The Limits of Social Policy

Many social policies of the 1960s and 1970s, designed to overcome poverty and provide a decent minimum standard of living for all Americans, ran into trouble in the 1980s--with politicians, with social scientists, and with the American people.

Wall Street Journal

[This] is a book about the policy process itself, about the necessary shortcomings of grand proposals and the influences on policy. And, characteristically for Mr. Glazer, it is pragmatic, thorough and evenhanded ... The Limits of Social Policy will be discouraging reading for all those people - liberal, moderate or even conservative - who fondly believe that it is possible to devise and implement a national social policy that will sharply reduce poverty and distress. That is precisely why they should read it.

Nathan Glazer is Professor of Education and Sociology, Emeritus, at Harvard University.