Jencks, a prominent Northwestern so-ciologist, and Peterson, a Har- vard political scientist, attests.
The underclass is not really new, Jencks observes. The "lower-class" lives described in Elliott Liebow's 1967 book,
Tally's Comer: A Study of Ne- gro Streetcomer Men, for ex-ample, are "very similar. .. to the lives described in more re- cent writing on the under- class." But has this class of people been getting larger? Jencks's answer (contrary to news media reports) is...