Subject: (Editorial):  Trickle-Down Morality
Date: Published: 1/8/90 (97 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial):
    Trickle-Down Morality

    The acute problems of America's inner cities might be
 called mediagenic.  Crack wars, AIDS epidemics and the
 pathetic homeless produce vivid and dramatic images.  But the
 inner cities are displaying important positive trends that
 can't be captured as easily on the evening news.
    Without much fanfare, above all, many members of the
 underclass are pulling themselves into the middle class.  The
 life of the underclass is indeed growing more desperate, but
 the size of the class itself is shrinking.
    Item:  The unemployment rate in many urban cities has
 dropped dramatically.  Harvard economist Richard Freeman has
 found that in the big cities with tight labor markets, such
 as Boston and Anaheim-Santa Ana, black unemployment dropped
 by about a third between 1983 and 1987.  Wages increased.
    Item:  Concurrently, urban school dropout rates are also
 falling.  In 1968, 30% of inner-city blacks between ages 16
 and 24 were dropouts.  By 1988, the black dropout rate was cut
 nearly in half.  Reading abilities are up.
    Item:  Even with the crack epidemic, inner-city crime rates
 seem to have stopped rising and are probably falling.  Murder
 rates, which mushroomed in the 1960s, dropped dramatically
 between 1980 and 1985.  Crack came into the cities in 1985.
 But the crime rate did not explode.  The murder rate rose
 slightly in 1986, but then fell again in 1987.  More recent
 data are not available, but it seems likely that the drug
 problem's effect on daily ghetto life may be overstated.
    Part of the credit for these positive trends goes to the
 economic policies of the Reagan administration.  If policies
 can sustain a recovery over seven years and thereby create 18
 million new jobs, then the benefits will eventually pervade
 society.  Many feared that the underclass had become separated
 from the mainstream economy, impervious to good times.  Not
 so.
    Credit also goes to the nation's cultural leaders.  Not
 only is the underclass a part of the mainstream economy, it
 is part of the mainstream culture.  The behavior of the
 underclass may be skewed by perverse welfare incentives, but
 the aspirations and values of its members seem to match those
 of the American middle class.
    Esteemed sociologist Christopher Jenks recently concluded
 that there is little evidence to support the existence of a
 deviant underclass culture.  Louis Harris polled blacks and
 whites of all income groups and concluded, "In the area of
 values, there is one America, not the two that the Kerner
 Commission described.  Blacks and whites differ modestly on
 cultural, religious and traditional values."
    Thus, the shrinkage of the underclass seems linked to
 cultural shifts in the '80s.  During the Reagan years, even
 the centers of the adversary culture, such as Hollywood and
 New York publishing, celebrated the old-fashioned standards
 of individual initiative, hard work and family values.  Urban
 leaders preach the gospel of self-help.  Those messages have
 gotten through, with happy effects.
    Not all the news is good, however.  Those who remained
 mired in the underclass are leading lives that are ever more
 chaotic.  AIDS and crack are still rampant.  Out-of-wedlock
 births increase.  One-parent families are being supplanted by
 no-parent families.  Families are not so much breaking down;
 they are never getting together.
    The family disintegration continues despite improved
 opportunities for employment and education.  This confounds
 the assertion by some liberal sociologists that the breakup
 of the black family was due to limited opportunities for men.
 The backbone of the problem is not economic but cultural.
    Here too, the underclass reflects trends in the mainstream
 culture.  In the 1970s, the women's movement decreed that
 women could raise children without male support.  That was
 viable for the upper-middle-class feminists, but for poor
 women it didn't work out so well.  The general divorce rate
 climbed 50% in the 1970s, and poverty got feminized.
    Even today, the cultural elite delivers mixed signals on
 the issues of promiscuity and illegitimacy.  Traditional
 sexual norms erode across society, but rich people can afford
 to have bad morals.  The poor get hit the hardest.
    The lessons of these latest trends, both the good and the
 bad, is that the U. S. is one culture, and one economy.  If
 cultural elites insist on life styles that they consider
 flexible, those life styles will trickle down to places where
 lives are already disorganized, and the result will be chaos.
    This makes us wonder about the child-care bills that
 Congress will be entertaining this coming session.  No doubt
 professional women will enjoy having subsidized government
 child care, but we doubt that children on the cusp of the
 underclass will really benefit from a program that weakens
 already tenuous family functions.

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