Charles Murray's third part of Losing Ground, which is accurately called "interpreting the data" explains how the information gathered is used and interpreted. It explains how the education system still fails to help its youth, with similar problems of the early seventies still unchanged. It also talks of the working poor and how they would receive more benefits in the 1970's if the accepted welfare rather than work, then in the 1960's. This was labeled as an incentive to fail.
This stage of the book also explains why economic growth in the 1970's was losing steam. "One reason that the economic growth in the 1970's lost its power to reduce poverty was that many of the poor were without jobs. If one has no job, it makes no difference how much the economy grows, poverty remains.".
The government was able to make a stronger Labor Department to jump on this crisis and see to it that it could better train people to find new jobs and to help the people attain jobs that it did. This was able to boost prosperity of the nation on a larger scale and to aid it as it turned over into a new decade and things were looking up and it was a big impact which people needed to see.
"The bare fact that a cause-effect relationship links certain social policies to some of the trends we examined in part two has been established. It was most clearly established, oddly, in an ambitious attempt to discredit the notion that such links exist." The above text deals with the chapter titled "The social scientists and the great experience." In 1965 the social scientists began to reach out from the campuses to join in the excitement at the nation's capital in Washington.
The fourth and final stage of the book is entitled "rethinking social policy," in which we find three chapters entitled "what do we want to accomplish," "the constraints on helping" and "choosing a future." The first chapter explains the goals and achievements in which our social policies try to obtain.
