William Julius Wilson

William Julius Wilson (1935 - ) is a significant American sociologist. He worked at the University of Chicago 1972-1996 before moving to Harvard in the 1990s.

In The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978) Wilson argues that the significance of race is waning, and an African-American's class is comparatively more important in determining his or her life chances. In The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987), Wilson was one of the first to enunciate at length the "spatial mismatch" theory for the development of a ghetto underclass. As industrial jobs disappeared in cities, and hence urban unemployment increased, women found it unwise to marry the fathers of their children, since the fathers would not be breadwinners. In "the Truly Disadvantaged" Wilson also argued effectively against Charles Murray's theory of welfare causing poverty.

A relatively unknown revision of Wilson's theories was postulated in Still the Promised City by Roger Waldinger. Waldinger noticed that other minorities do much better than African-Americans, and suggested that second and third -generation northern African-Americans are hampered by overhigh salary expectations, and the inability to find an economic niche.