The Harvard Law Forum hosted a discussion titled “$50 billion for what? The federal welfare program” on December 9, 1966. Banfield spoke third, after Dr. Ellen Winston and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who recently had returned to Harvard from government service.

The moderator describes Banfield as “another popular entertainer form the harvard community,” which elicits audience laughs, and notes that Banfield has “more auditors than people taking his courses.”

Banfield’s acidic opening remark notes that federal government housing policies have harmed inner city Blacks but benefited Harvard. Here Banfield was referring to the destructive effects of federal urban redevelopment efforts, which including bulldozing poor neighborhoods and relocating residents to massive low income complexes. He wrote of these policies in his second and fourth books, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest (1955) and Government and Housing in Metropolitan Areas (1958).

So what was the Harvard connection? Well, these aggressive federal policies sparked the establishment of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT, with which Banfield and Moynihan both were affiliated.

Banfield directs most his remarks at this event to discussing two types of welfare problems: helping the “money poor” (the old, disabled, etc.) and the “culturally poor” (who lack money but also live according to “low” standards.) This distinction was one Banfield explicated at length in his book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958), and developed further in The Unheavenly City (1970). Play the above video to hear the rest of his thoughts.