Word: sociologists
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...expanding and the number earning $5,500 to $10,000 is shrinking, almost a third of all black families are still below the poverty line, defined as $5,500 for an urban family of four (only 8.9% of white families are below the line). Says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman: "The awareness that many blacks have been successful means that the underclass is more resentful and more defiant because its alibi isn't there...
There are, of course, moral qualms about the strange phenomenon of efficient but illegal industry. Professor Franco Ferrarotti, a sociologist at the University of Rome, argues that "from a social point of view, home industry is slave labor. It is obviously wrong. It would be better to drop it altogether." Yet he concedes, "It works. Black labor acts as a shock absorber enabling Italy to survive economic crises." His conclusion: "This is a very backward -and yet advanced-way of doing things...
...Sociologist Daniel Bell put it recently, "If economic growth, which has been the means of raising a large portion of the world into the middle class-and also a political solvent to meet the rising expectations of people and finance social welfare expenditures-cannot continue, then the tensions that are being generated will wrack every advanced industrial society and polarize the confrontation between the South ... and the advanced industrialized capitalist societies of the West." IMF directors would doubtless reply that that is a prophecy of apocalypse tomorrow-and they have their hands full warding off disaster...
Like most other experts, Harvard Sociologist Talcott Parsons is "skeptical" that the pillage in New York would set off a new nationwide wave of disturbances. But behaviorists generally believe that, given a similar combination of total darkness, blistering heat and simmering anger on the part of an underclass, much the same kind of riotous looting could erupt in almost any other city...
California's current mood does not greatly surprise its demographers. Having skewed its population by welcoming successive waves of youth, it is now suffering the "baby-boom doldrums" of a generation confronting its inevitable mortality. Sociologists view the despair as something that logically follows a period of growth, the end of heady promise. But they worry about the effects of a prolonged malaise. Observes University of California Sociologist Neil Smelser: "There is abundant evidence that California is presently in a state of psychological depression because of the hollow notion that things are running out. Californians believe the best...