Hello, I'm City Journal editor Brian Anderson.

Thanks for joining us for the Ten Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.

When President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964, he said that the goal of the war was

to cure poverty and, above all, prevented. 50 years later, most people would agree that Johnson's

signature Great Society campaign

has shown at best mixed results.

While quality of life in the United States has improved,

the official poverty rate has changed very little.

Despite more than $20 trillion having been expended on anti-poverty initiatives since the 1960s. When President

Bill Clinton joined with Republicans in Congress and promised to end welfare as we know it, the

left claimed that it would lead to a massive increase in poverty with children and their mothers

starving in the streets. That didn't happen. Today, welfare caseloads are down, but new challenges have

emerged. Workforce participation, disability payments, and food stamps have all been moving in the

wrong direction in recent years, and with automation threatening to displace millions of workers,

even some conservatives are embracing the idea of a universal basic income,

regardless of what it might mean to have a huge population on permanent dependency. So where do we

go from here? Joining me to discuss the war on poverty and its history and its current situation

is Peter Cove. Peter is the founder of America Works,

the first for-profit welfare to work company in America, and author of the brand new book,

Poor No More, Rethinking Dependency and the War on Poverty. Peter, thanks very much for joining

us on 10 blocks.

Thank you for having me, Brian.

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