Scholarly Studies of the Culture of Poverty. Beginning in the late 1950s, studies of the welfare system were conducted by scholars focusing on the culture of poverty. None of these studies actually proved that welfare was causing poverty. Yet each analyzed a particular dimension of the poverty culture in a powerful and persuasive way.

• Anthropologist Oscar Lewis used the phrase "culture of poverty" to indicate that the poverty he observed among Puerto Rican families in New York in the 1950s was not just a temporary economic condition, but a way of life reinforced by despair of achieving even meager economic goals. ¹⁶
• In the 1965 book The Negro Family,¹⁷ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a professor at Harvard University, expressed alarm over the fact that 20 percent of all black children were living in single-parent households (today the figure is 70 percent) and advised the Nixon administration to quit pouring money into the black community and pursue a policy of "benign neglect."
• In the pathbreaking book Welfare, Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a chief of the Office of Policy Development in the Reagan White House, calculated effective marginal tax rates for low-income workers and concluded that the welfare system was designed from top to bottom to encourage dependency and discourage self-reliance. ¹⁸
• In the 1970s, sociologist George Gilder spent several years living among poor welfare recipients. In Visible Man¹⁹ and Wealth and Poverty,²⁰ he analyzed in great detail how the welfare system was destroying the family, especially the black family, in low-income communities.
• More than any other single study, Charles Murray's Losing Ground²¹ shocked liberals and conservatives alike by arguing that in our central cities the black family has been all but destroyed, chiefly by the welfare system.
• The idea that poverty is the result of a cultural pathology was given more credibility with the 1982 publication of journalist Ken Auletta's work, The Urban Underclass.²²
• In The Truly Disadvantaged²³ (1987), liberal sociologist William Wilson argued that the culture of the underclass is an adaptation to social forces over which the poor have little control; as working-class families and businesses move to the suburbs, those left behind form an adaptive culture that relies on welfare, street hustling and crime to survive in an isolated wasteland.
• In 1993, Michael Katz argued in The "Underclass" Debate²⁴ that the emergence of a hostile and desperate underclass is the result of a collapse of community and that the only viable institutions left in the inner city are the private agencies and churches that provide some limited level of "civil society."

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