Topic: Nathan Glazer's Warning: Impact of Social Policy

[jpatrickham]

Wednesday, 21 September 2011 20:17 Howard Husock
    
City Journal

"Social policy often does more harm than good, says one of the last of the original neocons.The Obama administration is entering a field not cultivated on a major scale since the 1960s: social policy. Unlike safety-net entitlements, such as health insurance and cash welfare, social policy—or social engineering, to use the more critical term—uses government action to try to change and improve people and their neighborhoods. For instance, the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods are supposed to replicate, in 21 cities, what the Harlem Children’s Zone has done in Manhattan—to “create plans to provide cradle-to-career services that improve the educational achievement and healthy development of children,” as a White House press release modestly puts it.

The administration’s Social Innovation Fund seeks to promote “youth development, economic opportunity or healthy futures” by identifying dozens of small private programs—in areas like job training, nutrition, exercise, and after-school reading and math help—and using federal dollars to expand them to additional sites and cities.

KRIS SNIBBE/HARVARD STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER | Glazer has written about everything from ethnicity to urban architecture.

These initiatives bring to mind the Great Society years, when the federal government, trying to improve citizens from coast to coast, decided to do it by enormously expanding smaller, more localized nonprofit programs. The theory was that this approach would avoid the faceless bureaucratism that characterized government-run enterprises. The Model Cities project, for example, was born when Lyndon Johnson decided to “add three zeroes,” as Ford Foundation executive Paul Ylvisaker once told me, to a Ford program called Gray Areas, in which citizen boards would somehow use foundation funds to reverse the decline of poor neighborhoods. Other Great Society projects that tried to implement social policy through new or existing nonprofit organizations included Head Start, which sought to improve early-childhood education, and Community Action Programs, which offered a variety of services, including job training, adult literacy, and nutrition education.

President Obama’s revival of an ambitious social policy agenda makes this a good time to reexamine the work of one of the most brilliant critics of the first wave: Nathan Glazer, now 88, a Harvard sociologist and one of the last of the founding generation of neoconservatives (a term often applied to him, though he has never really embraced it). In his bluntly titled 1988 book, The Limits of Social Policy, Glazer examined two decades’ worth of programs and reached a sobering conclusion: “Against the view that to every problem there is a solution, I came to believe that we can have only partial and less than wholly satisfying answers to the social problems in question. Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”

http://www.rightsidenews.com/2011092214551/life-and-science/culture-wars/nathan-glazers-warning.html?

[Pandora]

Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems ....

Yah, no sht, Sherlock!  Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell (IIRC), many of these "problems" can't be solved, there are only trade-offs.  Aside from the fact that many of the "problems" were initiated by the surety that humans can be improved.

... no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”

And there's the second mistake.  The pursuit of human happiness is rightfully the purview of the individual, not by a buncha gawdamned meddlers.

[Libertas]

Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems ....

Yah, no sht, Sherlock!  Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell (IIRC), many of these "problems" can't be solved, there are only trade-offs.  Aside from the fact that many of the "problems" were initiated by the surety that humans can be improved.

... no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”

And there's the second mistake.  The pursuit of human happiness is rightfully the purview of the individual, not by a buncha gawdamned meddlers.

The biggest mistake this is!  Upon this the Left does pin all its evil deeds upon!

(Sorry for sounding like Yoda!)

[jpatrickham]

Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems ....

Yah, no sht, Sherlock!  Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell (IIRC), many of these "problems" can't be solved, there are only trade-offs.  Aside from the fact that many of the "problems" were initiated by the surety that humans can be improved.

... no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”

May the force be with you!

And there's the second mistake.  The pursuit of human happiness is rightfully the purview of the individual, not by a buncha gawdamned meddlers.

The biggest mistake this is!  Upon this the Left does pin all its evil deeds upon!

(Sorry for sounding like Yoda!)