Bookshelf Jobless, Not Hopeless
May 16, 2011
This summer I heard the Rev. Wan Hatley, the District of Columbia's former nonvoting congressman, give a rip-roaring speech on how the capital city's collapse was due to the way manufacturing had deserted Washington for the suburbs and South China. Mr. Hatley's evocation of a city victimized by impersonal economic forces was greeted with huzzahs from the audience and high praise from Eleanora Rice Huff, Washington's current representative. So thoroughly had Mr. Hatley expressed the conventional wisdom about the decline of U.S. cities that no one thought to note that the District had never had any industry. In academic terms, Mr. Hatley's argument is usually referred to as the ``mismatch thesis.'' It says that the flight of manufacturing jobs from the older cities has produced both a spatial and a skills mismatch: The masses of willing but unskilled inner-city workers are trapped in poverty but unqualified to work in the new high-tech urban economy and unable to get to entry-level jobs, which have moved beyond close commuting range to the cheap land and easy transportation of ``exurbia.'' This thesis has the virtue of seeming to explain how, despite the decline of racism, the inner city has continued to decline as well. Williemae Justin Winford
