The Great Society Programs (3)

Perhaps the most significant and controversial effort to achieve social reform came through the Economic Opportunities Act of 1964, commonly called the War on Poverty. The objective of this act was to eliminate poverty through institutional change. Poverty traditionally was viewed as an individual matter, and its causes generally were thought to be the result of personal failure, lack of motivation, or personal choice. Those who designed the War on Poverty program came to a different conclusion. They considered poverty to be the result of inadequate social institutions that failed to provide opportunities for all citizens, and they concluded that traditional approaches to solving the problems of
poverty were unsuccessful.