Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 is a 1984 book about the effectiveness of welfare state policies in the United States between 1950 and 1980 by the political scientist Charles Murray.

[3][4][10][11] Christopher Jencks wrote a detailed review in the May 9, 1985, issue of The New York Review of Books in which he describes the book as a work of "Social Darwinism" which owes its popularity not to its scientific rigor but rather to its utility in providing a veneer of "moral legitimacy for budget cuts that many politicians want to make in order to reduce the federal deficit.

A 12-page summary was also published in their Focus magazine, in which the researchers "reject [Losing Ground's] broad condemnations of the Great Society", but they agreed that a new approach was needed for the 1980s to meet the goal of reducing poverty and crime.

"[10] In a December 1993 interview with NBC News, then U.S. President Bill Clinton wrote of Murray and Losing Ground: "He did the country a great service.

[15] In his 2009 book Prisons of Poverty, sociologist Loïc Wacquant criticized the book for misinterpreting data in a way that purported to demonstrate that rising poverty levels after the 1960s were caused by the emergence of the social welfare state when according to Wacquant the data showed no such thing.