Overestimating the Underclass, Failing to Understand the Poor

Think of the poor, and the image arises of jobless young black men and unmarried black mothers--an underclass maelstrom sucking the American inner city into a deepening pathology of violence, fractured families and idleness. More and more of the poor seem beyond reach of either the government or the economy, even beyond the reach of society. In Washington, not far from the Capitol grounds, whole neighborhoods are lost to drugs and gunfire.

Americans ask: Why do these people behave this way? Why do they flout the norms of work, marriage, lawfulness, supporting one’s children? Whites blame blacks for underclass crime and antisocial behavior; blacks feel scapegoated, stereotyped and resentful. Meanwhile the problem grows. Economist Isabel V. Sawhill of the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, estimates that the number of people living in hard-core underclass areas more than tripled between 1970 and 1980; the trend seems to have continued in this decade. The underclass culture has proved depressingly, even frighteningly, intractable.

When we talk about the poor, it is this mesmerizing, horrifying story we most often hear. But there is another story--one best not forgotten if Americans hope to look at the poor with clear eyes. The underclass problem is not the poverty problem. Far from it.

The underclass, in fact, is small. “There isn’t anybody doing research in this area who doesn’t conclude that this is a small group,” Sawhill said. Roughly 33 million Americans live in officially designated poverty. Of those, Sawhill finds, about a third are elderly or disabled, and another third are temporarily poor as the result of job loss, divorce or other misfortune. Of the rest, many are single women with children and often with at least part-time jobs. And the hard-core underclass? Looking at 1980 census data, Sawhill found 2.5 million people living in underclass neighborhoods--places with unusually large numbers of school dropouts, female-headed families, welfare dependents and idle men. Of those, 1.1 million were poor. That’s a far smaller number than many people imagine.

By no means are all poor people chronically poor; almost half of them climb out of poverty within a year. And, in 1987, 25% of all poor families with children had one full-time wage-earner (or the equivalent--say, two adults working half-time).

“While we want to keep the focus on people in the underclass, there are many other groups in the poverty population,” said Robert Greenstein, the director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington organization that focuses on poverty issues. “A group that is many times larger than the underclass is the working poor.”

The country in fact does not have one poverty problem--it has two. One is behavioral, a problem of people who do not know how to obey society’s rules, or do not want to, or both. This is the one that generates the lion’s share of both publicity and fear. “If you point out to people that poverty is much higher in the ‘80s than in the ‘70s,” Greenstein said, “an assumption people have is that the large increase in poverty probably occurred in the inner city, probably among blacks.” But the real increase, he says, is higher among whites and two-income families than among blacks and single-parent families. That is the other poverty problem--the one that is primarily economic--and its causes are neither pathological nor particularly mysterious.

The poor were clobbered by the recession of the early 1980s and they have yet to recover all the ground that they lost. The Reagan Administration philosophy of limiting poverty programs to the “truly needy,” Greenstein says, knocked many of the working poor off the public-assistance roles. Unemployment insurance has been scaled back. Thanks largely to Social Security, poverty among the aged has dropped steadily in the last 20 years, but young mothers with children to support have not fared so well: In the average state, the combined value of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the Food Stamp program has fallen by 20% (adjusted for inflation) since 1976.

All in all, according to one recent congressional analysis, almost half of the increase in the number of poor people since 1987 can be traced to cutbacks in state and federal aid. The Bush Administration has so far taken no dramatic steps to reverse this trend. George Bush’s rhetoric has been softer than Ronald Reagan’s but his pocketbook is no fatter. “Most of the specific programs the President has put forward have been pretty small,” Sawhill said. Greenstein calls Bush’s approach so far “largely a policy of drift.”

Misapprehension about the poor can’t make finding a direction away from drift any easier. Nor will it add to public sympathy. To talk about poverty as mainly an “underclass” issue, when in fact it is so much more, is to wall off poverty and make it alien. True, some of the poor are different from you and me (although a 1985 Los Angeles Times survey found that poor people’s values and aspirations are much like everyone else’s). And the hard-core, anti-social underclass may well be beyond the power of government assistance.

Most of the poor, though, remain within reach of traditional income-support programs, such as unemployment insurance (for the temporarily out of work); Supplemental Security Income (for the elderly and disabled poor), and wage subsidies (a more recent innovation, adding federal dollars to low-income workers’ paychecks). The risk today is that the obsession with the underclass, and the growing despair of healing it, will lead policy-makers and the public to forget about the less “dangerous”--but much more numerous--army of poor people who stand quietly among us.