When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor

When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor

By: William Julius Wilson  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Publisher: Vintage

Release Date: 1997-07-29

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Bit dated - but an important read to understand the poor - The urban poor are happy to take welfare, never work, commit crimes, do drugs, etc. Sound familiar? People love to tout this idea of the urban poor, based on anecdotes, popular TV and movies, and some media approaches. However, Wilson describes, quite convincingly, a world of the urban poor who yearn for the "American Dream" like the rest of us, who want to work, contribute to society, and make their lives (and their children's lives) better, but are simply unable to do so.

This book can get dry by piling on statistic after statistic, chart after chart, but always seems to bring the reader back in by presenting direct quotes from people, typically from ghetto areas of Chicago, on how their lives are effected by their situations. It puts a human face on the issues of poverty in America - a human face that rarely gets seen.

For all of those who have grown up in suburban areas, small towns, or cloistered urban situations, I recommend you read this book and open your eyes to the true world of the urban poor. Yes, there are some bad apples, as in any society - but these people want to improve their lives - and we need to ensure we enact responsible policies and give them the opportunity to do so.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
This book is an important perspective in urban sociology - I was confused to read reviews that tried to refute Wilson's knowledge in this field such as misusing statistical data or ignoring other important issues within the inner-city. It made me wonder if there is a real denial to the problems that exist within the inner-city. Myself, having worked within the field, experienced very similar stories told by the personal accounts given by residents and general population. Wilson gives a purely rational and valid interpretation of both existing data taken from samples within the inner-city (mostly Chicago - I'm sure D.C. stats are there too;) and statistics he has personally obtained. He uses methods of the sociological, psychological, and economic nature. As a researcher, I see no serious error in his suppositions. This is how academics use the scientific method.
While I agree that Wilson was a little naive about his proposal to changing policy he still is able to point out his own limitations. In general, the job market is up but for a specific population the job market is still weak. I think the greatest message Wilson leaves for the reader is a feeling of empowerment by understanding the underlying issues that goes along with this phenomenon. It's definitely an important read for any urban sociologist.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Analysis is excellent, policy advice needs some work - I found this to be one of the best discussions on urban poverty, and certainly one of the most balanced. I could go on about what I like about the book, but the other reviews do that justice.

I did not have much of a problem with his analysis of urban poverty. Wilson is right on when he blames a lack of jobs, transportation, adequate social support (including the lack of universal healthcare and childcare subsidies), and the cultural conditions created by unemployment as causes of urban poverty. However, like many sociologists and economists, he assumes post industrialist conceptions of these problems. For instance, he cites the "skills bias" as one of the major causes of a lack of jobs for poor, unskilled workers. He rehashes the common view that job loss can be attributed to our post-industrial economy that simply requires people to go to college and get more and more education. However, subsequent sociologists (namely, Michael Handel from the University of Wisconsin) have dismissed the skills bias as a bit of a myth that is used to distract people from the actual problem. If Wilson would have written his book a couple years later, he would have seen how job loss in the high technology sectors of the economy and the high unemployment rates for college graduates make it hard to believe that our economy has a skills bias. However, Wilson does acknowledge the other causes of job loss, including the trade deficit and off shoring production as more realistic causes of poverty.

My major problem is with his policy prescriptions, which like most establishment social scientists fall within the mainstream thinking. Wilson has excellent ideas concerning transportation, which should be a major policy issue in cities like Baltimore where most of the urban poor are without adequate means to get to work. Wilson's ideas about everything else are quite superficial considering the depth of his analysis. He basically advocates No Child Left Behind (national education standards) as a solution to our education problems. However, Wilson, like most scholars and political pundits, never advocates the obvious solution: more equal funding for inner-city schools to make them on par with suburban schools. Wilson himself acknowledges that problem, but it is not part of his solution. I think we do need to improve school instruction, but simply arguing for national education standards is too general. There are many problems with schools, but there are even more problems with students whom get their learning skills from the mass media.

Wilson also argues for more industry partnership with secondary education, and even goes so far to advocate allowing industry to shape curriculum. I think Wilson needs to examine the dangers in such a policy. While I agree that high schools do a poor job at preparing students for the labor market, I also think there is danger in using employer prescriptions as public policy. Employers are looking after what they need today in terms of workers, and by preparing students based on their prescription we might be shortchanging their futures when markets change (i.e. we were all told in the 1990s that computers were the way to go, but look what happened to the IT market). What we really need is to broadly educate students, giving them both skills and knowledge that are applicable to both the economy and in a democratic society where people are more than just workers. Only a broadly educated worker can adapt to this new economy.

Also absent from his education policy is the idea that we should have universal college education. I figured that was a given considering his views on education and joblessness, but it was absent from his discussion.

Wilson advocates creating a New Deal style Public Works program to give people jobs. I think that is essentially a good idea, but Wilson does not go far enough in justifying his arbitrary stance on setting public job wages below the minimum. The whole idea behind a WPA-style program is to decrease unemployment so wages rise, not just to decrease unemployment with no consideration of wages. Wilson shows a blatant disregard for Keynesian economics in this analysis. The problem is demand-side, not only the fact that people cannot find jobs, but because people cannot find good jobs that pay well. Industry is totally committed to keeping workers at poverty-level wages, and government policies for the past 30 years have ignored that struggle. Yes, Wilson advocates expanding the EITC, but why cut taxes? Taxes are not the problem, but the solution. Raise taxes for everyone, especially the rich.

What we need is for the government to create jobs of varying levels of skills and pay to compete with industry. The problem in the economy is that we have excessive amounts of labor slack generated by the decline of unions and the outsourcing of foreign labor. Wilson believes that by making the WPA jobs below the minimum wage it will give incentives for people to leave the WPA for higher paying private sector jobs. For what private sector jobs... McDonalds? How are low-waged WPA jobs going to influence the private sector to raise wages? Why does Julius not call for a higher minimum wage? Why is Wilson soft on making corporations pay their workers decently? Yes, unemployment is a problem, but so is job quality. Again, back to his analysis, the reason these women are on welfare is because it is more advantageous not to work than it is to work. The focus should be on raising wages through reducing unemployment and increasing labor's bargaining power. With a high paying public sector job, labor can tell private power "hey, if you're not going to pay me well, I'm going to go here...".

The last point of contention is where Wilson assumes that the globalization of production is "inevitable" and that protectionist policies are "undesirable". Of course, when discussing trade policy, the assumption is that job outsourcing is a phenomena associated with free trade. Transferring production abroad is not free trade; it is a protectionist policy corporations use to avoid the market discipline of comparative advantage. The phenomenon is the cause of the expanding trade deficit, and has disastrous economic effects. Public policy should aim to reduce job outsourcing by making it more expensive and by putting restrictions on capital mobility (and such restrictions were in place before the 1970s when everything started to go downhill). The federal government and state governments need to tell industry: "hey look, if you are not going to produce here, you can't sell here". That'll put them in line. These kinds of restrictions on capital mobility need to be implemented on a state level too to prevent businesses from fleeing the community anytime a local government creates a pro-labor policy.

It is interesting that private power is absent from Wilson's discussion. What responsibility do employers have to their workers in Wilson's book? None... In fact, public policy should aim to make everyone happy and not piss anyone off, according to the author. Well, the reality is that most of the policies that help working people are going to piss businesses off and may even hurt our competitiveness in the global economy. "Our" competitiveness in the global economy is based on exploiting third world countries and holding down the poor in our own country.

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
You can "prove" anything if you ignore the facts - Living in Washington, DC and seeing the changes in demographics in the city and surrounding area made me pick up this book at a sidewalk sale for 50 cents to see what Wilson's take on the "new urban poor" and his research correlating them to the loss of work opportunities. Reading this book should be mandatory at an advanced statistics course of how to come to bad conclusions through the use of selective and wrong data.
DC has never had a big industrial base, but it had a very strong and influential black middle class early in the 20th century up until FDR's New Deal when the city was swamped with undereducated and socially dysfunctional immigrants from the southern states. It is the same time that DC became a "black majority" city. This is the same time frame that Wilson uses to "prove" that there was a direct correlation with the loss of factory jobs and the explosion of the urban poor. In order to come to this conclusion, Wilson uses a lot of statistics taken out of context, manipulated to support his conclusions, and then come up with a rehash of "new" policy initiatives which are essentially a regurgitation of LBJ's "war on poverty" programs, which were an expansion and rehash of FDR's "New Deal."
What Wilson ignores are demographic shifts and trends that are much more easily explained and much more solidly supported by Charles Murray, Marvin Olasky, and others who were much more thorough in examining the trends that Wilson writes about.
The Washington DC area today has more jobs than ever before, yet the illegitimacy rate for black children is 90%. In the 1920's and 30's, the illegitimacy rate for whites and blacks was the same, even during the height of segregation and discrimination. The city now has a population base 25% smaller than its peak in the 50's. Even though job opportunities were expanding for minorities in DC, the black middle class abandoned DC and moved into Prince Georges County to get away from crime and other deteriorating social norms, but none of this is to be found in Wilson's research. The same is true for other cities where a combination of "white flight" and "black flight" of the middle class made these downtowns more closely resemble cities in third world countries than the USA. Similar problems can be found in Paris and its suburbs, and many other cities around Europe where immigration and a lack of assimilation have created huge ghettos of the "Urban Poor." There is indeed a much greater correlation to be found in the expansion of the size of the urban poor with the expansion of government programs designed to eliminate poverty. None of these alternative, and much more persuasive, reasons for the plight of the urban poor are to be found in this book. It was people like Wilson who "proved" Galileo to be wrong when he said that the Earth revolved around the sun, and this book is about as convincing.
There are many good statistics and arguments in this book. The problem is that Wilson has excluded any alternative explanations of the reasons for the urban poor, which makes this a very dishonest book.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Lets correlate joblessness with everything - This book is full of excuses and manipulated data that ignores the ultimate moral responsibility of a society. We can correlate joblessness with the number of innercity households that contain black ink pens if we want to. While Wilson presents an argument in an attempt to educate, his words are slanted in such a way that we are left feeling "sorry for them".

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