In the 1960s, the poverty rate was slowly but steadily declining. Then President

Johnson declared War on Poverty, and poverty--disappeared? Alas, no; it instead began to increase again. The thesis of Mr. Murray's hotly controversial book was that the program had indeed caused the increase--and for reasons that were entirely understandable: "By 1970, without stretching the rules, without imagining some sort of welfare cheat, you had a situation in which a young woman who had gotten pregnant... could quite reasonably say that her best option was not to marry the man, and to obtain an income which was roughly equal in purchasing power to a minimum-wage job in 1960." WFB: "Some of your critics say it may make sense in the short term for the girl not to marry the boy. However, since this almost inevitably catapults her into a perpetual state of poverty, it's a very poor strategic decision." CM: "We are talking about 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds in many instances ... You can think of it as people making incremental decisions from day to day and suddenly, down the road, they've locked themselves into a situation they had never foreseen."