Charles Murray on two books, one of which was very fashionable, and another that was decidedly not:

They appeared in the same year, 1962: The Other America, by Michael Harrington (Macmillan) and Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman (University of Chicago Press). The elite’s response to their publication was almost a caricature of the biases of the time. The Other America was greeted ecstatically. Dwight McDonald’s New Yorker review of it was read by John Kennedy and prompted the staff work for the War on Poverty. Capitalism and Freedom was not reviewed in any major American newspaper or newsmagazine.

How wrong can one book be? The Other America has to be a contender for the world record. Ignore the many evidentiary problems with Harrington’s attempt to portray America as a society with 50 million people in poverty. The real damage was done by his underlying premise: Poverty is the fault not of the individual but of the system. Seized upon as the new intellectual received wisdom, this view drove the design of social policy for the next decade: expanded welfare programs that asked nothing from the recipients, a breakdown of accountability in the criminal justice system, erosion of equality under the law in favor of preferences to achieve equal outcomes. All were bad policies that caused enormous damage, underwritten by the assumption that people are not responsible for the consequences of their actions.

Meanwhile, Friedman got it right. In a free society, the vast majority of people can be in control of their lives. It is a free society that best provides for those who remain in need. A free society produces in reality the broad economic prosperity that Harrington sought through Marxist theory. Harrington’s book is a road map for understanding just about everything that went wrong with social policy in the last 30 years; Friedman’s is a road map for understanding just about everything that went right.

We’re not here to debate the merits of each book, but rather to note: “Capitalism and Freedom was not reviewed in any major American newspaper or newsmagazine.” The intellectual class is fashionable in its own way.

Let’s all check back in forty years if we’re so lucky to be around and see how the books on Global Warming have fared, among other predictions. HT: Maggie’s Farm

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