Charles Murray
Political scientist, born in 1943, whose Losing Ground (1984) argued that US welfare programs from the 1960s on made poverty worse by rewarding behaviour that kept people poor.
Charles Murray did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsAnd, as years went on after Losing Ground, I became a lot more aware of the way in which something can be a cause of a problem at one point in time, but reversing it isn’t necessarily going to be the solution to the problem ten years later.
↗Conversations with Bill Kristol: Charles Murray III (taped February 7, 2018; transcript)conversationswithbillkristol.org 1st of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsI will still defend the proposition that the social reforms of the 1960s were a major contributor to the acceleration of out-of-wedlock births.
↗Conversations with Bill Kristol: Charles Murray III (taped February 7, 2018; transcript)conversationswithbillkristol.org 2nd of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd so, I had to come with terms to the fact that I don’t think getting rid of the welfare system would in any way fully restore the same kind of milieu, in which teenage boys and teenage girls made decisions about this sort of thing.
↗Conversations with Bill Kristol: Charles Murray III (taped February 7, 2018; transcript)conversationswithbillkristol.org 3rd of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsFamilies only form in the first place because there are very powerful social and economic pressures when kids are 20 years old to do that thing. And that fabric has just frayed enormously, for low-income people.
↗Conversations with Bill Kristol: Charles Murray III (taped February 7, 2018; transcript)conversationswithbillkristol.org 4th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsIt is settled science that this shared environment the siblings have explains far less about how they turn out than we thought it did.
↗Conversations with Bill Kristol: Charles Murray III (taped February 7, 2018; transcript)conversationswithbillkristol.org 5th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsSo, the family is still important, it is not as important as I used to think.
↗Conversations with Bill Kristol: Charles Murray III (taped February 7, 2018; transcript)conversationswithbillkristol.org 6th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsI did change my mind on that as well. I wasn’t as conscious of the role of heredity in the 1980s as I became when I was working on The Bell Curve.
↗Conversations with Bill Kristol: Charles Murray III (taped February 7, 2018; transcript)conversationswithbillkristol.org 7th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsWe tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead.
↗Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984)archive.org All 5 from this book
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Their wordsWe tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.
↗Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984)archive.org All 5 from this book
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Their wordsThe first effect of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term.
↗Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984)archive.org All 5 from this book
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Our reading
Any objective eligibility rule for a transfer program will irrationally exclude some people
Their wordsAny objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.
↗Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984)archive.org All 5 from this book
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Their wordsAny social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer.
↗Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984)archive.org All 5 from this book