================= HES POSTING =======================
[Perhaps of interest to historians of American economics and economic
policy. -- RBE]
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (October 1998)
Irwin Unger, _The Best of Intentions: The Triumph and Failure of the Great
Society Under Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon_ New York: Doubleday, 1996. 366
pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-385-46833-4
Reviewed for EH.NET by Stephen Ziliak, Department of Economics, Bowling
Green State University. <[log in to unmask]>
The middle class reader is disarmed here by a gentle story about
the Great Society, a story which attempts to fill the reader with the quiet
satisfaction, however mellow, that something worked. The middle class
reader merges easily with a traffic of words, traveling in a pathos fit for
the first day of Spring in the opening pages of Irwin Unger's _The Best of
Intentions: The Triumph and Failure of the Great Society Under Kennedy,
Johnson and Nixon_. The Great Society, Unger says plainly, made life more
"pleasant" (p. 9). The legacy of the Great Society is good for middle
class Americans. Unger has designs on easy listening, but the subtext is
more Springsteen than Kenny G.
Since the early 1980s, the typical way to begin a book about the
Great Society is to exhort with fists pounding that Americans have been
"losing ground" since Johnson waged a War on Poverty. Another way to begin
a book on the Great Society (less typical, though increasingly common) is
to emphasize with feminist and racial concerns--a la Frances Fox Piven,
Richard Cloward, and Linda Gordon--the post-Reagan attack on whatever gains
the War on Poverty made for welfare rights and the amelioration of poverty.
But Unger chooses the road less traveled. Unger's book about the Great
Society begins by naming the good effects the Great Society had on the
lives of the educated middle classes.
_The Best of Intentions_ opens with Unger and his wife driving
cross-country on a clean highway in a car fit with mandatory seat belts and
collapsible steering columns, listening to classical music and "intelligent
interviews" on National Public Radio (even from rural locations), stopping
at "well-equipped public rest stops" (p. 9), and taking in some nature,
such as they did at Assateague Island, in Virginia, a seashore preserve.
"The Great Society of the 1960s has left its mark on the land," says Unger.
But Unger's idea of "mark" is not what readers in the 1990s have come to
expect. Says Unger: "The Great Society . . . made our trip pleasanter and
safer" (p. 9). In other words, by contrast with Charles Murray's metaphor
"losing ground," _The Best of Intentions_ is positively cheery about the
ground that America has gained with the Great Society. Unger is cheery not
about the effects of welfare on the markets and morals of the poor (indeed,
on this judgment Unger is relatively quiet). Instead, Unger celebrates the
achievements of the Great Society which were designed with intent for the
middle classes. It's not his only point.
Unger's emphasis on the worth of human beings who find themselves
middle class is refreshing. The middle class, now that it has come into
the view of historians after a hundred-year eclipse, is still ignored
catholically in positive assessments of American culture. It's all
"spectacle" and "gaze" at the fin-de-siecle. Thus it is notable, too, that
Unger includes the values and the practices of the middle classes in the
social welfare function when he evaluates the many programs of the Great
Society--including the War on Poverty. Unfortunately, _The Best of
Intentions_ devotes little space to an articulation of the author's chief
and boldest argument: that the programs of the Great Society which "worked
best" were in fact the programs designed for the benefit of the educated
middle classes (pp. 10, 366).
Unger devotes most of his formidable energies documenting the
policy processes which gave rise to the big budget items of the Great
Society: Medicare, federal aid to education, and the War on Poverty. Here,
Unger is particularly strong in archival detail and in administrative
scope, chasing Presidential and Congressional paper trails across the
nation's depositories of oral history. Unger is also a patient teacher of
the sometimes painful formulation and design of the Great Society
programs--from VISTA to Head Start to the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
The main problem with the book as policy history is that Unger
engages in an unarticulated rhetoric of economic and policy performance. It
is difficult to discern what standards are being used by Unger to evaluate
the programs that "work best." For example, Unger seems to write without
irony: "The Economic Opportunity Act was sound, [Sargent] Shriver told the
legislators; the country would get a dollar's value for a dollar spent" (p.
86). That expected rate-of-return, it seems to Shriver and to Unger,
represented what Shriver called "the best thinking in the nation on this
subject" (p. 86). According to Unger, the Economic Opportunity Act "sought
to change the poor . . . The proposed bill provided modest amounts of seed
money to enable the poor to acquire the skills, motivation, and attitudes
they needed to better cope with the existing economic rules of the game"
(p. 86). Unger's main criticism of the bill is for its failure to promise
a massive transfer of income to the nation's poor. The point here is that
Unger does not consider his own standards for how any policy could "work
best:" Sargent Shriver's standard for investment, the textbook government
rule of TR=TC, does not--despite the intention to build skills among the
poor--promise growth in GDP. It is not clear in this chapter or in others
for what purposes a simple, massive transfer of income to the poor--if
politically feasible--would "work" well for both taxpayers and recipients.
Unger is not alone, of course, in being ambiguous about
performance standards in economic policy. The work is not cliometric: it
is an older style of policy history, pre-cliometric, pre-critical theory.
But a stated commitment to quantification or theory would not alone be
sufficient for improving Unger's policy analysis. (Witness the abuse of
tests of statistical significance, even in the top journals of economics.)
What Unger is reaching for but not attaining is a language for valuing
improvements in the "quality," not merely the "quantity," of life. Unger
credits Johnson's speech-writer, the Harvard-educated Richard Goodwin, for
putting a quality-of-life agenda in the mind of Johnson (p. 17). But Unger
himself has not decided how to evaluate quality of life as a policy
variable or as a way of being. Unger's use of the term "quality of life"
is reserved for the middle classes--for Johnson's middle class
intellectuals, who seem to inspire Unger, the quality-of-life agenda was
about getting more "Athens" and "Florence" and less
sprawl of kitsch and spiritless suburbia (p. 17). In _The Best of
Intentions_, "quality of life" does not seem to be an object of concern
when evaluating policy directed at those who lack severely in the
quantity" of life. In fact in the epilogue Unger leans against the project
of making quality distinctions altogether, yielding ground to the
neoclassical economic (or philosophical emotivist) idea that there is
no arguing about tastes. Here, Unger suggests that if Americans want
to buy more Heater Meals and less health care--and GDP is growing--
so be it (p. 364). Yet Unger's main point is that Americans ought to
discriminate quality from quantity, and that was the good of the Great
Society. Americans should want less Kenny G in the elevators and
more symphony in the city parks, so be it.
Historians of social welfare divide over the perceived need to
say that some reform movement came mostly "from above" or mostly "from
below." In some arenas the division is hardly perceptible. It is widely
agreed, for example, that the Charity Organization Movement of the late
nineteenth century-- the first widespread attempt to privatize and organize
"welfare" in America--came from the enterprise of the white and Protestant
middle classes. Historians of the War on Poverty are not in agreement, and
the division--in a world in which the simple binary top/down is toggled
obsessively--has important consequences for how one goes about policy and
reform. The thesis of reform-from-below is found mostly on the political
left. "The disagreement is not merely an academic squabble," says Unger.
"It is an issue that separates two models of America's social essence" (p.
49). Yes, historically speaking, as perceived. But it might be better to
think of the division this way: The disagreement is not merely an academic
squabble. It is an issue that separates two models of America's social
science.
Says Unger, "[on] the whole I believe the top-down view more
persuasive" (p. 50). "The top-down perspective identifies antipoverty
initiatives as the work of liberal technocrats in the Kennedy-Johnson White
House" and of other "top layer" bureaucrats and academics (p. 50). In
Unger's story of movements for reform in the 1960s, the credit goes to the
likes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the economists Walter Heller and Robert
Lampman, the speech-writer Richard Goodwin, the HEW's Alice Rivlin. There
can be no doubt that these and many other "liberal technocrats" did the
thinking and the policy-writing for the War on Poverty. But Unger, using
his own words, seems to force the conclusion that "America's social
essence" in the 1960s was one in which reform could have only come
from the top; or, perhaps, though less likely, Unger is concluding that
the top is simply the proper location for reform.
Yet it is plausible to think that Unger's conclusion has been
forced not by his preferred model of America's social essence. Unger's
conclusion that the reforms of the 1960s were top-down may be forced by his
preferred model of American social science. The way Unger views the
material of history is itself top-down. Unger is not a builder of
rational-choice models but he borrows its top-down, policy-driven, and
behaviorist rhetorics. Unger is an empiricist but he examines the
movements of the Sixties--community action programs, "ghetto unrest," the
theater of Baraka--through the lens of journalists, top-layer bureaucrats,
and liberal technocrats. In other words, Unger does not examine the rise
of anti-poverty initiatives by examining first-person stories and
micro-level practices of the nation's welfare recipients, welfare rights
activists, local bureaucrats, and so forth. Unger does not examine the
ways in which local inspirations--even neighborhood events--might have
gathered steam from other localities, shaping from the bottom-up what look
to be a passing storm of "federal initiatives." The top-down model of
America's social science is shaping the top-down understanding of
America's social essence.
The general weakness or absence of an explicit theoretical or
critical posture is what will turn many readers away from _The Best of
Intentions_. The Great Society made its mark on the land, but there were
apparently no women involved. (The author is explicit in his omission of
race and of civil rights [p. 10].) For this reader, Unger's archival
treasures are material for testing important critical work on economic
policy, such as that which is to be found in Albert Hirschman's _The
Rhetoric of Reaction_ (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1991) and in Robert
Higgs' _Crisis and Leviathan_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987). Hirshman's "jeopardy thesis" needs Higgs' "ratchet effect," and
the fusion would surely illuminate _The Best of Intentions_. Unger is at
his best when his verbal analysis of post-program achievements is
tightly woven with a narrative of program intentions: this is easily
witnessed in Unger's excellent summary of the Job Corps (p. 178).
_The Best of Intentions_ is at its worst when it attempts to characterize
the behind-the-scenes lives of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon,
sounding at times more like an Arts and Entertainment column than a
history with an ear to morals and manners.
But if Unger has not opened the conversation he has surely--in
his emphasis on the middle class--made an important contribution to the way
in which historians will view the triumphs and the failures of the Great
Society. The middle class matters. Thanks to Unger's work, observers of
the Great Society will be challenged to add to the balance sheet a Sesame
Street and a theater and a well-equipped rest area for each ill-conceived
community action program and long-term welfare case.
Stephen Ziliak
Department of Economics
Bowling Green State University
Stephen Ziliak authored, with Deirdre McCloskey, "The Standard Error of
Regressions" (_Journal of Economic Literature_, March 1996). Ziliak's
current research is on the economic history of welfare and charity in the
United States. His work on the privatization of welfare has appeared in
_The Independent Review_ and _Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance_.
Ziliak is guest editor of a forthcoming issue of _Social Science History_
on voluntarism and the welfare state, and he is a co-editor of the
millennial edition of _Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial
Times to the Present (Cambridge University Press)_.
Copyright (c) 1998 by EH.NET and H-Net. All rights reserved. This work may
be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the
author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.NET
Administrator. ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2850; Fax:
513-529-3308)
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]
|
