And you still didn't answer my questions--what are the universal human values after McIntyre's After Virtue (though it's been a decade since I read it) and what is our common cause? And what do you think of Hobsbawm's criticism of Korsch, the former last Marxist, in the former's Revolutionaries?
For empirically based criticism of the underclass discourse, see Adolph Reed Jr Radical America, 1992; Herbert Gans, The War on the Poor; and Michael Katz,ed The Underclass Debate--the last two are from the point of view of good left liberals. The underclass concept itself does not survive critically scrutiny. I just came across what seems to be a interesting history of the so called underclass in Antwerp, 1770-1860. Catharina Lis, Social Change and the Labouring Poor. Yale, 1986.
I admit my post was not empirically based but it wasn't simply shrill either. I did raise some well known problems in the underclass discourse, along with the Murray theory of the social problem: AFDC=> unemployed single mother households=>several new pathological, criminal, and work averse children, including more single mothers=>more AFDC=>...
You can break this theory at any of the links. The first link was subjected to much empirical criticism, i.e., where AFDC is highest is not where out of wedlock birth rates are highest, ceteris paribus. It has also been claimed that Murray's work would not survive internal academic scrutiny and that is why it has to be foisted on to the public from the so called think tanks.
But the real key to his argument today is that due to the increasing "complexity" of the economy and "skill intensity" of technological change--two of the most ill defined, albeit popular, ideas in the so called social sciences today--whole racialized groups of people, i.e., the so called underclass, are becoming genetically unfit for the new economy, no matter how much money is spent on their education. But then even many good people, like Robert Reich, while recommending in the vaguest terms possible a new type of education system to prepare future generations for the so called new economy agree that such measures won't help today and so recommend in the present the creation of low paying govt jobs and other custodial state measures--the kind of things that Lynn Turgeon seemed to celebrate as Hitler's successful employment policy. Murray is in the mainstream of policy debate today. After all, Clinton did claim before the welfare reform act that Murray had been proven right.
As I have mentioned before, the new common sense is that the compensation mechanism does not work because of the mismatch between the skill demands of new jobs and the inherent skill deficiency of the unemployed. Leading economists such as Romer and Helpman "model" such common sense.
Yours, Rakesh