Soc. 456Two Major Causes of the Urban UnderclassToday in the United States, as in many other wealthy, industrialized nations, there exists an urban underclass, defined as a class of people that includes members of low-income families who have little or no participation in the labor force ( Gilbert 2003, p. 274). Currently there are predominantly two distinct and conflicting views on why the underclass exists. On the one hand, there is the idea that the underclass is simply the result of its members, who lack values ​​and morals and sustain unemployment (Whitman and Thornton 1986). Some, on the other hand, believe that social institutions and injustices are responsible for the underclass. According to Julia Rothenberg and Andreas Heinz (1998), “current neoconservative discourse on social behavior and the problems of the poor centers on a notion of a morally corrupt underclass.” Charles Murray, a conservative and a leading proponent of this notion, measures the underclass by factors such as crime, dropout from the workforce among young men, and illegitimate births among young women. He writes of members of the underclass as “people who live outside the mainstream, often preying on the mainstream, in a world where the building blocks of a life – work, family, and community – exist in fragmented and corrupt forms” (Murray 1999) . . Because this group of people, which is proportionately small, remains at a relatively constant level in terms of income with seemingly no ambition, Murray blames them for his own problems. Murray's solution to the underclass is simply to lock up the criminals; he has no sympathy for them, as he believes they are in complete control of their actions (Murray 1999). He argues that the inner-city poor have opportunities for low-level jobs but reject them, in part because the busy life of the streets makes it attractive not to work (Whitman and Thornton 1986). Among people who take the conservative side, the lumpenproletariat is seen as the dregs of society, a class of people who deserve no help. According to Sonia Martin (2004), conservative and non-conservative observers often view the underclass as homeless, young, black, welfare dependent, drug dependent, intellectually disabled, physically disabled, criminal, single parent (typically women), p . ...... middle of paper ...... some job opportunities with decent pay. References Gilbert, D. (2003). The American Class Structure in an Era of Growing Inequality, United States, Wadsworth. Whitman, D. & Thornton, J. (March 17, 1986). A nation apart. US News & World Report. v100.Rothenberg, J. & Heinz, A. (Summer 1998). Meddling with monkey metaphorsCapitalism and the threat of impulsive desires. Social justice. v25 n2.Murray, C. (November 1999). And now the bad news. Society. v37 i1.Martin, S. (February 2004). Reconceptualizing social exclusion: a critical response to the neoliberal welfare reform agenda and the underclass thesis. Australian Journal of Social Issues. v39 i1.Sanoff, AP (March 4, 1991). [Interview with Nicholas Lemann, author of The PromisedLand: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America]. US News & World Report. v110 n8.Massey, D.S. (September 1990). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Creation of the Underclass. American Journal of Sociology. v96 n2.Pearson, R.W. (June 1991). Social statistics and an American urban underclass: Improving the knowledge base for social policy in the 1990s. Journal of the American Statistical Association. v86. No414.