The Poor Who Have Jobs

Liberal analysts of the economy leapfrog from one plan for abolishing poverty to another. Currently, the spotlight beams on manpower training and development as the answer to the misery of the urban ghetto and the rural wasteland. The hypothesis here is that the uneducated and unskilled-poor have been left behind in a rapidly advancing and automated – technology and hence have failed to compete successfully in the newly emerging job market. But the fact -is that the Triple Revolution theorists were wrong; or at least premature in their pronouncement. Dire predictions of cybernetic joblessness have not been fulfilled, and even -the less radical “structural unemployment” argument, remains relevant for only the most extremely disadvantaged of the poor. The problem of poverty for at least a great many, often overlooked’ – by those who peer into crystal balls instead of onto ghetto streets, is not so simple as the failure of the unskilled to meet the new requirements of America’s supertechnological society. Rather, the problem is that many people with adequate skills are simply not being provided with adequate fibs.

Poverty stereotypes of the ADC mother, the aged, the infirm, the small farm...