ABSTRACT
The emergence and growth of a highly visible underclass or ghetto poor population in US cities has deflected attention away from the rural poor. The conventional wisdom is that poor people have become increasingly concentrated spatially, especially within large metropolitan central cities. Public policy debates increasingly center on individual deficiencies, especially on the lack of education and jobs skills or on maladaptive values and behavior like adolescent childbearing or drug use that may undermine investments in education and job skills. Human capital theory posits a relationship between a worker's human capital and the individual's labor market experiences. Workers with only weak skill levels due to lack of education or relevant experience are, according to human capital theory, less productive at work, and are therefore poorly rewarded in the labor market. For working age adults, labor force nonparticipation and unemployment are the main pathways to poverty, while a steady job is the main avenue out.
