Leaving the Black Ghetto Behind

...The horrifying statistics about illegitimacy, for example, become less horrifying when one realizes that the number of such births is not really increasing much at all...

...Criticisms of Murray have generally been along two lines: that the situation of the black underclass has not deteriorated as badly as he suggests, and that the problems that do exist cannot be blamed on the government's efforts to help...

...Though there is reason to be skeptical of policy proposals based on such questionable economic premises, this should not obscure the fact that William Julius Wilson has written an absorbing book and, generally, a very good one...

...And as education levels have risen, the number of workers seeking unskilled jobs has greatly diminished—a fact that escapes Wilson's analysis, rendering it inconclusive...

...It deserves a wide audience...

...suffice it to remark that the real erosion in jobs in rust-belt industries took place not in the 1970s, but more recently...

...Determining any economic equilibrium situation is a matter of weighing supply against demand...

...Wilson's claim that a movement of jobs to the suburbs has hurt blacks is similarly undermined by much careful work that has not found this to be true...

...To be sure, the period since the civil rights revolution and Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty has witnessed fairly striking improvements for part of the black population...

...Consequently, where "68 per cent of all poor whites lived in nonpoverty areas in the five large central cities in 1980, only 15 per cent of poor blacks...

...1 am less enamored of the second part of Wilson's diagnosis, for it has him playing amateur economist rather than sticking to his sociologist's knitting...

...Murray made the challenge explicit in his celebrated Losing Ground, arguing that in this case correlation does imply causation: By removing incentives to work and form families, welfare and related programs have made it more attractive to be poor, and hence increased the number of people who choose to be so...

...During the earlier period of greater racial discrimination the black working and middle classes lived in the same ghettos as the poor, providing social stability, keeping community institutions going, and affording role models for young people...

...He then calls for major changes in national economic policy to stop the decline of manufacturing, restore rust-belt industries and so forth...

...The drop in manufacturing is a complex issue with many facets...

...A number of Charles Murray's opponents have pointed out that Losing Ground fails to consider—and indeed juggles the numbers to hide—the slowdown of the U.S...

...Interestingly, on the matter of the condition of poor blacks over roughly the last decade, Wilson scores liberals for refusing to accept that there has been a deterioration...

...The blacks remaining in theghettos, Wilson observes, were thus deprived of the "social buffer" that formerly propped up institutional and personal life there and represented some sort of hope for a better future...

...Citing work already done in this area, he notes that as the situation of the underclass was deteriorating during the 1970s, payments made by the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program—usually regarded as the villain of the piece for their allegedly bad incentive effects—were actually declining in real terms...

...Wilson has wandered outside his area of expertise here, and it shows...

...lived in such areas...

...rather, the fertility of married women is on the wane, making the number of out-of-wedlock births a much larger proportion of the total...

...Now William Julius Wilson, a University of Chicago sociologist who is himself black, has entered the fray...

...To support his case, Wilson submits that the demand for unskilled labor has fallen off as the high-tech component of the economy has grown, and that there has been a movement of jobs out of the central cities...

...One reading of this trend is that the status of the black middle class has improved, reducing family size, while the black lower class is behaving approximately as it has always behaved...

...Their criticism seems perfectly sensible...

...The first and very original one is that the improvement in the condition of the urban black middle class occasioned by the civil rights gains of the '60s ended up having a harmful effect on the urban black poor...

...Whereas about 82 per cent of blacks aged 20-24 were employed in 1965, by 1984 the figure had slipped to about 58 per cent (while the percentage for whites remained stable...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University...

...Yet the case is being made with increasing vigor these days that in the effort to improve the well-being of poor blacks in big cities we have been "losing ground," to use the evocative phrase of Charles Murray...

...Moreover, several students of the labor market are worried that the emergence of too many fast food-type jobs will result in a "de-skilling" of the service economy...

...In thinking about the availability of unskilled jobs for poor young people now as compared with the past, it is not enough merely to observe that the supply of these jobs has contracted...

...author, "Making Public Policy" Some of the most explosive data regarding issues of race and poverty in the United States are statistics that show, or appear to show, a worsening in the plight of inner-city blacks starting in the 1970s...

...Wilson's counterattack is based partly on a good distillation of the work of others and partly on some new and very interesting ideas of his own...

...Wilson, unfortunately, tries to embellish it with an argument about "structural changes" in the economy that have purportedly made job prospects for the unskilled worse than they were in the past...

...As for the figures on youth unemployment, they remain terrible by any reckoning, but are somewhat less shocking when one considers the growing proportion of young blacks who are in school instead of in the labor force...

...Given that the late '60s and '70s saw a huge surge in government spending on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, such statistics have proved nettlesome for supporters of public antipoverty efforts...

...Wilson's own etiology is based on two points...

...This is a fascinating and very suggestive argument, a brilliant use of the sociological perspective to illuminate an important public problem...

...In particular, people point to unemployment and illegitimacy rates among young blacks...

...Indeed, he sometimes goes too far in the gloom-anddoom direction...

...Wilson does agree with Uberai critics of Murray, however, that the decline was not caused by government welfare efforts...

...Since the publication of Murray's book, liberals have been very much on the defensive in an area they had always regarded as their home turf...

...From 1973 to 1982, for instance, the number of blacks with professional, technical and managerial jobs grew by 57 per cent, as compared with 36 per cent for whites (albeit from a much lower base...

...It is more successful at the former than the latter...

...Black university enrollment and home ownership among blacks also rose dramatically, at a pace well above that for whites...

...With the lowering of racial barriers these stabilizing elements moved out of the inner city ghettos, leaving them populated almost exclusively with poor blacks...

...The Truly Disadvantaged should be seen not only as a counterattack on Murray but also as an attempt to wrest the policy initiative from him...

...And the proportion of black children born out of wedlock has gone up so sharply that they now account for about half of all black births...

...economy in the 1970s and the concomitant rise in unemployment—which had an especially devastating impact on those at the bottom of the ladder...