When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.

William Julius Wilson's last book, The Truly Disadvantaged, published in the mid 1980s, was a conscious attempt to rebut the thesis advanced by Charles Murray in his then-current Losing Ground. Against Murray's argument that welfare had created the so-called underclass, Wilson argued convincingly that what really had done it was the disappearance of jobs, especially well-paying jobs in mass-production industries.

Wilson's new book is also, in part, a rebuttal of another Murray book, The Bell Curve, which Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein published two years ago. Murray-Herrnstein put back into play the notion that low intelligence, probably genetic in origin, accounts for the failure to thrive of African-Americans as a group. Against that notion, Wilson offers the argument that it is unemployment - persistent, concentrated, and on a community-wide scale - that produces the deviant behavior of so many black ghetto residents, who are then taken as representative in some way of African-Americans as a whole.

"Given the reemergence of the discussion concerning the importance of genetic endowment," Wilson writes, "it is urgent that social scientists once again emphasize, for public policy purposes, the powerful and complex role of the social environment in shaping the life experiences of inner-city ghetto residents."

In a very real sense, When Work Disappears is an effort to examine and describe the souls of certain black folk - those who populate inner-city neighborhoods where, in Wilson's telling, the central reality has come to be not just poverty, but mind-numbing, spirit-killing, community-destroying joblessness.

Unfortunately, that's an assignment for a novelist or a filmmaker or a good journalist, not for an academic writing in the turgid, polysyllabic prose of a scholarly journal. Even the occasional extended quotations of actual ghetto residents - compiled by members of Wilson's research team at the University of Chicago, where he taught for twenty-four years before moving to Harvard last summer - cannot enliven the author's leaden sociologist's prose.

Maybe more important, most of what is in this book will seem like old news to any conscientious reader of a decent daily newspaper. To be sure, Wilson and his researchers have compiled an impressive body of data, much of it the result of extensive field work and interviews with residents of inner-city Chicago neighborhoods. But in the end, they found nothing more than what many journalists and documentary-makers have discovered and reported in newspaper series on "the underclass" over the last dozen or so years. That is, that while many things characterize life in urban ghettos - rampant poverty, racial segregation, extreme violence - unemployment is perhaps the dominant reality. And as the nuns used to tell us in grade school, "idle hands are the devil's workshop." To quickly summarize Wilson's analysis: The "new urban poor" are those residents of segregated inner-city neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty where "a substantial majority of individual adults are either unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force altogether." This alienation from the world of work has several causes. The main one is what Wilson calls industrial restructuring: the disappearance of job-intensive manufacturing industries of the sort that required more brawn than brains but still paid a decent wage of the sort one could raise a family on. Others include the decline of unions and government policies that enabled people and companies to flee the cities for suburbia. To some extent, the old manufacturing jobs have been replaced by service jobs. But these, when they are not out of reach physically (that is, in the suburbs), are often out of reach in terms of the educational qualifications they call for, or because they appeal more to women than to men. (While everyone suffers from inner-city joblessness, men especially suffer.)

The ghetto culture of joblessness plays havoc with everything - the ability of parents to raise children properly; the peace of the community; the ambitions of adults; the ability of children to see a future. Most important, it fosters the sense, among individuals and in communities, that they have no control over their lives. In short, it demoralizes people.

In our current age of economic anxiety, that shouldn't be hard for anyone to understand or empathize with. But as Wilson points out, Americans are more inclined to hold individuals personally and morally culpable for being unemployed or on welfare than they are to blame social or economic conditions. All the more so when the individuals being judged are black.

The first half of When Work Disappears - the analysis - is Wilson's windup. His pitch comes in the second half, when he offers policy prescriptions for the plight of the jobless inner-cities. Since Wilson is one of President Bill Clinton's favorite interpreters of racial and urban problems, it's a fair assumption that these prescriptions already have been digested at the White House.

Like the analysis, they are familiar. They include job-training programs, school-to-work transition programs, universal health insurance, and a system of low-wage public jobs to replace welfare (although Wilson would not approve of the recently passed welfare "reform" legislation). Wilson is not fond of "race-specific" policies, for they have no staying power. To win sustained public support, policies need to be race-neutral, crafted to serve everyone, with blacks, who generally are among the most disadvantaged, benefiting along with everyone else who may qualify.

What was most disappointing to me was my sense that Wilson, for ideological reasons, refuses to accept and follow-up on the implications of some of his findings. Two examples will suffice.

Wilson recognizes that immigration has been a major factor in the inability of inner-city black men to find work and in the diminution of their wages over the last quarter-century. Yet his policy recommendations contain no mention of immigration policy. In this he is like most black political leaders, who are reluctant to call for tighter controls on immigration to improve the economic lot of African-Americans.

And in an observation of special significance to Catholics, Wilson writes this in his discussion of education, race, and employment for inner-city youth:

The employers who volunteered information on the schools they recruited from usually mentioned Catholic schools or those from Chicago's largely white Northwest Side communities. Although employees recruited from the Catholic schools were more likely to be white, black students from Catholic schools were also viewed more favorably than those from the public schools. For example, an employer at a suburban department store pointed out that although minority students fail the skills test more frequently than white students "the minorities that go to parochial school test as well as the whites. They come here dressed as well, and this is a totally different act. Now this is a difference that I can spot, is between your parochial school and your public school."

The new administration of Chicago's public school system has taken that sort of testimony to heart and is borrowing unabashedly from the Archdiocese of Chicago in restructuring the city's schools. Wilson, however, saw no reason to mine this nugget for his recommendations about education for inner-city children. There is none so blind as he who will not see.

Don Wycliff, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune.