Are Jobs the Solution?

William J. Wilson is arguably the nation's leading urban sociologist. Two of his previous books, The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), exerted a profound influence on both the academic and the popular discussions of race and urban poverty in America. For 24 years a professor at the University of Chicago and now at Harvard University, Wilson has received just about every honor available to a scholar of modern society, including a recent invitation to join the prestigious National Academy of Sciences--a rare achievement among sociologists, whose work is often regarded by "hard" scientists as less than rigorous. Wilson is therefore well positioned to bring the authority of science to bear upon that nagging question of public policy: what must be done about the ghettos? In his new book, he does not shrink from the task. He sets forth both a diagnosis of and a prescription for what ails our inner cities. The problem, he says, is that "the new urban poor" lack adequate employment opportunities. The cure, he thinks, would be a federally supported social policy agenda that includes greatly expanded public works to provide jobs of last resort, employment training for unskilled or displaced adult workers, universal and publicly provided health care, greater tax credits for low-income workers, and subsidized child care. Those who fail to see the scientific necessity for this agenda--the Republican congressional majority, for instance--are portrayed by Wilson as know-nothings, or worse. Wilson's diagnosis and prescription are supported by the Urban Poverty and Family Life Study (UPFLS), a massive, decade-long, multimillion-dollar empirical inquiry into the economic and social life of several impoverished Chicago neighborhoods (some practically in the shadow of the university). Assisted by an army of graduate students, Wilson and his colleagues have interviewed hundreds of housing project dwellers, community activists, employers, social service professionals, welfare recipients, and working-class residents. The result is a richly textured and revealing set of data, including both statistical and ethnographic materials, that will benefit scholars for years to come.But what has Wilson made of these data, by way of a grand synthesis? Regrettably, despite his often intriguing use of the UPFLS materials, his new book does not represent a fundamental advance over his previous work. Moreover, it raises essential questions without answering them effectively. How do individual behavioral problems interact with pathological cultural patterns and impediments to economic opportunity to produce intractable, multigenerational poverty? For someone purporting to be a scientist, Wilson's views on this complex matter seem surprisingly dogmatic.The most valuable feature of his book is its summary of the UPFLS data. Whether showing the impact of drug trafficking on social cohesion, the attitudes among men and women toward marriage and childbearing, or the beliefs of employers about the work habits of various ethnic groups, Wilson's findings are invariably provocative and troubling. Many readers, convinced of the need for drastic action, will endorse his call for "social rights," alongside economic and political rights, for every citizen of the United States. These rights have not been acknowledged, Wilson says, because, alone among Western democracies, America embraces an ideology of individualism in which economic failure is attributed to individual shortcomings rather than to structural factors for which society should take responsibility. Hence Wilson advocates a political program intended to counter this ideology and (he believes) to benefit the majority of American workers, not only the poor.

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