What Makes Charity Work?

A compassionate America has spent more than $5 trillion on welfare programs over three decades, but the poor haven't vanished, and the self-destructive behavior that imprisons many in poverty has become an intergenerational inheritance. Drawing on the City Journal's superlative reporting, What Makes Charity Work? shows in concrete and compelling detail how government assistance to the poor is doomed to failure — because it treats them as victims of forces beyond their control, robs them of a sense of personal responsibility, and neglects the virtues they need to escape poverty. Contrasting case studies of charities both old and new show how charity can succeed spectacularly when it encourages the poor to take control of their own lives and teaches them habits of self-reliance and the traditional virtues. Here are accounts of charities that follow these precepts and have not only brought individuals into the economic and social mainstream but have delivered whole classes of people from poverty and degradation into the middle class in a single generation. As welfare reform unfolds, and as the nation calculates how to implement the "charitable choice" provision of the 1996 welfare reform act that allows government to use private and religious charities in helping the poor, policymakers and concerned Americans will find both encouraging and cautionary case studies in What Makes Charity Work? Here is an urgent issue considered in vivid, practical, and unfailingly absorbing fashion.

Superlative reports drawn from City Journal show how charities old and new can succeed spectacularly when they encourage the poor to take control of their own lives and when they teach habits of self-reliance and the traditional virtues. Here is an urgent issue considered in vivid and practical fashion. City Journal is the great Fool Killer in the arena of urban policy. It's more than sharp and penetrating. It's a joy to read. --Tom Wolfe. It is a perfect time to understand better why some charities succeed and others fail. For this purpose and others, What Makes Charity Work? is a must. --Leslie Lenkowsky, Wall Street Journal

Publishers Weekly

Influenced by "practical visionaries" such as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford, America began the 20th century with a judicious commitment to help those among the less fortunate who were most willing to help themselves. A century later, argues Mac Donald, a journalist and John M. Olin fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, we are gripped in a choke hold by liberal social programs plagued by massive, systemic problems. In this crisp and well-argued collection of essays, she wonders why we tolerate generations raised on welfare, reinforce teen pregnancy (by, for example, providing day-care centers at high schools) and accept public schools where the three Rs are overlooked so that kids can work on perfecting their graffiti. Instead of blaming all of society's ills on a perceived insensitivity to diversification (e.g., racism and sexism), why don't we investigate what happened to individual responsibility? she asks. She swiftly and deliberately attacks liberal individuals and institutions of every stripe--from the most influential philanthropists to the leading public health institutions to the ivory towers of academia and the media, particularly the New York Times, which in her view not only reports the news but also creates it--with the aim of exposing the flaws in their philosophies and the drastic, real-world consequences of their actions. Mac Donald's incisive insights deserve the thoughtful attention of voters of all political affiliations this election year. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Myron Magnet is editor of City Journal, the highly respected quarterly magazine published in New York by The Manhattan Institute. He has also written The Dream and the Nightmare and edited What Makes Charity Work? and The Millennial City.