Sending the Right Signal
DESPITE HIS vigorous dissent, George Gilder reinforces the main findings of A Community of Self-Reliance in three important ways. First, he agrees implicitly with our central point—namely, that the problem of the late 1980s is no longer “poverty” but rather “dependency,” and that the problem of dependency is primarily a moral problem. Second, in the same connection, he uses the array of new statistical materials we were able to bring together (with the help of Nick Eberstadt and Karl Zinsmeister) to show that the material condition of the poor in the United States is far better than most commentators have observed. Third, he recommends greater attention to the males involved in female-headed households, a subject on which we worked hard to bring together a fuller brief compendium of information than is easily found elsewhere.
