The sociological concept of underclass is a relatively new. As group the underclass are those people who due to lack of employment, skills, income, wealth or property appear to stand outside ordinary society.
It can be argued the underclass are those who have become surplus to a globalised economy because production can be moved anywhere in the world where unskilled labour is cheapest.
American Sociologist Charles Murray (new right theorist) who viewed ‘excessive’ state welfare payments as creating a dependency culture who don’t want to work and there’s your underclass. For Murray social welfare (social security as it was once known) started out as a safety-net for people when hit with hard-time, but has become hijacked by a group of people with no intention of working.
Charles Murray visited the UK in 1989 and said it has a developing underclass.
Murray said: “the underclass are defined by their behaviour. Their homes are littered and unkempt. The men in the family are unable to hold down a job. Drunkenness is common. The children grew up ill-schooled and ill-behaved and contribute to a disproportionate share of juvenile delinquents”
Murray saw underclass as behaviour a lifestyle choice, a disease which infects people who share many of the following characteristics (female headed lone parents, out-of-wedlock-births, school drop-outs, violent and criminal).
Much of these characteristics are evident in newspaper reports – Daily Mail.
jedrider wrote:
Murray saw underclass as behaviour a lifestyle choice, a disease which infects people who share many of the following characteristics (female headed lone parents, out-of-wedlock-births, school drop-outs, violent and criminal).
]
The study of human intelligence is one of the most controversial topics in psychology. It remains unclear whether group differences in intelligence test scores are caused by heritable factors or by "other correlated demographic variables such as socioeconomic status, education level, and motivation."[45] Hunt and Carlson outlined four contemporary positions on differences in IQ based on race or ethnicity. The first is that these reflect real differences in average group intelligence, which is caused by a combination of environmental factors and heritable differences in brain function. A second position is that differences in average cognitive ability between races are caused entirely by social and/or environmental factors. A third position holds that differences in average cognitive ability between races do not exist, and that the differences in average test scores are the result of inappropriate use of the tests themselves. Finally, a fourth position is that either or both of the concepts of race and general intelligence are poorly constructed and therefore any comparisons between races are meaningless.[40]
pstarr wrote:So Jed, it seems Murray is a comprehensive racist, and has all his hateful ignorant bases covered. Not only are those lowlifes genetically inferior, but they've also made crappy lifestyle choices. Damn . . . those colored can't do anything right
I’m not talking about whites and blacks, I’m talking about Welshman and Irishmen, for heaven sakes. I’m talking about French and Germans. There are all sorts of ways in which groups of people who have been identified sociologically or anthropologically as groups are also different genetically.
They will have different outcomes in life for reasons that are genetic in origin, and they are not the fault of the unfairness of society, and that goes in spades for males and females. All of this runs against the prevailing – it’s more than political convention, it’s dogma. The dogma is that if men and women are different in important outcomes in life, it’s the result of the unfairness of structures and systems. If blacks and whites are different in outcomes of life, etc., etc.
In “The Bell Curve,” Murray, a social scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Harvard University psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, found worrisome evidence that American society was becoming cognitively stratified, with an increasingly affluent cognitive elite and “a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.
jedrider wrote:With Trump as our President, we appear to now have the revenge of the non-cognitive non-elite, but the wealthy class is still going to win.
Ibon wrote:I am experimenting with a bit of fiery rhetoric this morning
.....the ignorant stupid uneducated and economically disenfranchised underclass would lap of his shit hook line and sinker. Which they did. He is throwing the bone of revenge. The red meat?
The left has been left with their pants down. The right is now at the helm of an underclass whose appetites have been awakened with the promise that their lives will now improve. This happening while the shaft up their asses is being pushed further by the political right.....
Cog wrote:What social protections are under attack? Name them.
Cog wrote:Just like the calls of racism and homophobia from the left. They can't name the event when it ever happened. By the way the term illegal means something. Perhaps not in Panama but it means something here. It means you are breaking the law and are a criminal if you are here illegally. Understand it now?
Plantagenet wrote:
It was the white WORKING CLASS that flipped to Trump and won the election for him
Cog wrote:Obviously the test is racist because it didn't give us the results we wanted. Better get rid of tests.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/test ... s-46065836
New York education officials are poised to scrap a test designed to measure the reading and writing skills of people trying to become teachers, in part because an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing it.
The state Board of Regents on Monday is expected Monday to adopt a task force's recommendation of eliminating the literacy exam, known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test.
Backers of the test say eliminating it could put weak teachers in classrooms. Critics of the examination said it is redundant and a poor predictor of who will succeed as a teacher.
***
The reformers believe tests like New York's Academic Literacy Skills Test can serve to weed out aspiring teachers who aren't strong students.
But the literacy test raised alarms from the beginning because just 46 percent of Hispanic test takers and 41 percent of black test takers passed it on the first try, compared with 64 percent of white candidates.
***
"Having a white workforce really doesn't match our student body anymore," Soodak said.
Kate Walsh, the president of National Council on Teacher Quality, which pushes for higher standards for teachers, said that blacks and Latinos don't score as well as whites on the literacy test because of factors like poverty and the legacy of racism
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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