Our shrinking underclass.(the Digest: Summaries of important new research)

Paul Jargowsky and Isabel Sawhill, "The Decline of the Underclass," The Brookings Institution, January 2006 (brookings.org)

Hurricane Katrina served as a stark reminder of the existence and consequences of entrenched poverty in America. Yet, according to Paul Jargowsky and Isabel Sawhill, statistics show that there has been a decline in the number of Americans in what is often described as the "underclass."

In 1988, Sawhill and fellow researcher Erol Ricketts used census data to define "as an underclass neighborhood any census tract in which more than a quarter of the relevant population dropped out of high school, more than a third lived in female-headed families, more than a sixth were on welfare, and more than half the men were out of the labor force."

The underclass in America is fairly small, numbering 2.2 million people living in 775 neighborhoods. Simply being poor does not make an individual a member of the underclass. While during the past few decades there have been over 30 million Americans living in poverty, at its peak the number of those in the underclass was never more than 3.4 million. Similarly, not all in the underclass were poor, as only 57 percent of underclass neighborhoods could be defined as high-poverty areas in 2000.

The ...