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</form><br clear="all"></li></div></div><i>New York Times OP/ED</i><br><hr size="1" align="left">
<div class="timestamp">February 8, 2012</div>
<h1>The White Underclass</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Nicholas D. Kristof" class="meta-per">NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF</a></h6>
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<p>
Persistent poverty is America’s great moral challenge, but it’s far more than that. </p>
<p>
As a practical matter, we can’t solve educational problems, health care
costs, government spending or economic competitiveness so long as a
chunk of our population is locked in an underclass. Historically,
“underclass” has often been considered to be a euphemism for race, but
increasingly it includes elements of the white working class as well.
</p>
<p>
That’s the backdrop for the uproar over Charles Murray’s latest book,
“Coming Apart.” Murray critically examines family breakdown among
working-class whites and the decline in what he sees as traditional
values of diligence. </p>
<p>
Liberals have mostly denounced the book, and I, too, disagree with
important parts of it. But he’s right to highlight social dimensions of
the crisis among low-skilled white workers. </p>
<p>
My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about
925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as
a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed
white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the
pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the
last generation or two. </p>
<p>
One scourge has been drug abuse. In rural America, it’s not heroin but
methamphetamine; it has shattered lives in Yamhill and left many with
criminal records that make it harder to find good jobs. With parents in
jail, kids are raised on the fly. </p>
<p>
Then there’s the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white
American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births
are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.
</p>
<p>
Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional
marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree:
Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor
(more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion
when things go wrong). </p>
<p>
One study of low-income delinquent young men in Boston found that one of
the factors that had the greatest impact in turning them away from
crime was marrying women they cared about. As <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/steven_pinker/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Steven Pinker." class="meta-per">Steven Pinker</a>
notes in his recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: “The idea
that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as
Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern
criminology.” </p>
<p>
Jobs are also critical as a pathway out of poverty, and Murray is
correct in noting that it is troubling that growing numbers of
working-class men drop out of the labor force. The proportion of men of
prime working age with only a high school education who say they are
“out of the labor force” has quadrupled since 1968, to 12 percent.
</p>
<p>
In 1965, <a href="http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm">Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a famous report</a>
warning of a crisis in African-American family structures, and many
liberals at the time accused him of something close to racism. In
retrospect, Moynihan was right to sound the alarms. </p>
<p>
Today, I fear we’re facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class
America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs,
despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role
of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility. We need a
national conversation about these dimensions of poverty, and maybe
Murray can help trigger it. I fear that liberals are too quick to think
of inequality as basically about taxes. Yes, our tax system is a
disgrace, but poverty is so much deeper and more complex than that.
</p>
<p>
Where Murray is profoundly wrong, I think, is to blame liberal social
policies for the pathologies he examines. Yes, I’ve seen disability
programs encourage some people to drop out of the labor force. But there
were far greater forces at work, such as the decline in good union
jobs. </p>
<p>
Eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or
didn’t pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid
living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill. That’s what
their parents had done. But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs
collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with
immigrants. </p>
<p>
There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need
more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids
being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is
far cheaper than incarcerating them. </p>
<p>
<a href="http://www.mdrc.org/publications/616/overview.html">A new study</a>
finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them
22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This
initiative, by the <a href="http://ceoworks.org/">Center for Employment Opportunities</a>, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits. </p>
<p>
So let’s get real. A crisis is developing in the white working class, a byproduct of growing <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about income inequality." class="meta-classifier">income inequality</a>
in America. The pathologies are achingly real. But the solution isn’t
finger-wagging, or averting our eyes — but opportunity. </p>
<div class="authorIdentification">
<p style="text-align:center">•</p>
<p>I invite you to visit my blog, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground">On the Ground</a>. Please also join me on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/kristof">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://plus.google.com/102839963139173448834/posts?hl=en">Google+</a>, watch my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/nicholaskristof">YouTube videos</a> and follow me on <a href="http://twitter.com/nickkristof">Twitter</a>.</p>
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