Poverty as a Structural Problem

I wholeheartedly concur with Barry Bluestone’s position in “The Poor Who Have Jobs” (DISSENT, September-October 1968) that the currently popular proposals to adapt the poor to our modern industrialized economy through programs of manpower training and development are totally inadequate as solutions to relative poverty. His attempt to document this by focusing on the structural factors which perpetuate poverty—his distinction between employment in low- and high-wage industries and his analysis of the factors which cause and perpetuate these low-wage industries —is important evidence.

However, as he mentions in passing at the end of his paper, this is really a problem of . . an inequitable income distribution . . which, incidentally, low wages is only one of many causal components) and that .. negative tax proposals [or one might add any redistribution mechanism outside the economic structure] must be seen as crucial to the whole problem of the working po...