Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

Among the many explanations of income and poverty levels, especially among black families, two have garnered much of the recent public and academic attention: welfare disincentives and urban deindustrialization. Although on the surface, these explanations appear quite dissimilar, they do have a common thread.

The ''welfare-disincentive'' explanation argues that while public assistance raises family income and reduces poverty directly, it has the opposite effects indirectly. According to this argument, welfare leads recipients to reduce their work, schooling and traditional family formation [Murray, 1984] all of whose reductions significantly affect family income and poverty adversely. Blacks are hurt more than …

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