101 Chambers: Congress, State Legislatures and the Future of Legislative Studies

tics. Cutbacks are occurring throughout the West, under both left and right governments. And antipoverty programs based only on benefits and services for the needy, such as traditional welfare, failed to address the lifestyles that helped to make families poor— especially nonwork by parents and unwed pregnancy. Evaluations showed that welfare accomplished more if it required work. The voters and most politicians agreed, even if academics dissented. So the welfare reform of the 1990s was substantially bipartisan. When Congress reauthorized welfare recently, even Democrats accepted the end of entitlement. On the other hand, the nation is spending more on welfare than before reform, because of the cost of the child care and other subsidies necessary to support work. In some ways the welfare state has expanded, as federal and local governments now do more to advance the working poor. Thus, reform was far from an unalloyed conservative triumph. The author is better at analyzing the political structure of the welfare state. He shows how private agencies that first helped the poor in the Progressive era were subordinated to large government programs in the 1930s and 1960s. Later, professional groups like doctors and social workers obtained public funding from programs while retaining much of their autonomy. Most recently, human service executives have imposed managed care on the professionals. All of these groups now struggle for power within the welfare state. Stoesz also explains persuasively why the child welfare system, which is often ignored, commonly fails to protect poor children from abuse and neglect. On his account, child welfare workers have abandoned serious research into what works in favor of political correctness, thus undercutting their own authority. The incompetent, under-funded system has become one of several “networks of negligence” to which we consign the more disordered poor, alongside public long-term care and mental hospitals. The middle class, drawing on the private sector, is much better served. The author thinks liberals can recover the initiative in social policy only if they return to the pragmatism that built the welfare state. Like conservatives, they must advance proposals for new programs that appeal to research and experience about what works. They should abandon old-style bureaucracy and uniform benefits for more innovative structures that tailor benefits to the needs of individuals, the better to promote opportunity and mobility. He is vague, however, about what this means. He never seriously addresses the dysfunctional patterns—nonwork, unwed pregnancy, crime—that prevent benefits alone from overcoming poverty. Indeed, he says that government must “presume competence” in the poor. Welfare reform, in contrast, avoided that assumption, presuming that the poor needed direction as well as benefits if they were to work and get ahead. Stoesz is a better sociologist of the welfare state than he is a policy advocate. He has a good sense of who has won and lost in the welfare wars. But to turn around liberal fortunes, he would have to be more realistic about the poor themselves, not only about those who serve them.