Notes from Underground: Clashing Theories About the "Underclass"

...He is awaiting trial for murder...

...When full employment at decent wages suddenly materialized during World War II, entire cultures of poverty and economic isolation vanished almost overnight...

...This gender imbalance, and not the perverse welfare incentives in Charles Murray's stilted cost-benefit calculation, explains the appeal of the welfare life for young black women...

...The voters will support far more outlay directed to rewarding work than rewarding idleness...

...Members of an underclass rarely behave in a manner leftists consider politically appropriate to their condition, let alone a manner that invites sympathy from a broader public...

...Recently Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal, not a writer I frequently cite approvingly, ran the rap sheet on a man named Brian Lawrence, aged 30, who was finally charged with murder, after a string of lesser though still very brutal crimes that the criminal justice system had treated with astonishing casualness...

...No matter how much we understand, some acts are not socially forgivable unless we are damned fools...

...At the same time, as Wilson, Jencks, Skocpol, Greenstein, and others suggest, society also needs to widen the rewards of socially responsible behavior, especially for those who have been most disadvantaged by our most appalling legacy—racism...

...This shift deserves more than a moment's reflection...

...The connection between the drug and criminal underclass is that crime and drugs thrive on persistent poverty and despair...

...Wilson, for his part, straightforwardly embraces the term...

...Increasingly, "underclass" has become something close to a synonym for the undeserving or profligate poor...

...In the case of drugs, substantial decriminalization may be cheaper and more 216 • DISSENT Notes from Onderuround socially benign than making the sale of drugs an immensely profitable criminal enterprise that diverts police and court resources...

...Even casual empiricism suggests that the new underclass includes the mentally ill, homeless people who have "fallen out of the middle class" because of worsening economic conditions, neglected or abused children, as well as those arguably at personal fault, such as addicts and petty criminals...

...It indicates persistent and perhaps deepening racial isolation, as well as intractable poverty...

...One can address the root causes of social pathology with enlightened social policies and still hold individuals accountable for their actions...

...But strip away the patriarchal character of the traditional family, and this conservativesounding set of values is, I believe, entirely appropriate...

...Defenders of the welfare state include as a rhetorical staple the observation that a majority of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) recipients actually go on and off SPRING • 1991 • 213 Notes from Underground welfare for relatively brief periods of time, with changing economic circumstances...

...Much of Murray's arithmetic, as well as his mismatched time sequence, has since been discredited...

...Indeed, it is hard to imagine any viable society that would do less...

...Otherwise, we are right back to the usual problems of poverty traps and the political impossibility of subsidizing the $4.00 an hour poor but not the $7.00 an hour poor...

...A national policy to raise the rewards of work, via a blend of earned income tax credits, child care and medical care entitlements, and the like would cost in the range of $20 to 50 billion...

...By way of specific remedy, Wilson and the others mentioned above propose a diverse array of policy measures, all intended to bolster the rewards of work...

...Few people with more attractive alternatives will choose a life of street crime or drug addiction...

...Create economically attractive alternatives, says Wilson, and most inner-city blacks want the same good life that other Americans want, and will work for it...

...Second, at just about the same time, well-paying jobs for unskilled workers began to disappear...

...Jencks, with his research associate Kathryn Edin, accepts a good bit of the Murray critique—the better to deflate it...

...These include some form of wage subsidy, either a package of socially financed fringe benefits triggered by membership in the paid work force or an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit...

...Instead of punishing AFDC mothers for working or forcing them to work covertly, says Jencks and Edin, the remedy is to turn the AFDC grant into an overt wage supplement complete with fringe benefits, so that work actually improves economic status...

...Some hopeful observers have pointed, naively, I'd say, to an emerging left-right consensus about welfare...

...Now, in late twentieth-century America, the new growth of an underclass again has troubling, double-edged implications...

...Despite the worsening condition of our streets and neighborhoods and the tighter tangle of ghetto pathologies, we can still remedy the diverse, often interconnected ills that parade under the common and often misleading label "underclass" — if we take the trouble to understand them...

...With heroin, it was the need for the money to buy the drug that induced the criminal behavior...

...About this basic fact the time-honored left insistence that we look to deeper social causes remains accurate...

...It's also clear from the work of Lisbeth Schorr and Sheila Kamerman and an extensive body of longitudinal work on Head Start that compensatory programs for children can bear real fruit...

...Therefore, rather than attacking the very word, it is worthwhile investigating the logic of why different kinds of social isolation exist and are increasing...

...I should not give again at the price of my personal security...

...In assessing personal blame, one must also acknowledge that membership in the underclass often reflects ostensible "choices" that are barely choices at all, given the paucity of plausible alternatives...

...His most convincing example is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is really a family allowance based on family size that supplements paid employment...

...Wilson refers to four basic changes...

...In this respect, I think Skocpol and Wilson are right...

...But it does not present a simple politics...

...Create decent low-rent housing on the one hand and decent community mental health facilities on the other, and much homelessness would disappear, just as earlier Hoovervilles disappeared with wartime and postwar prosperity...

...Gans also argues, convincingly, that thinking of diverse social maladies as embodied in a single "underclass" of the isolated and presumably undeserving poor reinforces the conservative claims about the futility or perversity of policy...

...For our purposes, all of these critics are essentially on the same side of the underclass debate, and their remedy boils down to the same thought: Increase the rewards of work, make it possible to reconcile work and family, and most people will opt out of the underclass...

...And it will not be cheap...

...Perhaps not...

...It is simply a credit against income taxes, and if income is low enough the worker actually receives a check from the government...

...The philanthropist and child advocate Irving Harris has contended, in response to genetic or racist theories of the underclass, that virtually all of the difference in performance of young, inner-city black children can be accounted for by the lack of healthy stimulation in the first two years of life...

...Will they...

...Here, the charge (Murray's) is that public policy has encouraged socially destructive behavior: casual, illegitimate birth, longterm dependency, and chronic cheating...

...We now know that the culture of homelessness reflects two fairly distinct causes—the failure of the deinstitutionalization experiment of the 1960s, coupled with rising housing costs and disinvestment in social housing in the 1980s...

...it still allows voluntary bohemias that do not espouse middle-class norms, yet do not threaten public facilities and physical safety...

...This is of course also true of alcohol, our most popular drug...

...Liberals and leftists characteristically look to social causes of social distress...

...It is technically means tested, in the sense that it phases out at family incomes of roughly $20,000, but it doesn't feel means tested...

...So if the underclass takes in diverse sorts of people, it is also true that the hard-core, socially isolated poor do exist, just as a culture of homelessness exists...

...But here again, the solutions are not cheap...

...For the ideal of intact families and of rewarding labor, like the ideal of safe neighborhoods, is simply too attractive per se and too widely shared to leave by default to the political right...

...To be in the underclass, it seems, is to lack the usual bourgeois virtues of diligence, upward striving, thrift, self-restraint, discipline of one's children, and so on—virtues that educated white radicals of my generation disdained in our youth, though, unlike the ghetto poor, we had an almost effortless chance to reclaim them as adults...

...Still, there is a segment of AFDC families, approximately 25 to 30 percent, that in fact stay on AFDC for years at a stretch, just as there are indeed multigeneration AFDC families...

...This supposedly undergirded the welfare-reform legislation of 1988...

...The term," writes Gans, "has taken on so many connotations of undeservingness and blameworthiness that it has become hopelessly polluted in meaning, and should be dropped—with the issues involved studied via other concepts" (APA Journal, Summer 1990...

...If history is any guide, they probably will...

...However, you can't receive it except as a supplement to paid labor, and unlike AFDC it doesn't break up families...

...During America's flush years, when left critics had a hard time indicting American capitalism wholesale, "pockets of poverty" —the immediate forerunner of the current underclass—was the left's high ground of attack in its insistence that all was not well...

...As I get older, my sense of what is radical and what is conservative—and what blend is desirable—keeps shifting...

...Yet advocates of decriminalization still need to answer the charge that the drugs themselves have become more antisocial...

...These debates about the relative merits of greater or lesser targeting and means testing are worth another article...

...However, the worse the conditions of the underclass— the poorer, more neglectful, abusive, and disorganized the parents—the earlier the compensatory programs must start in order to make a difference...

...I find myself more conservative in my conception of what is sensible with respect to the work ethic, to family, to self-discipline, to "standards...

...To be in the underclass, almost by definition, is to be unkempt, unmotivated, unorganized, and, by inference, unworthy...

...However, once a drug culture takes hold, it is not easy to dislodge...

...The usual explanations of structural unemployment, inadequate housing and education, even the legacy of racism, lose much of their resonance against the reality of a junkie, a middle-class kid panhandling, or a crack-using teen mother, or other seemingly irresponsible 212 • DISSENT Motes from Underground forms of urban lowlife consuming scarce resources from the tax dollars of the working and middle classes...

...Admittedly, he writes in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) "that certain groups are stigmatized by the label underclass . . . but it would be far worse to obscure the profound changes in the class structure and social behavior of ghetto neighborhoods by avoiding the use of the term underclass...

...In their view, the solution to economic isolation is to offer greater reward for working, not to reduce the already meager benefits of the social wage...

...and finally (and most important), what we might do about it...

...Given the cost of living, the wretchedly low pay of minimumwage jobs, and the meager welfare check, virtually nobody with a family can afford to live solely on a minimum-wage job or solely on a welfare check...

...Yet I find myself more radical in my insistence that these perquisites of a fairly middle-class life be available to all citizens...

...She died...

...Writing in the American Prospect (Spring 1990), Jencks and Edin virtually concede the conservative critique that most welfare recipients are indeed cheating on the system...

...These two phenomena meant that ghetto communities became places where the very poor dwelled in much higher concentrations, stripped of leaders, role models, and people whose middleclass values and aspirations were validated by their life courses...

...Still, these are not entirely satisfactory explanations...

...Finally, a year ago, he made the mistake of pushing under a subway a young waitress whose purse he was attempting to grab...

...In the course of making these arguments, critics like Wilson and Jencks, and other friends of active social policy, such as Theda Skocpol and Robert Greenstein, David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane, end up embracing fairly mainstream notions about work, family, and the work ethic...

...First, affirmative action made it easier for the most talented blacks to escape the ghetto...

...If the left has anything, it has class, so to say...

...Otherwise, the entire society would be stoned most of the time...

...On the one hand, it suggests the persistent failure of our market economy to spread wealth and opportunity evenly and the suspicion that postindustrial capitalist society is simply discarding those at the bottom of the social ladder...

...Intriguingly, both Wilson and Jencks manage to put a progressive spin on fairly conservative notions about family, responsibility, and incentive...

...Of the several strands of social pathology that underlie the underclass, homelessness is at least the easiest to solve in principle...

...The notable change on the part of left critics of the welfare state is that we have again embraced work and family, ideals we never should have conceded to the right...

...And while doing so we must still insist that work needs to be more rewarding, that families need to be more democratic, and that society needs to acknowledge how the relationship between work and family has drastically changed as roles have changed...

...second, whether we care to acknowledge that a component of the conservative attribution of personal irresponsibility is fair...

...In this connection, other social scientists with equally good democratic left credentials, such as Christopher Jencks and William Julius Wilson, seem to think that an identifiable underclass does exist, that it is a useful term, particularly as applied to the economically isolated black poor...

...A look at family budgets shows why this is not surprising...

...Stable black working-class communities in northern cities, which were the result of migration to factory work stimulated initially by World War I, became pathological underclass communities only when well-paid work evaporated...

...Pascal's most famous pensee—Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner—was simply wrong, except as applied to divine justice...

...He then committed seven more crimes for which the authorities caught him, and by his own account thousands more purse snatchings, muggings, assaults, and so on—several a day over a decade—for which he escaped arrest...

...and that as a proxy for the underclass the AFDC population is actually a shifting collection of people, at least half of them Caucasian, rather than the caricatured hard-core, socially isolated poor...

...Even if we agree that the mainstreaming of the hard-core minority poor is economically and sociologically feasible, if costly, that still leaves us with other horrific problems associated with the underclass—drugs, crime, homelessness, untreated mental illness, to mention just four...

...As the beloved Mike Harrington used to quote Dorothy Day, the poor are poor not only in money...

...It also has the benefit of conforming to the value systems of the broader public about what it takes to be the "deserving" poor...

...Aren't those diligent Korean grocers just as disadvantaged...

...q SPRING • 1991 • 217...

...While some bleeding-heart conservatives, notably Jack Kemp and some people associated with the Heritage Society, are indeed willing to see government spend more money if that's what it takes to bring the virtuous poor into the economic mainstream, this is by no means the majority conservative view, least of all the view of the Bush Office of Management and Budget...

...Since the postindustrial economy no longer has economic need for much unskilled labor, and the wages of unskilled labor no longer can support a family, young black men from disadvantaged backgrounds are increasingly likely to be unemployed, behind bars, in the armed forces, or dead...

...In this respect, we would do well to heed Gans's advice to at least disentangle the meanings, if not to discard the term...

...At a time of static productivity growth and chronically slow economic growth, any redistributionist policies are difficult politics, especially when their recipients are people suspected to be at least partly at fault for their own dismal condition...

...Skocpol has insisted that to succeed both politically and substantively, the programs need to be universal ones, which serve the entire population regardless of income, rather than means-tested ones that stigmatize the poor, invade privacy, and create perverse incentives for staying poor...

...This is the dirty little secret about welfare, shared by caseworkers and AFDC recipients alike...

...In deconstructing the underclass, as Gans urges us to do, it is worth differentiating criminal behavior from mental illness and from plain poverty, especially poverty connected to racial isolation and hostility...

...Even some alleged liberals, such as Mickey Kaus, have endorsed a version of workfare that was more punitive than helpful to an escape from poverty...

...Of his first seven arrests for robbery, burglary, or attempted burglary, he plea bargained all seven, and only one resulted in a brief jail term...

...But it is not entirely clear that these policies address all of the several pathologies of the underclass or that they can be executed at a politically bearable price, or that they can overcome the profound legacy of racism, or that there are easy answers to the related plagues of drugs, AIDS, and escalating urban crime...

...In contrast, Robert Greenstein has argued that it is politically implausible to imagine that Congress will pass expensive new universal social programs in any foreseeable future and that, contrary to Skocpol's belief, it really is politically possible and technically feasible to have programs targeted at the poor—as long as the programs resonate with mainstream values such as work and the intact family...

...I have never understood why so many smart people essentially pose the choice as either treating the social causes of crime or getting tougher with criminals...

...The only fallacy in this supposed entente is that the right has agreed to nothing of the sort...

...Western Europe has no underclass (with the not accidental exception of Thatcherite Britain), and Western Europe does not expect market economics to provide sufficient housing...

...For, if certain forms of poverty are intractable, and if policies backfire, and if some conditions are self-inflicted, why intervene...

...you can "target within universalism" —but first you have to have a critical mass of universalism...

...I gave, as it were, at the office...

...In reality it would cost more than this, for it is very hard to imagine giving a new set of entitlements to the hard-core poor without extending them to all working Americans...

...And as the homeless, the drug dependent, and the often aggressive panhandlers of the underclass overwhelm subways, shelters, and safe neighborhoods, a blend of guilt, annoyance, fear, and finally rage often subverts the impulse of more careful social analysis...

...So it is necessary to go back to first principles and ask, first, whether the underclass is really a useful or a fair construct...

...Just as people like Jencks, Skocpol, and others found themselves embracing solutions that turned out to be a mix of the radical and the conservative, I suspect the same is true of solutions to these other troubling conditions...

...Herbert Gans, for one, has argued against the use of the word, as bad social science and loaded politics...

...It is worth disentangling the diverse subgroups that have been lumped together in America's lumpen...

...This will change 214 • DISSENT Notes front Underground relative incentives and make it economically possible for more of the underclass to join the economic mainstream and share in both its rewards and its norms...

...This thesis was crystalized in Charles Murray's famous Losing Ground (1986), which tallied the alleged rising benefits of welfare relative to those of paid employment and concluded that increasing numbers of poor people were seduced into the welfare life by the state's excess generosity...

...In this view, the left supposedly agrees that AFDC has failed and SPRING • 1991 • 215 Notes from Underground that work and intact family life are good things, while the right agrees that if the incentives can be straightened out it becomes salutary for government to spend some money...

...And a poorly educated youth, abused or ignored in early childhood, may turn to using or dealing drugs because the imaginable straight career ladders out of poverty are so remote...

...Let us begin with the most stereotypical members of the alleged underclass— "welfare mothers...

...I will argue, uneasily, that on balance the term is too useful to drop, though I think Gans's caveats are all worth keeping in mind...

...On the other hand, we would do well to become much less tolerant of crime and to be more solicitous of the rights of its victims, most of whom are also poor and black...

...More than one New Yorker with "good politics" has become more disgusted than radicalized, watching good public institutions like subways or parks, or even libraries, overwhelmed by the wretched refuse of the new underclass...

...Such notions about what constitutes a healthy family, and whether it is reasonable to expect people to work, are indeed scarcely different from conservative ones, save for the conservative preference for the traditional family in which papa works and mother raises children...

...It is also awkward that so many of the alleged underclass are black—this after three decades of ostensible liberal successes with compensatory spending on education as well as politically costly affirmative action programs...

...The solution, I suspect, would require a blend of radical and conservative principles that do not neatly fit ideological pigeonholes...

...In the process, the underclass has become almost as much an embarrassment for the left as for the capitalist system—a venerable dilemma familiar to connoisseurs of the literature of lumpenproletariat...

...She argues, as I have, that you can nonetheless accomplish a good deal of practical targeting of the needy within universal programs, in part by adjusting benefit formulas and in part because it is the poor who would be deprived in the absence of the program...

...third, how we might enrich the social explanation of the underclass...

...That still leaves room for an extraordinary cultural diversity...

...But then, adroitly flipping Murray's inference on its head, Jencks and Edin go on to argue that most welfare recipients indeed want to work —because most are in fact working...

...Drugs and violent crime—these are much harder...

...Broadly speaking, the reason is that the images of the underclass, media treatment of it, and the middle class's practical experience of it, raise the hoary question of blame...

...And, finally, thanks to these other changes, the ratio of eligible, that is, employed, black potential husbands to prospective black wives began seriously deteriorating...

...But in the case of many currently popular drugs, like cocaine, the violence can be induced by the drug itself...

...For Gans, the term has often been used to signify deviance from middleclass norms, even behavior that is not harmful per se, such as common-law marriage, as well as a racial code word...

...Getting tough does not mean longer prison sentences—some forms of supervised diversion and even short-term "shock incarceration" evidently reduce recidivism—but it does mean increasing the chance that criminals will be caught and punished...

...Weren't our parents or grandparents just as poor...

...As a taxpayer and American citizen with "good politics," I expect and demand reasonably safe streets...

...But to the casual eye and to conservative ideologues, at least some of the plight of the underclass is either self-inflicted or inflicted by the misincentives of the welfare state, which are said to reward social misbehavior...

...But the thesis, as they say, resonated...

...As the revisionist literature on teen pregnancy suggests, a young woman "choosing" to be casual about birth control, taking a risk of getting pregnant, may have concluded, even if not via a systematic and deliberate evaluation, that bearing a child may be the least bleak of a series of bleak alternatives...

...It should be obvious that we need to do both...

...At the same time, contrary to Charles Murray's false sequencing, public aid began dropping...

...As a middle-class person walks down, say, upper Broadway, fearing for personal safety, all three concerns are too easy to lump together as common blights on peace of mind, neighborhood, and the public fisc...

...But now that the existence of an American underclass is palpable—and worsening—the left, ironically, has grown increasingly uncomfortable with the very idea...

...If we follow that principle to its logical conclusion, we end up forgiving all street thugs, and even Hitler...