William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
Rorty, Richard
WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS: THE WORLD OF THE NEW URBAN POOR, by William Julius Wilson. Knopf, 1996. 352 pp. $26.00. Some years back Russell Jacoby introduced the term "public intellectual." He used...
...But William Julius Wilson, a sociologist, is as socially useful and as politically relevant as any American academic has ever been...
...Most of us professors who read Jacoby's book felt vaguely guilty...
...They drew a sharp line between science and politics...
...But sociology, economics, and political science turned inward...
...But what kind of country is it that can live with the thought that nine-tenths of its children are scheduled to profit from the utter ruin of the other tenth...
...Endless sensible proposals have been put forward for helping these children...
...They preferred to make contributions to knowledge, rather than to suggest ways to make American life better...
...My father was the sort of old-time nonacademic freelance whom Jacoby praised...
...He might have added that every job created may well make possible a decent home for a couple of children (at only $6,000 per child per year...
...Its audience is all of us, in our capacity as fellow citizens of those children...
...they are now the principal academic support system for leftist political initiatives...
...taxation more into line with the European system...
...When the social sciences first became entrenched in the American system of higher education, it was thought that people in those disciplines would become the paradigmatic public intellectuals...
...Professors in these fields began to write for each other rather than for the public...
...But by the end of his book you will have come to despise those pundits...
...Wilson shows you just why it is very difficult to come out of the ghettos with a stable character, self-respect, a clear head, and a conviction that America is a land of opportunity...
...So you will be, as your ancestors were, the last hired and the first fired...
...He shows you, in detail, how the ghettos strip people of civilized traits in the same way that the concentration camps did...
...One should despise them, for the same reasons one would despise a parent who gives his or her more nimble children every advantage, while moving the more awkward ones out to the garage and feeding them table scraps...
...While he was in the Senate, Bill Bradley kept introducing a bill for what he called "fifteen-month houses"—houses in which women in the sixth month of pregnancy 112 • DISSENT Books could go and live until their babies were a year old...
...Of these, the most comprehensive is his proposal that we revive the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) and put people to work renewing the country's infrastructure: tearing down the miserable old school buildings and putting up new ones, rebuilding the overpasses and bridges, replanting the parks, repainting the museums, and so on...
...behavioral") sciences have acquired a reputation for self-righteous sterility...
...If you have been reading books that suggest that African-American ghetto-dwellers are dumber, less civilized, more violent, or lazier than the rest of us, this book will explain to you how they got that reputation...
...Thanks to him, the rest of us professors can stand a little taller...
...But I am not sure we should have...
...In the first place, the jobs (especially those that pay more than the minimum wage) are usually far away from your part of the city...
...one's going to stand up like a flower...
...SUMMER • 1997 • 113...
...Unlike the recently arrived immigrants with whom you are competing for jobs, you are not likely to have access to a family car pool...
...Reading these pages gives you an excellent idea of exactly how hard it is to get a job if you are a black graduate of an inner-city public high school...
...Most of the people you know who aren't on welfare are criminals...
...government's disposable income to the Defense Department...
...If you are still looking for an honest job, they regard you as a chump, and you can see their point...
...The hundreds of people in Detroit and New York who line up whenever a McDonald's advertises for burgerflippers are symptomatic of the fact that there just aren't enough jobs, even lousy jobs, out there...
...There isn't any public transportation that will get you there in under two hours...
...Even the latest immigrants from Latin America and Asia—people accustomed to being treated like dirt back in their home countries—are likely to get in ahead of you...
...His new book is a paradigm of what the founders of American social science had in mind...
...Wilson is remarkably patient with the pundits who urge that black teenagers, growing up with no realistic hope of a decent life, should have more gumption, display more sense of individual responsibility, and stop blaming their circumstances...
...It is a highly readable, deeply informed, well-written argument for specific changes in public policy...
...The first will be defeated because the military-industrial complex will bribe Congress to keep its share of the taxpayers' money constant...
...He used it to mean the sort of nonacademic, politically concerned, widely read freelance who was typified, in the 1940s, by Dwight Macdonald...
...But its motive is straightforwardly practical: to figure out why millions of American children are leading utterly miserable lives in the ghettos, and what can be done about it...
...The other is to raise the tax rates on people making more than $50,000, thus bringing U.S...
...His bill never reached the floor...
...When Wilson mildly notes that "The U.S...
...He is fulfilling the function of the public intellectual better than any of us in the humanities...
...In particular, the irrelevance of much of sociological research to public policy provides ammunition for Jacoby-like polemics...
...The social (a.k.a...
...Wilson's book contains all the statistics, all the survey reports, and all the references to the scholarly literature that the prissiest academic review committee could ask for...
...Jacoby titled his book The Last Intellectuals...
...But, for better or worse, the humanities— and in particular the English departments— have gradually usurped the function that the social science departments were supposed to fulfill...
...The black CEO of an inner-city wholesale firm said about the inner-city employment pool: Anytime you put all like people together—and particularly if they're on a low level—you destroy them...
...They would help the cause of economic justice and social equality by providing the facts and figures needed to get the public to support reforms...
...Almost none have been acted upon...
...For Wilson makes clear why life in the ghetto unfits you for participation in American society, and would do so regardless of your genetic endowment or of anything else...
...The second will be defeated because of plain ordinary selfishness...
...He also gives you plenty of statistics of the sort which the New York Times summed up last year by saying that "it will be virtually impossible to move hundreds of thousands of people from public assistance into full-time jobs over the next few years, as the new federal law overhauling welfare intends...
...Wilson, like E. D. Hirsch, Jr...
...Neither proposal has much of a chance...
...SUMMER • 1997 • 111 Books If the founders of the University of Chicago sociology department (where Wilson taught for many years, before to going to Harvard) peer down from heaven and read When Work Disappears, they will rejoice that they did not build in vain...
...Hirsch thinks that accomplishing that will require a national curriculum as well as performance standards, and I suspect he is right...
...Most of the empirical research Wilson and his group did is summarized in Part I of his book: "The New Urban Poverty...
...Wilson would like to see the United States institute such schools, as well as a national system of performance standards for school work, a system that would force ghetto public schools to become something more than holding pens...
...One is to repudiate the idea that the United States must be ready to fight two Gulfstyle wars at once, and that we must therefore keep right on giving 40 percent of the federal...
...He estimates that doing so would take about $12 billion of tax money annually for every million jobs created...
...Bradley pointed out, year after year, how much money the country would save by giving these mothers and children decent food and medical care during those fifteen months...
...Although I honor his memory, it seems to me that lots of my fellow professors are doing much the same sort of thing that he did: writing for middlebrow journals about current social problems, explaining what the strong are currently doing to the weak, reflecting on possible scenarios for the country's future...
...Interviewer: So you understand the wariness of some employers...
...For millions of Americans (only about half of them black), it's not work or go hungry...
...There were always exceptions: David Riesman and John Kenneth Galbraith are obvious examples...
...How you going to expect...
...He viewed with alarm the fact that almost all American intellectuals are now on college and university faculties...
...Congress has retreated from using public policy as an instrument with which to fight social inequality," one is tempted to paraphrase by saying that American suburbanites have tacitly decided to turn the ghetto children over to the crack dealers...
...John Dewey would have thought it a splendid example of applied intelligence...
...in his recent The Schools We Need), points out that the French ecoles maternelles (which take in children at the age of three and provide a sort of super-Head Start Program) put the children of recent African immigrants to Paris way ahead of tenth-generation American kids growing up on the South Side of Chicago...
...Many of the African-American employers whom Wilson and his students surveyed would prefer to hire almost anyone but inner-city blacks...
...A candidate who pledged himself to support such anew WPA would be likely to lose, because there probably are only two ways to raise the necessary money...
...America was not in a mood, and still is not in a mood, to spend any money on losers—even if they are fourteen-yearold girls, or one-month-old babies...
...Further, your high school education did not equip you to speak in the way employers—even black employers—prefer, or to do the elementary math that the job requires...
...Jacoby did, however, have one good point: academization often produces introverted hyperprofessionalism...
...In the second part of his book, "The Social Policy Challenge," Wilson offers a battery of further suggestions about how we might stop creating generations of more and more wretched, desperate proto-criminals...
...I do not think that Jacoby gave any convincing reasons to think that the economic security we enjoy has diminished our social utility...
...Granted, this selfishness is as much a matter of concern with the future of middleclass children as of the desire for more beautiful cars and homes...
...It's stay on welfare or eat out of dumpsters...
...Black CEO: Sure...
Vol. 44 • July 1997 • No. 3
