Underclass
   HOME
*





Underclass
The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. The general idea that a class system includes a population ''under'' the working class has a long tradition in the social sciences (for example, lumpenproletariat). However, the specific term, ''underclass'', was popularized during the last half of the 20th century, first by social scientists of American poverty, and then by American journalists. The underclass concept has been a point of controversy among social scientists. Definitions and explanations of the underclass, as well as proposed solutions for managing or fixing the ''underclass problem'' have been highly debated. History Gunnar Myrdal is generally credited as the first proponent of the term ''underclass.'' Writing in the early 1960s on economic inequality in the U.S., Myrdal's underclass refers to a "class of unemployed, unemployables, and underemployed, who are ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Concentrated Poverty
Concentrated poverty concerns the spatial distribution of socio-economic deprivation, specifically focusing on the density of poor populations. Within the United States, common usage of the term concentrated poverty is observed in the fields of policy and scholarship referencing areas of "extreme" or "high-poverty." These are defined by the US census as areas where "40 percent of the tract population ivesbelow the federal poverty threshold." A large body of literature argues that areas of concentrated poverty place additional burdens on poor families residing within them, burdens beyond what these families' individual circumstances would dictate. Research also indicates that areas of concentrated poverty can have effects beyond the neighborhood in question, affecting surrounding neighborhoods not classified as "high-poverty" and subsequently limiting their overall economic potential and social cohesion. Concentrated poverty is a global phenomenon, with prominent examples world-wi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Lumpenproletariat
In Marxist theory, the ''Lumpenproletariat'' () is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the ''Lumpenproletariat'' and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category. The Social Democratic Party of Germany made wide use of the term by the turn of the century. Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) followed Marx's arguments and dismissed the revolutionary potential of the group, while Mao Zedong (1893–1976) argued that proper leadership could utilize it. The word ''Lumpenproletariat'', popularized in the West by Frantz Fanon's ''The Wretched of the Earth'' in the 1960s, has been adopted as ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson (born December 20, 1935) is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods. Academic career Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of 25 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member. After receiving a PhD from Washington State University in 1966, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucy Flo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Rust Belt
The Rust Belt is a region of the United States that experienced industrial decline starting in the 1950s. The U.S. manufacturing sector as a percentage of the U.S. GDP peaked in 1953 and has been in decline since, impacting certain regions and cities primarily in the Northeast and Midwest regions of the U.S., including Allentown, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Jersey City, Newark, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Toledo, Trenton, Youngstown, and other areas of New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Upstate New York. These regions experienced and, in some cases, are continuing to experience the elimination or outsourcing of manufacturing jobs beginning in the late 20th century. The term "Rust" refers to the impact of deindustrialization, economic decline, population loss, and urban decay on these regions attributable to the shrinking of the once-powerful industrial sector especially including steelmaking, automobile manufacturing, and coal mining. The term gained ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ken Auletta
Kenneth B. Auletta (born April 23, 1942) is an American author, a political columnist for the New York Daily News, and media critic for ''The New Yorker''. Early life and education The son of an Italian American father and a Jewish American mother, Auletta grew up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School. He graduated from the State University of New York at Oswego and received his M.A. in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Writing career While in graduate school, Auletta taught and trained Peace Corps volunteers. He "got bored in a Ph.D political science program and left to be a gofer and write speeches in politics; then on to serve in government", then working for then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign before serving as campaign manager for former Administrator of the Small Business Administration Howard J. Samuels's failed 1974 gub ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Poverty
Poverty is the state of having few material possessions or little income. Poverty can have diverse , , and causes and effects. When evaluating poverty in statistics or economics there are two main measures: '' absolute poverty'' compares income against the amount needed to meet basic personal needs
[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Gilbert Model
The Gilbert model was developed by Dennis Gilbert as a means of a more effective way of classifying people in a given society into social classes. Influences Karl Marx believed that social class is determined by ownership (or non-ownership) of the "means of economic production" - ownership of raw materials, farm land, coal mines, factories, etc. His theory contains the idea of a struggle between two social classes - the Bourgeoisie (the capital owners) and the Proletariat (the non-owner workers). Like Marx, Max Weber agreed that social class is determined mostly based on unequal distribution of economic power and hence the unequal distribution of opportunity. He also saw that honour, status and social prestige were key factors in determining what social class people belong to. "Life-styles" such as where a person lives and the schools they attend are very important in determining social class. "Life-chances" also determined social class. If a person becomes a respectable memb ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Douglas Massey
Douglas Steven Massey (born October 5, 1952 in Olympia, Washington, United States) is an American sociologist. Massey is currently a professor of Sociology at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and is an adjunct professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Massey specializes in the sociology of immigration, and has written on the effect of residential segregation on the black underclass in the United States. He has been president of the Population Association of America, the American Sociological Association and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He is a co-editor of the ''Annual Review of Sociology''. Academia Massey received his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, Psychology, and Spanish, from Western Washington University in 1974, and in 1977 he received a Master of Arts in Sociology from Princeton University. Massey continued at Princeton University and received his PhD in 1978. He was a Guggenhei ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ghetto
A ghetto, often called ''the'' ghetto, is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other areas of the city. Versions of the ghetto appear across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people. The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jewish people were restricted to live and thus segregated from other people. However, early societies may have formed their own versions of the same structure; words resembling ''ghetto'' in meaning appear in Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, Germanic, Old French, and Latin. During the Holocaust, more than 1,000 Nazi ghettos were established to hold Jewish populations, with the goal of exploiting and killing the Jews as part of the Final Solution.
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Crime
In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Cane and Conoghan (editors), '' The New Oxford Companion to Law'', Oxford University Press, 2008 (), p. 263Google Books). though statutory definitions have been provided for certain purposes. The most popular view is that crime is a category created by law; in other words, something is a crime if declared as such by the relevant and applicable law. One proposed definition is that a crime or offence (or criminal offence) is an act harmful not only to some individual but also to a community, society, or the state ("a public wrong"). Such acts are forbidden and punishable by law. The notion that acts such as murder, rape, and theft are to be prohibited exists worldwide. What precisely is a criminal offence is defined by the criminal law o ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Joblessness
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the reference period. Unemployment is measured by the unemployment rate, which is the number of people who are unemployed as a percentage of the labour force (the total number of people employed added to those unemployed). Unemployment can have many sources, such as the following: * new technologies and inventions * the status of the economy, which can be influenced by a recession * competition caused by globalization and international trade * policies of the government * regulation and market Unemployment and the status of the economy can be influenced by a country through, for example, fiscal policy. Furthermore, the monetary authority of a country, such as the central bank, can influence the availability and cost for money through its monetary p ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Dropping Out
Dropping out refers to leaving high school, college, university or another group for practical reasons, necessities, inability, apathy, or disillusionment with the system from which the individual in question leaves. Canada In Canada, most individuals graduate from grade 12 by the age of 18, according to Jason Gilmore who collects data on employment and education using the Labour Force Survey. The LFS is the official survey used to collect unemployment data in Canada (2010). Using this tool, assessing educational attainment and school attendance can calculate a dropout rate (Gilmore, 2010). It was found by the LFS that by 2009, one in twelve 20- to 24-year-old adults did not have a high school diploma (Gilmore, 2010). The study also found that men still have higher dropout rates than women, and that students outside of major cities and in the northern territories also have a higher risk of dropping out. Although since 1990 dropout rates have gone down from 20% to a low of 9% in ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]