Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #466860 in Books
• Published on: 1997-07-29
• Released on: 1997-07-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .79" w x 5.19" l, .56 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Amazon.com
An unofficial adviser to President Bill Clinton, Wilson has become a celebrity of sorts. A former University of Chicago professor, Wilson--currently on staff at Harvard--has been profiled in The New Yorker and dubbed one of America's most influential people by Time magazine. A respected thinker on issues of race and poverty, the author of The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged offers his take on welfare and inner-city joblessness in When Work Disappears. Racism, Wilson argues, plays increasingly less of a role in urban problems. More significant, he claims, are changes in the global economy and the disappearance of unskilled but decent-paying jobs near cities; according to Wilson, these factors have deprived the urban working class of steady jobs, destroyed inner-city businesses, and caused younger, upwardly mobile residents to flee for the suburbs.

From Publishers Weekly
Record levels of unemployment and disappearing jobs in inner-city neighborhoods are the root cause of poverty and social distress among African Americans, contends Wilson, an eminent University of Chicago sociology professor. A galvanizing blueprint for concerned citizens and policy makers, his scholarly study focuses on Chicago's inner-city poor, using three surveys he conducted between 1987 and 1993. Wilson (The Truly Disadvantaged) sees a direct link between growing joblessness and what he calls ghetto-related behavior and attitudes?fatherless children born out of wedlock, drugs, crime, gang violence, hopelessness?but unlike those who blame a "culture of poverty," he emphasizes that structural changes can effect a turnaround. His plan to reverse declining employment and social inequality includes proposals for city-suburban collaboration, private-sector partnerships with public schools, national health insurance, and time limits on welfare for able-bodied recipients combined with guaranteed jobs in a public-works program modeled on the New Deal's Works Progress Administration.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Drawing on recent research and three projects sociologist Wilson (now at Harvard after more than 20 years at the University of Chicago) directed, When Work Disappears seeks to replace an ideology-driven debate that explains ghetto problems as caused by either structural factors such as race or cultural pathologies. Wilson's "broader vision" recognizes structural, cultural, and social-psychological factors and analyzes "their interaction in determining the experiences and life chances of inner-city residents." Poverty areas, Wilson notes, experience an extreme form of trends that impact most Americans, e.g., increasing economic insecurity and changes in values that weaken the appeal of the traditional family. Surveys of Chicago's working and welfare poor--and area employers--shatter stereotypes but confirm the isolation and limited options of people in poverty areas. Wilson traces historical U.S. attitudes about poverty, welfare, and race before suggesting policies to "break the cycle of joblessness and improve [students'] preparation for the new [global] labor market." Given the power Wilson attributes to jobs, he pays too little attention to arguments (such as Rifkin's The End of Work, 1994) that full-time employment may soon disappear for most Americans, but Wilson's high profile and well-designed research ensure interest. Mary Carroll