The reason for the underclass.

Theodore Dalrymple has written a book about the underclass and in it he concludes that elite culture reinforces dysfunctional values:

Here is a searing account—probably the best yet published—of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in Engalnd, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and in observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple’s key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.

Review of Theodore Dalrymple's Life At the Bottom. The Worldview That Makes the Underclass. Author unknown, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 2001.

ADDENDUM:

Americans may find it surprising that most of the people wallowing in this slough of ignorance, illiteracy, promiscuity, bastardy, intoxication, vice, folly, lawlessness and hopelessness are white English people. Much of what is described here is the sort of thing Americans instinctively associate with this country’s own black underclass. There is some satisfaction . . . that sufficiently wrong-headed social policies, persisted in . . . will visit moral catastrophe on people of any race.

Not that racial foolishness is altogether absent from Life at the Bottom. Thanks to government policies of staggering idiocy pursued across several decades, England is now both multi-racial and multi-cultural, though there is no trace of evidence that any detectable number of English people ever wanted it to be either. This has, of course, made the country a much worse place to live in. Social workers, teachers, the police, and all other authority figures are thoroughly race-whipped, and know that any action they take against a person of color will bring them under the intense scrutiny of their superiors, not to mention the press and numerous busybody groups charged with maintaining the integrity of the “gorgeous mosaic”.

"The Age of Bad Ideas." John Derbyshire, The New Criterion, 1/02.