Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty(Power, Conflict, and Democracy: American Politics Into the 21st Century)

In this hard-hitting analysis of the war on poverty, Judith Russell charges that since FDR's New Deal, the U.S. government has introduced many public policies attempting to address poverty, yet it has failed to produce coherent programs to combat it. Focusing on the genesis of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the core of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson's antipoverty crusade, Russell asserts that the war on poverty could have been an inclusive policy of government-sponsored jobs programs, but it failed to confront the deep-rooted problems endemic to American poverty.

While the macroeconomic strategies devised by the Keynesian Council of Economic Advisors in 1963 and 1964 eventually rejected proposed jobs programs to combat unemployment, Russell argues that this was the wrong strategy for fighting the structural unemployment at the center of hard-core poverty. At the same time, liberal policymakers ignored direct calls for jobs programs emanating from black Americans who were disproportionately affected by structural unemployment. Without these programs at the center of the war on poverty, it was doomed to fail. Drawing on a plethora of archival sources, including the Kennedy and Johnson Presidential Libraries, and interviews and a ten-year correspondence with former Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, this forceful examination brings a fresh perspective to a key era in American economic policymaking and to contemporary policy debates.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Other War on Poverty--the Battle for Jobs Economic Ideas and the War on Poverty Change and Incapacity in the Department of Labor Social Forces, Civil Rights, and the Struggle for Jobs Governmental Will: The Limits of Noblesse Oblige Ideas and Government Policy Making Appendix: Joblessness, Poverty, and Public Policy in the United States

About the Author :
Judith Russell received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. Until 1999 she was assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. After serving as vice president for research and policy at the New York City Partnership, she has returned to teaching political science at Columbia University.

Review :
Russell's trenchant analysis is a refreshing antidote to the easy armchair analyses of nay sayers. -- L. Randall Wray Journal of Economic Issues Russell's analysis is a compelling one... she throws a penetrating light on a moment in the post-war history of the United States when... There was a real failure to try the possibilities of things. Labor History