Identity and Economic Performance

Reductions in the employment of less-skilled Americans during recent decades are often attributed to a deterioration in work values. That view is challenged. The key determinants have been deteriorating earnings opportunities and the poor's assimilation of mainstream values. Urbanization facilitates less-skilled workers' assimilation of preferences for high standards of living and egalitarian interpersonal relations found in advanced economic democracies. The rewards received in the competition for jobs become major affirmations or denials of the validity of self-perceptions. Demand for public respect induces people to avoid jobs perceived to be demeaning even as the proportion of such jobs increases. Traditional scientific data are combined with personal documents (autobiography and rap music) to construct subject-centered analyses of behavior. The data enrich the contextual basis for explaining behaviors of low-status men labeled the "malcontented."