Authors Amity Shlaes and Lindsey Burke discuss the human cost and policy pitfalls of top-down public reforms made during the 1960s.

The biggest debates in American politics today—about how to end poverty, improve living standards for the middle class, protect the environment, and provide access to health care and education—are nothing new. These same issues divided the country in the 1960s. Then, as now, Americans debated socialism versus capitalism and public sector versus private-sector reform. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. The result was the Great Society—a wave of massive reforms, implemented from the top-down by experts and bureaucrats.

In Amity Shlaes' new book, "Great Society: A New History," the results of the Great Society era are shown to be far from great, and actually, devastating. In a similar vein, Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, illustrates the policy pitfalls of the Great Society in her book, The Not-So-Great Society.

These authors' presentation was recorded in January 2020 at the Conservative Women's Network, a monthly event co-sponsored by CBL Center for Conservative Women and The Heritage Foundation.