Robert Rubin Cites Ken's Book "The Underclass" as Most Impactful
Asked by the New York Times what book had the greatest impact on him, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin cited Ken's 1982 work The Underclass :
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
That’s easy. “The Underclass,” by Ken Auletta. It follows a nonprofit organization as it attempts to improve the lives of some of New York’s lowest-income residents, and when I read it in 1982, it completely changed the way I think about poverty in America.
This was during the Reagan years, when the notion was that Americans could simply “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” But Ken’s argument — which I found very persuasive — is that poverty is a vicious cycle, replicated over generations, and that being trapped in that cycle is far more the result of society’s failings than of the individuals’. “The Underclass” led me to believe that trying to break the cycle of poverty through policy and through private efforts is not just right for moral reasons, but is enormously in the interest of all of us, both because of the economic impact of lifting people out of poverty, and because of poverty’s negative effects on social cohesion.
The Underclass was originally published as a three parts in The New Yorker.
