To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger have convened a team of experienced researchers to assess the long-term impact of the multifarious programs enacted under this banner during the mid-1960s. The results are not exactly economic history as we know it, but instead a series of policy evaluations for which specialists were asked to extend their time horizons and take a long view of their topics. This exercise in retrospective policy analysis is highly successful: The overall quality standard is high, and the contributions are unfailingly informative and sometimes surprising.

The volume is a collective enterprise only in part: contributors were given wide latitude in framing and addressing their questions, though they did meet to present and discuss their essays. (Disclosure: I participated in one of these gatherings and so had advance exposure to some of the chapters.) What unifies the essays is rejection of the simple prepackaged conclusion that the War on Poverty was a “failure,” an assessment that was popular even before Ronald Reagan's famous quip that “the Federal Government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.” True, the official poverty rate rose during the 1970s and has fluctuated trendlessly since then. But would it have been even higher in the absence of ameliorative programs, and is the official rate a good measure of economic deprivation in any case? The spirit of the volume is to escape from the binary success-failure, check-the-box mindset and ask what can be learned from fifty years of experience.

A brief review can only summarize a few highlights. Jane Waldfogel's essay on the safety net for families shows that federal food and nutrition programs (food stamps or SNAP, school breakfast and lunch, and supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children [WIC] have been a “resounding success” in improving nutrition and child health, though these gains are not reflected in the official poverty rate (pp. 154–60). In her chapter on the safety net for the elderly, Kathleen McGarry reports that “the War on Poverty has been a success for the elderly by almost any measure,” reducing the poverty rate for this group from 35 percent to less than 10 percent and expanding opportunities for independent living in retirement (pp. 179–96). (The largest contributor to these advances was Social Security, which was of course not a new Great Society program. But McGarry argues that by establishing clear national goals for the elderly, the Older Americans Act of 1965 “set the stage” for increases in Social Security benefits and establishment of the Supplemental Security Income program soon thereafter.) According to Barbara Wolfe, evaluations of Medicaid show significant gains in both access to health care and in mortality (pp. 242–43), while assessments of Community Health Center (first funded in 1964 under the Economic Opportunity Act) are “overwhelmingly favorable” (p. 249). Katherine Swartz finds that Medicare and Medicaid achieved their primary objective of access to medical care for the poor and near poor elderly, within a decade of enactment (pp. 268–71, 274–81).

One should not infer that the volume is a simple exercise in revisionist history, declaring that the War on Poverty was really a success on all fronts after all. Many chapters report shortcomings and failures quite candidly. Elizabeth Cascio and Sarah Reber show that Title I funding (authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) reduced the school spending gap between rich and poor states, but the evaluation literature is “uniform in producing discouraging results” (p. 74)—perhaps because federal block grants did not actually increase resources allocated to the poorest schools. In their chapter on housing policies, Edgar O. Olsen and Jens Ludwig report that President Johnson's signature homeownership program was plagued by scandals and high default rates, leading to its suspension in 1973, and ultimately to termination (p. 219). Harry Holzer surveys manpower development efforts under a variety of programs, concluding that they had only modest positive benefits that tended to fade over time (pp. 135–37).

The editors write in the introduction that the War on Poverty was “more than a disparate set of programs,” but was instead a “grand policy experiment” whose combined effect was greater than that of any one program (pp. 8–9). Unfortunately, the volume lacks an overview chapter that would consolidate the findings and demonstrate this overall result. The editors cite the work of Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan (“Winning the War: Poverty from the Great Society to the Great Recession.” NBER Working Paper 18718, January 2013), who deploy a consumption-based measure to show that the material well-being of the poor dramatically improved between 1965 and 2010. (A similar summary finding is reported by Yonatan Ben-Shalom, Robert Moffitt, and John Karl Scholz in The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Poverty.)

A pattern that comes through in Legacies is that programs to mitigate deprivation have shown more clear-cut success than those intended to increase the human capital and earning capacities of the poor. A potentially important exception is the review by Chloe Gibbs, Jens Ludwig, and Douglas L. Miller of Head Start, a program lambasted as ineffective almost from the start. True, test score progress tends to fade out over time, but recent longitudinal studies identify lasting gains for Head Start participants between the 1960s and the 1980s in schooling, employment, health and the probability of arrest or teen parenthood. Today's policymakers have much to learn from this history.