From the first issue of The American Prospect:
During the past two decades, as I have argued previously in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), urban minorities have been highly vulnerable to structural changes in the economy, such as the shift from goods-producing to service-producing industries, the increasing polarization of the labor market into low-wage and highwage sectors, innovations in technology, and the relocation of manufacturing industries out of the central city These shifts have led to sharp increases in joblessness and the related problems of highly concentrated poverty, welfare dependency, and family breakup, despite the passage of antidiscrimination legislation and the creation of affirmative action programs. In 1974, for example, 47 percent of all employed black males ages 20 to 24 held blue-collar, semiskilled operative and skilled-craft positions, which typically earned wages adequate to support a family. By 1986 that figure plummeted to 25 percent.
In other words, the economy changed, but the inner city didn't change with it. The jobs fled, either out of the urban centers or out of the country, and very little arose to take their place. What did emerge -- the service-sector economy -- paid less, and offered worse benefits and job security. This -- along with drugs, and various urban pathologies, and much more -- rendered men less marriageable, and increased the relative attractiveness of risky, unlawful methods of making money, which in turn left a lot of men in jail, making them again less marriageable. It's nasty stuff. Wilson argues for determinedly race-neutral effort to address these inequalities, at times in ways that border on the disingenuous, but in general strives to address the fundamental economic forces buffeting low skill groups rather than focusing merely on pockets of the affected.
