Politics and the professors : the great society in perspective / Henry J. Aaron.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aaron, Henry J.

Series:

Studies in social economics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economic assistance, Domestic--United States.

Economic assistance, Domestic.

United States.

Education and state--United States.

Education and state.

Physical Description:

185 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Washington : Brookings Institution, [1978]

Summary:

In the early 1960s America 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.

Contents:

The Common View 2

The War on Poverty and the Great Society 7

2. Poverty and Discrimination 16

Looking Backward 17

OEO, the War on Poverty, and the Great Society 25

Current Views on Poverty and Discrimination 35

3. Education and Jobs: A Swinging Pendulum 65

Naive Hopes and Simple Faiths 66

Loss of Innocence 72

Taking Bearings 92

4. Unemployment and Inflation 111

A Backward Glance 112

New Facts, New Theories, New Policies 117

5. Faith, Intelligence, and Good Works 146

The 1960s: Many Currents Join 147

The Currents Diverge 152

Looking Forward 159.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0815700261.

0815700253

OCLC:

3608673