The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State

by Fred Block, Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich

Like the enormously influential Regulating the Poor, this book is sure to profoundly influence national debate on one of the most explosive issues of our time. Against a crescendo of fashionable attacks upon the welfare state, our boldest social thinkers – Fred Block, Richard Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven – argue for its real, hard-won accomplishments. They show how current denunciations echo centuries-old laments as fallacious then as they are now. They expose the reigning orthodoxies about welfare – that it destroys incentives to work, uses up investment capital, augments a decline in productivity and competitiveness, and so on – and explain why these lack any substance.

Indeed, the reverse is true. Our national well-being has depended upon the welfare state, and today it is more needed than ever.

The Mean Season analyzes Reagan's war on the poor and the welfare state to reveal its true beneficiaries – and its true targets. More than a defense of the welfare state's economic efficiency and fairness, The Mean Season is a reaffirmation of those decent, humane values so much under attack in Reagan's America.

Genres: Politics

205 pages, Hardcover

First published July 12, 1987

Reviews

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Mean Season, published in 1987, is both dated and prescient. Many of the nightmares of the four authors (Fred Block, Richard A. Cloward , Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven) came true in Bill Clinton's ending "welfare as we know it" in 1996 with bipartisan support in the Congress.

Piven and Cloward examine the history of cash assistance and the impact of that history on the debate in the 1970s and 1980s about welfare reform. Block begins: "In the current climate of American politics, anyone with the courage to argue in favor of an expansion of the welfare state will be immediately denounced . . ." And then, bless his heart, he argues for an expansion of the welfare state. Ehrenreich argues forcefully that "we cannot let the attack by the right foreclose the task of envisioning what a just and democratic American welfare state would look like."

If you read (or even skim) The Mean Season and then look at Clinton's welfare reform (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996), you will see that the title of this book is right on.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Mean Season, published in 1987, is both dated and prescient. Many of the nightmares of the four authors (Fred Block, Richard A. Cloward , Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven) came true in Bill Clinton's ending "welfare as we know it" in 1996 with bipartisan support in the Congress.

Piven and Cloward examine the history of cash assistance and the impact of that history on the debate in the 1970s and 1980s about welfare reform. Block begins: "In the current climate of American politics, anyone with the courage to argue in favor of an expansion of the welfare state will be immediately denounced . . ." And then, bless his heart, he argues for an expansion of the welfare state. Ehrenreich argues forcefully that "we cannot let the attack by the right foreclose the task of envisioning what a just and democratic American welfare state would look like."

If you read (or even skim) The Mean Season and then look at Clinton's welfare reform (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996), you will see that the title of this book is right on.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first book reading in my "Political Economy and Social Change" program at The Evergreen State College. It was inspiring and an important criticism against Reagan's attack on the Welfare state. Thanks to Glenn Beck's big mouth, I was reminded of this book and am re-reading it.