Marking 50 years since liberals' big mistake on poverty

Columnist Nicholas Kristof, an unabashed liberal, writes this week about the 50th anniversary of the controversial report to the president about the origins of poverty by Pat Moynihan, himself a liberal but one who was pragmatic enough to stand by the facts.
Kristof, in his Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, notes that the 1965 Moynihan report to Lyndon Johnson did not deny the effects of inner city life and racial tensions on poverty. But the future senator from New York also did not gloss over the devastation wrought by broken families.

Here is a bit of Kristof's commentary:
"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.


Moynihan

“'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.'

 

The response from liberals was withering criticism.

 

“'My major criticism of the report is that it assumes that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America,' protested Floyd McKissick, then a prominent African-American civil rights leader."

But Moynihan's observations became accepted social science three decades later.

"... Growing up with just one biological parent reduces the chance that a child will graduate from high school by 40 percent, according to an essay by Sara McLanahan of Princeton and Christopher Jencks of Harvard. They point to the likely mechanism: 'A father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule-breaking, delinquency and illegal drug use.' These effects are greater on boys than on girls.

"Conservatives shouldn’t chortle at the evidence that liberals blew it, for they did as well. Conservatives say all the right things about honoring families, but they led the disastrous American experiment in mass incarceration; incarceration rates have quintupled since the 1970s. That devastated families, leading countless boys to grow up without dads."