Why the Poor Stay Poor

Vol. 3, No. 4. 1988.

The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy by William Julius Wilson.

William julius wilson’s book is the most thoughtful study of urban poor blacks to appear in many years. But it is cause for dismay as well as optimism. On the one hand, the book represents a significant departure from most writings on poverty published during the Reagan years. Wilson effectively challenges prevailing conservative arguments that discount the need for major new government initiatives. … A self-described “social democrat,” Wilson nevertheless adopts some of the assumptions and vocabulary of his conservative opponents, thereby remaining within the narrow ideological boundaries that constrict contemporary debate on domestic social issues. …

[Wilson’s] use of the term “underclass” marks a considerable departure from the notion once common among liberals that the poor were best understood as unemployed members of the working class rather than part of an enduring subculture characterized by the absence of the skills or attitudes required for success in the labor market. Wilson suggests that liberals cannot expect to have a serious impact on national policy until they admit the existence of this ghetto underclass, a heterogeneous catch-all which, according to him, includes those who “experience long-term unemployment or are not members of the labor force, individuals who are engaged in street crime and other forms of aberrant behavior, and families that experience long-term spells of poverty and/or welfare dependency.”

In explaining why conditions in the inner city have worsened, he accepts the thesis, often put forward by conservatives, that the ghetto underclass is not the result of present-day racism. …

While he acknowledges the existence of an underclass, he sees it primarily as a product of bad social policy rather than of the attitudes of the poor. While he discounts the importance of civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation as a means of addressing ghetto problems, he nevertheless acknowledges that forceful federal action is needed to address those problems. Wilson demolishes the arguments of Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground, who concluded that Great Society programs not only failed to reduce poverty but actually exacerbated the plight of the poor. Rejecting the notion that the underclass is characterized by an economically dys-functional culture of poverty, he prefers instead to emphasize the concept of social isolation, which he believes better expresses the source of distinctive attitudes that persist among the urban black poor. For example, rather than attributing the rise in the number of single mothers and female-headed households to a self-destructive rejection of white middle-class values or to “permissive” liberal welfare policies, Wilson argues that economic trends have reduced job opportunities for black urban residents, which in turn reduces the number of employable and thus marriageable black males.

Yet, while impressed by Wilson’s desire to provide a sound intellectual basis for a renewed assault on poverty, I remain troubled by what Wilson leaves out of his discussion of the causes of and strategies for combating the problem. Wilson tends to examine the black ghetto from the outside, as a problem to be solved through liberal social engineering, rather than as a complex community capable of being transformed from within as well as from without.

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