Word: underclass
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...beyond the era of self-congratulation and beer-commercial patriotism. America cannot afford stupidity. It costs too much in the world. Education therefore must have a priority, and not just through more money; it needs discipline and imagination. America can no longer afford racism and a neglect of the underclass. They also cost too much. These are problems that must be solved not only as a matter of social justice (which they are) but as a question of America's long-term economic survival...
...least 14 films. At heart, the novel's conflict is metaphysical: Valjean believes in the forgiving God of the New Testament, Javert in the retributive God of the Old Testament. The story resounds with images of Christian redemption. Yet it is by turns a panorama of the underclass, a Gothic romance about love at first sight threatened by family secrets, a psychological study and a radical tract. The novel's scale and complexity seemingly defy adaptation to a musical, especially one that in the fashion of opera, sets every word to song. The stage version's triumph is that...
That trend, though, seems to have reversed itself: the crime rate rose again in 1985 and early 1986. Blumstein offers this explanation: while there are fewer young males generally, there has been a disproportionate increase of males in the underclass. This group, with all its attendant ills of poverty, alienation and broken homes, is particularly prone to criminal behavior. "What we're seeing," says Blumstein, "is a changing social-class composition, and crime correlates with social class...
...have only been getting worse. Poverty rates have generally risen since the late '70s, and the rise has been especially rapid among the children the system was designed to help. Welfare mothers who rear children who in turn go on relief are a core element of the so-called underclass. David Ellwood, a Harvard authority on welfare, figures that a quarter of all AFDC recipients have received benefits, off and on, for ten years or more; at any one time they constitute a startling 60% of all recipients. The rise of illegitimate births, especially among ghetto teenagers, has probably done...
...from upstate New York, is a leading advocate of urban enterprise zones, which would use tax incentives to encourage businesses to provide jobs in depressed urban areas. Others feel that it is necessary to create work programs that will draw young blacks away from the inner cities, where the underclass culture makes it extremely difficult to break out of the poverty cycle. Nicholas Lemann, a journalist with the Atlantic, describes the migration of unskilled Southern blacks into the inner cities followed by the subsequent migration out by those with steady jobs. He argues that the only path into the American...