IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wej/wldecn/17.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The US Underclass in a Booming Economy

Author

Abstract

The main failure in the US economy in the 1980s through the mid 1990s was its inability to distribute the gains of economic growth to the bulk of the population. The traditional “rising tide lifts all boats†link between economic growth and poverty seemed broken, creating a large seemingly permanent underclass. To the surprise of many, however, the late 1990s boom has substantially improved the well-being of the disadvantaged and reduced underclass behaviour. Full employment has been a successful anti-poverty policy. But the US is taking a huge risk in placing all of its social policy eggs in the single employment basket. When there are no nuts squirrelled away for winter, one can only hope that the good times will keep rolling.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard B. Freeman, 2000. "The US Underclass in a Booming Economy," World Economics, World Economics, 1 Ivory Square, Plantation Wharf, London, United Kingdom, SW11 3UE, vol. 1(2), pages 89-100, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:wej:wldecn:17
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.worldeconomics.com/Journal/Papers/Article.details?ID=17
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wej:wldecn:17. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ed Jones (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.