- ISBN13: 9780679724179
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America’s inner cities–from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime–stem directly from the disappearance of blue-… More >>
When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor
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”.
Rating: 2 / 5
Interesting topic, but one can only take so much pounding into the reader’s head that it is society’s fault rather than the individuals when assessing why the inner cities have so much poverty. After awhile even I had to say enough already!
Rating: 3 / 5
I read this book and had serious doubts about some of the data. It seems like the prose changes in the quotes and the interviewers were feeding jargon to the respondents a little too much for comfort. Also, I have doubts about the scope of the interviews (i.e. did the researchers really interview enough black employers to support their findings about their preferences for employees in all situations?).
Rating: 3 / 5
This book promises much but aside from confirming
that many job producing firms have left the ghettos,
it leaves much to be desired. The policy
prescriptions are flabby and poorly reasoned,
especially considering the immense cost of
implementing them. Considering the hype that
wraps the book (front cover and back), it is much
ado about little.
Rating: 2 / 5
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.
Rating: 1 / 5