In the early 1960s American was in a confident mood and embarked on a series of efforts to solve the problems of poverty, racial discrimination, unemployment, and inequality of educational opportunity. The programs of the Great Society and the War on Poverty were undergirded by a broad consensus about what our problems as a nation were and how we should solve them. But by the early seventies both political and scholarly tides had shifted. Americans were divided and uncertain about what to do abroad, fearful of military inferiority, and pessimistic about the capacity of government to deal affirmatively with domestic problems. A new administration renounced the rhetoric of the Great Society and changed the emphasis of many programs. On the scholarly front, new research called into question the old faiths on which liberal legislation had been based.In this book, the sixteenth volume in the Brookings series in Social Economics, Henry Aaron describes both the initial consensus and its subsequent decline. He examines the evolution of attitude and pronouncements by scholars and popular writers on the role of the federal government and its capacity to bring about beneficial change in three broad areas: poverty and discrimination, education and training, and unemployment and inflation. He argues that the political eclipse of the Great Society depended more on events external to it--war in Vietnam, dissolution of the civil rights coalition, and, finally, the Watergate scandal and all its repercussions--than on its intrinsic failings. Aaron concludes that both the initial commitment to use national polices to solve social and economic problems and the subsequent disillusionment of scholars and laymen alike rest largely on preconceptions and faiths that have little to do with research themselves.
Limited preview - 1978 - 185 pages
Key words and phrases War on Poverty, nomic, unem, poverty threshold, Phillips curve, labor markets, Brookings Institution, Jacob Mincer, Coleman Report, American Economic Review, science court, full employment, culture of poverty, minimum wages, gross national product, structural unemployment, economists, Samuel Bowles, social science, Anita Summers |
References from web pagesMorePolitics and the Professors. The Great Society in Perspective.
ED168416 - Politics and the Professors. The Great Society in Perspective.
eric.ed.gov/ ERICWebPortal/ recordDetail?accno=ED168416 Politics and the Professors Revisited
Author(s): Aaron, Henry J. 1989 Abstract: No abstract is available for this item
ideas.repec.org/ a/ aea/ aecrev/ v79y1989i2p1-15.html Think tanks, public debt, and the politics of expertise in Canada
Think tanks, public debt, and the. politics of expertise in Canada. Abstract: Despite growing controversy about their roles and influence, Canadian ...
www.blackwell-synergy.com/ doi/ abs/ 10.1111/ j.1754-7121.1993.tb00832.x Science Communication
http://scx.sagepub.com. Science Communication. DOI: 10.1177/107554708100200312. 1981; 2; 452. Science Communication. Robert Harris. 1978) 185 pp ...
scx.sagepub.com/ cgi/ reprint/ 2/ 3/ 452.pdf The Politics of Random Assignment: Implementing Studies and ...
Aaron, Henry J. Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective. Washington, dc: Brookings Institution Press, 1978. ...
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Politics and the professors: the great society in perspective Henry J. Aaron Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, 1978 ISBN-10: 0-8157-0025-3 (Paper) ...
www.bibliovault.org/ BV.book.epl?BookId=14046 Discerning Policy Influence: Framework for a Strategic Evaluation ...
Discerning Policy Influence: Framework for a. Strategic Evaluation of IDRC-Supported Research. Evert A. Lindquist. School of Public Administration ...
www.idrc.ca/ uploads/ user-S/ 109569478910359907080discerning_policy.pdf Less References to this bookFrom Google ScholarPeter Gottschalk, Timothy M Smeeding - 1997 - Journal of Economic Literature WJ Wilson, R Aponte - 1985 - Annual Review of Sociology Judith I de Neufville, Stephen E Barton - 1987 - Policy Sciences Ron Haskins, Ron Haskins - 1991 - Journal of Policy Analysis and Management Popular passagesChinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. Page 172 Rising productivity and earnings, improved education, and the structure of social security have permitted many families or their children to escape; but they have left behind many families who have one or more special handicaps. These facts suggest that in the future economic growth alone will provide relatively fewer escapes from poverty. Policy will have to be more sharply focused on the handicaps that deny the poor fair access to the expanding incomes of a growing economy. Page 19 This strategy rested on a series of assumptions which went roughly as follows: 1 Eliminating poverty is largely a matter of helping children born into poverty to rise out of it. Once families escape from poverty, they do not fall back into it. Middle-class children rarely end up poor. 2 The primary reason poor children do not escape from poverty is that they do not acquire basic cognitive skills. They cannot read, write, calculate, or articulate. Lacking these skills, they cannot get or keep a well-paid... Page 89 Aaron [1978, p. 9] observed that "in many cases, the findings of social science seemed to come after, rather than before, changes in policy, which suggests that political events may influence scholars more than research influences policy. Page 9 Edward F. Denison, The Sources of Economic Growth in the United States and the Alternatives before us, Supplementary Paper No. Page 99 Commissioner shall conduct a survey and make a report to the President and the Congress, within two years of the enactment of this title, concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin... Page 75 The fact of the matter is that most of the problems, or at least many of them, that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of 'passionate movements' which have stirred this country so often in the past. Page 167 LessOther editions | by Henry J. Aaron
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More book information| Title | Politics and the professors: the great society in perspective | | Author | Henry J. Aaron | | Publisher | Brookings Institution Press, 1978 | | ISBN | 0815700253, 9780815700258 | | Length | 185 pages |
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