Editing Underclass (section)

==History==
[[Gunnar Myrdal]] is generally credited as the first proponent of the term ''underclass.'' Writing in the early 1960s on [[economic inequality]] in the U.S., 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".<ref>{{cite book|last=Myrdal|first=Gunnar|title=Challenge to Affluence|year=1963|publisher=Random House|location=New York, NY|isbn=0-394-41897-2|pages=10}}</ref>  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.

The specific concept of an underclass in the U.S. underwent several transformations during the decades following Myrdal's introduction of the term. According to sociologist [[Herbert Gans]], while Myrdal's structural conceptualization of the underclass remained relatively intact through the writings of [[William Julius Wilson]] and others, in several respects the ''structural'' definition was abandoned by many journalists and academics, and replaced with a ''behavioral'' conception of the underclass, which fuses Myrdal's term with [[Oscar Lewis]]'s and others' conception of a "[[culture of poverty]]".<ref name="Gans">{{cite book|last=Gans|first=Herbert|title="From 'Underclass' to 'Undercaste': Some Observations About the Future of the Post-Industrial Economy and its Major Victims" in Urban Poverty and the Underclass (edited by Enzo Mingione)|year=1996|publisher=Blackwell Publishers|location=Cambridge, Massachusetts|isbn=0-631-20037-1|pages=[https://archive.org/details/urbanpovertyunde0000unse/page/141 141–152]|url=https://archive.org/details/urbanpovertyunde0000unse/page/141}}</ref>