In 1963, Swedish economist and public intellectual Gunnar Myrdal published his book Challenge to Affluence. His landmark 1944 book, An American Dilemma, had already pointed out the gap between apparent abundance and the bitter reality of life for millions of African Americans. Almost twenty years later, his views contradicted the dominant trend by refusing to focus on only the “culture of poverty.” Instead, he emphasized the rise of what he was the first to identify as an “underclass of unemployed and, gradually, unemployable persons and families” that was the seemingly inevitable result of structural and technological problems inherent in modern society....
