept that, well, you can hold that argument elsewhere.
Posted by: Constantine | Apr 23, 2007 6:34:54 PM
the founding fathers had something quite different in mind by the phrase "general welfare". They meant that citizens should be free from the threat of physical force and the confiscation of the fruits of their labor - the exact aim of young collectivist Klein and his merry band of statists here
First, what the founding fathers may or may not have had in mind is quite irrelevant.
Second, the idea that redistribution of wealth is unconstitutional has never been seriously entertained.
Posted by: Jason | Apr 23, 2007 6:49:14 PM
Where is the evidence that all those tax cuts for the wealthy the GOP (and Bu$hCo) love so much has trickled down to anyone in the lower 50% of the population? Surely in 30 years some effect should be visible, right? Wasn't that part of the deal?
Isn't the truth now visible? The tax cuts were intended and resulted in the upper 10% of the population acquiring even a greater share of the nation's wealth.
It is way past time for some serious populist redistribution of wealth by a variety of actions: increasing the minimum wage, encouraging labor unions, nationalizing health care, halting and reversing the consolidation of mega-corporations, increasing corporate taxes back to levels comparable in other developed nations, eliminating large contributions for elections or PACs and capping total individual contributions, spliting up media conglomerates, insisting on fair trade and rolling back existing trade treaties that are not fair to US workers, removing subsidies and providing tax penalties for moving jobs outside the country, and
ignoring the damn fools who got the US into this position whether called libertarians, conservatives, or whatever.
Jefferson had it right: some revolution is needed periodically to cleanse the body politic.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Apr 23, 2007 7:28:39 PM
"Percentage of black children under the poverty line, compared 1965-69 versus 1981-89" is a strangely specific statistic to look at. Is there some reason to think that it's particularly good at controlling for the differences in presidential approaches to poverty? I'm not particularly versed in this area, but obviously the environment for poor blacks changed at lot from 1960 to 1990. It doesn't seem hugely credible on the face of it that very much of the difference between those two graphs had a lot to do with either LBJ or Reagan's policies.
Maybe the Prospect article explains it better, but I'm afraid that with the limited context of this blog post, my first impression was "Hey, if we look through a huge mass of statistics, we can pull out some particular line that looked good in LBJ's presidency and bad in Reagan's." Perhaps a bit more background would be helpful.
Posted by: Michael B Sullivan | Apr 23, 2007 7:30:59 PM
Reagan's trend (down, eh, 2%ish in 8 years) doesn't seem too much worse than Nixon-Carter-Ford (up 5%ish in 12).
I mean, isn't that the standard critique of post-Johnson poverty policy? "We threw a lot of money at it, but not much happened. Then we threw less money at it, and the same not much happened. What's the point?"
(Now, you could say that Johnson reached 40% at the tail of a boom, and keeping it level through the '70s recession was a worthwhile feat, while that same stablity becomes underwhelming seen in the context of the Reagan boom. Fair points, but still, the fact remains that the graph alone is not really that "striking".)
Posted by: Senescent | Apr 23, 2007 7:31:19 PM
The official federal poverty rate measure is so seriously flawed it's basically worthless. It simply does not account for the dramatic improvements in the standard of living of Americans classified as poor that have occurred over the past 40 years or so. See here for a detailed critique.
Posted by: JasonR | Apr 23, 2007 7:32:09 PM
On a more serious note:
1) You could try to separate the general economic conditions & policy from the particular anti-poverty programs as causes of the changes in poverty; i.e., inflationary Keynesianism vs disinflationary Friedmanism. IIRC, the improvements in Black std of living under late Clinton are usually attributed to the economy rather than programs.
2) It is interesting that poverty did not increase under Reagan, even tho the supply-side theory was so demonstrably a failure. The redistribution of wealth under Reagan via the mechanism of using increased FICA taxes to finance upper-class, capital, and business tax cuts would mainly be from the 2nd and 3rd quintiles to the top. But apparently there was some value in the political cover of flat poverty rates.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Apr 23, 2007 7:36:48 PM
Ezra! "Tomorrow's Media Conspiracy Today" has gotten old, especially since this blog focuses only very tangentially on the media. Please, please please please please change your motto to "Young Collectivist Klein and his Merry Band of Statists." Alternatively, start a band by that name.
I love Stuart Browning!
Posted by: Sam L. | Apr 23, 2007 7:40:13 PM
Also, Mr. Sullivan, that's an interesting point. I don't know why they would use that, on the other hand, the idea that things would actually be economically worse for African Americans in the 80s given the vastly improved social conditions is shocking. It supports the thesis that LBJ's programs were working and Ronald Reagan's were not.
Posted by: Sam L. | Apr 23, 2007 7:43:04 PM
Sam L.: Well, I'd say it supports the thesis that something went badly wrong between LBJ and Reagan.
My immediate questions about percentage of black children living in poverty, beyond "Why this statistic in particular" would be:
1. What does the line do between 1965 and 1981? And, for that matter, before and after 1961 and 1989? Can we get some context for how it varies?
2. Can we control the statistic for "percentage of black children who have two parents supporting them versus just a mother"? This strikes me as fairly likely to have a big impact on the figures, and I'm pretty dubious that either LBJ or Reagan had a lot to do with the rise of deadbeat dads. Maybe second or third order effects
3. Better yet, instead of using the federal poverty line, could we just look at inflation-adjusted dollars, or maybe percentage change versus per-capita growth of the economy?
4. Could we get some kind of stab at causation, rather than just correlation? Something that would at least work towards falsifiability?
Posted by: Michael B Sullivan | Apr 23, 2007 7:51:13 PM
Obviously there is and should be an enormous amount of research on this, which I am not expert in. That being said, searching for causation when one president waged a "war on poverty" and poverty dropped significantly and the other refused to do so and poverty went up a little seems a little silly. It's pretty straight forward, as far as I'm concerned, to see that at least some stuff LBJ was doing worked pretty well.
Posted by: Sam L. | Apr 23, 2007 8:03:47 PM
Michael B. Sullivan writes:
"Is there some reason to think that it's particularly good at controlling for the differences in presidential approaches to poverty? I'm not particularly versed in this area, but obviously the environment for poor blacks changed at lot from 1960 to 1990. It doesn't seem hugely credible on the face of it that very much of the difference between those two graphs had a lot to do with either LBJ or Reagan's policies."
No, the graph does not accurately reflect whether one president fought poverty better than another.
Posted by: Jason | Apr 23, 2007 8:06:19 PM
Sam L.: The reason I want to hear a theory of causation is that it makes for a way to falsify the theory that you're presenting.
Let's say that someone comes up with, "This particular welfare subsidy helps keep minority children out of poverty." Okay, then. We can then look at the history of that particular welfare subsidy and see whether changes that affect it track well with changes to the poverty rate of black children. If they do, then we know something that we didn't. If they don't, we also know something that we didn't.
I'm somewhat opposed to the suggestion that "LBJ fights poverty, Reagan doesn't" is a serious attempt at establishing causation. For one, there's a real specificity disconnect, here. If we were looking at "the poverty rate of the nation," I could to a certain extent get behind an explanation of "LBJ fights poverty, Reagan doesn't." When we're looking at "the percentage of black children below the poverty line," it feels really weird to say that we can't get more specific with the cause than the one-line summary of the Great Society.
But that's just my first objection repackaged, really. So, fair enough, if you're tied to the notion that percentage of black children in poverty is a good indicator of overarching Presidential agendas towards fighting poverty, that's something, at least. At this point, we get back to wanting to see the line for non-LBJ, non-Reagan years. If the line changes slope or height dramatically in ways that seem to correspond to Presidential initiatives, then that's a data point in favor of your view.
Posted by: Michael B Sullivan | Apr 23, 2007 8:26:53 PM
I understand your objections. I don't think the data presented is conclusive, but I do think it intensely unlikely that things would get worse for African American children between 1960 (we're talking Jim Crow South) and 1980 while getting better for other poor people.
Honestly, in response to your first point, I think tracking the success of one specific program is far more difficult than tracking the overall success of the war on poverty. Looking at job training or welfare or anything else doesn't tell us too much because they were all enacted at once. To me what this says is that doing something is better than doing nothing. All assuming, of course, that the rest of the data doesn't contradict what we learn about black children from the graphs, which I'm confident it doesn't.
Posted by: Sam L. | Apr 23, 2007 8:44:06 PM
I should clarify that if there were some other obvious thing that you really thought was having an effect instead, say globalization or declining union strength or a crashing economy, that would certainly require more study. But if all you're trying to do is refute the "LBJ was a failure, Reagan was great" meme, which is how Ezra started the post, I don't think going into all that is really necessary.
Posted by: Sam L. | Apr 23, 2007 8:48:00 PM
I could never understand why self-described libertarians like reagan so much?
I think it supports my theory that most libertarians are republicans without the strength of their convictions.
Strong post Ezra. Thanks.
Posted by: ice weasel | Apr 23, 2007 9:03:01 PM
So some say that "Lyndon Johnson's tenure was a historic failure... But for whom?"
Uh, Vietnamese people?
Posted by: Jacob | Apr 23, 2007 11:58:11 PM
I think people are missing the obvious point that Johnson's presidency coincided with the zenith of the civil rights movement, principally the passing of the civil rights act in 1964. Presumably this played a large part in the reduction of black child poverty.
Of course there any other number of objections to this. The fact that the illegitimacy rate of black children was far higher by the time that reagan took office than it was in johnson's time would also be a significant factor.
Posted by: henry hazlitt | Apr 24, 2007 4:31:13 AM
Amazing. It took 24 posts before somebody mentioned illegitimacy, you guys live in a liberal dream world. It wasn't 'a' significant factor, henry, it was THE significant factor, if anything the only factor, we really shouldn't talk about anything else. 69% OF BLACK CHILDREN HAVE NO FATHER. BEAT THAT INTO YOUR SKULLS! That isn't whitey's fault, except the part the pre-94 welfare state played in facilitating it by allowing black women to marry the state and allowing black men to be as irresponsible as they wished without consequence. Blacks will remain poor until black behavior changes.
Posted by: adrian | Apr 24, 2007 5:15:14 AM
