The Other Welfare

The Other Welfare is an excellent and insightful contribution to the study of federal and state interactions in social-welfare policy making and execution. In a few years its readers will want to return to it to trace the parallels between SSI and Obamacare.

-- John E. Murray * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *

Berkowitz and DeWitt offer an exceptionally fine history of SSI. Along with their descriptive project, Berkowitz and DeWitt offer a handful of historically informed lessons for SSI, including how the perceived 'deservedness' of program beneficiaries can profoundly affect how policies are understood and how they are 'reformed.'.

-- Stephen Pimpare * The Journal of American History, *

Berkowitz and DeWitt's story of SSI illuminates not ony the program's participants but also the largely uncharted territory of social poicymaking after 'the high tide of the expansive welfare state of the postwar and Great Society eras.' Drawing on recent multidisciplinary scholarship on the state and American political development, they point to new structures and actors shaping social policy in an age of political conservatism, market ascendancy, congressional restructuring, and media saturation.

-- Jennifer Mittelstadt * The American Historical Review *

For those familiar with the SSI program, the details in the book will shed some needed light on the legislative wrangling that produced the program's cumbersome and often confusing structure. For those unfamiliar with SSI, the book is a well-documented reminder of the difficulties of efficiently and effectively managing federal income support programs across changing political and social environments.

-- Mary C. Daly * Journal of Economic Literature *

In their masterful historical account of Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Edward D. Berkowitz and Larry DeWitt argue convincingly that disability benefits policy, though little studied by historians and political scientists, is at the heart of contemporary debate over the proper scope of government and its capacity to do good.. Drawing from archival material not previously available, Berkowitz and DeWitt's The Other Welfare is a marvelous book and their inquiry a timely one. Reformers of the left and right, academics, and policy analysts would do well to heed its lessons as our nation, amid great public doubt, partisan rancor, and budgetary pressures, rolls out the Affordable Care Act, one of the most ambitious pieces of social legislation since SSI.

-- Jennifer L. Erkul * Journal of Children and Poverty *

This unusual book provides an in-depth history of the administration of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program from its inception through 1996 and the Clinton administration. Berkowitz and DeWitt examine the pressures and compromises they witnessed from their respective professional positions.... The authors' proximity to the program enables them to report the details of political maneuvers and policy proposals few others could achieve.

* Choice *

This well-researched and insightfully argued history of the SSI program tells us how and why SSI failed to reinvent welfare and illuminates our understanding of U.S. social policy in several fundamental ways along the way. It shows that welfare policy—particularly in the U.S. political-cultural context of deserving and underserving poor—is inherently fraught with controversy.... In this sense, it takes its place in the venerable tradition of American Political Development.

-- Benjamin W. Veghte * Journal of Sociology and Social Welfa