Charles Murray is one of America's most respected social  policy analysts. His ideas about the underclass, outlined in his  classic Losing Ground, have entered the mainstream of the debate about  poverty. Murray's thesis, that the underclass represents not a degree  of poverty but a type of poverty, characterised by deviant attitudes  towards parenting, work and crime, has been explosively  controversial. It has also become more difficult to resist, as the  deterioration of the social fabric has become increasingly obvious.    In 1989 The Sunday Times brought Charles Murray to Britain to compare  the British and US situations. In his article, subsequently published  by the IEA as The Emerging British Underclass, Murray described  himself as a 'visitor from a plague area come to see whether the  disease is spreading'. In 1993 he returned to check on its progress,  and the resulting article, also for The Sunday Times, was published  with commentaries by critics of Murray's thesis, thus presenting the  reader with a range of views on the issue.    The success of the underclass titles, particularly as teaching aids in  schools and universities, has led to the present omnibus edition which  contains all of the original material from both volumes, together with  a new introduction by Ruth Lister of Loughborough University and an  update of the statistics by Alan Buckingham of the University of  Sussex.

Charles Murray and the Underclass : The Developing Debate (Choice in Welfare) PDF

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