Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass

Rating:
Summary: Once again, the problem with underclass is family structure
Review: Christopher Jencks corroborates what so many other social scientists, including Charles Murray (The Bell Curve, Losing Ground), Ken Aluetta (The Underclass)and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have been saying, and that is that social problems of the underclass are behavioral in nature, not just economic. Purely economic "solutions" (paying poor people money) may even exacerbate their tendencies to make poor choices, i.e., become addicted to drugs, commit crimes, have children out of wedlock. The question is, what to do to change attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that lead to these social pathologies? One of the most interesting parts of this book is where Jencks describes what happened in the sixties and seventies in terms of society's attitudes on sexual morality. He says the upper and middle classes were more able to make adjustments to liberalizing attitudes than the lower classes, who were devastated by the "sexual revolution." He says that lower class individuals have a hard time maintaining the discipline and long term thinking required to manage stable family structures anyway. To take away the neighborhood, church, and social constraints on promiscuity and illigitimacy is to devastate the urban poor, and has led to the 70% illigitimacy rate that we are seeing. Clearly, the public schools, who are barred from teaching morals or the religious underpinnings for them, and instead hand out condoms, exacerbate, in my opinion, the family problems of the poor, and hence, all of society.

Rating:
Summary: thoughtful and thought-provoking
Review: I buy this book for friends, assign it to my college students, and read it again every now and then for fun. Does social policy seem overwhelming - the domain of "experts" rather than ordinary people? By following the author's thoughtful analysis of complex issues, the reader cannot help but acquire critical thinking skills. Those skills can be put to good use in other contexts such as voting, evaluating news accounts, etc. Furthermore, the reader will learn interesting new things about topics covered in the book. Most highly recommended