Page "Underclass" Paragraph 1

Gunnar Myrdal is generally credited as the first proponent of the term " underclass.

" Writing in the early 1960s on economic inequality in America, Myrdal ’ s underclass refers to a “ class of unemployed, unemployables, and underemployed who are more and more hopelessly set apart from the nation at large and do not share in its life, its ambitions and its achievements .” However, this general conception of a class or category of people below the core of the working class has a long tradition in the social sciences, such as through the work of Henry Mayhew, whose London Labour and the London Poor sought to describe the hitherto invisible world of casual workers, prostitutes, and street-people.