The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Black Philly: Anderson on the “moral Life of the Inner City”

1486 investment, workfare, and “prisonfare” that have spawned the mounting social refuse strewn on the streets of the U.S. metropolis. Indeed, Duneier endorses the institutionalization of economic dispossession and social marginality as queer antipoverty policy when he proposes that “we will improve our well-being by making provisions for more persons, not fewer, to engage in informal entrepreneurial activity,” and that city government stay out of the way and accept such activity not only as “inevitable” but as downright “admirable” (SW, p. 315). Admirable indeed, is the ingenuity with which American society—and social science—keeps devising novel ways of making its poor shoulder the weight of their own predicament.