“THE UNDERCLASS”

Charles Murray (1990)

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THE CONCEPT OF UNDERCLASS

‘Underclass’ is an ugly word, with its whiff of Marx and the lumpenproletariat.  Perhaps because it is ugly, ‘underclass’ as used in Britain tends to be sanitized, a sort of synonym for people who are not just poor, but especially poor.  So let us get it straight from the outset: the ‘underclass’ does not refer to a degree of poverty, but a type of poverty.

                It is not a new concept.  I grew up knowing what the underclass was; we just didn’t call it that in those days.  In the small Iowa town where I lived, I was taught by my middle-class parents that there were two kinds of poor people.  One class of poor people was never even called ‘poor’.  I came to understand that they simply lived within low incomes, as my own parents had done when they were young.  Then there was another set of poor people, just a handful of them.  These poor people didn’t lack just money.  They were defined by their behaviour.  Their homes were littered and unkempt.  The men in the family were unable to hold a job for more than a few weeks at a time.  Drunkenness was common.  The children grew up ill-schooled and ill-behaved and contributed a disproportionate share of the local juvenile delinquents.

                British observers of the nineteenth century knew these people.  To Henry Mayhew, whose articles in the Morning Chronicle in 1850 drew the Victorians’ attention to poverty, they were the ‘dishonest poor’, a member of which was

distinguished from the civilized man by his repugnance to regular and continuous labour – by his want of providence in laying up a store for the future – by his inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly removed from immediate apprehensions – by his passion for stupefying herbs and roots and, when possible, for intoxicating fermented liquors…

Other popular labels were ‘undeserving’, ‘unrespectable’, ‘depraved’, ‘debased’, ‘disreputable’ or ‘feckless’ poor.

                As Britain entered the 1960s a century later, this distinction between honest and dishonest poor people had been softened.  The second kind of poor person was no longer ‘undeserving’; rather, he was the product of a ‘culture of poverty’.  But intellectuals as well as the man on the street continued to accept that poor people were not all alike.  Most were doing their best under difficult circumstances; a small number were pretty much as Mayhew had described them.  Then came the intellectual reformation that swept both the United States and Britain at about the same time, in the mid-1960s, and with it came a new way of looking at the poor.  Henceforth, the poor were to be homogenized.  The only difference between poor people and everyone else, we were told, was that the poor had less money.  More importantly, the poor were all alike.  There was no such thing as the ne’er—do-well poor person – he was a figment of the prejudices of a parochial middle class.  Poor people, all poor people, were equally victims, and would be equally successful if only society gave them a fair shake.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE US AND THE UK 

The difference between the United States and Britain was that the United States reached the future first.  During the last half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s something strange and frightening was happening among poor people in United States.  Poor communities that had consisted mostly of hardworking folks began deteriorating, sometimes falling apart altogether.  Drugs, crime, illegitimacy, homelessness, drop-out from the job market, drop-out from school, casual violence – all the measures that were available to the social scientists showed large increases, focused in poor communities.  As the 1980s began, the growing population of ‘the other kind of poor people’ could no longer be ignored, and a label came into use.  In the US, we became to call them the underclass. 

                For a time, the intellectual conventional wisdom continued to hold that ‘underclass’ was just another pejorative attempt to label the poor.  But the label had come into use because there was no longer any denying reality.  What had once been a small fraction of the American poor had become a sizeable and worrisome population.  An underclass existed, and none of the ordinary kinds of social policy solutions seemed able to stop its growth.  One by one, the American social scientists who had initially rejected the concept of an underclass fell silent, then began to use it themselves. 

                By and large, British intellectuals still disdain the term.  In 1987, the social historian John Macnicol summed up the prevailing view in the Journal of Social Policy, (vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 293-318) writing dismissively that underclass was nothing more than a refuted concept periodically resurrected by Conservatives ‘who wish to constrain the redistributive potential of state welfare’.  But there are beginning to be breaks in the ranks.  Frank Field, the prominent Labour MP, has just published a book with ‘underclass’ in its subtitle.  The newspapers, watching the United States and seeing shadows of its problems in Britain, have begun to use the term.  As someone who has been analyzing this phenomenon in the United States, I arrived in Britain earlier this year, a visitor from a plague area come to see whether the disease is spreading. 

                With all the reservations that a stranger must feel in passing judgement in an unfamiliar country, I will jump directly to the conclusion: Britain does have an underclass still largely out of sight and still smaller than the one in the United States.  But it is growing rapidly.  Within the next decade, it will probably become as large (proportionately) as the United States’ underclass.  It could easily become larger. 

                I am not talking here about an unemployment problem that can be solved by more jobs, nor about a poverty problem that can be solved by higher benefits.  Britain has a growing population of working aged healthy people who live in a different world from other Britons, who are raising their children to live in it, and whose values are now contaminating the life of entire neighbourhoods – which is one of the most insidious aspects of the phenomenon, for neighbours who don’t share those values cannot isolate themselves. 

                There are many ways to identify an underclass.  I will concentrate on three phenomena that have turned out to be early warning signals in the United States: illegitimacy, violent crime and drop-out from the labour force.  In each case I will be using the simplest of data, collected and published by Britain’s Government’s Statistical Service.  I begin with illegitimacy, which in my view is the best predictor of an underclass in the making. 

ILLEGITIMACY AND THE UNDERCLASS 

It is a proposition that angers many people.  Why should it be a ‘problem’ that a woman has a child without a husband?  Why isn’t a single woman perfectly capable of raising a healthy, happy child, if only the state will provide a decent level of support so that she may do so?  Why is raising a child without having married any more of a problem than raising a child after a divorce?  The very word ‘illegitimate’ is intellectually illegitimate.  Using it in a gathering of academics these days is a faux pas, causing pained silence. 

                I nonetheless focus on illegitimacy rather than on the more general phenomenon of one-parent families because, in a world where all social trends are ambiguous, illegitimacy is less ambiguous than other forms of single parenthood.  It is a matter of degree.  Of course some unmarried mothers are excellent mothers and some unmarried fathers are excellent fathers.  Of course some divorced parents disappear from the children’s lives altogether and some divorces have more destructive effects on the children than a failure to marry would have had.  Being without two parents is generally worse for the child than having two parents, no matter how it happens.  But illegitimacy is the purest form of being without two parents – legally, the child is without a father from day one; he is often without one practically as well.  Further, illegitimacy bespeaks an attitude on the part of one or both parents that getting married is not an essential part of siring or giving birth to a child; this in itself distinguishes their mindset from that of people who do feel strongly that getting married is essential. 

                Call it what you will, illegitimacy has been skyrocketing since 1979.  I use ‘skyrocketing’ advisedly.  […] From the end of the Second World War until 1960, Britain enjoyed a very low and even slightly declining illegitimacy ratio.  From 1960 until 1978 the ratio increased, but remained modest by international standards – as late as 1979, Britain’s illegitimacy ratio was only 10.6 per cent, one of the lowest rates in the industrialized West.  Then, suddenly, during a period when fertility was steady, the illegitimacy ratio began to rise very rapidly – to 14.1 per cent by 1982, 18.9 per cent by 1985 and finally to 25.6 per cent by 1988.  If present trends continue, Britain will pass the United States in this unhappy statistic in 1990. 

                The sharp rise is only half the story.  The other an equally important half is that illegitimate births are not scattered evenly among the British population.  In this, press reports can be misleading.  There is much publicity about the member of the Royal family who has a child without a husband, or the socially prominent young career woman who deliberately decides to have a baby on her own, but these are comparatively rare events.  The increase in illegitimate births is strikingly concentrated among the lowest social class. 

MUNICIPAL DISTRICTS 

This is especially easy to document in Britain, where one may fit together the Government’s Statistical Services birth data on municipal districts with the detailed socioeconomic data from the general census.  When one does so for 169 metropolitan districts and boroughs in England and Wales with data from both sources, the relationship between social class and illegitimacy is so obvious that the statistical tests become superfluous.  Municipal districts with high concentrations of household heads in Class I (professional persons, by the classification used for many years by the Government’s Statistical Service) have illegitimacy ratios in the low teens (Wokingham was lowest as of 1987, with only 9 of every 100 born illegitimate) while municipalities like Nottingham and Southwark, with populations most heavily weighted with Class V household heads (unskilled labourers), have illegitimacy ratios of more than 40 per cent (the highest in 1987 was Lambeth, with 46 per cent). 

                The statistical tests confirm this relationship.  The larger the proportion of people who work at unskilled jobs and the larger the proportion who are out of the labour force, the higher the illegitimacy ratio, in a quite specific and regular numeric relationship.  The strength of the relationship may be illustrated this way: suppose you were limited to two items of information about a community – the percentage of people in Class V and the percentage of people who are ‘economically inactive’.  With just these two measures, you could predict the illegitimacy ratio, usually within just three percentage points of the true number.  As a statistician might summarize it, these two measures of economic status ‘explain 51 per cent of the variants’ – an extremely strong relationship by the standards of the social sciences. 

                In short, the notion that illegitimate births are a general phenomenon, that young career women and girls from middle class homes are doing it just as much as anyone else, is flatly at odds with the facts.  There has been a proportional increase in illegitimate births among all communities, but the prevalence of illegitimate births is drastically higher among the lower-class communities than among the upper-class ones. 

NEIGHBOURHOODS 

The data I have just described are based on municipal districts.  The picture gets worse when we move down to the level of the neighborhood, though precise numbers are hard to come by.  The proporotion of illegitimate children in a specific poor neighbourhood can be in the vicinity not of 25 per cent, nor even of 40 per cent, but a hefty majority.  And in this concentration of illegitimate births lies a generational catastrophe.  Illegitimacy produces an underclass for one compelling practical reason having nothing to do with morality or the sanctity of marriage.  Namely: communities need families.  Communities need fathers. 

                This is not an argument that many intellectuals in Britain are ready to accept.  I found that discussing the issue was like being in a time warp, hearing in 1989 the same rationalizations about illegitimacy that American experts used in the 1970s and early 1980s. 

[…]

‘MAINLY A BLACK PROBLEM’? 

‘It’s mainly a black problem’.  I heard this everywhere, from political clubs in Westminster to some quite sophisticated demographers in the statistical research offices.  The statement is correct in this one, very limited sense: blacks born in the West Indies have much higher illegitimacy ratios – about 48 per cent of live births in the latest numbers – than all whites.  But blacks constitute such a tiny proportion of the British population that their contribution to the overall illegitimacy ratio is miniscule.  If there had been no blacks whatsoever in Britain (and I am including all blacks in Britain in this statement, not just those who were born abroad), the overall British illegitimacy ratio in 1988 would have dropped by about 1 percentage point, from 25 per cent to about 24 per cent.  Blacks are not causing Britain’s illegitimacy problem. 

                In passing, it is worth adding that the overall effect of ethnic minorities living in the UK is to reduce the size of the illegitimacy ratio.  The Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs and East Africans in Britain have illegitimacy ratios that are tiny compared with those of British whites. 

[…] 

CLICHES ABOUT ROLE MODELS ARE TRUE 

It turns out that the clichés about role models are true.  Children grow up making sense of the world around them in terms of their own experience.  Little boys don’t naturally grow up to be responsible fathers and husbands.  They don’t naturally grow up knowing how to get up every morning at the same time and go to work.  They don’t naturally grow up thinking that work is not just a way to make money, but a way to hold one’s head high in the world.  And most emphatically of all, little boys do not reach adolescents naturally wanting to refrain from sex, just as little girls don’t become adolescents naturally wanting to refrain from having babies.  In all these ways and many more, boys and girls grow into responsible parents and neighbours and workers because they are imitating the adults around them. 

                That is why single parenthood is a problem for communities, and that is why illegitimacy is the most worrisome aspect of single parenthood.  Children tend to behave like the adults around them.  A child with a mother and no father, living in a neighbourhood of mothers with no fathers, judges by what he sees.  You can send in social workers and teachers and clergy to tell a young male that when he grows up he should be a good father to his children, but he does not know what that means unless he has seen it.  Fifteen years ago, there was hardly a poor neighbour in urban Britain where children did not still see plentiful examples of good fathers around them.  Today, the balance has already shifted in many poor neighbourhoods.  In a few years, the situation will be much worse, for this is a problem that nurtures itself. 

CHILD REARING IN SINGLE PARENT COMMUNITIES 

Hardly any of this gets into the public dialogue.  In the standard newspaper or television story on single parenthood, the reporter tracks down a struggling single parent and reports her efforts to raise her children under difficult circumstances,  ending with an indictment of a stingy social system that does not give her enough to get along.  The ignored story is what it’s like for the two parent families trying to raise their children in neighbourhoods where they now represent the exception, not the rule.  Some of the problems may seem trivial but must be painfully poignant to anyone who is a parent.  Take, for example, the story told me by a father who lives in such a neighbourhood in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, about the time when he went to his little girl’s Christmas play at school.  He was the only father there – hardly any of the other children had fathers – and his daughter, embarrassed because she was different, asked him not to come to the school any more. 

The lack of fathers is also associated with a level of physical unruliness that makes life difficult.  The same Birkenhead father and his wife raised their first daughter as they were raised, to be polite and considerate – and she suffered for it.  Put simply, her schoolmates weren’t being raised to be polite and considerate – they weren’t being ‘raised’ at all in some respects.  We have only a small body of systematic research on child rearing practices in contemporary low income, single parent communities; it is one of those unfashionable topics.  But the unsystematic reports I heard in towns like Birkenhead and council estates like Easterhouse in Glasgow are consistent with reports from inner-city Washington and New York: in communities without fathers, the kids tend to run wild.  The fewer the fathers, the greater the tendency.  ‘Run wild’ can mean such simple things as young children having no set bedtime.  It can mean them being left alone in the house at night while mummy goes out.  It can mean an 18-month-old toddler allowed to play in the street.  And, in the case of the couple trying to raise their children as they have been raised, it can mean children who are inordinately physical and aggressive in their relationships with other children.  With their second child, the Birkenhead parents eased up on their requirements for civil behaviour, realizing that their children had to be able to defend themselves against threats that their parents hadn’t faced when they were children.  The third child is still an infant, and the mother has made a conscious decision.  ‘I won’t knock the aggression out of her,’ she said to me.  Then she paused, and added angrily, ‘it’s wrong to have to decide that.’ 

THE KEY TO AN UNDERCLASS 

I can hear the howls of objection already – lots of families raise children who have those kinds of problems, not just poor single parents.  Of course.  But this is why it is important to talk to parents who have lived in both kinds of communities.  Ask them why there is any difference in child-raising between a neighbourhood composed mostly of married couples and a neighbourhood composed mostly of single mothers.  In Britain as in the United States – conduct the inquiries yourself – the overwhelming response is that the difference is large and palpable.  The key to an underclass is not the individual instance but a situation in which a very large proportion of an entire community lacks fathers, and this is far more common in poor communities than it is in rich ones.

CRIME AND THE UNDERCLASS

Crime is the next place to look for an underclass, for several reasons.  First and most obviously, the habitual criminal is the classic member of an underclass.  He lives off mainstream society without participating in it.  But habitual criminals are only part of the problem.  Once again, the key issue in thinking about an underclass is how the community functions, and crime can devastate a community in two especially important ways.  To the extent that the members of a community are victimized by crime, the community tends to become fragmented.  To the extent that many people in a community engage in crime as a matter of course, all sorts of the socializing norms of the community change, from the kind of men that the younger boys choose as heroes to the standards of morality in general.

                Consider first the official crime figures, reported annually for England by the Home Office.  As in the case of illegitimacy, I took for granted before I began this exploration that England had much lower crime rates than the United States.  It therefore came as a shock to discover that England and Wales (which I will subsequently refer to as England) have a combined property crime rate apparently as high, and probably higher, than that of the United States.  (I did not compare rates with Scotland and Northern Ireland, which are reported separately.)  I say ‘apparently’ because Britain and the United States use somewhat different definitions of property crime.  But burglaries, which are similarly defined in both countries, provide an example.  In 1988, England had 1,623 reported burglaries per 100,000 population, compared with 1,309 in the US.  Adjusting for the transatlantic differences on definition, England also appears to have had higher rates of motor vehicle theft than the United States.  The rates for other kind of theft seem to have been roughly the same.  I wasn’t the only one who was surprised at these comparisons.  I found that if you want to attract startled and incredulous attention in England, mention casually that England has a higher property crime rate than that notorious crime centre of the western world, the United States.  No one will believe you.

VIOLENT CRIME

The understandable reason why they don’t believe you is that violent crime in England remains much lower than violent crime in the United States, and it is violent crime that engenders most anxiety and anger.  In this regard, Britain still lags far behind the US.  This is most conspicuously true for the most violent of all crimes, homicide.  In all of 1988, England and Wales recorded just 624 homicides.  The United States averaged that many every 11 days – 20,675 for the whole year.

                That’s the good news. The bad news is that the violent crime rate in England and Wales has been rising very rapidly. […]

                The size of the increase isn’t as bad as it first looks, because England began with such a small initial rate (it’s easy to double your money if you start with only a few pence – of which, more in a moment).  Still, the rise is steep, and it became much steeper in about 1968.  Compare the gradual increase from 1955 to 1968 with what happened subsequently.  By 1988, England had 314 violent crimes reported per 100,000 people.  The really bad news is that you have been experiencing this increase despite demographic trends that should have been working to your advantage.  This point is important enough to explain at greater length.

                The most frequent offenders, the ones who puff up the violent crime statistics, are males in the second half of their teens.  As males get older, they tend to become more civilized.  In both England and the United States, the number of males in this troublesome age group increased throughout the 1970s, and this fact was widely used as an explanation for increasing crime.  But since the early 1980s, the size if the young male cohort has been decreasing in both countries.  In the United Kingdom, for example, the number of males aged 15 to 19 hit its peak in 1982 and has subsequently decreased both as a percentage of the population and in raw numbers (by a little more than 11 per cent in both cases).  Ergo, the violent crime rate ‘should’ have decreased as well.  But it didn’t.  Despite the reduction in the number of males in the highest-offending age group after 1982, the violent crime rate in England from 1982 to 1988 rose by 43 per cent. 

                Here I must stop and briefly acknowledge a few of the many ways in which people will object that the official crime rates don’t mean anything – but only briefly, because this way lies a statistical abyss. 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OFFICIAL CRIME RATES 

One common objection is that the increase in the crime rate reflects economic growth (because there are more things to steal, especially cars and the things in them) rather than any real change in criminal behaviour.  If so, one has to ask why England enjoyed a steady decline in crime through the last half of the nineteenth century, when economic growth was explosive.  But, to avoid argument, let us acknowledge that economic growth does make interpreting the changes in the property crime rate tricky, and focus instead on violent crime, which is not so directly facilitated by economic growth. 

                Another common objection is that the increase in crime is a mirage.  One version of this is that crime just seems to be higher because more crimes are being reported to the police than before (because of greater access to telephones, for example, or because of the greater prevalence of insurance).  The brief answer here is that it works both ways.  Rape and sexual assault are more likely to be reported now, because of changes in public attitudes and judicial procedures regarding those crimes.  An anonymous purse-snatch is less likely to be reported, because the victim doesn’t think it will do any good.  The aggregate effect of a high crime rate can be to reduce reporting, and this is most true of poor neighbourhoods where attitudes toward the police are ambiguous. 

                The most outrageously spurious version of the ‘crime isn’t really getting worse’ argument uses rate of increase rather than the magnitude of increase to make the case.  The best example in Britain is the argument that public concern about muggings in the early 1970s was simply an effort to scapegoat young blacks, and resulted in a ‘moral panic’.  The sociologist Stuart Hall and his colleagues made this case at some length in a book entitled ‘Policing the Crisis’ (London: Macmillan, 1978) in which, among other things, they blithely argued that because the rate of increase in violent crimes was decreasing, the public’s concern was unwarranted.  It is the familiar problem of low baselines.  From 1950 to 1958, violent crime in England rose by 88 per cent (the crime rate began at 14 crimes per 100, 000 persons and rose by 13).  From 1980 to 1988 violent crime rose by only 60 per cent (it began at 196 crimes per 100,000 persons and rose by 118).  In other words, by the logic of Hall and his colleagues, things are getting much better, because the rate of increase in the 1980s has been lower than it was during the comparable period of the 1950s.  […] 

THE INTELLECTUAL CONVENTIONAL WISDOM 

The denial by intellectuals that crime really has been getting worse spills over into denial that poor communities are more violent places than affluent communities.  To the people who live in poor communities, this does not make much sense.  One man in a poor, high-crime community told me about his experience in an open university where he had decided to try to improve himself.  He took a sociology course about poverty.  The professor kept talking about this ‘nice little world that the poor live in’, the man remembered.  The professor scoffed at the reactionary myth that poor communities are violent places.  To the man who lived in such a community, it was ‘bloody drivel’.  A few weeks later, a class exercise called for the students to canvass a poor neighbourhood.  The professor went along, but apparently he, too, suspected that some of his pronouncements were bloody drivel – he cautiously stayed in his car and declined to knock on doors himself.  And that raises the most interesting question regarding the view that crime has not risen, or that crime is not especially a problem in lower class communities: do any of the people who hold this view actually believe it, to the extent that they take no more precautions walking in a slum neighbourhood than they do in a middle class suburb? 

                These comments will not still the battle over the numbers.  But I will venture this prediction, once again drawn from the American experience.  After a few more years, quietly and without anyone having to admit that he was wrong, the intellectual conventional wisdom in Britain as in the United States will undergo a gradual transition.  After all the statistical artifacts are taken into account and argued over, it will be decided that England is indeed becoming a more dangerous place in which to live: that this unhappy process is not occurring everywhere, but disproportionately in particular types of neighbourhoods; and that those neighbourhoods turn out to be the ones in which an underclass is taking over.  Reality will once again force theory to its knees. 

UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE UNDERCLASS

If illegitimate births are the leading indicator of an underclass and violent crime a proxy measure of its development, the definitive proof that an underclass has arrived is that large numbers of young, healthy, low-income males choose not to take jobs.  (The young idle rich are a separate problem.)  The decrease in labour force participation is the most elusive of the trends in the growth of the British underclass. 

                The main barrier to understanding what’s going on is the high unemployment of the 1980s.  The official statistics distinguish between ‘unemployed’ and ‘economically inactive’, but Britain’s unemployment figures (like those in the US) include an unknown but probably considerable number of people who manage to qualify for beneift even if in reality very few job opportunities would tempt them to work. 

                On the other side of the ledger, over a prolonged period of high unemployment the ‘economically inactive’ category includes men who would like to work but have given up.  To make matters still more complicated, there is the ‘black economy’ to consider, in which people who are listed as ‘economically inactive’ are really working for cash, not reporting their income to the authorities.  So we are looking through a glass darkly, and I have more questions than answers. 

ECONOMIC INACTIVITY AND SOCIAL CLASS 

The simple relationship of economic inactivity to social class is strong, just as it was for illegitimacy.  According to the 1981 census data, the municipal districts with high proportions of household heads who are in Class V ‘unskilled labour’ also tend to have the highest levels of ‘economically inactive’ persons of working age (statistically, the proportion of Class V households explains more than a third of the variants when inactivity because of retirement is taken into account). 

                This is another way of saying that you will find many more working-aged people who are neither working nor looking for work in the slums than in the suburbs.  Some of these persons are undoubtedly discouraged workers, but two questions need to be asked and answered with far more data than are currently available – specifically, questions about lower class young males. 

LOWER CLASS YOUNG MALES 

First, after taking into account Britain’s unemployment problems when the 1981 census was taken, were the levels of economic inactivity among young males consistent with the behaviour of their older brothers and fathers during earlier periods?  Or were they dropping out more quickly and often than earlier cohorts of young men? 

                Second, Britain has for the past few years been conducting a natural experiment, with an economic boom in the south and high unemployment in the north.  If lack of jobs is the problem, then presumably economic inactivity among lower-class healthy males in the south has plummeted to insignificant levels.  Has it?

                The theme that I heard from a variety of people in Birkenhead and Easterhouse was that the youths who came of age in the late 1970s are in danger of being a lost generation.  All of them did indeed ascribe the problem to the surge in unemployment at the end of the 1970s.  ‘They came out of school at the wrong time,’ as one older resident of Easterhouse put it, and have never in their lives held a real job.  They are now in their late twenties.  As economic times improve, they are competing for the same entry-level jobs as people 10 years younger, and employers prefer to hire the youngsters.  But it’s more complicated than that, he added.  ‘They’ve lost the picture of what they’re going to be doing.’  When he was growing up, he could see himself in his father’s job.  Not these young men.

THE GENERATION GAP

This generation gap was portrayed to me as being only a few years wide.  A man from Birkenhead in his early thirties who had worked steadily from the time he left school until 1979, when he lost his job as an assembly-line worker, recalled how the humiliation and desperation to work remained even as his unemployment stretched from months into years.  He – and the others in their thirties and forties and fifties – were the ones showing up at six in the morning when jobs were advertised.  They were the ones who sought jobs even if they paid less than the benefit rate.

                ‘The only income I wanted was enough to be free of the bloody benefit system,’ he said.  ‘It was like a rope around my neck.’  The phrase for being on benefit that some of them used, ‘on the suck’, says a great deal about how little they like their situation.

                This attitude is no small asset to Britain.  In some inner-cities of the US, the slang for robbing someone is ‘getting paid’.  Compare that inversion of values with the values implied by ‘on the suck’.  Britain in 1989 has resources that make predicting the course of the underclass on the basis of the US experience very dicey.

                But the same men who talk this way often have little in common with their sons and younger brothers.  Talking to the boys in their late teens and early twenties about jobs, I heard nothing about the importance of work as a source of self-respect and no talk of just wanting enough income to be free of the benefit system.  To make a decent living, a youth of 21 explained to me, you need £200 a week – after taxes.  He would accept less if it was all he could get.  But he conveyed clearly that he would feel exploited.  As for the government’s employment training scheme, YTS, that’s ‘slave labour’.  Why, another man asked me indignantly, should he and his friends be deprived of their right to a full unemployment benefit just because they haven’t reached 18 yet?  It sounded strange to my ears – a ‘right’ to unemployment benefit for a school-age minor who’s never held a job.  But there is no question in any of their minds that that’s exactly what the unemployment benefit is: a right, in every sense of the word.  The boys did not mention what they consider to be their part of the bargain.

                ‘I was brought up thinking work is something you are morally obliged to do,’ as one older man put it.  With the younger generation, he said, ‘that culture isn’t going to be there at all.’  And there are anecdotes to go with these observations.  For example, the contractors carrying out the extensive housing refurbishment now going on at Easterhouse are obliged to hire local youths for unskilled labour as part of a work experience scheme.  Thirty Easterhouse young men applied for a recent set of openings.  Thirteen were accepted.  Ten actually came to work the first day.  By the end of the first week, only one was still showing up.

A GENERATION GAP BY CLASS

My hypothesis – the evidence is too fragmentary to call it more than that – is that Britain is experiencing a generation gap by class.  Well-educated young people from affluent homes are working on larger proportions and working longer hours than ever.  The attitudes and behaviour of the middle-aged working class haven’t changed much.  The change in stance toward the labour force is concentrated among lower class young men in their teens and twenties.  It is not a huge change.  I am not suggesting that a third or a quarter or even a fifth of lower-class young people are indifferent to work.  An underclass doesn’t have to be huge to become a problem.

                The problem is remarkably difficult to fix.  It seems simple – just make decent paying jobs available.  But it doesn’t work that way.  In the States, we’ve tried nearly everything – training programmes, guaranteed jobs, special ‘socialization’ programmes that taught not only job skills but also ‘work-readiness skills’ such as getting to work on time, ‘buddy’ systems whereby an experienced older man tried to ease the trainee into the world of work.  The results of these strategies, carefully evaluated against control groups, have consistently showed little effect at best, no effect most commonly, and occasionally negative effects.

                If this seems too pessimistic for British youths, the Government or some private foundation may easily try this experiment: go down to the Bull Ring near Waterloo Bridge where one of London’s largest cardboard cities is located.  Pass over the young men who are alcoholics or drug addicts or mentally disturbed, selecting only those who seem clear-headed (there are many).  Then offer them jobs at a generous wage for unskilled labour and see what happens.  Add in a training component if you wish.  Or, if you sympathize with their lack of interest on unskilled jobs, offer them more extensive training that would qualify them for skilled jobs.  Carry out your promises to them, spend as much as you wish, and measure the results after 2 years against the experience of similar youths who received no such help.  I am betting that you, too, would find ‘no effect’.  It is an irretrievable disaster for young men to grow up without being socialized into the world of work.

WORK IS AT THE CENTRE OF LIFE

The reason why it is a disaster is not that these young men cause upright taxpayers to spend too much money supporting them.  That is a nuisance.  The disaster is to the young men themselves and the communities in which they live.  Looking around the inner cities of the United States, a view which has been eloquently voiced in the past by people as disparate as Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx seems increasingly validated by events: work is at the centre of life.  By remaining out of the work force during the crucial formative years, young men aren’t just losing the few years of job experience.  They are missing out on the time in which they need to have been acquiring the skills and the networks of friends and experiences that enable them to establish a place for themselves – not only in the workplace, but a vantage point from which they can make sense of themselves and their lives.

                Furthermore, when large numbers of young men don’t work, the communities around them break down, just as they break down when large numbers of young unmarried women have babies.  The two phenomena are intimately related.  Just as work is more important than merely making a living, getting married and raising a family are more than a way to pass the time.  Supporting a family is a central means for a man to prove to himself that he is a ‘mensch’.  Men who do not support families find other ways to prove that they are men, which tend to take various destructive forms.  As many have commented through the centuries, young males are essentially barbarians for whom marriage – meaning not just the wedding vows, but the act of taking responsibility for a wife and children – is an indispensable civilizing force.  Young men who don’t work don’t make good marriage material.  Often they don’t get married at all; when they do, they haven’t the ability to fill their traditional role.  In either case, too many of them remain barbarians.

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AUTHENTIC SELF-GOVERNMENT IS THE KEY

The alternative I advocate is to have the central government stop trying to be clever and instead get out of the way, giving poor communities (and affluent communities, too) a massive dose of self-government, with vastly greater responsibility for the operation of the institutions that affect their lives – including the criminal justice, educational, housing and benefit systems in their localities.  My premise is that it is unnatural for a neighbourhood to tolerate high levels of crime or illegitimacy or voluntary idleness among its youth: that, given the chance, poor communities as well as rich ones will run affairs so that such things happen infrequently.  And when communities with different values run their affairs differently, I want to make it as easy as possible for people who share values to live together.  If people in one neighbourhood think marriage is an outmoded institution, fine; let them run their neighbourhood as they see fit.  But make it easy for the couple who thinks otherwise to move into a neighbourhood where two-parent families are valued.  There are many ways that current levels of expenditure for public systems could be sustained (if that is thought to be necessary) but control over them decentralized.  Money isn’t the key.  Authentic self-government is.

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