When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1996 by David Whitman

No chapter in Wilson's book is more disturbing than his discussion of the black inner-city family. His book might well have been called When Marriage Disappears. Only 17 percent of black families with kids who live at home are headed by a married couple in Chicago's ghetto neighborhoods--compared to almost 80 percent among Mexican families. As Moynihan warned three decades ago, children who grow up without fathers at home in a community where fathers are largely absent live in communities that collapse.

Wilson reports that Mexican families come to Chicago with a clear conception of a traditional family with a breadwinner father. They are ashamed to have a daughter who gets pregnant out of wedlock. By contrast, inner-city blacks almost scorn marriage. "Black women routinely say they distrust men and feel strongly that black men lack dedication to their families," writes Wilson. Black men in the ghetto are also "extremely suspicious" of black women. Wilson quotes from several interviews with young fathers who complain that getting married would cut down "on hanging with the fellows all day", another unmarried dad explains that "most black men feel now, why get married when you got six to seven womens to one guy?" It is a common occurrence, Wilson reports, for black men in the inner city to father at least three children out-of-wedlock with three separate women.

It's hard to imagine a government program, or for that matter a structural change in the economy, that will make blacks in the ghetto eager to marry again. Wilson's policy agenda is a bit of a liberal wish list, one that reflects his long-held belief that only a multiracial coalition can push progressive legislation through the Congress. He calls for passage of universal healthcare, an expanded earned income tax credit paid out on a monthly basis, and national performance standards for schools. Several of his proposed solutions are specific to the ghetto: He wants to create more job-placement centers in the inner city, and more privately subsidized car pools and van pools to drive inner-city workers to jobs in the suburbs.

However, his chief recommendation, to paraphrase former homeless advocate Robert Hayes, can be summed up in three words: jobs, jobs, jobs. Wilson endorses the guaranteed jobs program advanced by journalist Mickey Kaus, a kind of modern-day update to FDR's Works Progress Administration. Under Kaus's plan, the government would offer a job to any American who wanted one at a sub-minimum wage. The scheme is expensive--about $12 billion for every one million jobs created, according to Wilson. He would have workers perform public jobs that aren't currently being performed for budgetary reasons. Wilson suggests collecting trash twice a week, opening libraries on Saturdays and evenings, and providing supervision at municipal parks and playgrounds.

Wilson acknowledges that Congress isn't going to bring back the WPA anytime soon. Clinton himself has already retreated from his 1992 campaign pledge to provide government jobs for welfare recipients who "play by the rules" but can't find work after their two-year stint on cash assistance ends.