Underclass

Overview

In the social sciences, “underclass” is a term used to describe the group of people belonging to the lowest possible level of the prevailing socioeconomic hierarchy. Researchers frequently describe the concept of an underclass as subjective. When the term first emerged in scholarly literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s, commentators noted that the social stratum commonly referred to as an “underclass” generally lacked the defining quantitative factors associated with traditional class delineations. Rather than being marked by measurable levels of educational attainment, labor market participation, and income, the social underclass has instead been defined by a general disconnection from mainstream society. Thus, while its members are often described as poorly educated and impoverished, commentators consider a prevalent sense of social dislocation as the key feature separating the underclass from its adjacent statistical analogs in the lower levels of the working class.

The term “underclass” is believed to have originated in U.S. mainstream mass media during the 1970s and 1980s, when it was typically depicted as being comprised of uneducated inner-city dwellers with no stable income and a high degree of reliance on government benefits. Underclass members were frequently depicted as being involved with substance abuse and criminal activity. They were often assumed to come from single-parent households, and due to prevalent racism, they were disproportionately presented as Black.

As the term continued to increase in circulation in the popular media lexicon, researchers sought to precisely define the underclass. One such paradigm identified four distinctive features of the underclass: entrapment in an inescapable cycle of poverty; broken family structures and nonconforming or criminal methods of earning money; a geographically limited sphere of activity; and the intergenerational transfer of underclass membership (Van Haitsma, 1989). While a member of the underclass was generally considered to exhibit most or all these characteristics, the presence of even one such factor could suffice to qualify an individual as part of the underclass, depending on the precise context of the person’s circumstances.

To differentiate the underclass from other people living in poverty, a 1990 examination published in the academic journal Science proposed three specific methods of measuring it (Mincy, Sawhill & Wolf, 1990). These methods, respectively, covered persistence-based, behavior-based, and location-based factors. The persistence-based element notes that people who belong to the underclass are virtually devoid of upward socioeconomic mobility due to their lifelong or intergenerational immersion in the extreme low depths of the personal income spectrum. However, because researchers widely acknowledge poverty as operating in tandem with other central aspects of an underclass member’s personal circumstances, it alone is not generally considered adequate grounds for identifying an individual as belonging to the underclass. Instead, poverty is usually considered in tandem with one or both adjoining behavior- and location-based factors.

The key behavior-based factor among members of the underclass is an explicit rejection of social norms and expectations. In the United States, it is generally expected that young people will complete their education, at least through high school; they will delay having children until they are able to support them; adults who are not old, disabled, or supported by a spouse will work; and all people will obey laws (Mincy, Sawhill & Wolf, 1990). People who belong to the underclass do not conform to these norms—either by choice or as a product of circumstance—or explicitly reject them. They are likely to commit crimes, be dependent on welfare, and engage in dysfunctional behavior such as abusing children (Mincy, Sawhill & Wolf, 1990). However, in identifying these characteristics, the researchers also conceded that behavior-based factors have limitations as defining traits of the underclass, since many people engage in such behaviors at varying points in their lives without necessarily coming to be defined by them. The researchers additionally note that they “would not know how to weigh a set of behaviors without knowing the consequences or significance of each” (Mincy, Sawhill & Wolf, 1990). As a behavioral adjunct, the paper’s authors also proposed that underclass members may alternately be defined by dependence on socially unacceptable forms of income, such as money from crime and public assistance (Mincy, Sawhill & Wolf, 1990).

In examining location-based factors, researchers drew a distinction between the concepts of poor neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, defining poor neighborhoods as those with poverty rates of at least 40 percent and bad neighborhoods as “those where the incidence of nonconformity with existing social norms is high” (Mincy, Sawhill & Wolf, 1990). From this viewpoint, the underclass can, in the view of the researchers, be more reliably placed in bad neighborhoods.

Other commentators who participated in the early formal development of the underclass as a social science concept also considered qualitative elements of the social context in which members of the underclass circulate. This approach examines a person’s attachments with respect to the type of household in which they live, the characteristics of the neighborhood in which their home is located, and the individuals or groups with whom a person regularly interacts (Van Haitsma, 1989).

As an additional defining feature, the term “underclass” has historically been used as a pejorative descriptor for people whose personal circumstances and lifestyles align with the concept’s prevailing characterizations. This viewpoint draws a hard distinction between socially conforming working-class people who remain locked in lower income brackets and impoverished people who live socially unacceptable lifestyles by choice, circumstance, or a combination of both. As early as the 1960s, the latter group of people—the underclass—were described by commentators as the “disreputable poor” (Matza, 1966).

Further Insights

Expert views on the underclass also include a paradigm that separates the concepts into three distinct types: economic, moral, and educational underclasses (Murray et. al, 1996). This model defines the economic underclass as consisting of individuals who are of working age but struggle to find secure employment and therefore tend to drift toward criminal activity or dependence on social welfare systems. The moral underclass represents individuals whose lifestyles, lifestyle choices, and personal preferences depart from established, mainstream social norms. While this also implies associations with criminality, commentators more broadly define it as a general form of social deviance that makes it functionally impossible for a person to operate in mainstream society with any degree of stability or longevity. The third and final underclass in this model, the educational underclass, is not necessarily limited to those with low levels of formal education. Instead, it also extends to people deficient in the interpersonal skills and cultural awareness that are required to succeed in the social mainstream.

Since the formal emergence of the underclass as a social science concept, researchers have generally agreed that single-parent households and other nontraditional household structures are a major driver of underclass risk, especially when combined with poverty and location-specific factors. Women who have children outside of marriage have been historically singled out as being worthy of stigma (Murray, 1996). As such, the “restoration of ‘the ideal of the two-parent family’” (Murray, 1996) has been identified by some experts as a potential remedy for the disadvantageous life outcomes commonly experienced by underclass members.

Some commentators alternately characterize the underclass as a product of a culture of victimhood, championed at an institutional level by intellectuals who tend to take the view that socially dysfunctional people bear little personal responsibility for their circumstances and are instead more properly considered the inevitable product of an unjust, inequitable society (Dalrymple, 2003). According to this view, underclass dynamics may be influenced by economics but are more accurately classified as a product of analytical culture. Notably, some researchers reject this view entirely, characterizing it as being rooted in the same prejudicial attitudes that allow historical and systemic cycles of poverty, exclusion, marginalization, and alienation to persist.

These competing viewpoints, along with many others proposed by commentators and researchers engaged in the study of the underclass concept, all share defining elements of subjectivity and extreme difficulty in precisely delineating exactly what constitutes the underclass and where the boundaries of the underclass are. In the associated research literature, social scientists have also routinely noted difficulties in performing conventional studies on the underclass, not only because the concept is so elusive and subjective but also because the people normally considered to be part of it exist on the margins of society and have no stable presence in the mainstream channels that would facilitate controlled analysis.

Viewpoints

Shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century, researchers conducting a statistical analysis of the U.S. underclass using data from the 2000 census concluded that the cross-section of society normally considered part of the underclass had followed a dramatic trend of decline during the 1990s after two previous decades of rapid growth (Sawhill & Jargowsky, 2006). Analysts attributed the drop to significant improvements in high school completion rates in neighborhoods with socioeconomic dynamics aligned with prevailing conceptions of the underclass, along with the general strength of the US economy that followed the 1991 end of an eight-month recession. At the time, researchers had embraced a cautious but growing optimism regarding the idea that the contributing factors to socioeconomic alienation and dislocation had entered a period of sustained contraction.

However, since that time, wealth and income inequality in the United States have grown to unprecedented levels, with some observers noting their approach to the gaps more typically associated with low-income countries (Florida, 2012). In analyzing the trend, experts have identified causal factors including increased levels of workplace automation and economic globalization, both of which have functioned to displace jobs that were previously available to unskilled workers at the lowest ends of the educational attainment spectrum. These developments prompted some commentators to revise their conceptions of the underclass, moving it beyond its traditional roots in social dislocation and placing it more firmly in an evolving economic reality that broadly divides the United States into a creative class and a service class (Florida, 2012). The creative class consists of highly educated professionals working in career-track roles and commanding salaries that, in the early 2010s, combined to account for about half of all wages and salaries earned in the United States, despite comprising no more than one-third of the nation's workforce (Florida, 2012). Meanwhile, the much larger service class is made up of people working low-wage jobs with little advancement opportunity, committing long hours for pay that averages less than half of what members of the creative class typically earn (Florida, 2012). This service class, commentators argue, is an emergent socioeconomic underclass locked in a cycle of low opportunity and a dearth of upward mobility. It is produced and reinforced by the “very structure of post-industrial capitalism” (Florida, 2012).

Another novel reconfiguration of the underclass concept emerged in the aftermath of the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Described as a “viral underclass” (Zamudio, 2022), the analysis centered on how members of historically socioeconomically disadvantaged racial groups in the United States suffered higher COVID-19-related fatality rates than White Americans (Thrasher, 2022). According to this perspective, broad disparities exist among how infections, medical treatment, and risk factors are managed among the respective members of the White and non-White U.S. population. The framework represented a novel extension of the notion of the underclass to include higher risk of disease and mortality, due not only to socioeconomic factors but also to wider, more institutionally ingrained forms of discrimination that affect not only the personal and economic outcomes of underclass members but also the line between their lives and deaths. Meanwhile, other commentators described those who elected not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine or were otherwise unable to become vaccinated due to health or circumstantial factors as belonging to a short-lived underclass of people who were temporarily excluded from society. Divisive debates surrounded the vaccination issue, with observers noting the situation represented “new territory from an ethical standpoint” (Nuki & Rigby, 2021).

Bibliography

Auletta, Ken. The Underclass. Open Road Media, 2023.

Dalrymple, T. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2003.

Florida, Richard. The 66%: America's Growing Underclass. Bloomberg, 29 Oct. 2012, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-29/the-66-america-s-growing-underclass. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Matza, D. (1966). The Disreputable Poor. In R. Bendix & S.M. Lipset (Eds.), Class, Status, and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, (pp. 289–302). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mincy, R.B, Sawhill, I.V., & Wolf, D.A. The Underclass: Definition and Measurement.Science,vol. 248, pp. 450–453. DOI 110.1126/science.248.4954.450

Murray, C., et. al. (1996). Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate. IEA Health & Welfare Unit.

Nuki, Paul, and Rigby, Jennifer. "From Sydney to Vienna, the Rise of the Unvaccinated Underclass." The Telegraph, 15 Nov. 2021, www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/15/unjabbed-sydney-forget-going-friends-house-dinner/. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Sawhill, Isabel V., and Jargowsky, Paul A. "The Decline of the Underclass." Brookings Institution, 1 Jan. 2006, www.brookings.edu/articles/the-decline-of-the-underclass/. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Thrasher, Steven. The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. Macmillan Publishing, 2022.

Van Haitsma, Martha. "A Contextual Definition of Underclass." University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1989, www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc121d.pdf. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Zamudio, Maria I. "How Racism and Inequality Created COVID-19’s ‘Viral Underclass.’ " The Center for Public Integrity, 14 Oct. 2023, publicintegrity.org/environment/public-health/how-racism-and-inequality-created-covid-19s-viral-underclass/. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Zelley, E.W. Is the ‘Underclass’ Really a Class? Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 75–85. DOI 10.15453/0191-5096.2216