When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor

Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work.



"Wilson is the keenest liberal analyst of the most perplexing of all American problems...[This book is] more ambitious and more accessible than anything he has done before."
--The New Yorker

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• More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (Issues of Our Time)
• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
• Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, 3rd Edition
• Career Counseling: A Holistic Approach
• Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City
• Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, with a New Preface
• Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
• The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit - Updated Edition (Princeton Classics)