Full text of The Underclass : Hearing Before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, One Hundred First Congress, First Session, May 25, 1989

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S. H r g . 101-330

THE UNDERCLASS

HEARING
BEFORE THE

JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE
CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES
ONE HUNDRED FIRST CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION

M A Y 25, 1989

Printed for the use of the Joint Economic Committee

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JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE
[Created pursuant to sec. 5(a) of Public Law 304, 79th Cong.]
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
LEE H. HAMILTON, Indiana,

SENATE
PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland,
Vice Chairman

Chairman

AUGUSTUS F. HAWKINS, California
DAVID R. OBEY, Wisconsin
JAMES H. SCHEUER, New York
FORTNEY PETE STARK, California
STEPHEN J. SOLARZ, New York
CHALMERS P. WYLIE, Ohio
OLYMPIA J. SNOWE, Maine
HAMILTON FISH, J r ., New York
FREDERICK S. UPTON, Michigan




LLOYD BENTSEN, Texas
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico
ALBERT GORE, Jr., Tennessee
RICHARD H. BRYAN, Nevada
WILLIAM V. ROTH, Jr., Delaware
STEVE SYMMS, Idaho
PETE WILSON, California
CONNIE MACK, Florida

Joseph J. M in a r ik , Executive Director
R ic h a r d F K a u fm a n , General Counsel
S te p h e n Q uick, C hief Economist
D a v id R. M a lp a s s , M inority S ta ff Director

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CONTENTS
WITNESSES AND STATEMENTS
T h u r s d a y , M a y 25, 1989
Page

Obey, Hon. David R.. member of the Joint Economic Committee, presiding:
Opening statement.................. ......... .... ........ .........................................................
Mincy, Ronald B., research associate, the Urban Institute.............
.......... ..... ..
Mead, Lawrence M.. associate professor, Department of Politics, New York
................... ...........
..........
..... ........
— ....
University.......
Anderson, Elijah, professor of sociology, University of Pennsylvania.

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SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD
T h u r s d a y , M a y 25, 1989

Mead, Lawrence M.: Prepared statement ...................................................................
Mincy, Ronald B.: Prepared statement............................................................................




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THE UNDERCLASS
THURSDAY, MAY 25, 1989
C o n g r e s s of t h e U n it e d S t a t e s ,
J o in t E c o n o m ic C o m m it t e e ,

Washington, DC.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m., in room
2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Lee H. Hamilton (chair­
man of the committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Hamilton, Hawkins, Obey, Scheuer,
Solarz, Wylie, Fish, and Upton.
Also present: Joseph J. Minarik, executive director; David R.
Malpass, minority staff director; and Jim Klumpner, professional
staff member.
OPENING STATEMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE OBEY. PRESIDING

Representative O b e y [presiding]. Good morning. This morning
the Joint Economic Committee will be reviewing the issue of what
has been described by many as America's underclass.
Despite the long economic expansion of recent years, there are
still 33 million poor people in this country. Among those below the
poverty line, a substantial number of families find themselves in
such chaotic current circumstances that their future prospects
seem to be even more bleak. For those families poverty is being
passed from generation to generation.
Many Americans— in fact, most Americans— probably never visit
underclass neighborhoods. They are unaware of the terrible human
toll that the breakdown of social convention has taken. They are
unaware of the real face of economic deprivation, but highly visible
manifestations of the tragedy of the underclass, like soaring teen­
age pregnancies, drug murders, chaotic schools, have alerted the
Nation as a whole to the fact that the problem affects us all.
If compassion did not prompt us to seek solutions to these prob­
lems, certainly enlightened self-interest, both individual and soci­
etal, would.
We will hear today from three distinguished scholars who have
studied this problem.
Mr. Ronald Mincy, with his colleagues at the Urban Institute,
has been involved in a substantial effort to define and quantify the
underclass.
Mr. Lawrence Mead of New York University has investigated
ways in which the underclass culture undermines economic initatives.
The work of Mr. Elijah Anderson of the University of Pennsylva­
nia concerns the ways in which a lack of economic opportunity




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helps to create a culture which in turn diminishes opportunity
even further.
Gentlemen, your prepared statements will certainly be entered
in the record. I think we would ask you to simply summarize your
prepared statements so that we might have as much of give and
take as possible and leave as much time for questioning as possible.
Why don't we begin with Mr. Mincy?
STATEMENT OF RONALD B. MINCY, RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, THE
URBAN INSTITUTE

Mr. M i n c y . First of all, good morning, and I would like to say
that I welcome this opportunity to testify before this committee
about the problem of the underclass and how it should have been
affected both by the economic recovery and by demographic
changes that we anticipate over the next 10 or 15 years or so.
And since you prefer that we summarize our testimony, let me
sort of begin by suggesting that the work that has taken place at
the Urban Institute on the underclass has concentrated on an
effort to define and measure the underclass in order that policy­
makers would have a handle on what the population is, where it is
located, and what are some of the more important determinants of
its existence and growth.
We have found in our research and our review of the literature
that there has been a lot of discussion of the problem, but very
little empirical evidence about what and where and how large, and
so our work has concentrated primarily on that.
To do that we have looked at 1970 and 1980 census tract data,
and the implication of that is that our definition is an area defini­
tion. It includes everyone who resides in a severely distressed
neighborhood as part of an underclass area population, and we do
that not to stigmatize all residents of a neighborhood, but rather to
say that everyone who lives in such a neighborhood is adversely af­
fected by the things that are going on.
So I would like to direct your attention to the latter part of the
prepared statement, which includes the criteria for our definition
and then, on the second chart, also shows some of the results that
we have obtained from this.
First of all, we define as an underclass area any neighborhood
which has an above proportion of teenagers who are high school
dropouts, prime age males who are not regularly attached to the
labor force, households that are headed by women, and households
that are dependent on welfare.
This is a very stringent definition because a neighborhood will
have to qualify on all four of these adverse criteria in order to
qualify as one of our underclass areas.
We discovered that there were 243 underclass areas in 1970, but
by 1980 that number of neighborhoods had risen to 880, and the
population in all underclass areas was about 750,000 people in 1970
and it had grown to 2.5 million in 1980.
I think the message there is that using this stringent definition
the underclass area population is a small population, but between
1970 "and 1980 it grew very rapidly. There was indeed a threefold
increase in the underclass area population.




3
And if you will turn then to the second chart briefly, I want to
describe some of the key characteristics of this population that we
noted.
First of all, the underclass area population is almost entirely an
urban phenomenon the way we measure it, but more importantly,
it is concentrated in the Northeast and North Central regions.
Over 60 percent of the underclass area population resides in cities
in the Northeast and North Central regions, regions which have
lost dramatically in manufacturing and other employment opportu­
nities that used to pay high wages to workers with relatively low
skills.
Second, a large proportion of the underclass area population is
black and Hispanic, but I want to emphasize that between 1970
and 1980 the black share of the underclass area population de­
clined from 72 percent to 59 percent.
And I think one of the things that I would like to emphasize in
what I say about these issues is that I believe the underclass area
population is disproportionately minority; however, I believe the
problem is reaching out to envelop low-skilled immigrants— new
immigrant groups and low-skilled whites who are still confined to
large urban areas, and that should be so because the changes in
the structure of employment opportunities should affect workers of
all races as long as they live in inner cities, and increases in hous­
ing costs should have adversely affected all low-skilled and low-paid
people because it prevents them from escaping to suburban areas
where employment is growing.
I would then like to move on and to talk about what might have
happened to the underclass area population during the recovery
and what demographic changes— how they should affect the under­
class area population and then finally to look at some policy sug­
gestions that I think are paramount.
First of all, of our four underclass indicators, male employment
is the one that is most likely to be sensitive to changes in the busi­
ness cycle. The other parameters having to do with welfare depend­
ency, female headship, and high school dropout rates, they are
going to really respond to long-term changes, but male employment
in particular should change most rapidly with the business cycle.
Since the underclass area population is disproportionately black,
I concentrated on the employment-to-population ratio of black
males in the United States to try to predict what has happened to
the underclass, and I would then turn your attention to the final
figure in the prepared statement.
That figure indicates that there has been a long-term decline in
the black male employment-to-population ratio since 1955. That
long-term decline is only relieved when we have periods of low and
falling unemployment, and during the recent recovery, although
the unemployment rate fell by 8 percent at an average annual
rate, the black employment-to-population ratio increased by only 2
percent. The point being that in a period of strong recovery the in­
dicator most likely to be sensitive to the business cycle rose very
little, and that is my reason for suggesting that the underclass area
population probably grew during this period of economic recovery.




4
And we have suggestions of that in other variables that I could
talk about, but I will leave that to perhaps be addressed in a period
of comment or questions and answers.
Second, the underclass area population is a disproportionately
minority population, and that suggests that the demographic
changes that we anticipate over the next 10 years or so is going to
provide a window of opportunity for the underclass.
I think it is important to recognize that a very high share of
teenagers in underclass areas are dropouts, and a very high share
of their parents and older siblings are also dropouts. Unless the
educational attainment of children who are now going to school in
underclass areas is vastly improved, I think we are fooling our­
selves to think that the year 2000 will provide an effective window
of opportunity for these young people.
On average, Federal spending on education has declined by 3
percent per year since 1982, and this is just not the commitment
toward education that is likely to enable children who are now in
school in underclass areas to enter an effective labor force.
Finally, there was some interest, I understand, on the part of the
committee to think about what portion of the underclass area pop­
ulation might reside in rural areas, and I have tried to address
that, but in a limited way.
First of all, the rural poor population undergoes poverty. The
problem of working poverty in rural areas is severe and very im­
portant, and I don’t mean to deny that. However, the rural poor
tend not to exhibit the same dysfunctional behaviors that the un­
derclass area population does.
Looking at our four indicators— high school dropout rates, female
headship, welfare dependency, and nonwork—the rural poor tend
to score higher than the underclass area population in urban areas
only in the high school dropout rate. Otherwise, they tend to
depend on welfare less, they are less likely to have female headed
families, and they are more likely to work.
Therefore, I think that the concentration of the research and
policy that tries to address the underclass problem, that concentra­
tion stayed in urban areas is the correct one because, although the
problem of rural poverty is important it is just not the same
animal.
Finally, let me conclude by making some policy suggestions.
I think the kernel of the solution to the underclass problem is to
guarantee that families in underclass areas benefit from two earn­
ers. To me that is the bottom line. We have Federal policies that
will seem to work toward the goal of ensuring that female headed
families in underclass areas have a single earner.
However, welfare reform is essentially not going to affect the
earnings of absent fathers and the employment possibilities of
absent fathers, and in view of the fact that 72 percent of black pov­
erty in the United States was accounted for by female headed fami­
lies and that never fell throughout the decade of the 1980's, it
seems to me that the solution toward the underclass is to guaran­
tee that there are working mothers, there are working fathers, and
that working fathers, irrespective of their status in the household,
contribute to the support of their children.




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Long-term solutions will have to emphasize increasing the
amount that children now in school in underclass areas learn in
school, making sure that they graduate from high school without
having children of their own and, third, making sure that if they
demonstrate high academic and technical ability they have the
money to go to college.
And I think that is probably as much as I can jam in here in my
time, and I welcome the opportunity in the question and answer
session to focus on interests that you may have in all this.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mincy follows:]




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PREPARED

STATEMENT

OF

RONALD

B,

MINCY

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE UNDERCLASS
DURING THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY

I welcome this opportunity to speak before this Committee about the effects of the
economic recovery and demographic changes on the underclass. Urban policymakers and
researchers use the term underclass more and more, but they have been slow to define
exactly what the term means. Gunner Myrdal first used the term "under-class" in 1962 to
describe a group of permanently unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable persons,
"... that was not really an integrated part of the nation but a useless and miserable
substratum." Discussions through the mid-1980’s expanded this definition by concentrating
on minorities in inner cities, but contracted it by adding welfare dependency, childbearing by
teenagers, crime, and dropping out of high school to the list of cerftral features describing
the underclass. Despite this evolution in usage, policymakers have no measurable
definition of the underclass population to work with and no way to distinguish the
underclass from the poor.
When I use the term underclass, I have a specific population in mind. The working
definition that I use was derived after an exhaustive review of the literature to synthesize
what various authors were saying about this population. Here is the conventional
description. First, multiple social problems within neighborhoods characterize the
underclass. Crime, drug abuse, welfare dependency, female headed families, dropping out
of high school, childbearing by teenagers, and non-labor force participation by males are
the social problems most often discussed. Next, the underclass is almost exclusively black

Any opinions expressed herein are solely the author’s and should not be
attributed to The Urban Institute, its officers or funders.




7
or black and Hispanic. Last, the underclass is physically and socially isolated from other
communities because whites moved away from inner-city ghetto areas long ago and middle
income blacks followed after the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
To completely understand the growth of the underclass we need two kinds of
explanations. Subjective explanations emphasize the motivation to work, to finish
schooling, and to avoid crime, drug abuse, and parenting before one can support children.
Objective explanations emphasize changes in the structure of urban economies and
changes in laws affecting employment and housing discrimination. We have learned much
more about objective explanations, but subjective explanations are becoming more and
more popular. Since I know little about changes in motivation over the past twenty years
and their effects on the underclass, I will try to confine my remarks to the objective
explanations.
Let me make three summary remarks before going into details. First, the underclass
probably grew during the recovery, because the indicators most likely to be affected by the
business cycle-namely, black male employment and earnings-showed little improvement.
Second, the demographic changes expected over the coming decade seem to provide a
window of opportunity for children of minority groups who are over-represented in the
underclass. But to take advantage of the opportunities, children now enrolled in elementary
schools in underclass areas must have two things: (1) greater primary and secondary
school achievement than their parents and older siblings; and (2) public and private support
for post-secondary education. Our present levels of funding for education are too low to
achieve these goals. Three, popular rhetoric and the volume of data on blacks promote the
notion that the underclass is a problem involving blacks exclusively. But there are signs




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that the underclass is beginning to envelop Hispanics, other recent immigrants, and whites
as well.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE UNDERCLASS

To determine how microeconomic and demographic changes affect the underclass,
we must define and measure the underclass, understand some of the factors responsible
for the emergence and growth of the underclass, and know what kinds of opportunities the
economic and demographic changes create.
Let’s start with the definition and measurement issues. The first stage of The Urban
Institute’s work on the underclass used the conventional description given above to design
a method for measuring the underclass. We have used this method to study the size,
growth, and composition of the underclass, and we are now using the method to test and
refine the conventional wisdom about why the underclass has emerged. Here is a brief
description of that wisdom, concentrating on objective explanations.
Male joblessness and isolation are the keys to understanding the other social
problems that distinguish the underclass from other disadvantaged groups. Male
joblessness means too few desirable marriage partners for women in low income areas.
Next, out of wedlock births among young-often poorly educated-women leads to female­
headed and welfare- dependent families. Next, the concentration of poor, jobless men;
poor, single mothers; and poor, fatherless children creates conditions ripe for crime, drug
abuse, dropping out of high school, and so on. Last, a decline in the number of urban jobs
paying high wages to workers with little formal schooling explains the increase in male
joblessness.




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With the conventional descriptions and explanations as background, we designed a
measure called an underclass area. The four criteria for an underclass area appear in
Chart 1. An underclass area is a census tract with above average proportions of: (1)
teenage high school dropouts; (2) males detached from the labor force; (3) households
dependent on welfare; and (4) households headed by females. This is a stringent definition
because a tract must have above average scores on all four indicators to be counted as an
underclass area.
Using this definition, we found 750,000 people living in all underclass areas in 1970
and 2.5 million people in 1980. The small size of the underclass comes from the stringent
definition we used. But the three-fold increase in the underclass area population between
1970 and 1980, suggests that the underclass is a serious social problem. The composition
of the underclass area population supports some, but not all, elements of the conventional
wisdom. The black share of the underclass area population was 77 percent in 1970, but
this share was only 59 percent in 1980. Poverty rates in underclass areas were 49 percent
in 1970 and 44 percent in 1980. These rates were in the same range as the poverty rates
in extreme poverty areas, a measure other researchers use to estimate the size of the
underclass. Underclass areas were located almost exclusively inside SMSA’s in 1970 and
1980 and most such areas were located in the Northeast and North central regions. Finally,
the average underclass area had over 3,600 people in 1970, but only 2,800 people in 1980.
Part of the conventional explanation for the growth of underclass areas is
depopulation of undesirable neighborhoods by middle income residents. If this is true, one
would expect to find the most disadvantaged people left behind. Labor market and family
structure trends in underclass areas between 1970 and 1980 support this view. But trends




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in welfare dependency and high school dropout rates in underclass areas became stable or
showed improvement. Chart 2 shows other characteristics of underclass areas In 1980.

HOW DID THE RECOVERY AFFECT THE UNDERCLASS?

Since our method relies on Census data, we must await the 1990 Census to
determine exactly how the recovery affected underclass areas. But data on demographic
groups overrepresented in underclass areas and nonspatial data on underclass indicators
suggest that the underclass continued to grow during the recovery.
To predict what happened to the underclass during the recovery, I emphasize
changes in black male employment and real earnings. There are three reasons for doing
so. Our underclass results support the idea that joblessness among black men is key to the
emergence and growth of the underclass. Black male employment and earnings trends are
easily traced in published data. And these trends are more likely to respond to changes in
the business cycle than other underclass indicators.
The recovery could have reduced the size of the underclass if stable employment and
real earnings had grown among black men in underclass areas. Higher earnings of absent
fathers, a common phenomenon in the underclass, could benefit children indirectly. Higher
real earnings could also reduce welfare dependency and enable families to leave inner-city
poverty neighborhoods where social dislocations incubate. In fact, employment of black
men increased by less than one would have hoped during the recovery and real earnings
fell. So the changes that would have reduced the size of the underclass, after being
induced by growth in black male employment and real earnings, probably did not occur.




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Economic recovery periods have stemmed the long-term decline in black male
employment-to-population ratios. The employment-to-population ratio of black men has
been declining-absolutely and relatively-since 1955, except for the three periods of low
and falling unemployment as shown in Figure 1. The biggest gains in the black male
employment-to-population ratio occurred during the sustained recovery between 1964 and
1969. Little improvement occurred during the shorter recovery between 1977 and 1979.
And little improvement has occurred in the recent, sustained recovery since 1984. That is,
the employment-to-population ratio of black men rose at a 2 percent annual rate, even
though the unemployment rate fell at an 8 percent annual rate.
A recession could easily remove the small gains that were made. During most of the
past thirty years, the employment position of black men resumed its absolute and relative
downward trend as soon as unemployment began to rise. Last month’s economic and
unemployment figures suggested that the recovery is slowing down. If the economic picture
worsens, and unemployment begins to rise, the ranks of the underclass could swell in the
months to come.
Employment and real earnings for young, inner city, black men-a critical group for
making predictions about the underclass— also showed little improvement. At the height of
the recession (1982), the overall unemployment rate was nearly 10 percent. At that time, a
startling 47 percent of the high school dropouts in this critical group reported no earnings.
Further 21 percent of the high school graduates in this critical group also reported no
earnings. By 1986 the unemployment rate had fallen to 7 percent. Still, 36 percent of the
high school dropouts and 15 percent of the high school graduates in this critical group
reported no earnings.




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Finally, employment in sectors traditionally paying high wages to low-skilled black
men has continued to decline. In 1980, for example, the manufacturing, transportation, and
public administration sectors employed 34.2 percent of the U.S. workforce, but by 1987
these sectors employed just 30.3 percent.
What about trends in other underclass indicators? The most favorable sign is the
trend in high school dropout rates. The fraction of adults who had not completed high
school fell between 1970 and 1980, even though the underclass was growing. This trend
has continued for both whites and blacks and the rate of decline has been greater for
blacks since 1980. This is good news. But slower growth in labor productivity and rising
skill requirements make it harder for high school graduates to find employment and to
preserve real wages. Even in 1986, only half of the black male high school graduates
between 20 and 29 years old were full-time, year-round employees. Further, mean real
annual earnings fell by 16 percent between 1979 and 1986 for those who were employed,
as did the real mean annual earnings of white high school graduates of the same age.
Other underclass indicators showed little improvement. First, there was virtually no
change in the fraction of black families headed by females: 41.7 percent of black families
were headed by females in 1980 and 42.8 percent in 1987. Poverty rates among such
families remained above 50 percent. And the fraction of poor black families headed by
females never fell below 72 percent. Next, the number of AFDC recipients as a fraction of
the poor (or a fraction of the total population) have changed little since 1982, despite
declines in the real value of benefits and tighter eligibility requirements. Third, the fraction
of the poverty population that lives in central city poverty areas has continued to increase.
Many researchers use this measure to estimate the size of the underclass. Between 1980
and 1987, the fraction of the poverty population living in central city poverty areas increased




13

by 64 percent. One third of poor blacks lived in central city poverty areas in 1980 and by
1987 this fraction had grown to 42.4 percent.
In sum, young black men, whether high school dropouts or graduates, have
experienced slow increases in employment and earnings. These trends make it more and
more difficult for them to support themselves and the families they may have created,
through work. This probably prevented a decline in the underclass area population by
preventing a decline in the number of female headed families depending on welfare and
preventing dispersion of the low-skilled black population from inner-city poverty areas.

ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN THE UNDERCLASS

The conventional wisdom presumes that the underclass is an inner-city minority
phenomenon, so government efforts to reduce the underclass require more spending on
minorities. I am skeptical of this view for two reasons. First, although racial discrimination
undoubtedly creates additional barriers for blacks, low-skilled workers of all races and
ethnic groups have been hurt by declines in high paying jobs for low-skilled urban workers.
Second, suburban migration of low-income people of all races and ethnic groups has been
slowed by rising suburban housing costs.
The data show signs that whites, Hispanics, and immigrants are being drawn into
underclass areas. The black share of the underclass area population declined from 72 to
59 percent between 1970 and 1980 and the foreign born share of this population increased
from 3 to 8 percent. Next, Chart 2 shows that blacks and Hispanics together represented
70 percent of the underclass area population. Some people in the remaining 30 percent
are non-Hispanic whites. Other results show that in almost a quarter of the 1980

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underclass areas, whites represented 51 percent or more of the residents. These white
msyority underclass areas include few Hispanics, so many of the residents of these
neighborhoods are probably non-Hispanic whites.
Published data on central city poverty areas, which include separate tabulations for
non-Hispanic whites, also suggest some racial and ethnic diversity in the underclass.
Though only 7.2 percent of poor non-Hispanic whites lived in central city poverty areas in
1980, this fraction had increased to 15.2 percent by 1987.
Some even suspect that there is a growing white underclass in rural areas, which is
missed because underclass researchers focus on urban areas. We will know more about
the rural underclass question shortly, but data on poverty by place of residence support a
continued focus on the urban underclass. Poor whites are more likely to live in rural areas.
But, except for having higher school dropout rates, the rural poor are less likely to exhibit
underclass behaviors than the urban poor. The rural poor are less likely to depend on
welfare, have female headed families, and they are more likely to work. Further, the rural
poor are much less likely than the urban poor, to have all four underclass behaviors.

DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS AND THE UNDERCLASS

Widely publicized demographic trends point to a window of opportunity for children of
minority groups, which are overrepresented in the underclass. First, labor force growth
during the next 10 years will be lower than growth at any time in the post war period.
Second, only 15 percent of labor force growth will come from white males. Third, the
average age of the labor force will Increase from 34 years to 39 years. This is important
because younger workers are more willing to move and may adapt to new skill demands




15
more easily than older workers. Last, the number of workers between 16 and 34 years old
will fall. As a result of these demographic trends, America’s labor needs over the next
decade will draw heavily from minorities, women, older workers, and immigrants.
Despite expanding opportunities for these groups, there is no open field for the
underclass. Rising skill requirements create employment barriers for children now enrolled
in underclass area schools. A study for the Labor Department estimates that that more
than half the jobs created between now and the year 2000 will require more than a high
school diploma and more than one-third will require a college degree. These estimates
may overstate educational requirements, but the basic point is clear. To take advantage of
slow labor force growth, children from underclass areas must: (1) have much higher
academic achievement than their parents and older siblings and (2) enter and complete
post-secondary schooling at higher rates.
Achieving these goals will require a consistent commitment to education at the
federal level. The federal budget has shown no clear signal for or against education since
1982. Instead, large increases in federal funding for all levels of education followed
consecutive annual cuts, so that this funding has declined at an average annual rate of 3
percent per year. This cannot continue.

POLICY DIRECTIONS

To decrease the size of the underclass, families must receive contributions from two
earners, so that they can leave areas where social dislocations incubate. So short term
policies must ease the transition from welfare to work among mothers and increase
employment and child support among fathers.




16

The greatest earnings gains from recent state, work-welfare, experiments have come
by increasing work efforts by single mothers, through childcare, job search, job training, and
job counseling. The 1988 Family Support Act requires all states to develop similar

*

programs, but because these programs rarely apply to absent fathers they leave half of the
underclass problem untouched. Single mothers provide support for their children through
in-kind services. If these mothers find a job through work-welfare programs, they will also
provide cash support. But absent fathers, who are unwilling take a job, bear no
responsibility for their children. Finally, Those who are willing, but unable, to find work and
those who earn too little receive no help in meeting their paternal obligations.
Future policy must compliment work-welfare by (1) reducing joblessness among men
in underclass areas and (2) making sure that absent fathers in underclass areas support
their children. Increasing demand for low-skilled workers in urban areas or providing public
service employment at low wages could accomplish the first goal. If successful, such
programs would stabilize labor force participation among men in underclass areas, allow
them to establish employment records, and make it possible for those who father children to
share the responsibility with mothers and with taxpayers. This leaves the problem of low
pay unresolved. But by joining the ranks of the working poor, men in underclass areas
would become part of a large and growing constituency whose plight is at the top of the
domestic policy agenda.
Establishing paternity and support orders, even when fathers are poor or
unemployed, and tying employment services for absent fathers to child support payments
could achieve the second goal. The Family Security Act already contains the foundations
of this proposal. Further, even though poor, young, fathers, rarely marry the mothers of
their children, there is some evidence that they make small cash and in kind child support




17
contributions. This leaves room for optimism that, if government can increase and stabilize
their earnings, some absent fathers in underclass areas will make higher and more stable
contributions to their children. Finally, while purely punitive measures could backfire,
establishing paternity and a legal obligation to support could discourage absent fatherhood.
Longer term policies must help children from underclass areas reach their working
years with fewer scars. This means they should: (1) learn more in elementary and high
school; (2) complete high school without children of their own; and (3) have the money to
attend post-secondary school, if they have strong academic or technical ability. Education
for children from underclass areas should rank high among competitors for federal dollars
because programs like Head Start and Chapter One of the Education Consolidation and
Improvement Act have already shown some success. Besides extending these programs
to more children, additional funding is needed to design new strategies to educate
disadvantaged children and to retain them in greater numbers in high school and college.
Finally, teen pregnancy prevention programs should focus on the sexual and contraceptive
choices of girls and boys, since the goal is to reduce the concentration of absent fathers,
single mothers, and their children.







Chart 1

DEFINITIONS
Urban Institute estimates are based on a definition of the
underclass that focuses on concentrations of individuals
living in neighborhoods where dysfunctional behaviors are
commonplace.
That is, where there is a high proportion of:
o

teenagers who are high school dropouts,

o

prime-age males not regularly attached
to the labor force,

o

households on welfare, and

o

households headed by women,

and where "high" means one standard deviation
above the mean for the United States as a whole.

19

Chart 2
THE SIZE AND COMPOSITION
OF THE UNDERCLASS, 1980
Underclass Areas
Total Population (Thousands)
Total Poverty Population (Thousands)
Proportion of Total Populations that is:
Urban
In Northeast
In North Central
In South
In West
White
Black
Hispanic
Adults with less than a
high school education
Proportion of:
Households headed by women
Teenagers who are high school
dropouts
Prime-age males not regularly
attached to the labor force
Households on welfare




2,484
1,066

U.S.
226,546
26,100

0.99
0.36'
0.27
0.26
0.11
0.28
0.59
0.10

0.77
0.25
0.24
0.30
0.21
0.82
0.12
0.03

0.63

0.31

0.60

0.19

0.36

0.13

0.56
0.34

0.31
0.08




Figure 1
Nonwhite (or Black) Male Employment
to Population Ratios, 1955-88
Employment to Population Ratio

Total Unemployment Rate

Year
- ■ Overall Rate
SOURCE: Economic Report of the President
February, 1988; Employment and Earnings,
U.S. Department of Labor, January, 1989.

-------Male Ratio

21

Representative O b e y . Thank you very much.
Mr, Mead, please proceed.
STATEM ENT OF LAW REN CE M. M EAD, ASSOCIATE PRO FE SSO R ,
DEPARTM EN T OF P O L IT IC S, NEW Y O R K U N IVERSITY

Mr. M e a d . Thank you, Congressman. I am delighted to be here.
Let me just say somewhat parallel things to what Ron Mincy has
said but emphasizing a different view of the causes of this problem.
The underclass, as most people use that term, is a small group
that is poor and which has various problems of functioning along
the lines that Ron Mincy has described. One estimate is that the
size might range somewhere between 2 to 9 million.
I don't believe there is any serious disagreement about the defi­
nition of this term. The disagreements are quite limited, and they
have mostly to do with whether the underclass can be associated
with geographic areas, with neighborhoods in the way that Ron
Mincy has suggested. But everyone uses the term to mean people
who are poor and who have problems in functioning.
I would particularly want to emphasize the employment aspect.
One of the things that hasn't been noticed enough, I think, in the
debate about poverty is that work levels among the poor are re­
markably low, and furthermore they are falling, and they are fall­
ing in the midst of the tightest labor market that we have had in a
long time.
In 1986, only 42 percent of poor adults had any earnings at all in
a year, and that contrasts to 68 percent for the public. Obviously,
that is a major cause of poverty and there is a sharp and inverse
relationship between work effort and poverty levels.
Yet the share of poor family heads who had any earnings has
fallen 20 percentage points since 1959. The drop is from about twothirds to less than half, to 47 percent, and there isn't any obvious
explanation.
It is connected to the rise in female headedness. It is female
headed families who work markedly less than two-parent families,
and you might think, well, that is the reason, because the mothers
are unable to work. Well, that is unpersuasive, however, because
other single mothers who are not poor are working and for women
as a whole, married and unmarried and with and without children,
there has been increasing labor force participation. That is true
among whites and blacks.
So rising female headedness really doesn't explain our problem.
Also, among poor blacks, families that break up are usually poor
before they break up as well as after, in both cases because there is
limited work effort.
Also, it isn't true that the poor are becoming less employable.
Actually, the share of the poor who are working age, that is, not
children and not elderly, is rising. It is right about half of the pov­
erty population.
It is also not true that all of this can be explained by rising real
wages. As wages rise, it is tougher to work and remain poor be­
cause the income that you get from working is above the poverty
line, which is a fixed level and does not rise. However, if you look
at poverty in a relative sense, if you look at the bottom fifth of the




2 2

income distribution, you still see falling work effort even while the
better off are working harder. There has been this division in
American society where most people are putting in more working
hours to maintain incomes and get ahead in various senses. Espe­
cially, the best off are working very hard indeed. But the worst off
are working less.
This division largely accounts for the underclass and also for the
division politically over this question. Most Americans feel they are
working hard and people who are poor and dependent are typically
not working hard.
Now, that just pushes the question back. What is the origin of
the various dysfunctions that define the group, and especially what
is the origin of nonwork?
There are fairly well-defined theories here, both liberal and con­
servative, and I find both of them rather unpersuasive on the evi­
dence. I am left with a mystery and rather tentative answers.
Among liberals one theory is that jobs don't pay enough. It is
possible to work and be poor in this country, and indeed there are
working poor people. By the broadest definition, there are about 9
million working poor, about 2 million of whom are working full
time the full year.
But it is important to point out that that is a much smaller
number than the nonworking poor; 58 percent of poor adults don't
work at all. That is over 12 million in a year. That is a consider­
ably larger number than the working poor by the broadest defini­
tion.
And the same is true for the idea that the minimum wage is the
answer. The minimum wage has a very small connection to pover­
ty. Most people who are working at the minimum wage are not
poor. Most people who are poor are working above the minimum
wage. Overwhelmingly, the reason for poverty is low working hours
and not low wages, and the great difficulty is to expand working
hours. That has a much sharper effect on poverty levels than wage
rates do or the minimum wage.
A second theory, to which Ron Mincy has alluded, is that jobs
may be absent, opportunities to work may be lacking, especially in
the cities. There is no way to be sure of this for various technical
reasons, but the evidence we have overwhelmingly suggests that
jobs, at least of the low-paid variety, are indeed available in the
cities on a wide basis. The labor market is quite tight. It is tighter
in the suburbs, to be sure, than in the inner city, but it looks like
jobs of some sort are widely available.
The notion that the collapse in manufacturing employment is
the bogey is unpersuasive because there isn't much connection as
far as anyone can find between nonworking poor people in the
inner city and people who worked or could work or ever have
worked in factories. Deindustrialization is occurring, and it is a se­
rious problem for American workers, but it is going on over the
heads of the poor. Most of those involved are made worse off by
deindustrialization, but that is not the same thing as becoming
poor. As long as they work and they keep working, they may be
worse off, they may be less equal, but most of them are not poor or
dependent.




23
The mismatch theory that sees a connection between the trends
of economic change and rising inner-city joblessness has simply not
been verified by a variety of economists over 20 years. It is not a
new theory. It is an old theory and it hasn't been found to check
out.
So I don't think there is really any convincing evidence now that
lack of jobs is the reason for the problem. The fact that opportuni­
ties are worse in some ways for the unskilled, I don't doubt that,
but I don't think that explains the total lack of work. What that
would explain is working and doing worse, making lower wages,
lower income. But being poor and dependent primarily is due to a
total lack of employment.
The same can be said for other barriers to employment, such as
racial discrimination and child care problems. These are unpersua­
sive as causes for nonwork; that is, for lack of all employment.
They are rather more persuasive as problems for people who are
working.
And that is my general conclusion about the barriers that are
cited as reasons for nonwork. They explain inequality among work­
ers. They are important, but they explain problems among people
who already have jobs. They do not explain the failure to work at
all, and therefore they don't explain the underclass.
Now, turning to the main conservative theory, it is a theory asso­
ciated with Charles Murray, the notion that welfare programs and
other programs create disincentives for work effort.
It hasn't been shown that there is any clear association between
high welfare benefits and low work levels or, indeed, other dysfunc­
tions which have to do with the underclass. This entire tradition of
research has shown only slight effects.
I would look at several other causes to explain the underclass
myself, one of which is emphasized by Bill Wilson and other people
in his tradition, and that is the isolation of the inner-city poor. I do
think they are isolated, even though jobs appear to exist. They are
cut off from the mainstream economy, and this tends to entrench
attitudes against employment over time.
The second thing I would emphasize is the permissiveness of the
welfare system. I don't see strong evidence that benefits deter
work, but I do see evidence that lack of work requirements deters
work, or rather permits nonwork. The strongest effect that welfare
can have on the work situation is whether or not work is required
as a natural part of the welfare bargain.
The third element I would emphasize is several attitudes that
appear to be well entrenched among the underclass and are con­
trary to work. I don't mean that people don't want to work. I see
strong evidence they do want to work.
What you find, rather, is a resistance to low-wage jobs on the
part of many individuals, especially men, not because it is irration­
al to work but because they feel it is morally insulting to have to
take jobs that are dirty and low paid. There is an attitude of revul­
sion against the available jobs. That is one reaction, which I find
understandable.
The second reaction is defeatism, where one wants to work and
one does accept the available jobs but one feels overwhelmed by the
logistics of employment. One can't arrange a job. One can't arrange




24
child care. One needs help on all those things, and because it is so
defeating one gives up. I think that is a predominant reaction
among long-term welfare mothers.
So this complex of social isolation, permissive welfare, and atti­
tudes contrary to work—not values contrary to work, but attitudes
which cause one not to work even though one wants to work in
principle—these things are what I would cite as the causes.
Now, this leads to a curious conclusion that I have just reached
recently. In general, in talking about the problems of work, liberals
tend to emphasize structural social problems, including economic
limitations, lack of jobs, lack of wages, et cetera, while conserv­
atives question the desire of the poor to work, and so on. But the
evidence that I see is almost the other way around.
It looks like the conservatives are right about society, the liber­
als are right about the psychology of the poor. Conservatives are
right to say on the whole that opportunity does exist, jobs do exist,
at least good enough to keep out of welfare and out of poverty, if
not to become equal in broader senses. Conservatives are right
about society.
But liberals are right in saying that poor people don't feel they
have opportunities. They do feel alienated. They do feel defeated.
So I think the liberal reading of the psychology is correct, even
though it is not in fact supported by the objective facts about socie­
ty. So we have to deal with that alienation.
In terms of policy I feel the great difficulty is to avoid assuming
a solution in advance. What I see in the history of Federal antipov­
erty policy is a tendency to assume economic competence; that is to
say, to assume that people want to work, will work if offered the
chance, so all they have to have is better opportunity.
So most Federal employment programs concentrate on increasing
jobs or increasing the pay of those jobs or increasing skills through
various kinds of training. They all assume precisely the thing
which seems to be lacking, which is that people are economically
competent in the sense that they seek to get ahead and seize oppor­
tunities and go to work without prompting.
But if that were true, we wouldn't have an underclass in the first
place. I don't think one can premise policy on the supposition that
people are economically activist because that simply isn't true of
the underclass. I don't believe that economic reasoning can explain
the predicament. If the poor in fact did seize opportunities and did
respond to incentives in the way that all our policies have pre­
sumed, they wouldn't be poor in the first place.
It is not surprising to me that work incentives and voluntary
training programs and government job programs have had very
little impact on this problem because they all assume in advance
the thing which, if it were true, we would have no problem.
We have to create rather than presume the will to get ahead—
not the desire to get ahead, but the will to actually do it. That is
the thing that has to somehow be liberated in these people.
Employment policies have moved toward work requirements, es­
pecially in the welfare system and to a lesser extent elsewhere. We
have seen that we cannot presume economic competence, but
rather we have to create it.




25
What workfare does is use public authority rather than economic
incentives to try to motivate. My studies say very strongly and also
my reading of the psychology says very, very strongly, that this is
the way to go. Public authority is a real lever which can in fact
affect behavior; whereas, economic incentives do not.
This is a dutiful group that wants to work, wants to function, but
feels unable to do so. But they want the norms enforced and they
respond when they are enforced, and when they are not enforced
they experience that as abandonment.
So we have to be willing to be tutelary. We have to be willing to
set up a structure to some extent paternalist. I don't see any alter­
native to that. Some way down the road it may be possible to go
back to strictly economic motivation.
Now, my main problem with the workfare programs we have is
that they don't in fact involve the bulk of the clients. They are a
formality for most clients. Only about a third of those are employ­
able have to participate actively. That would be changed very little
by the Moynihan bill enacted last fall. I would try to get the par­
ticipation rate up to 50 percent. That is the strongest thing one
could do to get at the heart of the underclass.
The difficulty is to again persuade politicians that we need to do
this, to stop making the competence assumption about the way
people function at the bottom of society, and realize that this is
necessary.
Liberals and conservatives both make that assumption. When
liberals want government to be involved in the economy, they
mean to expand opportunities for workers. The whole progressive
tradition is about equality for workers. It assumes working fami­
lies. But work-based benefits are no answer to nonworking families.
The same is true for the conservative side. Conservatives trust the
private marketplace, but the marketplace again assumes that fami­
lies are working, and if they are not then they don't benefit from
economic expansion.
What Ron Mincy has told us about the effects of the expansion I
think is quite extraordinary. We have declining work effort in the
midst of the tightest labor market in about 20 years. That is ex­
traordinary, and it indicates that economic solutions are not suffi­
cient. We have to go over to some more paternalist structure in­
volving administrative sanctions where people are in fact required
to work rather than motivated to work by economic payoffs.
Two other recommendations I would have. One is not only to
expand workfare, but also to reform inner-city schools—Ron Mincy
has alluded to that—so that people really possess some skills before
they get out. I don't think we should promote or graduate students
who are illiterate, who can't add and subtract.
And, finally—and this is an important part of the work problem
for men who are not on welfare—law enforcement against the un­
derground economy. That is the key to requiring that men not on
welfare actually work.
I would also, incidentally, allow more men to go on the rolls, but
I wouldn't do it in the way that is done now under the unemployed
father program, where the father has to not work in order to qual­
ify for welfare. I would do just the opposite. I would qualify the
father, but require him to work. He would have to be working full




26
time, and if he was, the family could get aid if it were still needy.
The mother might have to work only part time.
Those would be my recommendations, and I will be glad to
answer questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mead follows:]




27

PREPARED
The

STATEMENT

Underclass

and

OF

LA WR E NCE

American

M,

MEAD

Politics

SUMMARY
The underclass comprises those 2 to 9 million Americans who combine low
income with difficulties in functioning, particularly in working. Work effort is
low and falling among the poor. The main reason is not social barriers such as
low wages, lack of jobs, racial bias, or welfare disincentives. The incentive to
work is already great, and the chance to do so seems widely available. More
likely, nonwork arises from the ambivalence the poor feel toward employment
and a permissive welfare system that seldom requires work.
Most strategies to help the poor, such as voluntary training and jobs
programs, have failed because they presume just the economic competence—the
willingness to take chances to work—that today's poor tend to lack. Workfare
shows more impact because it motivates work effort through public authority.
This and stronger education and law enforcement offer the best hope to
integrate the underclass.
However, such paternalist measures are difficult for American politics.
Leaders prefer to debate traditional progressive issues, such as the proper scale
of government and how to advance equality among workers. The real need is to
create more workers. The real issue is not opportunity but competence.

[Lawrence M. Mead is Associate Professor of Politics at New York University. He
is the author of Beyond Entitlement (Free press. 1986). a study of the
employment issue in welfare, and other works on social policy. He received his
Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1973.]




28
The underclass has become a touchstone for current debates about social policy in the Ui.
Whatever approach one recommends, it must promise integration for this group. In this
testimony, I will describe the underclass as most experts understand it, discuss its causes, and
suggest prescriptions. None of these matters is as contentious as the debate suggests. Much of the
argument is an evasion of the real issue, which is hov to cope with the economic incompetence of
the nonworking poor.1

Tffi.UNPERCLASS
Most experts understand the underclass to include people who are poor or near-poor over the
long term &nd who display serious problems in functioning in the ways society expects. That is,
they have difficulty observing such civilities as obeying the lav, getting through school,
maintaining families, and. above ail. working for a living. These behavioral problems are the
most fundamental, as they usually are the initial causes of the income problems of the group.
The focus on behavior implies that we talking mostly about working-aged and able-bodied
people, not children, the elderly, or the mentally ill or disabled. While significant numbers of
these groups are poor too. their need less often arises from uncivil behavior. This makes them
easier to help, and helping them is less controversial. In the following. I focus on adult poverty,
and especially on poor single men and long-term welfare mothers. I do not deny that there are
other, and more "deserving, types of poverty.
One'good estimate, by Robert Reischauer. is that the underclass comprises between 0.9 and 33
percent of the population depending on the kinds and degrees of dysfunction specified. That
implies somewhere between 2.2 and 8.3 million people in 1987. The underclass is clearly a much
smaller group than oil long-term poor people (6-7 percent of population, or 13-17 million), let
alone all poor in a single year (13 3 percent, 33 million). It may be seen as the inner core of the

1 Much of the following is drawn from a new book, tentatively entitled The Nav Dependency
Politics: Nonworking Poverty In the US., which should appear from Basic Books next year. I have
avoided documentation but will be glad to supply it.




29

poor, those who are not only needy year after year but whose poverty is rooted in a lifestyle that is
difficult to change.
Of all the dysfunctions that help to define the group, the most fundamental may be nonwork,
in which I include both failure to find a job and failure even to look for one, It has been noted too
little that wort levels are dropping among the American poor. The share of the heads of poor
families that work at all in a year has dropped 20 percentage points since 1939, from over twothirds to less than half. The share working full-time and ftill-year has dropped from almost a
third to under 13 percent. Much of the decline is associated with the rapid rise in female-headed
families among the poor, but family breakup alone cannot explain it. Among poor blacks, who
dominate the underclass, most couples that split were poor before the breakup as well as after.
Work effort has fallen among poor female heads, not only because there are more such heads. Yet
among the general population, including blacks, work effort among women has risen and
employment is usual for single mothers who are not poor.
Nor is it inevitable that work levels should fall because the needy are becoming less
employable. The proportion of children and elderly among the poor has actually fallen due to
smaller families and rising Social Security benefits for the retired. Almost half of poor individuals
today are working-aged. Nor is it true that poverty and work hsve become mutually exclusive
because of rising real incomes, which make it more difficult to work and remain poor by the
official measure, which is fixed in real terms. Even if we define poverty in relative terms, a trend
against work is apparent. Work effort is falling among the poorest fifth of families, even as it is
rising among the better-ofT.
In 1986. only 42 percent of poor adults reported any earnings in a year, compared to 68
percent for the public. Among welfare mothers, only 3 percent work in a given month, even part
time, though over a year perhaps a third do. Low earnings, in turn, produce need. The
relationship between poverty and work effort is potent and inverse. The poverty rate is a quarter
for families with nonvorking heads, and over half for those with nonworking single heads, but it
drops to 3 and 8 percent, respectively, for all heads and female heads who work full-time and fullyear. Escape from poverty is also strongly related to the number of workers in the family.

23-645 0 - 8 9 - 3




30

Members of the underclass are poor largely because they live off welfare or illegal activities
rather than steady earnings in legitimate jobs. The failure of husbands to work. while wives
qualify for welfare, is also a leading cause of family breakup, which in turn helps precipitate
many of the other social problems of the inner city, Separation from work is a more important
cause of isolation for the poor than the ghetto as such. It is common participation in the economy,
more than residential integration, that traditionally has brought races and ethnic groups together
in America.

CAUSES
To explain the underclass means, in essence, to explain the demorali2ed mindset that leads to
the functioning problems of the group, which in turn usually cause its poverty. The puzzle is to
explain why people engage in behaviors, such as illegitimacy, crime, and nonwork, which are
irrational for the individual's long-term interest, let alone society's.
Since most of the underclass is nonwhite, one obvious cause is past slavery and racial
discrimination. Groups that have been denied fair opportunity inevitably pursue it lese
energetically than the privileged. The most heavily dependent groups-blacks. Hispanics,
American Indians—also came from less achieving backgrounds than those that are conspicuously
successful (e.g.. Jews and Asians). The trouble is that the influence of racism and ethnicity is
heaviest in the past, while the decline in work effort is recent. Indeed, it coincides with the
period since 1960 when racial barriers have fallen.
Most of the recent debate has been specifically about the causes of nonwork. Two main
explanations have been proposed. Liberals say that the poor are kept from earning their way out
of poverty by various social barriers, particularly low wages, lack of jobs, and other impediments
to employment. Conservatives say government programs create disincentives to work. Neither
theory is very persuasive.
It is said that people are poor today mainly because the jobs they can get do not pay enough,
but this is implausible. Steady work at any legal wage typically takes a family off welfare and
above poverty, at least if both parents work, as is now the norm. It is true that there are “working




31

poor" people-nearly 9 million in 1986,2 million of whom worked full-time and full-year. Bui
they are considerably outnumbered by poor people who do not work at a l l- 12.3 million in 1986.
Overwhelmingly, poverty is due to low workinghours nuher th&n low wages Low wages cannot
explain iow hours. One would expect the low-paid to work more hours than the better off, when
in fact they average far fewer.
The minimum wage, now setat $3.33 an hour, is often blamed for working poverty. But the
relationship between poverty and minimum-wage work is very tenuous. Most working poor are
above the minimum wage-when they work-and most people who work at the minimum are not
poor.. It is true that one cannot support a family above poverty by working at the minimum wage
even full-time, but such calculations are always made hypothetically. Very few actual workers
are in that position. Most minimum-wage workers are teenagers, and spouses, not heads of
household, and most work part-time. According to CBO. only120,000 workers in the entire
economy worked full-time, full-year at the minimum wage and were still poor, and not all of these
were heads of family. There may be grounds to raise the minimum wage or expand workconnected benefits (such as the EITC). But since most poor people do not work at any wage, doing
this will have little effect on poverty.
It would have an effect only if more people were tempted to work by the higher returns. One
often hears that the answer to nonwork is to make employment “pay," by raising wages and
guaranteeing benefits such as health care. But the incentive to work is already great, as the
powerful antipoverty effects of employment show. Work levels probably would rise if wages or
benefits were raised to middle-class levels, but they would have to be raised for ail workers, and
this would be prohibitive. Increases on the much smaller scale now under discussion would have
little impact.
The contention that jobs are lacking is also implausible. The labor market is already tight
and. due to demographic trends, likely to remain so. The boom of the 1980s coupled with the "baby
bust ‘ have brought unemployment down to around 3 percent, and there is a distinct labor
shortage in suburban areas. Millions of illegal aliens have entered the country to do jobs not
taken by poor Americans. Most unemployed are out of work only briefly, and joblessness even
among the groups with the highest measured unemployment (minorities, women, youth) is




32

characterized more by rapid turnover than a lack of all employment. A good deal of
unemployment, among rich and poor alike, appears to be voluntary, in the sense that people pass
up available but unattractive jobs in hopes of finding better. Poor people themselves say they
usually can find jobs; they complain, rather, about the quality of these positions.
On the left, structural theories have been advanced to explain nonvork. The "dual labor
market theory1says disadvantaged workers are confined to a "secondary" economy of small firms
and service industries in which pay and prospects are much worse than in the "primary"
economy of large firms and government. Research does not corroborate such a division. Even
low-paid workers, it appears, typically enjoy substantial mobility over their llves-if they work
steadily.
Recently, William Julius Wilson and others have contended that nonwork among the poor is
explained by a "mismatch" between available jobs and jobless adults in the inner city. The latter
cannot get to the suburbs, where most available jobs are located, nor can they qualify for
employment in a high-tech" economy. Manufacturing jobs they could do have declined in favor
of fields such as computing and telecommunications that demand much more education. However,
nobody has shown a concrete connection between deindustrialization and the inner-city poor.
Very few of the iauer ever worked in factories. Studies do not find that difficulty commuting to
jobs is an important cause of urban unemployment, and. despite “high-tech" trends, the bulk of
jobs in the economy still demand only limited education.
Other barriers to employment are more apparent than real. Racial discrimination seldom
restricts employment by the poor; it is a greater problem for better-prepared blacks who are in
more direct competition with whites for preferred jobs. Because the size of families has fallen, the
burdens of children less often keep single mothers from working than was once the case. Nor is
lack of child care a significant barrier. Most working mothers, poor and nonpoor, arrange care
informally with friends and relatives and are satisfied with it. Expanded child care centers might
be necessary for other goals, such as early childhood education, but not for employment. Finally,
while skills among poor adults are clearly limited, only a small proportion are disabled or
otherwise clearly unemployable.




33

My sense is that the barriers cited by liberals largely explain inequality among woi
poverty or dependency. That is. they explain why low-skilled adults, if they work, will selt
prosper in competitive senses. Most will be decidedly worse-off than better-prepared worki
But these facts cannot explain why so many of the poor do not work at all. That usually make
them worse off than working even in the worst jobs. The same may be said of deindustrializau
It may explain why some unionized workers have had to come down in pay. but It is going on
largely over the heads of the poor. Most workers driven out of factories keep working in some jc
and so avoid poverty or dependency.
The leading conservative theory of nonwork is that it is caused by the disincentives
inherent in welfare and other social programs. These benefits support people who are single
mothers and nonworking, so they encourage the poor to avoid marriage and employment.
Allegedly, nonwork and other dysfunctions rose to record levels in the 1960s and 1970s ts social
spending soared due to Great Society initiatives. The theory sounds plausible, but research offers
little hard support for it. There may be some low threshhold of welfare that permits nonwork, but
above that work levels among recipients do not vary much with benefit levels. And work levels
went on failing after the real value of welfare benefits fell alter the early 1970s.
Rather than the pattern of opportunity or welfare benefits. I would cite two other structural
causes. One is the isolation of the long-term poor. The underclass may be linked to particular
geographic locations, especially the inner-city neighborhoods of large cities. In these areas, an
alien subculture opposed to self-reliance hss arisen that may be feeding on itself. Researchers
are divided as to whether there is such a "neighborhood“ or “contagion" effect. But it is clear that
the underclass is substantially separated from the economy. This seems to have entrenched
employment difficulties over time.
The other structural factor is the lack of serious work requirements in welfare and other
antipoverty programs The poor accept the work ethic, but it has not been enforced as a routine
aspect of social policy. It has thus become an aspiration divorced from actual behavior, much as
the tax or traffic laws would be if they went unenforced. The mistake is not the benefits
government gives people but its failure to expect work and other civilities in return. The problem
is not government's generosity but its permissiveness




34

There are also attitudes that cause the poor to avoid work despite the opportunities that
appear available. I do not mean they do not want to work. One might suspect this from the daily
activities of the poor, which are little directed toward getting ahead. Butin interview studies, poor
adults say firmly that they do want to work, and most welfare recipients who participate in
welfare employment programs are enthusiastic about their experience. 1believe these sentiments
are sincere.
Nor is it lively, as some liberals claim, that nonwork is a rational* response to the
constraints low-skilled workers face in getting and keeping jobs. This view is implausible if. as
the evidence suggests, poor workers do not face unusual obstacles to working, only in
succeeding/' Not to work cannot be as "rational;' at least in material terms, as laboring steadily in
available jobs, however meagre they are. Neither crime nor welfare, on average, pays as well as
work. Apparently, the jobless poor want to ’get Ahead " hut. they are not. competent in the
economic sense. That is. they do not press their own advancement effectively, above all by
working regularly.
Two other reactions seem to be much more important. One is that many nonworkers,
especially youth and men, reject available jobs as beneath them. The motivation is not rational
calculation but moral revulsion at the limited options society offers the low-skilled. These workers
would rather be out of a job entirely than accept low-paid or “dirty work." Secondly, a larger
number of poor, especially welfare mothers, suffer the syndrome often called "culture of
poverty.' They do not resist available jobs, but they are overwhelmed by the demands of working.
They feel they cannot work unless government assumes most of the burdens, including arranging
a job. training, transportation, and child care.
Overall, in assessing the causes of nonwork, conservatives are right about society, but
liberals are right about the mentality of the poor. Society docs offer opportunities to the poor
sufficient to escape poverty and dependency. But most long-term jobless do not believe this. They

fcei they are bored in by barriers even if, to an impartial eye. they are not. These feelings have
themselves become the major barriers to employment.




35

POLICY
Federal domestic policy ha* been driven since the early 1960s by the desire to reduce
poverty, and much of that endeavor has been to raise work levels. But federal programmers have
usually made whet I call the competence assumption. They assume the poor are willing and able to
advance their own interests if offered the chance. The emphasis has been on expanding the
opportunity to work and profit from it. Liberals have tried to do this by expanding governments
role, conservatives by reducing it. But since the long-term poor no longer seek consistently to get
ahead, both approaches have failed.
Roughly, opportunity policies succeeded with people that were already working but failed
with those who were not. In the 1960s, civil rights reforms and Keynesian measures to maintain
full employment opened new chances to blacks as a group and especially to two-parent, working
families. The result was the rapid fall in working poverty and the expansion of the black middle
class. The government, however, has signally failed to raise work effort among nonworking
adults, which is now the key to reducing poverty, A number of benefitroriented approaches have
been tried, to no avail.
One was "work incentives." The idea was that welfare would not discourage work effort by
recipients if only part of their earnings were deducted from their welfare grants. But incentives
added to AFDC in 1967 did not raise work levels, while government income maintenance
experiments showed that work effort reacts little to such inducements. Nor does the provision of
Medicaid benefits attract more people onto the roils than would otherwise be dependent. It now
seems that people go on welfare largely because of an inability to cope, and that reflex varies little

with the details of the benefit package.
A number of voluntary training programs were instituted, on the view that better skills
would enable the poor to get better jobs. The programs increased individual earnings, but the
effects were small, and they came mostly from motivating clients to work more hours in the lowpaid jobs they could already get, not from getting them better jobs. In the 1970s, government took
to hiring disadvantaged workers for jobs in public and nonprofit agencies, on the view that this
would accustom them to work. These programs, chiefly under the Comprehensive Employment




36
and Training Act (CETA), generated useful income and work experience, but few clients
"transitioned11to employment in the private sector when their subsidized positions ended. All
voluntary programs manifestly failed to stem the fall in work effort among the poor.
On the conservative theory that benefits deterred work, the Reagan Administration trimmed
work incentives and eligibility in welfare, abolished government jobs, and cut funding for
training sharply. But these steps also had little effect. Work levels kept falling even in the midst
of the Reagan boom, while poverty and dependency have declined very little.
The trouble was that all these approaches assumed that nonworking adults would respond to
the incentives provided so as to maximize Income and wealth. But experience has shown that most
of the long-term poor do not respond strongly to economic payoffs, whether they stem from
Incentives or disincentives, from government or the private sector. Indeed, if they did, they
would seldom be poor for long in the first place.
Largely due to these disappointments, employment policy has turned increasingly toward
’workfare." or efforts to require welfare recipients to work In return for support. The term
originally meant making clients "work o f f their grant* in unpaid government jobs, but it has
lately come to connote any employment program where participation is mandatory. Workfare in
this meaning, which I will use, may offer a range of options. Including job search in the private
sector, training, and education, as well as public employment.
Federal wortfare began in 1967, when a Work Incentive (WIN) program was attached to Aid
to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and employable recipients were required to sign up
for it. These stipulations were strengthened in 1971, and in 19S1 states were allowed to replace
WIN with more demanding programs of their own. The Family Security Act (FSA) passed in 19SS
will expand these programs further.
Workfare programs have shown promise. They have if anything greater impact on
individual earnings than voluntary employment programs, and they save enough money due to
reduced welfare to finance themselves. More important, they show a potential to elevate work
levels generally, at least on welfare. That effect has strengthened as the programs have become
more demanding, and it can be shown statistically. My studies comparing programs find that the
main determinant of the share of clients entering jobs is the share obligated to participate




37

actively. That is so even controlling for economic conditions, the employability of clients, and the
generosity of benefits relative to wages, which conventional analyses say determine whether
recipients work.
The main weakness of workfare is that participation has been low. Although ail employable
recipients have to register for the programs, only about a third typically have to participate
actively. The rate is lowest in major cities like New York. The best of the post-1981 programs have
raised the participation level to 30 percent or more, and this seems the main reason they are more
successful. But for most recipients, the work requirement remains a formality.
Many liberals oppose the mandatory aspect of workfare. They would prefer "workfare“ run
on a virtually voluntary basis, as Massachusetts has done. The trouble is that clients who
volunteer tend to be the least dependent, the most likely to get jobs on their own. To reach the
true underclass, participation must be required. The great difficulty is to overcome withdrawal, to
get people out of their homes into the public world. Only there can they be less isolated and
recover hope. The rationale is the same as for mandatory public education. Anyone who opposes
requiring poor parents to work should ask why they should be required, rather than merely
permitted, to send their children to school.
The main recomendatlon 1would make is to raise participation rates. Federal rules for state
programs have typically exempted mothers with preschool children as unemployable, and have
required that only 13 percent of other recipients participate actively in work programs. FSA
includes mothers with children 3 or older in the employable pool but raises the participation floor
only to 20 percent in 1993. 1would have preferred 30 percent. This seems practicable, and it
would achieve an important change in norms: purposeful activity, rather than inactivity, would
now become the norm on welfare.
The national interest is to set the participation floor and a few other critical standards. The
detailed design, administration, and much of the funding of workfare programs should come from
the states. The 1981 reforms have shown that locally-designed programs perform better than WIN
or any national model could do. The Bush Administration is now developing regulations to
implement the participation levels set in FSA. Congress should resist complaints from states that

23-645 0 - 8 9 - 4




38

the rules are too demanding, or workfare will remain a token. Localities have quite enough
discretion as it is.
The critical difference between workfare and voluntary programs is that it does not make
the competence assumption. It does not assume that poor adults will go to work and get ahead on
their own. Rather, they have to be motivated initially by public authority, and they can be. That
is just what experience proves, and what a reading of poverty psychology should lead us to expect.
Although nonworkers are ambivalent about jobs, their response to the work ethic is dutiful. They
want to be held to it. and they respond positively when they are. Workfare helps close the very
considerable gap that normally exists between their desire to work and their inability to work in
practice. For this most are grateful
The main limitation of workfare is that it can reach only nonworkers who are on welfare,
That includes some unemployed fathers, who under FSA would be subject to a fairly stringent work
requirement, but they are only a small part of the caseload. To qualify, they have to work less
than 100 hours a month, yet show enough prior attachment to the labor force to be classified as
unemployed. Most of the fathers of welfare families are not on welfare, though some of them
receive support unofficially from mothers who are.
One of the ways to reach them is to bring more of them onto the roils. I would allow them to
live openly with their spouses and draw welfare //th e y worked full-time, in either a private or
government job. That is. instead of forbidding them to work, I would require them to. The other
way to enforce work on this group is to foreclose the alternatives to legal employment. That
primarily requires police action to shut down the illegal economy, especially drug trafficking.
Besides demanding work and enforcing public order, a third essential step is educational
reform. Poor adults have marginal skills partly because standards in inner-city schools have
collapsed. Disadvantaged children must be taught to read and figure at a young age and not
promoted, let alone graduated, until they can.
All these steps, especially workfare, can be seen as breaking down the isolation of the
underclass and thus dealing with the deeper roots of dysfunction. To do this is to offer opportunity
but also to enforce the mores the poor must live by to get ahead, and in which they already
believe. A broad-based workfare structure, offering and demanding a wide range of involvements




39

by clients, can be understood as another stage of public education for those who are not yet able to
take care of themselves. Within that structure, more of them could function and thus command
the respect of other Americans.

POLITICS
The main difficulty in helping the underclass is notin knowing what to do. It is getting
political attention and support for it. The trouble with all these recommendations, and especially
workfare, is that they violate the competence assumption. They institute a degree of paternalism.
They assume that poor Americans require some direction if they are to improve their lives. That is
distinctly uncongenial to politicians of either left or right.
In this century, American politics has taken a progressive form. It has largely been a battle
between those advocating more government and less. Liberals say that government must
intervene in the economy to assure fair wages and protect income when people cannot work. That
is the purpose of such New Deal measures as the minimum wage and Social Security. Conservatives
say there will be more economic growth, hence more and better jobs, if government does lest of
these things. Such was the logic behind President Reagan's domestic policy.
Both viewpoints make a serious appeal to the interests of ordinary Americans. But both
assume that people naturally seek to get ahead. Both assume that families are working. Otherwise
they would not receive income from the private economy, nor even much from government, since
mainstream social benefits (Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, Medicare) presume a work
history The very fact that welfare benefits, which are not contributory, are so much less
generous than social insurance reflects the strong belief of virtually all Americans that income
should be premised on employment.
The underclass has defeated the preferred strategies of each side precisely because it does
not act to get ahead. The era of big government in the 1960s and 1970s failed to cure entrenched
poverty because poor adults did not seize the chances to work which were offered. Falling work
levels, more than anything else, defeated the innovative programming of the Great Society. But
the Reagan era of smaller government was no more successful. Poor families could not benefit




40

from a growing economy if they were detached from it, as most are. For antipoverty purposes,
reliance on the marketplace is now in as much disrepute as Big Government was earlier. Through
its passivity, the underclass has discredited the ideologies of both left and right.
Politically, the great difficulty is to get leaders to face up to this reality. They much prefer to
go on fighting old progressive battles. The debate over welfare reform typically becomes a
struggle over the scale of government, with liberals demanding more spending and conservatives
less. Liberals want entitlements, while conservatives would prefer to devolve responsibility for
welfare entirely out of Washington. This has obstructed the major need, which is to strengthen
work requirements to make welfare less passive, however generous it is. That pattern recurred
over the Family Security Act. which is one reason the work reforms it contains are only marginal.
Another progressive issue is how to advance equality among workers. Politicians love to
argue over how best to achieve "good jobs at good wages.' That is the issue when they debate the
minimum wage. It raises no questions about competence, and it taps old passions about the proper
scale of government in a free society. Among experts, there is much dispute whether jobs, even if
they exist, are "real" or “decent“ enough to require the poor to take them. Liberals set demanding
conditions for acceptable jobs, conservatives much more lenient ones. But the debate is almost
irrelevant to the issue we face. Poverty reduction is mostly about creating more steady workers in
any kind of job.
The real issue in social policy today is competence rather than opportunity. Even if
opportunity of a kind exists, can the poor really profit from it? Are they able to stomach the
demands of work and satisfy employers7 This is where liberal and conservative analysts part
company most sharply Ironically, it is liberals, the putative champions of the poor, who are most
doubtful about their potential. Unskilled men and welfare mothers, they feel, are unable to get
and keep jobs without massive government help. It is conservatives who assert a brassy
confidence that people with little background can compete and succeed like the better-off. They
are actually more positive about the poor than their opponents.
The policy question is no longer whether, or how, to restructure the economy to provide
fairer opportunity for workers. It is how to generate steadier work effort among the poor in any
kind of economy. That requires some way to change the passive, dysfunctional behavior of poor




41

Adults. Simply altering the array of benefits and opportunities around them, which is what
progressive politics is about, cannot accomplish this. The person at the center of the web must be
mobilized. Benefit-oriented policies have shown little power to energize. Exertions of authority
such as workfare look better because at least they can motivate activity.
Competence and how to improve is increasingly what experts dispute. The underclass debate
has tended this way precisely because prohibitive social barriers to the poor are no longer
apparent. More reliance now is placed on direct studies of the culture and psychology of the poor,
less on analyses of the structure of opportunity outside them. The competence debate has much
more to contribute to solutions than old battles about social openness and fairness. This does not
mean that liberals are defeated. Their view of poverty psychology is actually more persuasive
than their view of society ever was. It appears that most poor adults really are alienated and
defeated. We cannot assume, as conservatives tend to, that they are just like other people.
But just because social barriers no longer seem prohibitive, neither can we exempt them
from work and other normal expectations. The goal of policy cannot be to confine work to the few
poor who choose it, or to require it only in a less demanding world of public jobs created specially
for them. Rather, it must be to achieve the integration of poor adults in the mainstream economy,
albeit with some ongoing support arrangements. That requires some tutelary structure that will
seriously require work while providing the services and encouragement needed to achieve it.
That is just what the most effective workfare programs offer.
The public strongly supports this. If the last election proved anything, it w$s that
progressive issues no longer control the national political agenda. Rather, issues of competence
and dependency do. The public Is more worried about crime and other disorders, most of them
linked to the underclass, than it is about whether the economy is serving working families fairly.
In this climate, a credible social policy must above all address competence. It must find a way for
more of the very poor to work and otherwise function in the ways they and other Americans
expect.
1 do not mean that society is entirely fair or that progressive battles are dead. They remain
perennially important. But they cannot recover center stage in American politics until work
levels rise. When and if that happens, the country can go back to battling over how to advance




42

equality among workers. That question is more divisive than poverty, but also less distressing. !
does not bring competence into question, while poverty does.




43

Representative O b e y . Thank you very much.
Mr. Anderson, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF ELIJAH ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY,
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Mr. A n d e r s o n . I am pleased to be here today to discuss my eth­
nographic work on ghetto and underclass communities.
My testimony focuses on some of my findings from about 10
years of ethnographic work in poor black communities in west
Philadelphia. My chief research concern has been and continues to
be with the nature of the social organization of such communities.
In order to do my work, I spend time with people, listening to
what they have to say and looking at what they do, and then I try
to make sense of all of this with regard to sociological issues. The
purpose of all of this is to better understand the people and the so­
ciety of which they are a part.
As the black middle class in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the
Nation emerges socially and economically, it has tended to become
ever more distant from the ghetto communities of its origin. This
absence has led to the diminution of an extremely important
source of moral and social leadership within the ghetto community.
In pursuit of status and employment opportunities and out of the
sense of genuine concern for their survival, members of the black
middle class and those who aspire to it tend increasingly to leave
the ghetto behind. In their wake, crime, drug use, and antisocial
behavior have become powerful social forces working to segment
these communities.
At the same time, poor blacks do not have much opportunity to
participate in the regular economy. With severely limited educa­
tion and skills, they are caught in an employment bind. Many
young people are totally unprepared to work in the emerging serv­
ice economy except at its lowest levels.
Many service jobs are located many miles from the inner city,
out of range of so many young black people. As high-paying factory
jobs disappear, older workers fall into poverty. To many young
blacks an underground economy of drugs and vice appears attrac­
tive. The level of interpersonal trust and moral cohesion that once
prevailed in the community is increasingly undermined and an at­
mosphere of distrust, alienation, and crime pervades, effectively al­
tering the social organization of the ghetto.
Little known to most outsiders, one of the black community's
most important institutions has become a casualty of these
changes, the relationship between “old heads" and young boys.
Now, the relationship between old heads and young boys repre­
sents an important institution of the traditional black community.
It has always been an important aspect of the social organization of
such communities. This institution assisted the transition of young
men from boyhood to manhood, enabled youth to secure gainful
employment and participation in the regular manufacturing econo­
my. The old heads' acknowledged role was to teach, support, en­
courage, and, in effect, socialize young men to meet their responsi­
bilities with regard to the work ethic, family life, law, common de­
cency.




44

But as meaningful employment opportunities have become in­
creasingly scarce for young black males, drugs accessible and crime
a way of life for many, this institution has undergone stress and
significant change.
In the past an old head was known as a man of stable means
who believed in the work ethic and was strongly committed to
family life, to church, and, most important, to passing his philoso­
phy, developed through his own rewarding experiences with work,
to young boys whom he found worthy. He personified the work
ethic and equated it with values and high standards of morality. In
his eyes an employed working man was a good and decent individ­
ual.
The relationship between the old head and boy was essentially
one between mentor and protege. The old head could be 2 years
older than the young boy or as much as 30 or 40 years older. The
boy was usually at least 10 years old. The young boy readily de­
ferred to the old head's chronological age and worldly experience.
The nature of the relationship was that of junior-senior, based on
junior's confidence in senior's ability to impart useful wisdom and
practical advice for getting through the world successfully and
living well according to values of decency, family responsibility,
and regular work.
The old head was a kind of guidance counselor and moral cheer­
leader who preached anticrime and antitrouble messages to his
charges. Encouraging boys to work and to make something of
themselves, he would try to set a good example by living as best he
could a stable, decent, worry-free life.
His constant refrain was: “Get yourself a trade, son, do some­
thing with your life, make something of yourself." Displaying initi­
ative, diligence, and pride as a prime role model of the community,
he lived to have something, usually something material, but an
intact nuclear family counted for much in the picture that he pre­
sented to the young boys on the corner.
On the corner and in the alleys of the community he would point
to others who worked, using them as examples of how hard work
and decency could pay off for such a person. He might urge the
boys to “pattern yourself after him."
In these conversations and lectures he would express great pride
in his own outstanding work record, punctuality, good credit
rating, and anything else reflecting his commitment to honesty, in­
dependence, hard work, and family values.
The old head could be a minister. He could be a deacon in the
church. He could be a policeman, a favorite teacher, an atheletic
coach, or a corner man. He could be the uncle or even the father of
one of the local group of boys. Very often the old head played the
role of surrogate father for many of those he determined to be in
need of such attention.
A youth in trouble would sometimes discuss his problems with
an old head before going to his own father, if he had a father, and
the old head would be ready with a helping hand, sometimes in the
form of a loan for a worthy purpose.
Through this kind of extension of himself, the old head could
gain moral affirmation that would be his reward for saving yet an­
other young boy.




45
On occasion he might be seen walking through the community
streets with one or two of his boys in tow, showing them how to
hustle, how to make money legally by doing odd jobs for communi­
ty residents. The young boys would sometimes attempt to do such
jobs on their own, and they also may meet strangers at the doors of
local supermarkets and offer to carry groceries to their car for
money, or they may stand around self-service pumps and offer to
pump gasoline for a small fee. There is often an old head in the
background encouraging boys to earn spending money through
honest work.
Within the traditional black community, the old head served as
an important link to the more privileged classes. Often he could be
seen at the local barbershop pointing out and speaking of the big
shots in glowing terms to the youth. Through his examples he of­
fered moral support to both the local and the wider system of strat­
ification.
With the massive introduction of drugs into the black communi­
ty, a drug culture as well as a drug economy has emerged and
become elaborated. The attendant financial opportunities as well as
possibilities for getting high compete effectively for the minds, if
not the hearts, of boys and girls. The roles of drug pusher, pimp,
illegal hustler have become increasingly attractive.
Street-smart young people who work in this underground econo­
my are apparently able to obtain big money more easily and glam­
orously than their elders, including traditional old heads. Some
young people who are able to appear successful become role models
for still younger people, and the older people, many of whom are
not doing so well financially, find themselves ineffectively compet­
ing with such young people for leadership roles.
In turn, older working people of the community find themselves
becoming very cautious or altogether shying away from any gratui­
tous involvement with young people, believing they are the pri­
mary source of so much drug-related street crime.
Now, these general perceptions have contributed to the flight of
many from the black community and have deflected others who
might consider moving into some of these areas, and those black
residents who remain and might serve as self-conscious and upright
role models for youth are often reluctant to become involved.
The drug culture and its organization are related in the follow­
ing account by a former drug dealer. He told me:
The way I see it, there is top dogs, middle dogs, and low dogs in the neighborhood,
right?
The top dogs are the guys with the money, the dudes with the cars. The majority
of them sell drugs. They got big money. They drive Cadillacs, El Dorados, Rivieras.
They are selling their drugs in the bars. There is not many of them that work at
regular jobs. They dress casual. Then on weekends they go on out and they show off
their suits. They walk in the neighborhoods. They sell cocaine mostly and heroin.
They are in their late 30’s, in the 36 to 38 range. They make big money. They have a
little war here and there. When they sell bad stuff, they get their cars shot up. They
stand on the corner and sometimes come shooting at one another.
Mostly you see the top dogs at afterhours spots, after the bars close. I went to one.
They had a gambling spot upstairs. They go to them all morning. They are located
in somebody’s house, one of the top dog’s houses. They sell foods and they have
liquor and a bar upstairs, and they have a little whore room where the whores give
you a little action.
All of them are black people, and that is the top dogs.




46
The middle dogs are the ones who sell the drugs for the top dog. They are
taking— they are trying to be like them. They are trying to get like the top dog.
Selling drugs for them, shit like that.
They range from 17 to late 20’s. They get their supply from the top dog. They are
selling drugs. When they sell out, they give them the money. They get their half
and they go on out.
The middle dogs ask— or the top dog asks the guy, “Do you want to sell for me?”
Everybody knows the top dog. The guy wanted me to sell for him. I knew I knew a
lot of people. He knew I knew a lot of people. It got tiresome. People coming to my
house at all times of the day and night. They make a bag of cocaine. They will sell
you nickels, just 20’s. Sometimes they are nice if the guy know you, you are good.
Crack is out there. I took a lot of that myself.
The low dogs never completely get off that stuff. When they like it, they like it.
Some of them will get off crack and maybe do a little cocaine.
You know, I had these boys— 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old— ask me for rolling paper. I
was shocked. I said, “How old are you?” He said, “I am 10.” I said, “Man, you are
crazy. What are you going to do with that paper? Smoke a joint, man.”
Eight, nine, ten years old. I was shocked. I didn’t know they did it that young, 10
years old. Man, that freaked me right out. Cute little guy, dressed in a Fila sweat
suit. Nice. I would say he was wearing $200 worth of clothes easy. Shit, a Fila sweat
suit is $200. Fila sneaks on. That is $70 a pair. Fila hat, another $5. 10 years old.
Smoking a joint and had over $300 worth of clothes on.
He comes with a 16-year-old guy and a 15-year-old girl. He got stuff from middle
dog. They don’t care who they sell that stuff to. You got the money, you can have it.
Tiny dog, I call him.
That is a lot of money for a little boy like that; 10-year-old boy. I didn’t believe it.
I looked at him. He had to be selling something or he had a good mother and father,
one or the other. I didn’t picture him selling drugs really. I just pictured him, young
guy, you should have seen him into rolling the joint.

Now, with the expansion of the drug culture and its opportuni­
ties for large sums of quick money, street-smart young boys are
reaching the conclusion that the old heads' lessons about life and
the work ethic are no longer relevant.
In place of the traditional old head, a new role model is emerg­
ing. He is young, often a product of the street gang, and indiffer­
ent, at best, to the law and traditional values.
This new old head is in many respects the antithesis of the tradi­
tional old head. If he works, he works at the low-paying jobs avail­
able to him and he does so grudingly. More likely, he makes ends
meet by working either part time or full time in the drug trade. He
derides family values. He has a string of women but feels little ob­
ligation to them and the children he has fathered.
On the street corner his self-aggrandizement consumes his whole
being as he attempts to impress people through displays of materi­
al success like expensive clothes and fancy cars. Eagerly awaiting
his message are the young, unemployed black men, demoralized by
a hopeless financial situation and inclined to emulate his style and
values.
For those following his model, his recruits, a trail of broken lives,
trouble, jail, and even death awaits. Stable family life, respect for
the law, propriety, self-esteem, common decency are all strongly re­
lated to gainful employment, which has become scarce for so many.
Thirty years ago, a young worker migrating from the South
could find a factory job that paid roughly $5,000 a year. In today's
dollars that is about $23,000, enough to start and raise a small
family. But such manufacturing jobs have largely vanished from
the economy, replaced by thousands of low-paying jobs that tend to
exist in the suburbs beyond the reach of inner-city blacks.




47
Young people require jobs that pay not only livable wages but
good benefits as well, and if such jobs were available, young blacks,
I believe,wwould rush after them as earlier generations of blacks
did. It is not so much that the work ethic has declined in the black
community as it is that good jobs are not available to young black
people, and when good jobs are not available, the work ethic loses
its force.
Even in the most destitute neighborhoods, decent people contin­
ue to believe in the infinite value of work, even for jobs that are
increasingly unavailable. The rise of the alluring drug economy is
particularly dismaying to them, but the regular economy offers few
places for young inner-city black people.
The main problem then is not an individual one. Rather, it is
deeply connected to a changing economy and the social and racial
nature of opportunity in America. But the problem, I believe, is not
intractable.
Traditionally, blacks have been systematically excluded from the
occupational structure. The middle class is just beginning to gain
something of a foothold, but this does little for the poor. Because of
the racial situation in this country, blacks have seldom been in a
secure enough position to sponsor their own people seriously.
One of the lessons from my presentation is that the old heads
must be supported and reinforced by the wider structure. One way
to accomplish this is for the Federal Government to encourage the
private sector to join with the public sector in a serious program of
on-the-job training. Young people would have more of an incentive
to work if they were confident of obtaining a job at the end of their
training. In this on-the-job training situation, the person would
learn a marketable skill and fill a job at the same time. It is a onestep process to financial self-sufficiency.
I will end my presentation there, and we can have questions.
Representative H a m i l t o n [presiding]. Congressman Wylie. We
will begin with a 10-minute rule and alternate.
Representative W y l i e . Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much, panelists, for your testimony, which cer­
tainly was most revealing and I think to the point.
The subject that we have of today's hearing is an important
public policy issue, and I suppose that if you can help us define the
problem or define the issue that is needed before we can determine,
one, the cause and what we should do about it, I suppose, whether
it is a problem of the Federal Government, of the private sector or
local government, or whatever.
Mr. Anderson, may I say that you have recounted a very scary
scenario, and I think that probably with your testimony you have
indicated that you have a feeling that a lot of the problem of the
underclass is drug related now.
Is that a fair analysis of your testimony?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I think that it is becoming increasingly difficult
to separate poverty from drugs anymore.
Representative W y l i e . What can we do, or how could we advise
the committees of legislation? What could we advise them to do
about that?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . It is a very complicated question, certainly. But I
think that with respect to drugs there is a great need for effective




48

interdiction, to keep drugs from coming into the country. I think
that people in these communities, not just in the urban communi­
ties but in the rural communities and suburban communities as
well, need serious drug education.
One of the things that I have been learning by visiting people
who go to crack houses, who spend time in crack houses, is how
devastating crack is. If you could see that situation—and I assume
that many of you probably have never seen a crack house—you
would realize how devastating the whole business is.
Crack, as you all may know, is instantaneously addictive and the
addiction is permanent. The medical people that I associate with at
the University of Pennsylvania tell me that there is no cure for it.
As they work through rehabilitation of people, they talk in terms
of drug-free days. They feel they have achieved a victory if they
can keep a person off of drugs for a day. These are professionals at
the University of Pennsylvania Hospital with whom I talk regularly-

One doesn't have to have a pathological history in order to get
involved in crack. You can just try it a few times, and you can
become completely addicted, irretrievably so, and I think that
young people need to be educated about this. I think we have to
embark upon a very serious drug-education program, and I would
combine that with effective interdiction.
Representative W y l i e . You mentioned interdiction and stopping
the source, and I couldn't agree with you more on that, and then
you used the key word “education," and, Mr. Mead, you talked
about education, too, and may I say that I can relate to this. In my
own city of Columbus I never thought it would happen, but we just
had a big drug raid in the city of Columbus, and the head of the
organization was not an American citizen. He was from Jamaica.
How he got there I am not sure, but anyhow he had quite an oper­
ation going.
But I want to get on this issue of education. Many of our city
schools, including the District of Columbia, spend more on educa­
tion per student than any other industrialized country, and yet the
quality of education seems often inadequate. I think our school
system is pretty good in the city of Columbus, and yet they don't
seem to do very well on tests right now. There are some outstand­
ing students, of course, but on average they do worse in the urban
city schools.
To what extent does that relate to discipline or educational op­
portunity, lack of educational opportunity?
You touched on this, Mr. Mead. So I will ask you to respond.
M r . M e a d . I d o n 't t h i n k t h a t t h e f u n d a m e n t a l p r o b le m is la c k o f
o p p o r t u n ity , n o t in t o d a y 's la b o r m a r k e t. I t h in k jo b s a r e a v a ila b le .
I d o n 't s e e e v id e n c e t h a t t h e y h a v e a ll le ft fo r t h e s u b u r b s . T h a t
c o n t e n t io n h a s n o t b e e n s u p p o r te d b y a n y h a r d e v id e n c e t h a t I
k n o w of.

What you do see is a breakdown of social authority. I think—and
for various reasons—the schools and police and other public agen­
cies no longer routinely enforce mores in which the bulk of society
believe and, indeed, poor people themselves believe. They do want
to work. They simply don't work in practice.




49

I think Professor Anderson has described it very graphically.
These drug dealers have come in and displaced the traditional au­
thority figures who previously socialized youth. What is remarka­
ble about it is it really isn't true that you are better off hustling
drugs. It may appear that way for a few, but on average crime is
not a rational way to get ahead. You make less money over a year
as a criminal, on average, than you do working in a low-paid job.
The notion that this is somehow an escape from poverty is really
not supported by any hard evidence. Crime is not a rational deci­
sion. This behavior can be understood in various human and psy­
chological ways. But we should not assume that it is some rational
response to the structure of opportunity. That is simply false. The
opportunities today are better than they were 30 years ago when
work levels were a lot higher. That is the puzzle.
You have these old heads who previously inculcated a work ethic
at a time when opportunities were actually quite constricted. Now
they are much wider, although the nature of the jobs has changed.
I mean, there are fewer factories. I agree with that. I don't agree
that there are no other jobs that would allow a person equally to
support a family.
Representative W y l i e . Yes, Mr. Mincy has talked about that.
M r . M e a d . Yes.
Representative W y l i e . And it appears that this emerging under­
class that you talk about is practically “prosperity proof' in the
sense that the improved economic conditions do not seem to have
helped members of this underclass.
To what extent then is the problem due to social causes as op­
posed to economic causes?
Mr. M i n c y . Well, I recently sat in on a presentation that talked
about how young whites in a white ethnic community in Boston
who are high school graduates entered the labor market, and what
I found surprising—to summarize what I learned—was that they
were no more aggressive about finding their first job than are
young blacks in inner-city neighborhoods. But what was there was
a network of old heads and of other people who connected them
from high school graduation to work.
And I think economic opportunities have a lot to do with—the
available set of opportunities enables one to get a reference to a job
from someone who lives in your neighborhood. Most low-wage em­
ployers recruit labor through their own employees and through
other employers who work in a similar kind of industry. If you live
in a neighborhood in which—in my data—56 percent of the men
don't work, then you lack opportunities to find out where the jobs
are, where the opportunities are, and so forth.
So I think it is—and I don't want to suggest that attitudes about
work ethic, about working for low pay have nothing to do with
what is going on here, and I fundamentally disagree with Larry
Mead about economic incentives not operating. What we have here
is a set of circumstances whereby young people think they can
make more money pushing drugs than they can by working. That
is an economic incentive, and it is operating.
And so I think a lack of good employment opportunities outside
of the neighborhood and a breakdown in the networks whereby




50
people find out what good jobs are available is what causes the low
levels of unemployment among males in this population.
Representative W y l i e . Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Congressman Solarz.
Representative S o l a r z . Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, do any of you know how many poor people there are
in the United States and, of that number, how many would you
consider to be part of the underclass?
Mr. M incy . There are about 33 million poor people in the United
States, and about a third of that population is probably in the un­
derclass.
It is hard to say because it is difficult to categorize the poor irre­
spective of where they live, OK, and it is difficult to categorize the
poor unless you add to it other dimensions of it, and I rarely talk
about poverty and the underclass in the same breath because not
all poor people are part of the underclass.
Representative S o l a r z . Well, obviously, and that was the next
question I was going to ask. What is the difference between the
poor on the one hand and the underclass on the other?
But do any of you have a rough estimate, order of magnitude of
the 33 million poor people in the country—I gather on that figure
there is broad agreement—what percent, what number would you
say are in the underclass?
Mr. M e a d . I would say it is somewhere between a tenth and a
third.
Representative S o l a r z . Between a tenth and a third?
Mr. M e a d . The estimate that I used was 2 to 9 million people,
and you are saying there are 33 million people who are poor in a
given year, in 1 year. Probably somewhere between 2 to 9 million
of those can be defined as underclass.
Now, the difference is that with underclass you have not only
poverty but long-term poverty, and you also have these behavioral
problems. Not all poor people are underclass because they don't all
have these behavioral problems.
Representative S o l a r z . Right, and so what would you say is the
critical difference between an individual you would identify as
being a member of the underclass and another individual you
would identify as poor but not as a member of the underclass?
Mr. M e a d . An underclass person is someone who by reason of
the way he or she lives is unlikely to get out of poverty even when
the opportunity does exist. There are many people who are poor
short term because of economic reverses of the sort that are tempo­
rary, but when another opportunity appears they go back to work
and thereby escape poverty. Those people are not distinct from the
general population. But this group that has tremendous trouble
functioning has a much more difficult problem because their pover­
ty is rooted in lifestyle rather than in the structure of things.
Representative S o l a r z . Well, describe it.
Mr. M e a d . Well, the things we have been talking about primari­
ly are problems getting and holding jobs on the part of men. The
other important dysfunction is single ^parenthood on the part of
welfare mothers who have children out of wedlock, usually at a
young age, go on welfare for long periods, drop out of school.




51
Those are the two poles of the underclass, I think. There are a
number of other groups that can be considered underclass, like the
mentally ill or many homeless, but the two most important groups
are single, nonworking men or people who are hustling or doing
other things to make ends meet, and then the long-term welfare
mothers.
Representative S o l a r z . N o w , these single, nonworking men, do
you have any sense of what percentage of them are in fact, say, in
the drug trade or in the underground economy engaged in various
forms of illegal activity?
Mr. M e a d . There is no hard evidence on that. I had an assistant
review research on that question, and we found that the under­
ground economy is smaller than most people think. The best esti­
mates are somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of GNP. Also, most
of it involves the activities of small business that are off the books,
people who are, in other words, not themselves poor. It looks as if
probably only a small share of nonworking poor people are actually
working underground.
Representative S o l a r z . N o w , I read some time ago William Wil­
son's book, which I was very impressed with, and as I understood
one of the main arguments he was making, it was that one of the
primary explanations for the underclass was a departure of manu­
facturing jobs from the inner city out to the suburbs and the fact
that a lot of the people living in the inner cities didn't have the
skills for the kind of service jobs that the economy was demanding
and so you had a large pool of unemployed young men for whom no
jobs were available and that in turn was one of the critical expla­
nations for why you had so many unwed, unmarried women but
who had children. The pool of marriageable age men had declined.
But you said something that really struck me, Mr. Mead. You, I
gather, contend that while it may be true the manufacturing jobs,
unskilled jobs, manufacturing jobs are leaving, that there are nev­
ertheless a lot of other jobs that are available. I think Mr. Ander­
son may have challenged that.
Could you explain to us in a little bit more detail what kind of
jobs are you talking about that you claim are in fact available if
these people were willing to take them?
Mr. M e a d . They are willing, but they don't take them in fact.
Just let me back up a little.
I agree with parts of Bill Wilson's argument. I think it is true
that the employment problems of men are primary to the family,
that nonworking men is the ultimate reason why the mothers
become dependent. I also agree that the ghetto poor are isolated to
a large extent from the larger society.
The place we differ is on the point whether this lack of work by
the men can be explained by structural changes in the economy.
That is the part that I don't see evidence for, and I don't know
anyone who has hard evidence making that connection.
The jobs that I see are primarily service-sector jobs. The prover­
bial example is working at McDonald's. Other jobs involving clean­
ing office buildings, maintenance jobs in restaurants, all kinds of
maintenance jobs surrounding the high-tech economy. There are
many such jobs. They are being done largely by aliens.




52
Representative S o l a r z . S o this is the next question I wanted tc
ask. Let's assume that these jobs do exist. They are very low-skilled
jobs, McDonald's jobs, cleanup jobs, security jobs, not the kind oi
jobs that appear to have a great future, but nevertheless jobs which
are being filled by other people. I mean, there are people who are
willing to take them. I gather a lot of them are immigrants oi
aliens.
Mr. M e a d . That is right.
Representative S o l a r z . It is part of the tradition of America
You know, you start out at the bottom and you scrape and save
and you get a little bit of money maybe and you open your business
or you get a better education for your children.
The question I have is what accounts for the fact that there are
people in our country who are willing to take these jobs, lowly as
they may be, but then you have this other group who are not will­
ing to take the jobs? That I don't understand. Why aren't they will­
ing to take them?
M r . M e a d . I think it is the factors that I mentioned. It is the fact
that there has been a breakdown of social authority involving the
schools, involving the welfare system, involving law enforcement
such that these people have become involved in alternative forms
of supporting themselves, including the drug trade, welfare, othei
illegal activities.
Meanwhile the aliens and recent immigrants are doing the jobs
For them the problems of doing those jobs are fewer. It is not thal
they want to work more. I don't believe that, but they have lowei
expectations.
The research says that the main reason disadvantaged youth dc
not do those jobs is not that they don't want to work, but the>
want to have jobs as good as white kids can get. But they less often
qualify for those jobs because they have lower skills.
Representative S o l a r z . Yes, Mr. Mincy.
M r . M i n c y . Thank y o u .
First of all, we have some difficulty because we are moving very
rapidly across a population and not defining our terms. The fact oi
the matter is we have evidence from youth employment projects
that demonstrate that the same underprivileged youth, underprivi­
leged black youth in inner cities have been willing to work in lowwage jobs, minimum-wage jobs in point of fact. But their successes
in acquiring those jobs have come about through demonstration
programs that have worked on their skills, that have worked on
their basic education, but have also spent a great deal of monej
trying to get the private sector to connect with them, so that Larry
Mead's point bears emphasis, I think, that many of these people
need help connecting to the labor market. They need help----Representative S o l a r z . Why does that group, these young black
males, need help in the sense that young aliens or immigrants
don't need help?
Mr. M i n c y . Because oftentimes young immigrants have employ­
ment networks. Young immigrants oftentimes work for their par­
ents or other immigrants—members of the same immigrant group
who arrived earlier. They work in those businesses. They often­
times establish commuting networks within cities to take them tc
jobs.




53
Mr. M e a d . Well, but the network argument I don't believe has
any hard evidence behind it. It sounds plausible, but studies do not
support it.
Most unemployed youth say they can find jobs. That is not their
problem. They find the jobs unacceptable. The wages aren't high
enough.
Representative S o l a r z . Well, that was my question. Why are the
jobs unacceptable to them whereas they are acceptable to the
people who take them?
Mr. M e a d . They have higher expectations, and I don't say that
they are wrong.
Representative S o l a r z . Why?
Mr. M e a d . Because they feel that they deserve jobs that will
allow them to support a family. Whereas other people feel that
their wives should work, they apparently don't feel this. So they
want to have a job which will allow them to be middle class or
working class with one job. Now, maybe that is just, but that is the
kind of claim you can make after you are working and not before.
Representative S o l a r z . OK. Mr. Anderson, did you want to com­
ment on that?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I just wanted to add that quite apart from the
fact that the networks don't exist, a component of the networking
has to do with the kind of affinity that the worker can feel with
the employer, and one of the things that I have found out in my
studies—I think you alluded to this one study that I did about
youth employment a few years back among black youth—that was
so striking was that so many young black males face a tremendous
amount of distrust as they go from employer to employer to em­
ployer, and once they get the job sometimes they continue to expe­
rience this problem of trust. The black male is, in the minds of
many people, an outsider in the society.
Representative S o l a r z . Mr. Chairman, if I may ask just one final
question.
There was a very interesting article in the Outlook section of the
Washington Post this week, or last weekend, the thesis of which
was that this problem of the underclass which is getting everybody
excited is essentially no different than the problems we have his­
torically experienced with the urban poor, and there were generous
quotations from Jacob Riis' “How the Other Half Lives," and these
descriptions of the Jewish ghetto and of the Italian ghetto, you
know, sound almost like contemporary descriptions of the black
ghetto today—of crime, you know, pestilence. I mean, it was these
descriptions—and they have quotations about how there is no hope
for the future, these people are outside of the realm of the values
of our society, but of course they grew out of it.
So my question is from a historic perspective, is there a qualita­
tive, fundamental difference between the underclass today and the
urban poor, you know, in the 19th and early 20th centuries in our
country?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I think one of the issues is persistent racial dis­
crimination and prejudice. That fact is a very imporant difference,
and I think we should face up to that.
Mr. M e a d . M y sense is the old ghetto was qualitatively different.
In the period that these earlier authors were writing about there




54
were certainly social disorders in the ghetto. No question about it.
But two things were much less prevalent than they are today. One
was female headed families and the other was low work effort.
Much of the difficulty of the ghetto at the turn of the century
was simply low wages. You had entire families slaving away 12
hours a day, 7 days a week, and they were destitute. The solution
was higher wages. This is the very thing that Congress now talks
about, but it is not a solution for our poor today because they are
not working. It was a solution for those poor because they were
working.
Furthermore, because the families were intact the children had a
much better base to get through school and prosper. Much of the
disorder that those commentators talked about was things such as
drunkenness, lifestyle questions that didn't reach the core of func­
tioning; whereas, today's disorder does reach to the core.
Also, if you look at pictures in Riis' book and compare them to
pictures of today's most seriously poor, you find that today's poor
look very much more depressed, very much more defeated than
was true back then.
So I think a structural analysis was really valid for the turn of
the century. That is when limitations of the economy and society
really did explain the problem to a large extent; whereas, today
that is no longer very plausible.
Mr. M i n c y . I would just add that I underscore the connection be­
tween male joblessness and female headed families. Those are dif­
ferent phenomena, but because male joblessness and female headed
families is so important, the potential for these—Nicholas Lehman,
the author of this article, mentioned that there were eventually
roots of opportunity. The sum of male joblessness and female
headed families threatens that those roots for opportunity won't
exist, will be much harder to achieve in the current underclass
than in the one he talked about.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Congressman Upton.
Representative U p t o n . Thank y o u .
Mr. Mead you indicated a few minutes ago that jobs were avail­
able in some of these areas, but that they were simply unaccept­
able because they included higher expectations.
I would presume part of that would be along what Mr. Anderson
indicated was drug trafficking and what people see as what they
can earn and that would be a pretty heavy factor with that.
How would you expect the recent minimum-wage proposal that
Congress now has passed and the President will veto to impact on
some of these areas?
M r . M e a d . I t h i n k it w i ll h a v e a v e r y s m a ll e ffe c t, t h e r e a s o n
b e in g t h a t m o s t p e o p le w h o w o r k fo r a n y c o n s is t e n t p e r io d o r u n ­
u s u a l h o u r s a r e w o r k in g a b o v e th e m i n im u m w a g e n o w , so it is
a lm o s t a n o n p r o b le m . I f y o u r a is e it, y o u w ill h e lp p e o p le w h o a r e
w o r k in g a t t h e m i n i m u m w a g e , b u t fe w o f t h e m a r e p o o r .

There are many people who work at the minimum wage part
time or sporadically. The main reason they are poor, if they are, is
not the minimum wage, but lack of full-time hours. There are very
few full-time, full-year workers at the minimum wage who are
poor.




55
R e p r e s e n t a t iv e U p t o n . Y o u in d ic a t e d in y o u r t e s t im o n y , I t h in k ,
it w a s o n ly 1 2 0 ,0 0 0 .
M r . M e a d . Y e s , t h a t is r ig h t .

So I am not saying it is unimportant, but we should face up to
the fact that wage levels and the minimum wage are simply not
the heart of the poverty problem. They affect inequality among
workers. Our main difficulty in dealing with the poor, however, is
to generate more workers.
I think it is a good idea to say that the lowest paid job should
earn more, but we should not imagine that it is going to cause very
many more people to work. It is based on the supposition that work
doesn’t pay now and must be made to pay.
Work already pays. The incentives to work are quite strong, and
why this group doesn't work consistently is, quite frankly, a mys­
tery. I don't believe that any structural factor can explain it.
Representative U p t o n . D o you think that it is more with regard
to the hours that the individual works? Is that more because of
what the worker desires or more because of what the employer de­
sires?
M r . M e a d . It is a little of both, but in the current state of the
economy it is mostly the worker. According to the Labor Depart­
ment surveys, about two-thirds of part-time workers are working
that many hours because they choose to, not because they would
like to work more hours and cannot.
Now, amongst part-time workers who are poor you find a higher
proportion who say the reason they are not working greater hours
is that they can't find a job. So there is some reason to think that
there is a problem moving from part time to full time.
But the really serious difficulty is part-year work. It is the fact
that people don't work consistently for any number of hours in a
week.
Also, the part-time problem has receded with the recovery. Most
of the upsurge in part-time employment that has been so much
commented upon was due to the recession of the early 1980's and
the years immediately after that. Most of the jobs being created
now are full time. So we should not say that it is a fundamental
difficulty.
Again, it is a problem, but it is a much lesser problem than
people who are not in the labor force at all.
M r . M i n c y . C o n g r e s s m a n Upton.
Representative U p t o n . Yes.
M r . M i n c y . I h a v e r e c e n t ly c o m p le t e d a p a p e r lo o k in g a t t h e e f­
fe c ts o f m in im u m w a g e in c r e a s e s o n t h e w o r k in g p o o r , a n d in fa c t
6 8 p e r c e n t o f lo w -w a g e w o r k e r s a r e t e e n a g e r s o r w o m e n .

Therefore, in answer to your question, is it the employer or the
worker, most of those workers have other commitments—family
commitments, schooling commitments—and it is for that reason
that many of them desire part-time, part-year work, and so that is
explaining the potential impact of the minimum wage change.
Representative U p t o n . OK. So you really put the onus back on
the worker as well?
M r . M i n c y . O n t h e w o r k e r s fo r t h e s u p p ly c h o ic e s, b u t t h e o th e r
is s u e is t h e o th e r o n e , a n d t h a t is m u c h — to m e , w h a t r e a lly u n d e r ­
s c o r e s t h e u n d e r c la s s is n o n w o r k a n d , h e n c e , a n in c r e a s e in t h e




56
minimum wage is not going to be a big enough inducement on its
own to encourage, particularly, some of these younger men into the
labor market, and we have to begin to operate on—to discover why
that is and then to attempt to draw them in and in the process
make work pay so as to sort of cooperate with this whole argu­
ment, and it seems to me that it is somewhat illogical that we are
beginning to set up this process in welfare reform to do so for
women but we are not doing so for men, and in the absence of two
earners, higher incomes, those families can't get out of the neigh­
borhoods where the work ethic and other kinds of attitudes are in­
cubating, quite frankly.
Representative U p t o n . I would be interested if you might provide
my office with a copy of your study that you did.
M r . M i n c y . Will do.
Representative U p t o n . An interesting question for you here. You
indicated in your testimony, Mr. Mincy, that for the period be­
tween 1970 and 1980 the number of areas grew from 243 to 880 and
that the numbers of people grew from 750,000 to 2.5 million.
Well, today, 9 years later from when you did these statistics, we
have had tremendous economic expansion, unemployment dropped
to almost near record levels. Where do you think these statistics
have moved from 1980?
Mr. M i n c y . Let me give you—not to overwhelm you with statis­
tics, but in 1982 the unemployment rate overall was 10 percent; 47
percent of black high school dropouts between 20 and 29 years old
reported no earnings at the height of the recession. When the un­
employment rate had dropped to 7.2 percent, still 35 percent of
those people reported no earnings. Even high school graduates
were reporting no earnings—black males in inner cities.
It is that that leads me to say that, well, first of all, things did
move. You have more employment among inner-city blacks than
you did at the height of the recession, which is to say that people
do respond to economic incentives.
My point is that the response isn't enough. We would have hoped
that with an 8 percent annual decline in the unemployment rate
that we would have had a much larger increase in the employment-to-population ratios of these critical groups, and we are going
to have to operate directly on, or more directly on the employment
incentives of particularly the men in these groups in order to get
more income, more earnings into those families and to facilitate
their mobility that Nicholas Lehman was talking about in his arti­
cle.
Representative U p t o n . Let me ask one final question because I
know my time is about ready to expire.
Last year the Congress did pass a large piece of legislation, the
welfare reform bill, and included much along the lines of Senator
Moynihan's ideas on mandatory workfare for those who are able
bodied.
I would like to hear from each of you in terms of how you think
those provisions—I mean, were they worthless?
I saw Warren Brooks' story that you may or may not have seen
in the last couple of weeks, indicating he was not particularly
pleased with it. He didn't think it would have any impact really at
all.




57
I would be interested to know what your thoughts were, if you
have in fact done an analysis of what we in the Congress did and
how it in fact would affect those areas of the underclass that you
have identified.
Mr. M i n c y . I, for one, think that they are a step in the right di­
rection. They change the philosophy of supporting the poor from
welfare to work, and all that is good.
Their implication for the underclass, however, is weak because
basically they extend no benefits to absent fathers, and in under­
class areas that underscores the problem, so that job training, job
search, a whole litany of help is available for the single mother but
the single father who is equally responsible for that family is out of
the picture, and it seems to me that that is a major flaw not only
in welfare—and there is a five-State demonstration that is going to
think about that and give us some evidence on how to fix it, but I
think there is where we need more work to incorporate the two
earners into this household so that the earnings can rise and that
they will have the capacity to get out of the neighborhoods that ev­
eryone is trying to avoid.
Representative U p t o n . Mr. Mead.
Mr. M e a d . I think the main achievement of the Moynihan bill
was to state more explicitly the participation levels expected in
these workfare programs. The act allegedly obligates all employ­
able mothers—who are now defined more broadly—to participate,
but that only means registration. The key is the share that have to
participate actively in a work program of some kind.
My research is the only research that I know that has focused on
the importance of participation. I find that the participation rate
in workfare is overwhelmingly the most important determinant of
the share of clients going into jobs. It doesn't affect the quality of
the job, but it very much affects the proportion of people who enter
jobs. Therefore, the participation rate is critically important to per­
formance.
Now, the Moynihan bill raises the Federal floor on participation
only from 15 to 20 percent, and not until 1995. That was a big dis­
appointment to me. I would have preferred 50 percent, and the ad­
ministration proposed 70 percent. However, they are measuring
and enforcing it more stringently, and there has already been some
resistance from the States on implementing those regulations.
As far as I am concerned, that is where the shoe pinches. That is
a place where Congress has to stand tough and at least not water
down the standards that were in the Moynihan bill.
I also agree with Ron Mincy that the father should be covered,
but I would have the emphasis be on his accepting available jobs
and working full time. If he did, then his family would be eligible
for coverage under the welfare grant.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I have an informant who is 23 years old, and----Representative U p t o n . An informant?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . One of my subjects in my ethnographic studies, a
young man of the so-called underclass. He has four children out of
wedlock by three different women. I have been working with this
young man for some time, and I have helped him to get a job. I got
him probably the best job he ever had in his life. He was working
as a janitor at a big institution, making about $500 a week take-




58
home pay, working lots of overtime. He was a very hard-working
man for a number of months.
But after he had been working for a while, the various women,
most of whom he would give money to sporadically in exchange for
social and sexual favors, wanted to formalize their relationships
with him. As they got lawyers and petitions for child support, he
lost the incentive to work. In fact, he worked for about 5 months at
this job, which had benefits and good money, and he quit, went
back to the street corner, and he is now involved in the under­
ground economy. He told me about 12 weeks ago that he was deal­
ing drugs.
Representative U p t o n . Thank y o u , Mr. Chairman.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Congressman Scheuer.
Representative S c h e u e r . Thank y o u , Mr. Chairman.
I have a sense of deja vu, as I guess many of us do. All over
again, as Yogi Berra said.
In 1965, in my freshman term in Congress, I was on the House
Education and Labor Committee, and at that time there was a lot
of talk about structural unemployment. I headed up a task force of
the Education and Labor Committee on structural unemployment,
and at that time the black unemployment rate was about twice
what the white unemployment rate was, and I don't think things
have changed very much, except that the problem seems to have
been exacerbated by an exponential leap in the skills and the liter­
acy and numeracy requirements of the job market.
About a year ago, I conducted for the Joint Economic Committee
9 days of hearings on what it would take to produce a competent,
effective, and competitive labor force in our country. I would be
happy to send any of you a report if you haven't seen it.
Witnesses at the hearings testified that about 75 percent of all
new jobs that would be created would require some postsecondary
education—so even graduating from high school wasn't enough—
and that 90 percent of the kids who were in the job market didn't
have the numeracy and literacy skills needed to process informa­
tion.
So you had 90 percent of the kids who didn't have those skills
chasing the 25 percent of the new jobs that didn't require them,
and you had 75 percent of the employers who need those skills
chasing the 10 percent of the kids who do have them. Nowhere in
the country is that imbalance between skills and jobs more preva­
lent than New York City. We had executives of major corporations,
the insurance companies, the banks, IBM, all those major service
industries coming down and telling us the terrible problems they
had finding and training new employees.
Then we had a very brilliant black sociologist from the Universi­
ty of the District of Columbia, Department of Education, Signithia
Fordham.
And she testified that a problem that they had in the District of
Columbia was that there was sort of an ethic in the high schools to
fail—she did a study on the high school population here in Wash­
ington. It was OK to succeed in athletics, but if you excelled in aca­
demics, you had a real peer group problem with your black col­
leagues in high school and that the black kids who excelled aca­
demically had to sort of hide it and compensate for it by trying to




59
excel athletically, which was OK, but try and sort of hide the fact
under a bushel basket that they were also succeeding academically.
Of course, it is very difficult to tell a young, disadvantaged 17year-old to give up a job that may pay him a thousand bucks a
week and take a job that pays him the minimum wage. I mean,
when you get to market forces, which one of those two market
forces is the young disadvantaged kid going to opt for?
To ask the question is to answer it.
But still there is something to the business of leading a legal life,
of being able to raise a family, job prospects, education prospects,
marriage prospects, life prospects, all of which are destroyed by
drugs. They threaten all of them, including life itself.
So there are these other pulls that might induce the young, dis­
advantaged kids to want to make it and acquire those skills that 75
percent of the job market seems to demand.
Where do we intervene?
We don't want to increase the welfare class. We can't do every­
thing at one time, but we know we can do some things.
We have to try and find out the key areas in which we can inter­
vene.
Is it more welfare reform or do we intervene at the very begin­
ning of the education spectrum?
We had testimony before our committee that we ought to lower
the school year all over the country. We ought to have an entitle­
ment down for 2 years of Head Start.
I used to say, and I do say, I am a Head Start kid, and it prob­
ably did me a lot of good, although probably I came from a family
that provided a lot of that. We didn't call it Head Start in 1923. We
called it nursery school or prenursery school.
But the kids that needed it the least have received it the most
over the last half a century, and the kids that urgently, desperately
need it are getting it the least. Maybe 16 percent of the kids at edu­
cation risk are getting the benefits of a Head Start experience, an
enriched preschool experience, without which they are almost cer­
tainly destined for education failure.
Where in the chain do we intervene? Should we tell kids in
school that we are going to extend to them an entitlement for free
education through the first 2 years of college or other postsecond­
ary education?
We had a spectacularly successful national research and demon­
stration program on exactly that. Only we did it for as much post­
secondary education as the young person wanted, and the cost ben­
efit for that exercise in creating an entitlement for postsecondary
education all the way through law school, med school, whatever,
was a minimum of 5 to 1 and a maximum of 12.5 to 1.
Where do we intervene with the limited funds that we have?
Is it extending the school system down? Is it extending the school
system up?
Is it more day care? Is it more counseling?
Is it more effort to create practical, realistic vocational educa­
tion, programs that give kids—that don't just train kids to be
makers of carriage whips, buggies, and Stanley steamers?
Where do we intervene most cost effectively? What have we
learned from our research as the way to shoot with a high powered




60
rifle and a 12-power scope rather than splattering our buckshot all
over the landscape?
M r. M

in c y .

M a y I?
S c h e u e r . Yes, please.
M r . M i n c y . I w i ll h a z a r d t h e fir s t t r y a t th is .

Representative

I think where you begin is you begin with children. You begin in
the prenatal, perinatal stages. You begin with Head Start because
what we are learning is, unfortunately—you know, this is under
constraints that we are operating with.
You take a 16-, 17-, 18-year-old, young male or woman, put them
in the labor market with educational scars, and with children.
They become much more difficult to work with and their potential
for success is very limited.
We know that Head Start has demonstrated dramatic successes,
and so we should begin with what we know how to do, and we put
resources there.
Representative S c h e u e r . Let me ask you a specific question be­
cause you are going right to my central nervous system.
We now have about 16 percent of educationally deprived young­
sters who are urgently at education risk; 16 percent of them are
now in a Head Start Program. Under the new budget that we
agreed on that would go up to 18 or 19 percent, maybe 19.5 per­
cent.
As a matter of national priority, would you think that getting all
kids at education risk in their third and fourth year into some kind
of an enriched preschool program at a cost of $5 or $6 or $7 billion
would be perhaps the most cost—and I don't want to put words in
your mouth—effective way of making an investment in our future
and the future manpower of America and the future citizenry of
America as anything else that we could do later down the line
after these kids have failed at school and after all of those emotion­
al and pathological problems have developed?
And please don't let me put words in your mouth.
M r . M i n c y . I t h i n k w i t h t h e d o ze n o r so h e d g e s t h a t y o u h a v e
g iv e n m e , m y a n s w e r w o u ld b e y e s.
Representative S c h e u e r . Let's hear the hedges.
Mr. M i n c y . The hedges are that in doing so we are condemning

the lives—or not condemning, but cooperating in phenomenal and
unspeakable rates of incarceration among people who are already
12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 years old. That is why I hedge, the people that
we write off by doing so. However----Representative S c h e u e r . Well, I am not saying we shouldn't do
anything.
M r. M

in c y .

N

o,

no.

However, my bucks are there, or my bucks are with the youth
because we know that those programs demonstrate successes. We
know that by the time those children reach—children who are now
in school—maturity we will need them, and it seems to me both
from their point of view and from the larger point of view that is
where to put the dollars.
Representative S c h e u e r . Anybody else? Yes, Mr. Mead.
Mr. M e a d . I would be a little more cautious about Head Start.
All the evidence that promises great impacts comes from the Perry
Preschool Project. That is an excellent project. I am not sure it can




61
be generalized or has been generalized. I am not sure we should
assume that Head Start can have that kind of effect nationwide. I
do think it is a good investment. If I had to recommend one thing
to do for children, that would be it, not child care, which I think is
mostly available already.
The other thing that I would do, however, is I would mobilize the
mothers and fathers, if possible, through more ambitious workfare
programs.
I think the most important teacher is the parent. The parents
are lions in the path who you can't get around by some aggressive
early childhood strategy. You have to involve the parents in some
meaningful activity outside the home that makes them think
better of their own lives and their own hopes.
If you do that, that has more impact on the child than anything
else you can do.
So even if you are trying to get to the child, you should worry
about the parents. They should be doing something that is hopeful,
even if it is training or preparing for work rather than immediate­
ly working.
Representative S c h e u e r . Your are absolutely right, but of course
you are aware of the fact that well-designed Head Start Programs
have that as their central organizing element.
M r . M e a d . Well, no, no, I don't just mean----Representative S c h e u e r . The active involvement of parents.
Mr. M e a d . But that is involvement in the Head Start Program.
What I am talking about is involvement in employment-related ac­
tivity, which is a little bit different. We are saying to the mother
and the father, if possible, you should be involved in something to
help yourself, not only to work with a Head Start Program. Indeed,
if they work at something meaningful, they will have more author­
ity to help their child.
Representative S c h e u e r . Y o u are absolutely right. If you really
want to be depressed, talk to school administrators about the diffi­
culty that they have involving parents.
My god, they have been trying this for years and years and
years. They are at their wit's end as to how to involve parents in
the education prospects of their kids.
Mr. M e a d . I think the best way to involve them is to get them
doing something that makes them feel good about their own lives,
and that especially means employment. If you do that, they will
show up at PTA meetings. They have something proud to show.
Representative S c h e u e r . Well, my time is over, but I very much
appreciated your comments.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Let me ask you, why do you think pol­
icymakers should be concerned about the underclass?
There is a tendency, I think, on the part of the affluent group in
America just to want to forget about them, and some of the studies
talk about the forgotten half or third, or whatever the figure is.
What is it about the underclass that weakens a society and that
is cause for us to be concerned about these people? I mean, why
bother, I guess is the question, from a policymaking standpoint?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . First off, I think it is morally right to bother
with these people, but the society could also go from enlightened
self-interest.




62
I wish you could see what I have seen on the streets around the
crack houses in the community. There is a new group of people
who are becoming maybe even a subunderclass, and people in the
community that I am working in call these people zombies.
Zombies. These are crack-addicted people. Sometimes they are as
young as 16, 17 years of age. Their parents don't know what to do
with them. They take the family property and exchange it for
crack. They go to the store for their mothers with $30, and they
come back a few hours later with no money and no groceries.
Eventually, the family puts them out. They go to a friend's
house, and the same thing happens, and eventually they find them­
selves on the streets. They gravitate to the shelters.
They are on crack, and they do all kinds of things, from stealing
to selling their bodies—anything you can imagine. They walk the
streets with a glazed look in their eyes. They scan the streets. They
scavenge. They pick up anything of value. They break into cars to
steal change. They break into cars to steal something like dog food.
The respectable, law-abiding people of the community can't keep
their door mats. They can't keep their garbage cans.
Representative H a m i l t o n . OK, then one of the reasons is the
threat that these people constitute to other people. They are going
to steal, they are going to commit all kinds of antisocial behavior?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . Yes, but I think it is morally right to help these
people.
Representative H a m i l t o n . I understand that, of course. But I am
trying to look at it from a policy point of view.
So it is the threat of crime that certainly impresses you as to the
manner in which the underclass affects the rest of us?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I think that is one thing. Another thing is lost
productivity. Drug addicts don't work well. I think that there is a
lot of wasted talent out there. Those who are in effect running very
lucrative underground businesses are poor models for talented but
frustrated young people. One can sit in a car and watch activities
at the crack houses and you can see the queues.
I have one informant who tells me about the schoolbus driver
who pulls up in the schoolbus, with children in the schoolbus, goes
into the crack house, gets crack, gets back into his schoolbus, and
drives off.
The same informant told me about the Philadelphia Gas Works
man who drives to the crack house in his truck, who stops, goes in,
gets his crack, gets back into the truck, and drives off.
We are talking about working people. We are talking about
people in queues with their VCR's and TV sets and toasters, trad­
ing these for crack. We are talking about women who come to the
crack houses with no underwear on because they are ready to sell
their bodies not for money, not for subsistence, but to get high.
Representative H a m i l t o n . D o you find a hardening in the atti­
tude of the rest of us toward the underclass or is it a reverse? Are
we becoming more compassionate or less compassionate for these
people?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . My sense is that so many people are indifferent
because this problem has not touched them in a way, and----Representative H a m i l t o n . That is what I was driving at a
moment ago.




63
Mr. A n d e r s o n . This is my sense. It seems that this kind of a
problem is for many middle-class people a problem for the so-called
underclass, and this is one of the problems with the term “under­
class," I think.
It helps people to distance themselves from that largely black,
Hispanic, and urban group, and I think that a lot of them don't
take this group very seriously. They put the poor out there, al­
though the problem, as many reports are showing, is emerging in
the rural areas and in the suburbs increasingly.
Representative H a m i l t o n . So you see the threat, if you would, of
the underclass beginning to spread?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . That is what the reports say.
Representative H a m i l t o n . What reports are you talking about?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . Well, various news reports. There are any
number of New York Times articles and Washington Post articles
that indicate that in certain rural areas of Ohio and various other
places they are finding crack problems, including crack babies.
Middle-class families in suburban communities are having these
problems with their children.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Do you think we are more receptive
in the Congress and in other policy bodies to dealing with the prob­
lems of the underclass today than we were a few years ago or less?

Mr. A n d e r s o n . My sense is that the American people have
become more receptive. I read this piece that appeared in the New
York Times a few weeks ago in which Louis Harris 1 found that
the American people were very much ready to do something about
the underclass, and my sense, from what I have been reading is
that many Congressmen are ready to do something, too.
Representative

H a m ilto n .

Do you all feel the same way?

I would say rather more strongly that the public
wants to do something. In fact, it always has. For a long time—
indeed, for as long as there have been polls on the subject—the
public generally, not simply worse off people, but better off people,
express a concern about poverty and helping people in need. That
is a popular thing to do, and programs that do that are popular.
That feeling has strengthened, if anything, in the last several years
because of the underclass, but it is a constant. It has been there all
along.
At the same time, the public is opposed to welfare. The way one
reconciles that is that welfare has nefarious connotations and is
seen as having failed. It is a handout. But people want to help the
poor.
It is the political class that is much more polarized on this ques­
tion, with some elements feeling that great effort should be made
and other elements opposing this, both sides for ideological reasons.
The public is consistent in wanting something done, but equally
wishing to uphold social standards.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Let me pick up on Congressman
Scheuer's line of questioning for a moment.
We have all of these programs here that we enact into law. You
talked about Head Start. You have nutrition programs, you have
M r.

M ead.

1 See Louis Harris, '‘Examining These Myths of the 80s,” New York Times, May 19, 1989, p.
A -35.




64
remedial education programs, you have child care programs, you
have job training programs, you have welfare, the Family Support
Act. You have income—earned income tax credits. You have the
minimum wage. You have all of these and probably many, many
more as well.
What does not come through to me from your testimony this
morning is a sense of unanimity or agreement with respect to
policy steps that we ought to take. I mean, do you all have differ­
ent views as to how to resolve this problem?
If you as experts don't have some sense of unanimity or focus on
remedies for the underclass, then it is very difficult for us to do it.
Mr. M i n c y . I don't think that is accurate. First of all, you know,
research on the underclass and trying to cull that problem out of
the more general problem of poverty, which we have not success­
fully done even this morning, focusing on the underclass as distinct
from the poor, the rural poor, it is very recent and hence we don't
have well thought out ideas and agreement on causes. Hence, we
can't have well thought out ideas among us. We are the first tar­
gets.
Representative H a m i l t o n . It is still going to take a lot more
work to understand the phenomenon; is that right?
M r . M i n c y . That is m y o p in io n .
Representative H a m i l t o n . What do y o u think?
M r . M e a d . Yes.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I agree.
M r . M e a d . I don't know that there is quite that much disagree­
ment. There are two points at issue among researchers, I think.
One is the question of the neighborhood effect----Representative H a m i l t o n . The what effect?
Mr. M e a d . The neighborhood effect, the notion that the under­
class is related to particular low-income areas; in other words, it is
something that inhabits a territory rather consisting of individuals
who might go anywhere. That is an issue. I don't believe it is terri­
bly consequential because clearly most of the underclass is concen­
trated in the inner city regardless of whether that is an inherent
part of the definition.
The major difference that I see among researchers and policy
people close to the researchers is the question of whether structur­
al economic change accounts for the underclass by explaining the
unemployment of the men.
I don't see hard evidence for that. A lot of people are trying to
find hard evidence for it. What we agree on is that the unemploy­
ment of the men is crucial. We don't agree on the reason why they
are unemployed. I tend to think that it is because of a falloff in the
attitude that one should accept available jobs and also because of
the permissive welfare system. The other view says that the failure
of the factory and the exit of jobs from the city means the people
can't work.
But even among those people there is agreement about some
things that ought to be done, and I think we have mentioned two
in particular.
One is early childhood education, and the other is building up
workfare programs which, by the way, have a variety of options.
They don't simply involve working immediately in available jobs,




65
though that is something that one should have. Rather, they have
training and education aspects as well.
There is a fair amount of consensus about that, and it lay behind
the Moynihan bill when it was passed last fall. The major dispute
that was unresolved and I think is going to be with Congress for
some time is how large those programs should be. That is, what
proportion of the employable recipients we seriously want to in­
volve in them. This again is the issue of the participation rate.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Congressman Solarz.
Representative S o l a r z . Thank y o u , Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Mead, I gather your feeling is that one of the main problems
with the underclass is not due to the lack of jobs, but rather to the
unwillingness of the people in the underclass to take the jobs that
are available; is that correct?
M r . M e a d . T h a t p lu s d e fe a t is m ; t h a t is to s a y , s o m e w o u ld lik e to
t a k e t h e jo b s , b u t t h e y fe e l t h e y j u s t c a n 't h a n d le t h e lo g is tic s .
Representative S o l a r z . OK, but you categorically reject the

notion that it is due to a structural lack of employment opportuni­
ty.
Mr. M e a d . Not categorically. I think there are some very de­
pressed cities like Detroit where it might explain part of the prob­
lem.
Representative S o l a r z . But by and large nationally----M r . M e a d . Yes, yes.
Representative S o l a r z [continuing]. Your point is that there are
unskilled jobs available. Witness the fact that a lot of aliens and
immigrants take these jobs, and presumably the people in the un­
derclass who have no jobs, if they really were willing to take them,
would be able to get them.
M r . M e a d . Yes.
Representative S o l a r z . D o you disagree with that, Mr. Mincy?
Mr. M i n c y . I do. Just because a job is out there, one has to know
who the employers are, how to get to the jobs, and a number of
other things. Now, Mr. Mead has said they have logistical prob­
lems, and I think those logistical problems are important. It is not
just that people have difficulty locating the opportunities that are
available.
For example, if you have a job paying $3, $3.50 an hour but it
costs you more than a dollar a day to commute from here to there,
then that is more than a logistical problem. The cost-benefit analy­
sis said that job isn't worth it.
So I think those kinds of----Representative S o l a r z . But there are a lot of people in those
jobs.
Mr. M i n c y . There are a lot of people in those jobs and they have
worked out mechanisms for making it cost efficient for them to
have those jobs.
Representative S o l a r z . Mr. Anderson, what is your view?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I was just thinking about that young man I
helped out. You brought up the idea of drugs, Congressman Solarz,
before. I had lost contact with the young man for a year after I had
obtained him the job that he quit. I bumped into him about 12
weeks ago, and we had a long conversation. He told me about what
he had been doing over the year, and 15 minutes into the conversa­




66

tion he told me that he used to deal drugs, and I said “When did
you quit?" He said, “2 weeks ago."
And we talked about that, and he wanted me to help him again.
He wanted a job, but I didn't feel right going back to the employer
with whom I had spoken before. I asked him if he had ever thought
about going into military service, and he said he had thought about
that and he would like to do that, and I went down with him on a
Monday morning to the recruitment office, and we tried to sign
him up.
Of course, one of the first questions was, “Are you on proba­
tion?" which he had to answer yes to, and the man told us to talk
with his probation officer and try to work that out. We went to the
probation office—and I am getting to this point—and this woman
was not around. So eventually we went to various places in the city
looking for jobs for this person. We went to this one restaurant,
and we walked in and we talked with the owner, and the man
looked at this young man and spoke with him, interviewed him,
and hired him, and this young man was ready to work for $3.50 an
hour.
Now this is a person who was a former drug dealer, who had
been making a good deal of money. In my conversations with him
he told me about the great sums of money he had been making,
how many things he had in his apartment, from gold chains to TV
sets and so on. But now he was ready to work, and the reason that
he wanted to leave this other life is because he was “tired" and he
had seen death.
And in this I am in rare agreement with Larry Mead, but drug
dealing is a very difficult job. And now he wanted a regular job.
He came back by my office later in the day and told me that in­
stead of getting $3.50 an hour, which was the implicit arrange­
ment, he was making $5.50 an hour. The implication is that for
workers and employers, the minimum wage is negotiable. He was a
good worker.
My feeling is that it speaks so much to the issue concerning com­
mitment to drug dealing that you raised a few minutes ago.
Representative S o l a r z . Mr. Mead, your feeling seems to be that
the problem is competence.
M r. M

ead.

Y es.

Representative S o l a r z . It is not clear to me how the society—
what we can do to create competence where it doesn't exist above
and beyond what we are already doing. We have a school system.
We have various programs.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
M r . M e a d . I think that very few of these people are absolutely
disabled. They mostly can function well enough to do the minimal
jobs that exist. I am actually fairly confident about that. Compe­
tence is important not so much as a barrier to employment, but
rather as an issue.
Much of what experts dispute today is really not the structure of
opportunity, but whether or not these people can cope with the de­
mands of the jobs that exist. The real dispute among liberals and
conservatives is that liberals say that the demands should be lower,
that these people cannot cope, and the conservatives say they can




67
cope like other people. That is what we are really arguing about
rather than whether jobs literally exist.
I am optimistic because I see evidence that when expectations
are clear people in fact function.
Representative S o l a r z . Well, let me ask you a question about the
single mothers.
Do we know in the society as a whole what percentage of the
single mothers work?
Mr. M e a d . I think it is 75 percent. It depends what kind of single
mother, but it is a very high proportion.
Representative S o l a r z . OK. But among the underclass a very
high proportion of single mothers don't work?
Mr. M e a d . That is right.
Representative S o l a r z . S o my question is what accounts for the
fact that most single mothers do work but most single mothers in
the underclass don't work?
Mr. M e a d . I don't know, probably the welfare system, plus the
choice for a single mother to go on welfare. If you work full time,
then you are off welfare, you are out of poverty. If you don't, then
you are on welfare. That is the basic difference between the two
groups. There isn't any very compelling reason from demographics
or other background factors to explain which welfare mothers
make which choice.
Representative S o l a r z . Why do they prefer to be on welfare
rather than to work?
M r . M e a d . I d o n 't k n o w . T h a t is r e a lly t h e u lt i m a t e m y s t e r y .
M r . M i n c y . T h e r e is a v a s t d iffe r e n c e b e t w e e n t h e e d u c a t io n a l
a t t a i n m e n t o f w o r k in g s in g le m o t h e r s a n d o f n o n w o r k in g s in g le
m o th ers.
M r . M e a d . T h a t is t r u e , t h a t is t r u e .
M r . M i n c y . Working single mothers tend to be better educated.

They make higher wages. They can pay child care, and the after
cost, after work cost earnings are such that they can make a
decent living.
M r. M

ead.

B u t it i s n 't t r u e --------

Mr. M i n c y . Working nonsingle mothers tend to be younger, less
skilled, and what they could make after offsetting the cost of child
care is paltry relative to welfare benefits, which is also a part of
their equation.
Mr. M e a d . According to an analysis that hasn't been published
yet, but which I have seen and commented on, a single mother
working at the minimum wage is going to be off welfare and out of
poverty in every State in the Union. That assumes full-time work
and taking advantage of benefits that are still retained.
The notion that a person working at the lowest possible wage
can't get off welfare—this is a woman with two children—is simply
not supported by the facts. Again, the real issue is why do they
work so few hours.
Representative S o l a r z . And you are saying that such a person
would be better off materially----Mr. M e a d . Materially, yes.
Representative S o l a r z [continuing]. Than they would be if they
stay on welfare?




68

Mr. M e a d . Definitely. Now, they might not be better off in other
senses. Ron Mincy is right to say that the working mothers as a
group are better off in educational terms. But among welfare moth­
ers, those that work at all, even a little bit, and those that don't
aren't very different. There is other research, too, that says that
the decision to work off of welfare is not very strongly related to
the mother's skills or demographics.
That implies that work is something that we can require people
to do and they will be able to do it. In fact more than half of wel­
fare mothers who enter jobs through workfare programs immedi­
ately leave the rolls.
Mr. M i n c y . I just wanted to turn you back to one other thought,
however.
Most people who are on welfare and escape welfare do not—most
single mothers do not do that through work. They do it through re­
marriage, through reconstituting their relationship.
M r . M e a d . T h a t is tr u e .
M r . M i n c y . A n d t h e n I a m d e lib e r a t e ly a t t e m p t i n g to t a k e u s
b a c k to t h is n o t io n o f w h a t is h a p p e n in g to th e m a l e s w h o a r e p a r t
o f t h a t h o u s e h o ld b e c a u s e t h a t d e fin e s t h e c a p a c it y in g e n e r a l to
g e t o f f o f t h e w e lf a r e s y s t e m .
Mr. M e a d . Yes, that is true.
Mr. M i n c y . And if we keep walking down a social policy toward

the poor or, indeed, the underclass that concentrates on escape
through welfare that is directed primarily through single mothers,
we are going to miss, indeed, the most serious aspect of the prob­
lem, the most intractable part of it, but the part that ultimately is
where the real long term—and so that we won't be doing that
when I have gray hairs.
Representative S o l a r z . But, you know, Mr. Mead has raised, I
think a profoundly important point. If one believes that the main
reason these young males are not working is basically because the
kind of jobs for which their experience and talents make them suit­
able are no longer available, that points to one set of conclusions.
You then have to come up with programs or incentives that create
those kinds of jobs.
But if he is correct in saying that there are jobs available for
which their talents and experience suit them, which if they took
would take them out of poverty, but they are not taking them be­
cause either they believe that they should get middle-class jobs
right away or because somehow they can't—they would like to
work but they can't emotionally overcome the difficulties of getting
the job and keeping the job—if he is right, I am not sure what the
implications are for public policy because I don't know how the
Government deals with those problems.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . One of the things that I agree with Mr. Mincy on
is that the networks are really so very important—how to get a job,
how to keep a job, how to work in a situation. There are a lot of
people who don't really fully appreciate that, just like the young
man that I mentioned. He was just amazed.
Representative S o l a r z . But let’s assume you are right. What can
government do about that? How can government create networks?
Is there a way?




69
Mr. A n d e r s o n . In my presentation I talked about the importance
of the old heads, and my feeling is that the Government should
somehow support that old head.
R e p r e s e n t a t iv e S o l a r z . H o w ?
M r . A n d e r s o n . T h a t is a g o o d q u e s t io n .
Representative S o l a r z . Well, that is the question.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . One of the ways would be to employ

such people
through a serious on-the-job training program as a way to connect
and match them with the private sector. Look for them systemati­
cally and bring them in.
Serious on-the-job training for well-paying jobs would enhance
the status of the old head and encourage younger people inclined to
follow his example.
Mr. M e a d . Y o u can use law enforcement to break down this al­
ternative economy that has humiliated the old heads. The drug
pushers who are advancing alternative ways of living have to be
put in jail. There is no alternative to that.
Representative S o l a r z . Mr. Mead, with all due respect, we have
five district attorneys in New York.
M r. M

ead.

I know , I know .
S o l a r z . They
M r . M e a d . I k n o w th a t .
Representative S o l a r z . The

Representative

are working 80 hours a week.

arrest rates are going all the way
up. Prison population has gone all the way up. It is hard to see
that we could do within the resources available much more on law
enforcement than we are already doing.
Mr. M e a d . That may well be true, and I can't really claim to
know much about that.
I also think that programs of a mandatory kind connected to wel­
fare can help to construct the networks that we are all talking
about. I don't believe the problem in fact is networking in the
sense of discovering a job. I think people know how to do that. It is
rather keeping the job and accepting the mores that that requires.
Even existing workfare programs have a fair number of men in­
volved. About a fifth of the clients are men for these clients, the
staff are the old heads in a way. They provide the practical
wisdom, and they also provide encouragement, and they provide
the expectations, and all of that causes those men and the women,
too, to more regularly stay at work.
In essence what you are doing is using a public structure to pro­
vide the authority that used to exist informally and has now
broken down in these areas. That is the gist.
Representative S o l a r z . Y o u are saying, in effect, we should re­
quire every able-bodied person on welfare to have a job?
M r . M e a d . O r s o m e th in g c o n s t r u c t iv e ly a im e d a t t h a t e n d . I
d o n 't s e e fin d in g s t h a t s a y t h a t e v e r y o n e h a s to w o r k i m m e d i a t e ly ,
b u t t h e y h a v e to b e in v o lv e d in s o m e a c t i v i t y t h a t m a k e s d e m a n d s
o n t h e m , t h a t m a k e s t h e m o r g a n iz e t h e i r liv e s fo r e m p lo y m e n t , g e t
o u t o f t h e h o u s e in t h e m o r n in g , e v e n i f it is a t r a i n in g o r e d u c a ­
t io n a l o p tio n a t fir st.
Representative S o l a r z . D o you have any problem with that, Mr.

Mincy?
Mr. M i n c y . Yes. The problem that I have is that in underclass
areas the fathers are generally absent. So it seems to me that what




70
Mr. Mead—it could work if the fathers were part of a household,
you could attach that household----Mr. M ead . That is what I am advocating.

Mr. M i n c y [continuing]. And attach both members of it; 60 per­
cent of the underclass, of the families in underclass areas are
female headed. Hence, the men exist, they are out of the house­
hold. How are you going to twist their arms to do this?
I don’t know. If you can provide inducements or encouragements
to do it, it seems to me it is a much better strategy.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I agree with Mr. Mincy. I take issue with Larry
Mead on that.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Congressman Scheuer.
Representative S c h e u e r . Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask
unanimous consent that at the point in the record where I de­
scribed the young assistant professor at the University of the Dis­
trict of Columbia, but didn’t have her name, to insert her name.
Her name is Signithia Fordham, S-i-g-n-i-t-h-i-a F-o-r-d-h-a-m.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Without objection, it is so ordered.
Representative S c h e u e r . H o w do we mobilize the peer group
pressure and the role models in the disadvantaged communities to
stimulate and motivate young people to learn, to succeed in school,
young fathers to stay with their families, all of these phenomena
that we are all familiar with?
How do we stimulate more widespread consciousness on the part
of young kids who are dealing in drugs that it is a life of death?
As you pointed out, the young man that you conferred with, he
decided to give it up because he could see the life of drugs being a
destroyer of education, prospects, job prospects, marriage prospects,
indeed life prospects itself.
How do we motivate these young people? The society desperately
wants it to happen, but we don’t know how you change them.
Mr. M ead. I think you have hit on an important point, and that
is that there have to be role models coming from the groups in
question. That means that black and Hispanic leaders have to
come forward and publicly affirm the values that the group be­
lieves in and thereby provide political support for the policies that
we are all in various ways recommending.
I don’t believe, as some conservatives do, that the black or His­
panic community should assume entire responsibility for the solu­
tion. I think this is a problem for all Americans and that there is
very little hope unless public authority can be mobilized in various
forums. That is a job for public agencies.
But politically there has to be cover provided by minority lead­
ers. I think they have moved in that direction. Recently, a number
of spokesmen, experts, as well as politicians among blacks have
begun speaking out openly about the family problems and saying
that something must be done. I think they are fairly close to en­
dorsing a policy of enforcement in the work area, which is some­
thing that we need.
It won’t be just that. There will be some opportunity policies, too,
about which I am more skeptical, as I don’t see the need. But I do
think that there is a real opportunity that there can be some con­
sensus around this. It hasn’t quite happened yet, but I think there
is some chance of it.




71
Representative S c h e u e r . Just as a footnote to that, I think the
process has started.
About 2 years ago or maybe 3 years ago, the NAACP and the
Urban League and maybe one or two other organizations had a
major conference in a Midwest city about the problems of the selfinflicted wounds in the black community, the problems of black be­
havior, and that was a wonderful thing because that was the begin­
ning, as I saw it, of the process, although maybe it had been going
on for quite a time.
I would like very much to hear from the other two witnesses be­
cause they bring to the table a sensitivity and an insight that you
and I don't share perhaps.
Mr. M i n c y . I would like to say that a quarter of the underclass
areas—social problems, OK, female heads, et cetera—are white.
This is not a problem of race. It is disproportionately black. It is
not strictly a problem of race. I think we have to bring that right
on top of the table.
Representative S c h e u e r . Of course, you are right.
Mr. M i n c y . We have to recognize that.
Representative S c h e u e r . There is no question about that.
M r . M in c y . S econ d, w h e n y o u t h in k a b o u t h o w do y o u e n c o u ra g e
y o u n g p e o p le to do x, y, z, t h e is o la t io n in t h e s e c o m m u n i t i e s is i m ­
p o r t a n t , t h e is o la tio n fr o m w h it e s a n d t h e is o la t io n fr o m s u c c e s s fu l
b la c k s , a n d so t h e fir s t p a r t o f t h e s t r a t e g y is t o fig u r e o u t h o w to
r e d u c e s o m e o f t h a t is o la tio n , h o w to c a u s e g r e a t e r in t e g r a t io n
a c r o s s s o c ia l c la ss, a s it w e r e , e v e n b e fo r e w e c a n t h in k a b o u t h o w
to m o t i v a t e p e o p le to do th in g s .

In the first place you have to get the role models back. You have
to get them there. Those role models used to take place in schools.
Teachers were role models. Old heads were role models.
But the very problem of decreasing the amount of isolation in
these communities must precede more strategic kinds of problems
about questions about motivation.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I think it goes back, too, to the source of author­
ity, to the old head. He was a product in some ways of the old man­
ufacturing era. I mean, in those days he made big money; $5,000,
$6,000 a year was a good deal of money in 1950; with this he could
drive a nice car, support a family. He could set a good example be­
cause he “had something" and other people could look up to him.
But over time he has declined in terms of financial ability, in
terms of being a role model, and increasingly he has to compete
with the emerging role model.
I am not saying that it is an either-or proposition, but I am just
seeing it as a competition within the ghetto community itself, and
asking what are the implications of this? What do we do for the old
head to shore him up?
And I think one of the things we have to do is to create job op­
portunities somehow for those young people who would become old
heads in the way that the traditional old heads were. They must be
matched with effective employment in the modern economy.
It goes back to the old head's authority that was linked with the
manufacturing era when he had a good job that people could look
up to and respect. The jobs that the young people are able to get




72
today in fast-food places don’t pay enough money for a person
really to support a family.
A lot of the young men I have talked with and interviewed, say
derisively about family life, “I ain’t playing house,” but they do
have babies. But they cannot afford, they say, to play house, and I
think this goes to the heart of it, in a way. The old head, tradition­
ally, was able to play house rather well because $6,000 a year back
in 1950 was more like about $23,000, $24,000, enough to raise a
small family.
Representative S c h e u e r . Let me just narrow the question a
little.
Two behavioral problems in just what you have talked about. In
our country well over half of all black births are out of wedlock.
How do we provide the role models, the incentives for young black
women—in fact, young black couples, or minority couples, to con­
trol their fertility?
It assuredly is not wholly a race problem, but this exists in the
white community, but very much more disproportionately in the
black community.
That is a key because once a woman becomes an unmarried
mother she is almost fatally crippled in terms of education, job,
marriage, a happy and fulfilling life.
Second, how do we convince those kids who aren’t satisfied with
flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s that there are other jobs for
them that are available—the insurance companies, the banks,
IBM? They are desperate for young people, but who bring skills to
the table. How do we convince these young kids that there are al­
ternatives to flipping hamburgers but they have to acquire certain
skills, that when they acquire the skills there is a job out there for
them?
M r . M e a d . The skills they need are in fact quite minimal for
most of those jobs. The notion that these white collar employment
opportunities involve high education is simply not true. Even in
New York the share of employment that requires more than a high
school education has dropped by only 1 point—from 58 to 57 per­
cent, according to one study—in the last 15 years.
Representative S c h e u e r . Well, there is an enormous mismatch
in New York City between kids with their skills available and the
jobs that are out there.
We had panel after panel of corporate executives, corporate lead­
ers who told us of their great need for reasonably skilled employees
who could read, write, count, compute, with some computer skills,
and they were beating the bushes for young people—the telephone
companies, IBM, the banks, the insurance companies. Panel after
panel, and they couldn’t—and they are having a desperately diffi­
cult time finding enough people to fill the vacuum.
Mr. M e a d . That is true. But what isn’t true is that those skills
are new, that you didn’t need those skills previously or their
equivalents. You did. What has changed is the caliber of student
coming out of the school. That has declined. It is not that the econ­
omy is very much more demanding.
The kinds of jobs that take advanced skills are only a small
share of the total employment picture. They are growing very rap­




73
idly. That is quite true. But most jobs that are created in the econo­
my still require only low and moderate skills.
It simply isn’t true that these jobs are beyond the reach of people
with a high school diploma. The problem is that a high school di­
ploma no longer indicates literacy. One doesn’t necessarily know
anything or able to do anything. In fact, I would go even further,
since many of these companies are training people in basic skills,
the only really critically essential skill is the ability to come to
work on time.
I also want to just make one comment in response to what Ron
Mincy said about race. I agree with him that this is not a racial
problem in its causes, but politically it is a racial problem. Al­
though there is a white underclass, the white people don’t make
special claims. They don’t resist social authority; whereas, the
black leadership still does to some extent. That creates a political
problem over restoring order in the ghetto even though the nature
of the difficulty there is not distinct to blacks or Hispanics.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . I think we have to take some of these corporate
executives and match them up with the people who need work, and
I agree with Ron Mincy here. I think that you have to get the
people while they are young and bring them up and talk to them
about these things. But I think the corporations should make a
more concerted effort to match themselves up with people in need.
That would be one way to do it, and I think serious on-the-job
training is important here.
Mr. M i n c y . Congressman, i f I may.
We have had some conversation here about educational reform
and what it does and how it may impact people whose highest level
of educational attainment is high school. While it is true that we
seem to have really low skills among our high school graduates, it
is also true that those students have very few incentives to do well
in school.
Employers do not raise wages for high school graduates who get
A’s as opposed to B’s unless they go to college. Employers don’t
give better employment opportunities for students who do better in
high school than other students. So their incentives for going for it
while in high school are not great, and we need—employers even
have difficulty getting references from guidance counselors about
which are the great students as opposed to the mediocre students.
So in terms of matching the high school labor market with the
high school student, we could do a better job in encouraging the
private sector to provide the incentives that students need—if they
are not headed for college—to provide the incentives they need to
distinguish themselves and to learn better, and let me take a little
liberty and go a little further.
Another thing mentioned in this report in the Washington Post
yesterday by the Joint Center of Political Studies on the education
of minorities in inner-city schools, it pointed out the differential
treatment of minorities in inner-city schools, in the sense that they
are more frequently pushed off into programs for slow learners or
retarded children, and so forth and so on, and I think this under­
class problem is creating another kind of problem, particularly for
black males in inner-city schools.




74
Those schools are highly segregated. Most often young black
male students are taught by white females, two steps removed
from who they are, and I think a lot of the difficulties that these
young people face in doing well in school is alienation that is
caused by the antagonism that they face, not to say that they are
not misbehaving in this manner or some other manner, but rather
we haven’t learned—and I speak as a parent of a 13-year-old and
an 18-year-old, not an underclass 13-year-old and 18-year-old but
other than that, and I constantly deal with an antagonism on the
part of teachers relating to my young son, and so----Representative S c h e u e r . And do you think that is based on race?
M r . M i n c y . I t h i n k it is b a s e d o n th e b r o a d e r v is io n o f w h a t t h e
u n d e r c la s s is, o n t h e b r o a d e r p r o b le m t h a t y o u n g b la c k m a le s a r e
t r o u b le , a n d it e x t e n d s to a ll, y o u n g a n d m id d le a g e d a n d o ld e r
b la c k m a le s .

So I think we have to enable this emerging understanding of the
perception of young black males to filter its way down into our
educational system and affect the way young black males—affect
what they have to deal with in negotiating this process to maturity
in education, and so forth.
It has an impact. It alienates them, and when it alienates them,
it affects their performance in the school.
I am not an educational psychologist. I am a parent. I am a
scholar of the underclass, but in my sense this is very important,
and we have to study it and understand it and enable it to be af­
fected.
Representative S c h e u e r . I am utterly depressed at what you are
saying. Your kids obviously come from a home that is an education
factory, right?
M r . M i n c y . Yes.
Representative S c h e u e r . And if your kid, with all the advan­
tages of the elegant education heritage that they enjoy from having
breakfast with you and your wife and dinner with you and your
wife and spending weekends with you and your wife and seeing
books and magazines and scholarly articles around the house, if
with all of those advantages they continue to experience antago­
nism and resentment with white teachers----Mr. M i n c y . N o , no. Don’t misunderstand me.
Representative S c h e u e r . Y o u are not saying that?
Mr. M i n c y . That is not what I am saying. I am saying that the
perception of teachers of my children because they are young black
males is such that they—my children are antagonized by their
teachers, and I have to constantly work at helping the teachers dif­
ferentiate them—my children from the stereotype young black
male.
Representative S c h e u e r . I am utterly depressed at hearing that.
It seems to me that a teacher, seeing your kid perform, listening to
him or her talk, their very speech, their attitude, the way they are
dressed----Mr. M i n c y . Sir, I could tell you things that would curl your hair.
Representative S c h e u e r . Well, you have already done it.
M r. M

in c y .

N

o,

Representative




no.
Scheuer.

I am absolutely flabbergasted.

75
Mr. M incy. If we have established a dialogue, I think it is impor­
tant, and let me continue a bit.

Representative S c h e u e r . Please.
Mr. M i n c y . My son walked into a local university library with
his white friend, and he was arrested, cuffed, taken out of the li­
brary. My son does not curse. He does not use phrases like “man.”
He is not your typical image young—I am trying to suggest to
you----Representative S c h e u e r . I wouldn’t think so.
Mr. M i n c y [continuing]. That this is serious, and it is the percep­
tion, and this problem of the underclass is generating a vision of
young black people, and young black males in particular, that is
destructive to what we are trying to accomplish.
So far from the motivation and, you know, are the students
trying, what I want to suggest is that they have obstacles to deal
with irrespective of their performance, and we have to allow the
educational system to become cognizant of that and to help—so
that system can perceive better what these students are having to
deal with and help them make the transition to maturity, help
make that transition easier.
Representative S c h e u e r . Before we adjourn this hearing—and it
has been a most interesting, if somewhat depressing hearing—can
somebody say something of an upbeat nature that will leave us
with some hope?
Mr. Mead. Yes. The labor market is very tight. There is a baby
bust. That is, we have many fewer youth going into the labor
market today.
Representative S c h e u e r . But we have this question of structural
unemployment. We have found for the last 30 years, at least for
the last 24 years that I have been in Congress, that when the water
rises all the boats don’t rise.
Mr. M ead. That is correct.

Representative S c h e u e r . Some boats do and some boats don’t,
and if the young person doesn’t have the skills to meet the needs of
IBM or the New York Telephone Co. or the John Hancock Life In­
surance Co., even though those corporations may need hundreds of
thousands of employees, as they apparently do, if you don’t have
the skills to participate in the kind of work that they perform, if
you only have a strong back and a willing heart, that rising tide
will not benefit you, and this is a problem that we have lived with
for decades.
Mr. M ead. But it is getting better.

Mr. M i n c y . That sends a discouraging message for people who
are now out of it, who are now 16 and beyond.
Representative S c h e u e r . They have to acquire skills.
Mr. M incy. But it sends an encouraging message for those who
are now enrolling in elementary school.

Representative

Scheuer.

Right.

Mr. M incy. It says that the potential payoff to real investment in
their education and training for them and for us, broadly defined,
is high.

Representative S c h e u e r . H o w do we convince the kids of that?
You just told me that kids who are going through high school
don’t feel they can do any better if they excel in their studies or




76
whether they fail in their studies. Now, there is a big difference
between two kids who graduate from high school in the 12th grade.
One kid can’t read his diploma, and the other kid can read his di­
ploma, can count, can compute, and is ready for the kind of jobs
that these service corporations in the new era provide in great
abundance.
How do we motivate the kids early in their education system to
understand that there are a great wealth of jobs out there and
there is a very happy and satisfying and independent life full of
pride and self-respect if they only will acquire skills?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . If this problem is to be solved, the corporations
must become more deeply involved.
Mr. M e a d . I think that the best way to do that is get the parents
involved. If the parents aren’t doing anything, that is what tells
the kid there is no hope. So the first step is to get the parents
doing something constructive.
Representative S c h e u e r . We know the desiderata, but every
school administrator and every principal and every teacher has
been trying—they have been breaking their hearts trying to get
parents involved. Of course, that should be done. Maybe we have to
find new ways of motivating parents.
Mr. M e a d . I am not saying get the parents involved in the
school. I am saying get the parents involved in the labor market.
Representative S c h e u e r . Yes. Can I hear from you two gentle­
men?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . Yes. I was just going to say that I think we need
to get the corporations involved. I keep saying that because I think
it is extremely important to match up the corporation with the
school somehow.
Representative S c h e u e r . But there is a New York partnership. I
am not sure you are aware. But corporations are involved in work­
ing with the school system in New York, where they do advise the
high schools on vocational education programs and they help them
construct vocational education programs that are relevant and give
the kids job skills that are in demand, and they arrange for workstudy programs where the kids work toward jobs that are waiting
for them, where the corporation has had a hand in designing the
vocational education program and the kid may work over a
summer.
There are experiments going on, and I suppose the question is
how do we do more of it, how do we extrapolate the trend of corpo­
rations sort of adopting a school or adopting a system and working
closely with the school administrators and the vocational education
people to offer a kid a light at the end of the tunnel, so that when
he gets out of school he doesn’t just have a hunting license to find
a job but maybe he has a job.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . Right, that is what we have to promote.
Representative S c h e u e r . And you think closer education be­
tween----Mr. A n d e r s o n . Match.
Representative S c h e u e r . A closer relationship, a closer network­
ing between corporations and schools is a key element?
Mr. A n d e r s o n . Indeed. Yes. See, the one thing that the under­
class does not have is this ability to network.




77
Representative S c h e u e r . Yes.
Mr. A n d e r s o n . They just don't have that connection, the
networking, and somehow that ought to be enhanced, supported.
People ought to be taught important skills. But the ability to con­
nect is the thing that is missing.
That young man that I mentioned before was amazed that I was
so receptive. He was enlisting me as an old head, as you probably
understood from the testimony, but he was amazed at the results.
He was surprised at the reception of the prospective employer to
us, and the fact is that I applied for the job with him. I did the
talking, and when he saw me later he gave me a big hug. He said,
“How did you do that?" I had helped him beyond all his expecta­
tions.
Representative S c h e u e r . Do you have any thoughts?
Mr. M incy. Only that wisdom probably says this, that we know
what works for younger children, we know what works in terms of
prenatal care and the like, and we have limited resources. At the
time that these experiments for the younger ones— for the older
ones are taking place, perhaps we ought to await the findings.
They are going to tell us hopefully how to create networks, how to
enable the young and already unskilled to make the transition
better.

But we know what works for the really young children. Perhaps
we ought to be spending resources on what we know works and
awaiting results for the older ones until we know what works.
That is not very profound, but I think it makes a lot of sense.
Representative S c h e u e r . Well, it has been very, very interesting,
and with a mixture of discouragement and hope, and I very, very
much appreciate your testimony.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Representative H a m i l t o n . Thank you very much, gentlemen. We
appreciate the testimony. It has been a long morning for you, and
your testimony has been excellent.
The committee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:31 p.m., the committee adjourned, subject to
the call of the Chair.]

O

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