Lasting Influence:
A Quick Look at Some of the Most Influential Books and Essays of the Last 18 Years
Twin Cities Business Monthly, January 2000
By Mitchell B. Pearlstein

As a sign of how I've not been caught up in things millennial, I'll be flying (in a plane) as the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, never mind Y2K warnings to the contrary.

By so doing, I'll miss seeing the ball come down in Times Square. I'll also miss celebrating the new epoch at some Twin Cities hot spot. But if truth be told, if I were home in Minneapolis, I'd probably be asleep by 10:30 p.m., anyway. Suffice it to say (my wife has been known to concur on the point) I'm a few magnums short of party animal.

Still, I do feel obliged to mark -- albeit in abridged and wonkish fashion -- the passing of the last 1,000 years. So let me try this: Reaching all the way back, say, to 1982, what books and essays have been most pivotal in shaping the current state of social policy in the United States. Here's a too-quick rundown of a handful of entries.

• "Broken Windows," by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, The Atlantic Monthly (March 1982). I know of no act of scholarship that has been more influential in turning the tide on crime, especially in big cities, than this seminal piece which made the case that "disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked," and that in order to fight the latter, it is essential to combat examples of the former: seemingly small things such as panhandling, public drunkenness, graffiti and unrepaired broken windows.

This has been precisely the strategy pursued in places like New York City, where, in 1995, the violent crime rate declined to its lowest level in nearly a quarter century. Nationally, it's no coincidence that violent crime dropped nearly 20 percent from 1991 to 1997.

• Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, by Charles Murray (1984). More effectively than any other study over the period, Losing Ground made the case that welfare policy -- especially programs that were either created or radically expanded in the 1960s and 1970s -- often did more to hurt poor people than to help them. Whereas conservative critiques of welfare policies previously focused on how they invariably wasted money, Murray led the way in empirically documenting how Great Society-type programs, much more sadly, routinely wasted lives. Losing Ground also was essential in driving home the now better understood point that, in the making and execution of public policy, it's good results, not good intentions, that ultimately matter.
• "A Liberal-Democratic Case for the Two-Parent Family," by William A. Galston, The Responsive Community (Winter 1990- 1991); and "Dan Quayle Was Right," by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The Atlantic Monthly (April 1993). These two essays did more than anything else written over the span to make it politically acceptable (up to a point, anyway) to talk about the largest social disaster of our time: the huge number of boys and girls forced to grow up without their fathers at home.

In good measure, Galston's contribution lay in the not inconsequential fact that he's a Democrat (though I've always viewed him as more of a moderate than a liberal one). His bravery gave cover to others on the left who were inclined to say similarly sensible things on behalf of "traditional" families but who had been intimidated into politically correct silence.

Whitehead's contribution was in pulling together so much compelling evidence on the question that those who should know better -- politicians, journalists, academics, and others -- no longer could legitimately claim ignorance of the extraordinary costs of fatherlessness.

• The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin Olasky (1992). I cited this book in these pages just a few months ago, but it deserves to be cited again, as it serves as the principal foundation of "compassionate conservatism," which is in high profile these days. Olasky's argument was that the poor were better served, both in the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th, when efforts to help them were rooted less in government and more in churches and other religious institutions. And along with works like Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief (1993), Olasky's book surely has been key in helping more than a few elites overcome their overdone nervousness about the proper role and place of religion in public squares.

This is an artificially short list, of course, if for no other reason than it contains nothing so far by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York's retiring senior senator and one of the nation's most insightful and imaginative social scientists. To amend, I would commend two of his efforts in particular.

In "Toward a Post-industrial Social Policy" (The Public Interest, Summer 1989), Moynihan suggested that bad and unwise behavior often causes poverty. As unremarkable as this sounds, his claim posed a major and persuasive challenge to War on Poverty orthodoxy, which held the opposite: namely, that bad behavior and choices are mainly the byproducts of poverty.

And in "Defining Deviancy Down" (The American Scholar, Winter 1992), Moynihan shocked and shamed many into reality by spotlighting how Americans had become dangerously acquiescent to social pathologies of the severest sort.

The concluding point I would make is not just that ideas matter, as I would like to think that that's self-evident. The better wrap-up has to do with the social sciences: For all the cant and trivia committed in their name, especially in recent decades, when pursued rightly and brilliantly, they can add sizably to how we live.

At least they occasionally were known to do so last millennium.

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.