Word: social
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book, Wilson challenges liberal orthodoxies by candidly exploring the social pathologies -- drug use, crime, teen pregnancies, welfare dependency and other destructive behavior -- evident in the inner cities. Discussion of these catastrophic ghetto problems by liberals has been stifled, he says, ever since black scholars raised a storm over the 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the breakdown of the black family. In the absence of forthright research from liberals and blacks, writes Wilson, right-wing scholars like Charles Murray (Losing Ground) gained influence with the Reagan Administration by asserting that welfare programs had become so lucrative that they provided...
...skilled workers and the increase in the number of service jobs that either require white-collar skill or provide little chance for advancement. This had a disastrous impact on young black males, whose unemployment rate is more than double that of their white counterparts, and it leads to other social problems. Because there are only 60 or so stably employed marriageable men for every 100 women in numerous ghettos, black females often elect not to marry if they become pregnant...
...thriving churches, small businesses and schools. But desegregation laws allowed blacks with stable jobs to flee the ghettos in great numbers, knocking the props from local institutions. Those left behind formed an increasingly homogeneous underclass whose members suffered from the "concentration effects" of isolation from mainstream education, job and social networks...
This thesis is already under attack by some black social scientists. Says Harriette Pipes McAdoo, professor of social work at Howard University: "It blames ghetto people who got out rather than external forces. It sounds good, but there is no empirical data to support it. It's rather ridiculous...
...best-known of Huntington's dozen books, Political Order in Changing Societies, in which the ratio of aspiration to % satisfaction was examined in 62 countries. "The overall correlation between frustration and instability," Huntington wrote, "was 0.50." Says Lang: "This is utter nonsense. How does Huntington measure things like social frustration? Does he have a social-frustration meter? I object to the academy's certifying as science what are merely political opinions...