54, During the hard times of 1857, when starvation was a real possibility for the unemployed, the charitable societies of New York published circulars invit,!
ing those who would accept work in the country to register. None did, K. H.
Claghorn Report to the Industrial Commission on Immigration
15 (1901):
463,
55, U,of Selected Low-mary- Urban The Decentralization of JobsS, Bureau of the Census Census of Population: 1970Areas (January 1972), p. 12, Income Areas Final Report PHC(3)-IMonthly Labor ReviewSee also Dorothy K. Newman, Employment Profiles, United States Sum-
90 (May 1967):
13,
56. The theory is developed in MichaelJ, Piore , "
On-the-Job Training in a Dual Labor Market" in Arnold R. Weber, et aI., eds. Public-Private Manpower
Policies (Madison, Wis" Industrial Relations Research Association,
1969) i and " Manpower Policy," in Samuel Beer et aI., eds" The State and the Poor (Boston: Winthrop Publishing Co" 1970),
pp, 53 - 83, See also Doeringer and Piore Internal Labor Markets ch, 8 and pp, 204 - 208,
57, Ibid" p, 52, See also Bennett Harrison, Ghetto 130-152,(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University PressEducation, Training, and the Urban, 1972), pp.
5'8, Harrison, op, cit., p, 123, 59, Op, cit., p. 18 I,
60, Op, cit., p, 208,
61. Ibid" p, 193, See also Harrison
Public Service Jobs for Urban Residents (Washington, D, : National Civil Service League, 1969),
62, Ibid" p, 132,
63, Op, cit., p, 202, Despite this observation, the authors offer a five-
fold classi- fication of the low-income population according to its adaptability to primary employment in which the first group consists primarily of adults ("
with stable but low-wage experience ), Op. cit., p, 179,
Toward the end of his book Bennett Harrison assures the reader that the idea that some persons cannot "make it" because of personal incapacities is
one of our most unfortunate national myths,
" Earlier, however, he has said that it is "incontestable" that secondary labor is "significantly more unsta- ble," Op, cit., pp. 210 and 132.
64. In the article cited above, Gloria Shaw Hamilton reports that public employ- ers were much more likely to require a high school diploma and a passing score on a test and more likely to reject an employee because of health prob- lems, being overweight, or having an arrest or prison record. p, 20,
65, Cf. Fried et aI.,
Setting National Priorities: The
1974 Budget p, 92.
66, For an argument in favor of it on a
more than limited scale, see Lester
Thurow , "
Toward a Definition of Economic Justice
The Public Interest 3 I (Spring 1973), especially pp, 79-80, There is an exchange between Richard A.
Posner and Thurow in the Fall 1973 issue of the same magazine which touches on the issue,
67. Work in America pp, 174 and 184,
68, Fellner, in Philip Cagan et aI. A New Look at Inflation p. 166,
69, U.S, Congress, Employment a'ld Manpower Problems in the Cities: Implica-
tions of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders,
Hearings before the Joint Economic Committee
, 90th Congress, 2nd Session, May-June 1968, p, 66.
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 6 3 I 9
CHAPTER 6
Several Kinds of Poverty
I, The dependency ratios (i,e" number of children under twenty-two for every 100 persons in the "prime working ages," twenty-two to sixty-four) for poor persons living in the central cities of Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSA's) of 250,000 or more population and for poor persons living in the entire country were 168 and 148, respectively, in 1966, By contrast, the dependency ratio of the nonpoor in the central cities was lower than that of
the non poor in the entire country - 7 I as against 79. Harold L. Sheppard,
Effects of Family Planning on Poverty in the United States (Kalamazoo, Mich.: The W, E, Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, October 1967), pp, 3-4,
2, Richard F. Wertheimer, II, The Monetary Rewards of Migration Within the
u.S, (Washington, D.c.: The Urban Institute, 1970), p, 26,
3, U,S, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports 60, No, 86, "Char- acteristics of the Low-Income Population, 1971" (Washington, D, : U, Government Printing Office, 1972).
4, Friedlander, in an effort to estimate illegal income in Harlem, found that one-fifth of the adult population received income in 1965 that was not from work, welfare, gifts, and so forth, His "crude" estimate is that 20 percent of those unemployed or not in the labor force and 18 percent of other workers reported some income which they could not account for and which was pre-
sumably illegal. That they reported any was because they could not hide their consumption of goods from the Census enumerator and gave him a figure they thought consistent with what was visible, In this way a large number of people without any acknowledged source of income reported incomes in the
$4,000 and above range; a substantial number of these, Friedlander supposes, may actually have been earning $10, 000 or more, If we assume a lower limit of $ 5,000 for the true income of those who could not account for their income and put 20 percent of the population in this group, the illegal income of Har- lem would be $150 million or 37. 5 percent of the total. If we assume a lower
limit of $ 10,000, it would be $300 million or 75 percent. A "very low" esti-
mate- 10 percent of the population (15, 000 people) at $6,
000-
would be$90 million or 22,5 percent, Stanley L. Friedlander, Unemployment in the Urban Core: An Analysis of Thirty Cities with Policy Recommendations (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp, 186--189,
5, Margaret Reid, testimony in House Hearings on the Economic-Opportunity
Act of 1964, 88th Congress, 2d Session, Part 3, p, 1429. A two-year income average, however, yields nearly as many low- income families as does a one-
year average, Economic Report of the President (Washington, D,c.: U.
Government Printing Office, 1965), p, 165,
6, Irving Hoch, "Urban Scale and Environmental Quality," in Population Resources, and the Environment, vol. III of task force reports of the Commis- sion on Population Growth and the American Future, Ronald G, Ridker, ed.
(1972), pp, 256 and 235,
7, Rose D. Friedman, Poverty Definition and Perspective (Washington, : American Enterprise Institute, February 1965), pp, 34-35.
320 / THE UNHEAVENLY CITY REVISITED
8, Jacob Riis, "Special Needs of the Poor in New York The Forum (Decem-
ber 1892): 493,
9, For an authoritative treatment by an economist of poverty and inequality defined in terms of income (as opposed to status, cultural deprivation, or the
like), see RobertJ, Lampman, Ends and Means of Reducing Income Poverty (Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1972),
10, Quoted (with italics added) in Rose Friedman, Poverty, p, 30.
II. Quoted by Robert Hunter, Poverty (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp, 7-
12, A New York Times story (October 14, 1970) began: "The first results of a Federal study of malnutrition in New York City show that nearly half of a sample of low income children under 7 years old suffer from low levels of vitamin A," Later on in the story it developed: (I) that as between low- and upper-income children age 7- 12 there was only a 2 percent difference in the frequency of vitamin A deficiency; (2) that deficiencies of other nutrients were found in less than 10 percent of the children; (3) that in the case of some nutrients no deficiencies were found; (4) that doctors disagree as to whether any of the deficiencies found constitute "malnutrition (S) that vitamin deficiencies found have not been linked to any specific symptoms or illness;
and (6) that lack of vitamin A contributes to loss of vision in dim light but doctors do not know how great the deficiency must be to produce this effect.
To the extent that ignorance rather than poverty is the cause of bad diets, diets cannot be expected to improve as incomes rise, Leontine Young, in Wednesdays Children: A Study of Child Neglect and Abuse (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964), p, 123, reports: "Many of the mothers lack the most elemental knowledge of nutrition as well as the will to act. One mother insisted she fed her children well, She bought potato chips and Coca-Cola regularly," With a higher income, this mother might buy more potato chips and Coca-Cola.
13, For a perspective differing somewhat from the one here, see Nathan Glazer, The Paradoxes of Health Care The Public Interest 22 (Winter 1971), pp, 62-77; see also Charles Kadushin, "Social Class and the Experience of III Health, " in Bendix and Lipset, op, cit., pp, 406-412,
14, This paragraph is based entirely on Harold Stephen Luft, "Poverty and
Health: An Empirical Investigation, " unpublished Ph,D, dissertation, Har-
vard University (July 1972),
IS, Martin S, Feldstein, "The Medical Economy, Scientific American 229 (Sep- tember 1973), p, IS6, See also Myron J, Lefcowitz, " Poverty and Health: A Re-Examination, Inquiry, 16 (March 1973), pp, 3- 13, This is Reprint 96 in the series of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin,
16, Adapted from Charles L. Schultze et aI., Setting National Priorities, the 1973 Budget op, cit., pp, 224-22S,
17, Julius A. Roth, "The Treatment of the Sick," in John Kosa, Aaron
Antonovsky, and Irving Kenneth Zola, eds" Poverty and Health, A Sociolog-
ical Analysis (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1969), p, 223; see also Mary W, Herman, "The "Roor: Their Medical Needs and the Health Services Available to Them Annals of the A merican Academy of Political
and Social Science, 399 (January 1972): 12-21.
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 6 / 321 18. Irving Leveson, 'The Challenge of Health Services for the Poor, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 399 (January 1972): 26, Pointing out that there are consistent findings of a strong impact of education upon health, the author remarks that education , , , extends one time horizon, and behavior may be very different when future consequences of current actions are given increased weight,
19. Richard Auster, Irving Leveson, and Deborah Sarachek, "The Production of Health, An Exploratory Study, Journal of Human Resources, 4 (Fall 1969):
411-436, The analysis is limited to whites, Drawing upon the same data Leveson has shown elsewhere that environmental factors account for about seven-tenths of the differences in infant deaths among (white) income groups and that these estimates " explain" about half the white-nonwhite differential.
Irving Leveson, "Determinants ofInfant Mortality, Inquiry, 7 (June 1970):
60-61. A study of infant death in New York City, published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, is reported to have found that the infant death rate for the city would be reduced by "as much as" one-third if all women had the pregnancy outcome of those who received adequate health care (away of putting it which ignores the possibility that among the women not receiving adequate care there may be many whose infants would die even if they did
receive it). New York Times July 8, 1973.
20. Alonzo S, Yerby, ' The Problems of Medical Care for Indigent Populations, American Journal of Public Health SS (August 1965): 121S,
21, George W, Albee, in AnselmL. Strauss, ed" Where Medicine Fails (Chicago, Aldine PublishIng Co" 1970), p, 39,
In an analysis of British experience, Martin Rein writes: " Different occu- pations both at the top and the bottom of the social scale generate different illness patterns, But this measure of class is not a measure of poverty, Hence redistribution of income among these occupational groups is unlikely to alter this pattern of illness, This leads naturally to the question of what kinds of environmental manipulations are likely to reduce occupational related mor- bidity, Here we are led to the curious conclusion that it may be easier to alter the morbidity-generating character of the environment of the unskilled than it is to alter the occupational environment of professional and managerial groups, But by this new criterion of severity responsiveness to prevention - we might be forced to conclude that more highly skilled white-collar occupational groups are sicker than unskilled manual groups, We should be hesitant to draw such an inference too quickly, But the example does illus- trate how demanding is the task of reaching ajudgment about the relationship between class and morbidity," Martin Rein, "Social Class and the Utilization
of Medical Care Services, Hospitals, Journal of the American Hospital Association 43 (July 1969): So.
The poor, writes Anselm L. Strauss in Where Medicine Fails (p. 17), "live strictly and wholeheartedly in the present, , , To them a careful concern about health is unreal. , , ," Daniel Rosenblatt finds that the relative failure of the poor to use the many preventive health services available to them is in some measure "another dimension of the general lack of future orientation that characterizes blue collar workers,
" "
Barriers to Medical Care for the Urban Poor," in Arthur B, Shostak and William Gomberg, eds., New Per-
spectives on Poverty (Englewood Cliffs, N,J " Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp, 72 -73,
322 / THE UNHEAVENLY CITY REVISITED
Commentary, 55 i
See also Eric J, Cassell, "Disease as a Way of Life (February 1973), pp, 80-82,
22, Edward R, Fried etal. Setting National Priorities: The 1974 Budget op, cit.,
p, 112,
23, U,S, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Consumer Buying Indicators, Household Ownership and A vailability of Cars, Homes, and Selected Household Durables and Annual Expenditures on Cars and Other
Durables: 1971 (May 1972), Tables 1-
24, Quoted in N, M, Bradburn, The Structure of Psychological Well-Being (Chi- cago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), p, 115,
25, Victor R, Fuchs, "Redefining Poverty and Redistributing Income, The
Public Interest, 8 (Summer 1967): 91.
26, Edward R. Fried et aI. Setting National Priorities: The 1974 Budget (Wash- ington, D, : The Brookings Institution, 1973), p, 45,
27, Lester C, Thurow finds that between 1947 and 1965, poverty (using the
$3,000 line for families and the $ 1
500 one for unrelated individuals) declined
7 percentage points per year (in constant 1965 dollars), If this rate of decline continues, it would take 23 years to eliminate poverty among families and 55
years to eliminate it among unrelated individuals, Lester C, Thurow, The
Economics of Poverty and Discrimination (Washington, D, : The Brook-
ings Institution, 1969),
28, Peter A, Morrison, Dimensions of the Population Problem in the United
States (Santa Monica, Calif, : The Rand Corporation, Monograph R-864-
CPG, August 1972), pp, v-vi,
29, Benjamin A. Okner, Transfer Payments: Their Distribution and Role in
Reducing Poverty, Reprint 254 (Washington, D,c.: The Brookings Institu- tion, 1973), A comprehensive account of current welfare programs is pro-
vided in Gilbert y, Steiner, The State of Welfare (Washington, D,c.: The Brookings Institution, 197 I); a much briefer one, which emphasizes the,prob- lem of reconciling work incentives with public assistance, is Sar A. Levitan,
Martin Rein, and David Marwick, Work Welfare Go Together (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972),
30, The negative income tax proposal was made in Milton Friedman, Capitalism
and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), ch, 12, See also Christopher Green Negative Taxes and the Poverty Problem (Washington, c.: The Brookings Institution, 1967); James Tobin, Joseph A. Pechman, and Peter M, M ieszkowski, "Is a Negative Income Tax Practical?" The Yale Law Journal 77 (November 1967): 1-27; and James C. Vadakin
, "
A Critique
of the Guaranteed Annual Income, The Public Interest I I (Spring 1968):
53-66,
3 I. For a detailed, vivid, and authoritative account of the formulation of the proposal and the subsequent political struggle, see Daniel p, Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, The Nixon Administration and the Family
Assistance Plan (New York: Random House, 1973),
32, Michael K. Taussig, "Long-run Consequences of Income Maintenance" in
Kenneth E, Boulding and Martin Pfaff, eds" Redistribution to the Rich and the Poor, The Grants Economics of Income Distribution (Belmont, Calif, Wadsworth Publishing Company;"I972), p, 385,
A three-year experiment to test the disincentive effects of eight different
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 6 323
assistance plans on " working poor" families in five cities of New Jersey and Pennsylvania indicated, according to the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, "that only small changes in family earnings should be expected in response to a negative income tax plan," Only families headed by able- bodied men were
studied, New York Times, December 21,1973, See also U,S, Office of Eco-
nomic Opportunity, Preliminary Results of the New Jersey Graduated Work
Incentive Experiment (Washington, D,c.: Government Printing Office,
1970),
33, The loss of output in the economy in 1963 attributable to the disincentive effect of the progressive income tax on high incomes (over $ 10 000) " may have been ofthe order of one-third of I percent." R, Barlow, H, E, Bracer, and
J, N, Morgan, Economic Behavior of the Affluent (Washington, D,c.: The Brookings Institution, 1966), p, 146,
34, Elizabeth F, Durbin, Welfare, Income, and Employment: An Economic
Analysis of Family Choice (New York: Praeger, 1969),
35, Fried et aI. Setting National Priorities: The 1974 Budget p, 81. Related matters are discussed by Edward C. Banfield, Nathan Glazer, and David
Gordon in separate articles on welfare in The Public Interest 16 (Summer 1969),
36, Martin Rein, "Poverty and Income American Child, 48 (Summer 1966): 9, 37, See Simon Rottenberg, " Misplaced Emphases in Wars on Poverty, Law and
Contemporary Problems (Winter 1966): 68-7 I.
38, Glen G, Cain, "Issues in the Economics ofa Population Policy for the United States, American Economic Review 61 (May 1971): 414,
39, Bruno Stein, On Relief(New York: Basic Books, 197 I), pp, 86-87,
40, David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 48,
41. Lester C. Thurow , "
The Political Economy of Income Redistribution Poli- cies, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 409 (September 1973), p, 150,
42, Hunter, Poverty, pp, 322-323,
43, Cf, David Matza, "The Disreputable Poor " in Neil J.Smelser and Seymour
Martin Lipset, eds" Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1966), especially pp, 310-317,
44, The distinction is akin to that made by John Kosa between "acute" and
chronic" poverty, The former, he says, implies a previous period spent above the poverty level. "The chronically poor person," on the other hand, " has no personal knowledge of how to live above the poverty level and, if given some unexpected aid from a charity organization, he cannot live up to the expecta- tions; perhaps, , , he has to be taught the rudiments of middle-class life and spending habits," Chronic poverty, he adds, is self-perpetuating and, unlike
acute poverty, preserves all the traits of pauperism, "The Nature of Poverty,
in John Kosa, Antonovsky, and Zola, eds" Poverty and Health p, 27, 45, From an unpublished paper by Francis Duehay,
46, Cf, L. L. Geismar and Michael A. LaSorte Understanding the Multi-
Problem Family (New York: Association Press, 1964), pp, 56-58, . 47, Gordon E, Brown, ed" The Multi-Problem Dilemma (Metuchen, N, : The
Scarecrow Press, 1968), p, 8,
48, J, Leslie Dunstan, A Light to the Cit
!'
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p, 106, that", , , the poor ~articip~t~ less frequently ,than the gen~r~l population in all 49, Reverend, Lyman A bbott, IntroductIOn to Mrs, Helen Campbell Darkness kinds of communIty activIties, And, the white p~~r partIcipate les~ than the
and Daylight; or, Ltglils and Shadows of New York Life
(Hartford Conn, black poor. But both black and white poor families tend to perceive them-
~~ford Publishi?g Co" 1896), p, 53, Th~ secret of success in dea
ling with
selves as not being a part of the community," Frederick E, Case, ed" Inner.the outcas~ class, Reverend Abbott says, IS "personal contact with men and City Housing and PrI\'ate Enterprise (New York: P~aeger, 1972!, p, 34, , women of higher nature " by which he presumably means higher-class culture 60, Robert A, Berliner, "Alinskism in Theory and Practice," unpublished senIor (P.
49),
honors thesis, Harvard University, 1967,50, ~oy Lubove
slty Press, 1965), p, 16,
The Professional A ltmist (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard Univer- 61. On Chicago, see Winston Moore, Charles P. Livermoreland, Jr., "Woodlawn: the Zone of Destruction, The Public Interest, and ~eorge F, Gal- 5 I. How far superclass the blmd~ision can go even with welfare recipients who are not lower : ~?r inst~nce is described by Jacobus TenBroek and (Winter 1973): 48-52 in particular. "For discussion of "citizen participation" from a vanety of POlI~tS of VIewFlo~d W. Matson m The Disabled and the Law of Welfare,
California Law and for much bibliography, see Roland L. Warren, ed" Perspectives on the
Review 54 (May 1966): 83 I:
American Community, 2d ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1973), the age
' ,
Section Five, nc 0 we are, not t e !~Clplent, who decides what life
goal~ are to be followed, what ambitIOns may be entertained, what services are appropnate, what wants are to be recognized, and what
funds allocated to eac? In sh
.ort, the recipient is told what he wants as
~ell as how much he IS wanting. In the velvet glove of public aid is an
Iron hand: If the recipient does not comply and conform, he may be
removed from the rolls or have his budget reduced, The alternatives are
obedience or starvation,
324 THE UNHEAVENLY CITY REVISITED
52, Winifred Bell, Aid to Dependent Children (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1965), p, 113,
A recent study compares the progress of fifty multiproblem families receiv- ing intensive social casework (the caseworkers had earned the Master of Social Work degree, had previous field experience, and had less than half the usual caseload) with that of a control group of fifty similar families receiving normal public assistance, After thirty-one months "
the essential finding was that while the demonstration group attained a slightly better degree of family functioning, its margin of progress over the control group was not significant in the statistical sense." Brown, The Multi-Problem Dilemma
p. 7,
53, Quoted in Harvey W, ZorbaughUniversity of Chicago Press, 1929), p, 262. The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago:
54. There is no standard usage for the terms "community development,
" "
munity organization," and "community mobilization," The meaningscom-
employed here follow Patricia Cayo Sexton, Spanish Harlem: Anatomy of
Poverty (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp, 140-141.
55. See, for example, various writings by and about Saul Alinsky, especially the
uncritical account of his doings in Charles Silberman,
Crisis in Black and
White (New York: Random House, 1964), ch, 10.
56, Peter Marris and Martin Rein, Atherton Press, 1967), pp, 222-223,Dilemmas of Social Reform (New York:
57, See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Com-
munity Action in the War on Poverty (New York: The Free Press, 1969),
58, New York Times July 24, 1966,
59. Ralph M, Kramer, tice-Hall, Inc" 1969), p, 256,Panic/pat ion qLthe Poor (Englewood Cliffs, N, : Pren- Studies in nine cities of inner-city housing problems led to the conclusion
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 6 325
CHAPTER 7 Schooling versus Education
The " Dear Abby" correspondence appeared in the (McNaught) syndicated
column on July I I, 1966,
I. Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc" "Youth in the Ghetto" (New York: multilithed, 1964), p, 33,
2, However, a Survey Research Center study, begun in 1968 and repeated at intervals, ofa nationally representative panel of boys (there were 1 620 in the sample, including 286 dropouts, in the summer of 1970) found the weekly
incomes of employed dropouts to be nearly identical to those of ployed high school graduates; this was so even when the groups were matched for length of time on their present jobs, The unemployment rate of the nongradu- ates was twice that of the graduates, but this " is caused primarily by family background and ability factors," There was a difference of about five IQ points between the dropouts and the graduates, Jerald G, Bachman, SwayzeI'
Green, and Ilona 0, Wirtanen, Youth in Transition, vo!. III: Dropping
Out Problem or Symptom? (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, 197 I), In an earlier Project TALENT study, Combs and Cooley, using data from the participants who were in the ninth grade in 1960, found that employment rates of male dropouts and controls were almost identical (87 and 89 percent, respectively, had full-time jobs) and the mean yearly salary of the employed dropouts was slightly more than that of the controls ($3,650 as against
$3,500), Unfortunately, the authors write, the results of their study were not consistent with their expectation, which was to reveal that the graduate was much better off than the dropout, a finding that "might help dissuade some students from leaving high-school before graduation." Later follow-up stud- ies by Project TALENT, they say, may " show more precisely the disadvan- tages of dropping out of high schoo!." Janet Combs and William W, Cooley, Dropouts: In High School and After School," American Educational
Research loumal, 5 (May 1968): 352,362,