The Hallmark of the
Underclass
By CHARLES MURRAY,
COMMENTARY, WSJ Online September 29, 2005
Watching the courage of ordinary
low-income people as they deal with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, it is
hard to decide which politicians are more contemptible -- Democrats who are
rediscovering poverty and blaming it on George W. Bush, or Republicans who are
rediscovering poverty and claiming that the government can fix it. Both
sides are unwilling to face reality: We haven't rediscovered poverty, we
have rediscovered the underclass; the underclass has been growing during all the
years that people were ignoring it, including the Clinton years; and the
programs politicians tout as solutions are a mismatch for the people who
constitute the problem.
* * *
We have rediscovered the underclass.
Newspapers and television understandably prefer to feature low-income people who
are trying hard -- the middle-aged man working two jobs, the mother worrying
about how to get her children into school in a strange city. These people
are rightly the objects of an outpouring of help from around the country, but
their troubles are relatively easy to resolve. Tell the man where a job
is, and he will take it. Tell the mother where a school is, and she will
get her children into it. Other images show us the face of the hard
problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing
nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.
We in the better parts of town haven't had to deal with the underclass for many
years, having successfully erected screens that keep them from troubling us.
We no longer have to send our children to school with their children.
Except in the most progressive cities, the homeless have been taken off the
streets. And most importantly, we have dealt with crime. This has
led to a curious paradox: falling crime and a growing underclass.
The underclass has been growing. The crime rate has been dropping for 13
years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who,
given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.
A rough operational measure of criminality is the percentage of the population
under correctional supervision. This is less sensitive to changes in
correctional fashion than imprisonment rates, since people convicted of a crime
get some sort of correctional supervision regardless of the political climate.
When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional
supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to
fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has
dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.
This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how
to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder
time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own
neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s
and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes
that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes
reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The
actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million.
If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if
today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons.
* * *
Criminality is the most extreme
manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of
young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for
example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first
numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s
and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose
again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking
workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males
is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.
These increases are not explained by changes in college enrollment or any other
benign cause. Large numbers of healthy young men, at ages when labor force
participation used to be close to universal, have dropped out. Remember
that these numbers ignore young males already in prison. Include them in
the calculation, and the evidence of the deteriorating socialization of young
males, concentrated in low income groups, is overwhelming.
Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly?
In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have
grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here
is the illegitimacy ratio -- the percentage of live births that occur to single
women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen
substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25%
milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure
was 35% -- of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio
in 2003 was 68%. By way of comparison: The illegitimacy ratio that
caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to proclaim the breakdown of the black family in
the early 1960s was 24%.
But illegitimacy is now common throughout the population, right? No, it is
heavily concentrated in low-income groups. Perhaps illegitimacy isn't as
bad as we used to think it was? No, during the last decade the evidence
about the problems caused by illegitimacy has grown stronger. What about
all the good news about falling teenage births? About plunging welfare
rolls? Both trends are welcome, but neither has anything to do with the
proportion of children being born and raised without fathers, and that
proportion is the indicator that predicts the size of the underclass in the next
generation.
The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in
the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already
know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the
underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not
caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every
morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home
ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but
because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it.
It doesn't work with the underclass.
Perhaps the programs now being proposed by the administration will help ordinary
poor people whose socialization is just fine and need nothing more than a
chance. It is comforting to think so, but past experience with similar
programs does not give reason for optimism -- it is hard to exaggerate how
ineffectually they have been administered. In any case, poor people who
are not part of the underclass seldom need help to get out of poverty.
Despite the exceptions that get the newspaper ink, the statistical reality is
that people who get into the American job market and stay there seldom remain
poor unless they do something self-destructive. And behaving
self-destructively is the hallmark of the underclass.
* * *
Hurricane Katrina temporarily blew
away the screens that we have erected to keep the underclass out of sight and
out of mind. We are now to be treated to a flurry of government efforts
from politicians who are shocked, shocked, by what they saw. What comes
next is depressingly predictable. Five years from now, the official
evaluations will report that there were no statistically significant differences
between the subsequent lives of people who got the government help and the lives
of people in a control group. Newspapers will not carry that story,
because no one will be interested any longer. No one will be interested
because we will have long since replaced the screens, and long since forgotten.
Mr. Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, is the author, most recently, of "Human Accomplishment"
(HarperCollins, 2003).
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