ABSTRACT
Social efficiency and its convenience for a conservative political agenda inspire ineffective social programs. The community of social service professionals has made its peace with a political and social process that has assigned to social services the symbolic role of caring without providing resources to fulfill a substantial care giving function. Welfare services neither provide adequate welfare nor do they offer solutions to dependency. Juvenile delinquents are not reformed. Addicts are not rehabilitated. Social casework is ineffective, probably across social need. But the literature of the human services does not describe the depth of these failures. It expresses the stakes of practitioners and of the prevailing social ethos in the myth of efficient solutions. The perfusion of this myth throughout the American culture denies remedy to people without adequate access to social institutions. The common and deep institutional failures of American society have produced an enormous number of people who are problems for their neighbors and for themselves.
