Charles Murray, WQ, Autumn 19841. Murray asserts that "basic social indicators took a turn for the worse" during the 1960s. Jencks, a sociologist at Northwestern Univer- sity, replies that the official overall poverty rate fell from 19 percent in 1965 to 13 percent in 1980, when adjusted for inflation. Medicaid and Medicare, he adds, not only improved poor people's health but also may have helped to lower infant mortality. Life expectancy, in fact, rose more from 1965 to 1980 than from...