ACKNOWLEDGMENTS his book is an expansion of the Aaron Wildavsky Memorial TLecture that I delivered in April 1996 at the School for Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley. All of the chap- ters are original for this book, although a few rewritten para- graphs from When Work Disappears, published by Alfred A. Knopf, are integrated into chapters i, 2, and 4, and parts of a 1997 essay entitled "The New Social Inequality and Affirmative Opportunity" appear in chapters i and 4. That essay was pub- lished in the Yale University Press volume The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (edited by Stanley B. Greenberg and Theda Skocpol). In the preparation of this book I owe a very special debt to Jennifer Hochschild, Richard Parker, Dalton Conley, and Mar- shall Ganz, who read the entire first draft of this manuscript and provided detailed comments that led to significant revisions. I am also indebted to Alan Krueger for his very helpful comments on chapters i and 2. To Susan Allen, I owe a great deal for her ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS skillful editing of the manuscript to improve its readability for a more general educated audience. To Bruce Rankin, I am grateful for his assistance in developing the figures on growing income and wage inequality. I would also like to thank the students in two of my seminars at Harvard—Race, Class, and Poverty in Urban America and Sociological Perspectives on Racial Inequal- ity—for providing a good sounding board for ideas that eventu- ally found their way into this book. Finally, I would like to thank the Ford Foundation for their support of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program that I direct at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. That support aided the research and travel associated with gathering materials for this book..