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The Truly Disadvantaged

1. The theme of William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged is that the United States has undergone changes in the structure of its economics and social organization that have had a disproportionately negative impact on the inner cities and the largely black populations that inhabit them. He uses the term ghetto underclass to refer to the well-known fact of poverty in the inner cities, noting that experts have long disagreed on the substance of the idea but asserting that reasons for underclass deprivation are less important than understanding that the underclass experiences cycles of more or less deprivation in conjunction with macroeconomic cycles. The big cyclical picture as of 1988, when the book was written, was the shift of the US industrial base from relatively well-paid manufacturing to relatively poorly paid service jobs. Industrial-sector unemployment was especially destructive in dislocating family and employment structures in the inner cities, since young black men lost access to semiskilled jobs. That fostered social problems so often linked to inner-city life--teenage pregnancy, welfare households, family instability, female-headed families, youth gangs and crime (Wilson 3-4, 25). Additionally, working- and middle-class blacks fled the inner city for the suburbs, which robbed the inner city of models of family/social stability as well as of mainstream economic opportunities. That transformed the ghetto from a heterogeneous mixture of (so to speak) deserving and undeserving poor to a place dominated by the undeserving. It aggravated historically discriminatory patterns, which may account for persistence of a culture of poverty out of which residents cannot break. Wilson acknowledges that antipoverty programs were meant to help the underclass, but he suggests that they have never been as effective as jobs in transforming lives of the underclass. His therefore recommends subsidizing the jobs of the working poor with prac...

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The Truly Disadvantaged. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:12, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689322.html