1940-60, progress on steroids. 1960-2000, regression.
Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North.
No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of black advancement, which predates affirmative action programs that often receive credit for creating the black middle class.
Moreover, what we experienced in the wake of the Great Society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression. Black labor-force participation rates fell, black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. In 1960 fewer than 25% of black children were being raised by a single mother; within four decades, it was more than half.
FromWall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley via Cafe Hayek
All in all, a tribute to the power of utopianism preached by unscrupulous pol as uncritically bally-hoo’d by noosepapers, radio and tee-vee.
Blithe Spirit 